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Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

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Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#141

Post by greedo »

ericabiz wrote: post #61
emu wrote: post #13

It's trivially easy to run into counterfeit products on Amazon. Here's an example I pulled up in 2 minutes of searching: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-A1385-Adapter-Charger-iPhone/dp... I see two sellers offering an iPhone charger, ostensibly genuine and new, as low as USD 3.19. Compare with the Apple listing for the same item for USD 19: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD810LL/A/apple-5w-usb-pow... There is no way…

Apple doesn't have a wholesale cost since Apple does not sell parts wholesale. What you are getting is a Chinese knockoff. For phone accessories, I'd recommend sticking with a reputable 3rd-party brand. Anker, Puregear, IXCC, and several others make good-quality chargers and cables.

And buy them direct from the vendor, not via Amazon. If scammers are counterfeiting Apple gear, they can just as easily do the other vendors.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#142

Post by jrs235 »

nkrisc wrote: post #106
jrs235 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon needs to signal co-mingled and non-co-mingled stock so buyers can purchase with more certainty. The problem is Amazon doesn't want to admit to their co-mingled mess yet. It will hurt their brand admitting that there is a material difference between co-mingled and non-co-mingled stock.

If they clearly label commingled stock, they might as well call it "genuine" vs. "counterfeit." There'd be no reason to buy the commingled stock since odds are it'll be fake.

Touche. Which is also why they won't do it. And as a sibling comment says, they need to fix and get rid of co-mingling items.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#143

Post by ams6110 »

emodendroket wrote: post #129
Zigurd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1,000 full time employees is pretty big these days. The highly touted Carrier deal amounted to maybe 700 jobs. Elizabeth Warren made an announcement about the big new Amazon distribution center in Fall River. It's supposedly Amazon's biggest, and I recall it was about 1,000 jobs. So they are doing more with the same headcount.

Fall River is also extremely economically depressed. I thought that was a typical case but the list of locations suggests maybe that's not entirely true.

Pretty smart on Amazon's part. Locate in depressed areas: the work doesn't require any real skills, the wages, working hours and conditions can be poor because there's no other real competition for employment, and dispite all that the local politicans love you for being an improvement on what they had before.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#144

Post by mschuster91 »

rwmj wrote: post #119
ArtDev wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened to me. The funny thing is that the Samsung website sends you an Amazon seller. I noticed this the second time I needed a battery. The batteries look identical. The only difference was that the counterfeit battery only lasted a couple months.

While I agree that buying phone batteries is a lottery on Amazon, in this case you might have got a genuine battery which had simply been in storage for a long time (which applies to batteries for any phone that's out of production). Li-Ion batteries won't necessarily work after being stored unless they were charged to a specific level and stored in a very specific way. And you have to go back and check the charge an…

Now here's some piece of legislation that could e.g. be made part of "right to repair" bills:

When a product with batteries gets EOL'd and uses non-standard (e.g. AA/AAA, CRxxxx coin cells, 18650 Li-Ion) cells and/or proprietary controller chips, the specifications (mechanical, electrical and EC firmware source) must be made public.

To ensure that this gets followed and e.g. devices from insolvent manufacturers don't end up without reasonable possibility of new batteries, any manufacturer / importer of any device into the country must deposit said information at a public library/archive, similar to FCC/CE certification records.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#145

Post by backtoyoujim »

binarymax wrote: post #133
tw04 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm curious how you came to the conclusion they're major employers where their warehouses are. As far as I can tell each warehouse is about 1,000 full-time jobs. If I look at a list of warehouse locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations They're pretty much universally a rounding error for total population and jobs in their respective metro areas.

That's tens of millions of dollars in salaries injected into the local economy from one employer, not to mention the other additions like local taxes and utility spending. 1000 jobs is significant.

So we wait until 990 of those jobs are lost to automation ... then we order pitchforks from Amazon ?

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#146

Post by [deleted] »

tzakrajs wrote: post #84
cookiecaper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful jumping on the Walmart train. Their online marketplace has recently started including third-party sellers as well. I'm not sure how they police them or if they're any better than Amazon, but you're not implicitly free from these concerns just by going to Walmart.com instead of Amazon.com. I would guess that Walmart doesn't commingle stock from third-party sellers, since it's such a bad idea, but I don't kn…

Jet seems to have very similar inventory to Amazon (even on obscure or niche stuff, like springs for my 2015 Ford Taurus), eerily so. What is more, several times I have been credited money to my account because Jet didn't have the product they claimed to have (the springs...). Weird.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#148

Post by mcphage »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #72
Lasher wrote: post #4

I purchased Quickbooks Pro 2017 (PC) on Amazon last week, said it was "sold by Intuit" so wasn't even supposed to be an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon). Figured if it costs no more I might as well get the physical disk. What showed up was a DVD case with a very clearly photocopied cover for a Mac version with a Verbatim CDR inside and a hacked version of the software. Amazon processed the refund just fine but didn't seem p…

Amazon isn't going to take this seriously until a major company gets burned and the FBI gets involved. Then Amazon will experience what every other company does that gets burned for selling counterfeit goods... the FBI will raid their warehouse and hold all the inventory as evidence until they complete their investigation. Like you said, Amazon doesn't seem concerned that they're selling counterfeit goods -- probably…

I think Apple sued them recently about counterfeit chargers. Let's see if that will do anything.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#149

Post by emodendroket »

ams6110 wrote: post #143
emodendroket wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fall River is also extremely economically depressed. I thought that was a typical case but the list of locations suggests maybe that's not entirely true.

Pretty smart on Amazon's part. Locate in depressed areas: the work doesn't require any real skills, the wages, working hours and conditions can be poor because there's no other real competition for employment, and dispite all that the local politicans love you for being an improvement on what they had before.

It's a tried and true formula.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#150

Post by amsilprotag »

emodendroket wrote: post #82
bonestamp2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon isn't going to take this seriously until a major company gets burned and the FBI gets involved. Then Amazon will experience what every other company does that gets burned for selling counterfeit goods... the FBI will raid their warehouse and hold all the inventory as evidence until they complete their investigation. Like you said, Amazon doesn't seem concerned that they're selling counterfeit goods -- probably…

There is probably a calculation that the feds will be reticent to do that to an Amazon warehouse as they're generally major employers in the areas they're built in.

There was a great Bloomberg Decrypted podcast a couple weeks ago weighing the costs and benefits for a small town in offering a multi-million dollar subsidy for thousands of low-skill Amazon warehouse jobs. Is it really worth subsidizing at all when the government will have to fund various welfare programs to cover the difference between the ~$10.00/hr paid and a livable wage? But since towns compete and prestige is awarded to politicians who win deals, towns race each other to near zero expected value.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/your-tax-...

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