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Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

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Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#261

Post by benmorris »

losteverything wrote: post #56
benmorris wrote: post #45

Amazon is turning into a mine field for legitimate sellers. I have a customer I work closely with to integrate their customer products into Amazon. They have a catalog of 3,000 stock parking signs listed on Amazon. We took considerable time to buy custom SKUs and get them listed. We discovered in the last month two separate Chinese sellers utilized the Amazon buy box feature and listed on our product page for less mo…

I'm curious. Did you ever send an order to China? So if I make a thing that can't be digitally copied easily I'm safe???

To answer your question no we don't ship to China. Ripping off our main image was enough to recreate our product (poorly).

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#262

Post by tremon »

timthelion wrote: post #102
ams6110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about that too. How do I really know that a pair of Levi jeans at Target is genuine?

It doesn't matter. Levi's these days are trash. Bought a pair at the official Levi's store which lasted all of 6 months before there were holes in the pockets. (to replace a 5 year old pair that was fine except I was too fat for it.)

Agreed, I've had the same experience with clothing. I have a 15-year old sweater that is still in better condition than the ones I purchased one or two years ago.

It seems to me that most stores either sell counterfeit products, or all mid-tier brands have given up and sell low-tier products for the same old prices. It's no surprise then that consumers are flocking to low-price, low-tier stores: at least they know what they get.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#263

Post by mattwinslow »

kalleboo wrote: post #221
mattwinslow wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to ding the seller further, leave a negative feedback response (for the seller) on that order. Mark the reason as "item not as described" and don't add any additional text that would allow the seller to claim the feedback was "product related / a product review". Speaking from experience as an FBA seller for the past seven years, those are nearly impossible to dispute with Amazon's seller support staff...…

But if the item was commingled, then it wasn't that FBA seller's fault and you're punishing someone who's innocent...

If you wanted to be sure it was warranted, take a look at the seller's feedback prior to leaving yours. If there's a hint of buyers with similar issues - fire away with a clear conscience.

If you've opened a dialogue with the seller via the messaging system, you should attach a picture of the item with its packaging. IF the seller is innocent (and consistent in their processes re: labeling), they might be able to open a case with Amazon along the lines of "this was commingled inventory - we always apply our label vertically over the item's barcode and our customer received an item packaged with the barcode applied horizontally...therefore you sent the customer another seller's inventory."

That would be a semi-tenuous case to make, but would have a flying chance of working, particularly if the seller had an inbound shipment for the same SKU that was due to arrive at an Amazon warehouse and had left prior to the customer's issue surfacing.

In general though, if there's a shred of doubt...don't worry about the innocent seller. The seller (hopefully) has enough sales volume that your feedback will be lost in the crowd. If not, well, maybe they aren't a good fit for Amazon and you're doing everyone a favor.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#264

Post by forgottenpass »

BubbleFett wrote: post #79
6stringmerc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider my perspective is that eBay / Amazon / et al are acting with the least amount of policing effort they can legally or financially commit, then yes, I would like to advocate that a marketplace such as eBay should attempt to verify every item it sells is not counterfeit. I'd like to avoid being unrealistic in that I don't think a marketplace can 100% verify every item and grow to scale, but I'm also extr…

Totally sympathetic to the author here, and believe that the counterfeit should be taken down IMMEDIATELY (checking amazon it looks like this is the case) If the book was digital then I would say preemptive verification should be done. However, for a physical paper book how could you verify legitimacy at scale? It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and tha…

It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort.

I've worked at places with serious quality management systems, the problem isn't hard. The answer is easy and obvious: incoming inspection.

Unless "scale" means the percentage of product that passes through inspection is zero. In which case the problem is only hard because the problem isn't how to do something, the problem is how get the benefit of having done something without doing it (whether through inspection, not co-mingling, etc...).

In the case of No Starch Press, the build quality issues were noticeable without scanning the book. And even cutting the spine and covers off of a book to scan it isn't that much manual effort with the right hardware. One of the offices at my college had the cutter and bulk scanner, it was so not a big deal for them to use that they'd digitize a semester's worth of course textbooks for anyone who asked.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#265

Post by SantiagoDraco »

blobbers wrote: post #63

Counterfeits in comingled inventory has become pretty common on Amazon these days. "Fulfillment by amazon" has led them to comingle inventories on common products, meaning every seller's product gets jumbled together. I've gotten counterfeit huggies diapers from amazon (invalid serial number for huggies 'points' and different build quality), Mach 3 razor blades, GE MWF Water filters, even a counterfeit baby bath. The…

Inventories are not "commingled" they are completely separate in the warehouses. Just because multiple vendors sell the same product and use the "fulfilled by Amazon" service to fool you doesn't mean Amazon is accidentally sending you an item from the wrong seller.

If you purchase from Amazon and don't check that it's "shipped and sold by Amazon" then you are asking for trouble.

The biggest issue is that Amazon has allowed, because of corporate greed, Amazon to become the new Chinese Ebay. The crap you have to wade through to find trusted sources is ridiculous. Amazon has lost a huge amount of trust because of this.

That said if you take the time to verify who the seller is you WILL get items from that seller and NOT from some other random seller. They are not just tossed into inventory together.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#266

Post by philfrasty »

SantiagoDraco wrote: post #265
blobbers wrote: post #63

Counterfeits in comingled inventory has become pretty common on Amazon these days. "Fulfillment by amazon" has led them to comingle inventories on common products, meaning every seller's product gets jumbled together. I've gotten counterfeit huggies diapers from amazon (invalid serial number for huggies 'points' and different build quality), Mach 3 razor blades, GE MWF Water filters, even a counterfeit baby bath. The…

Inventories are not "commingled" they are completely separate in the warehouses. Just because multiple vendors sell the same product and use the "fulfilled by Amazon" service to fool you doesn't mean Amazon is accidentally sending you an item from the wrong seller. If you purchase from Amazon and don't check that it's "shipped and sold by Amazon" then you are asking for trouble. The biggest issue is that Amazon has a…

„...That said if you take the time to verify who the seller is you WILL get items from that seller and NOT from some other random seller...“

Wrong.

Source: Amazon seller

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#267

Post by SantiagoDraco »

pmorici wrote: post #237
jasode wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Fulfillment by amazon" has led them to comingle inventories The key phrase I look for that I haven't seen discussed in this thread explicitly is: "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com." (That is the current status shown for the No Starch book prompting the thread.)[1] Based on some youtube videos[2] showing FBA stocking bins at the warehouse, I can see where multiple 3rd-party seller using FBA Fulfillment by Amazon ha…

Yeah, I do that too. You used to be able to filter by seller and only view items sold by Amazon I was exceptionally irritated when they removed that ability.

You can do it but only by filtering down to a specific department. Once you do that you can choose Amazon.com as the seller filter.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#268

Post by SantiagoDraco »

a3n wrote: post #163
blobbers wrote: post #63

Counterfeits in comingled inventory has become pretty common on Amazon these days. "Fulfillment by amazon" has led them to comingle inventories on common products, meaning every seller's product gets jumbled together. I've gotten counterfeit huggies diapers from amazon (invalid serial number for huggies 'points' and different build quality), Mach 3 razor blades, GE MWF Water filters, even a counterfeit baby bath. The…

Crap, "fulfilled by Amazon" was my last line of defense against crap products, variable shipping, unacceptable state at arrival, etc etc. Even at that, I recently bought two books, both arrived damaged. Returned them (I really don't want to have to do that, and I thought "fulfilled by" would reduce that likelihood), and the replacements were damaged. I gave up.

Fulfilled by amazon is and always has been the red flag. If you thought it was a line of defense you were mistaken unfortunately.

Shipped and Sold by Amazon is your last line of defense and I'm still convinced it's a trustworthy way to buy. What Amazon better do is assure that it remains that way AND give us an option to filter out EVERYTHING else.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#269

Post by coldpie »

cookiecaper wrote: post #247
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>authentic products, but "not authorized" because they were factory overruns These are counterfeit products. When you contract with a factory to make 10K units with your brand on them, they aren't allowed to use your brand to sell any number of "overruns" past that.

I'm not familiar with the legal definition of "counterfeit" so you may be correct. I'm using the common definition of counterfeit, meaning a falsified imitation product that is usually low-quality and always produced by a third party who has "reverse-engineered" the target product. To most people, "counterfeit" does not mean literally the same product, produced by literally the same people, even if the company who co…

I upvoted you because I think you have a reasonable position even if not everyone agrees with it. Disagreement is not a sufficient reason for downvoting.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#270

Post by DanBC »

awinter-py wrote: post #68

I'm assuming used books is a much larger category than fakes and has a larger drain on sales.

If I buy a used book I'm prepared for poor quality - folded pages, broken spine, dirty book.

If I buy new and I get a poor quality book my first assumption (until I read this submission) is "this publisher pushes out poor quality books", and that influences my choice of publisher in future.

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