Let's start burning books that are not aligned with left media.
Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're surprised it took this long, then outline some of the harder issues that would make it take a long time to implement correctly. Not only that, but those are policy / design issues. The technical implementation of this at Amazon scale isn't trivial, then adding in fraud detection so folks don't abuse it too. The assumption that Amazon doesn't care about this problem, the fake reviews problem and others killing…
Amazon FBA, which made this problem much harder, was launched in 2006. I don't feel like "took this long" is unreasonable.
And it became an issue immediately or was it only an issue in the last 2-3 years as bad actors found and exploited holes in the system?
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#23Could there be negative unintended consequences here? If someone else sells your product cheaper than you do on Amazon, could this be used to remove them and keep prices higher?
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#24About time. I've ordered quite a few skincare & haircare products that were obliviously refilled with random things. Shampoos that smells like pool cleaner, etc. I used to always order everything from Amazon. Now I've reached a point where I avoid it. What's annoying is that the fakes and the reals have the same listings and share the same reviews. So you glance at the reviews and see mostly 5 stars... only to notice…
Switching products like this seems to be very common on Amazon. I always make sure and go to all reviews and check the most recent before ordering. Review Meta is also a great resource for weeding out less trustworthy reviews.
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#25This has existed for the better part of 4 years BTW. No idea why it’s suddenly newsworthy - slow week?
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#26So, how will this help with things like fake SD cards? Those are usually sold unbranded, but are still faker than fake. IMHO, it's not a good compromise to push the responsibility for fake-detection onto brands and manufacturers. Small makers might not have the resources to effectively police Amazon's massive inventory , and some brands might abuse this power to squash smaller competitors. It's really Amazon's job to…
Small makers might not have the resources to effectively police Amazon's massive inventory, and some brands might abuse this power to squash smaller competitors.
I just bought a small physical device/tool for a particular task. (Magazine reloader.) Apparently, this small niche manufacturer has serious problems with Chinese knock-offs. However, all of the knock offs could be found with a simple generic search on Amazon. Furthermore, most of the knock offs really relied on also knocking off the branding of the original, so searching on the brand name very specifically found all of the knock offs.
So this can cut both ways. Strong brands, even from small manufacturers, can cope without Amazon's intervention, but this could well raise the barriers to entry for new brands.
It's really Amazon's job to keep fakes out off of its platform, and I think they should do the work themselves.
I ordered 1 Gerber keychain multitool from Amazon awhile back, and I got 3 of them. The runner who grabbed the box didn't realize she/he grabbed a pack of 3. If they are operating at a pace where they get quantity wrong, just who at Amazon is going to take the time to inspect items and distinguish the fakes?
This can be a serious problem, with potentially health damaging effects. There was a problem with knockoffs of a leading brand of electronic hearing protection. These knockoffs had electronics that were too slow to clamp down on noise signals, and so could actually amplify quite dangerous levels of noise for a few milliseconds.
Just last night, I was watching a YouTube video about knockoff green laser pointers. It turns out, all of the cheaper ones tested leave out a necessary filter and so leak a lot of energy as invisible infrared light. This can be quite dangerous, as it's potentially eye damaging and yet invisible, so it's far too easy to expose yourself from a back reflection, without even knowing it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/420214/the-danger-of-gree...
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon FBA, which made this problem much harder, was launched in 2006. I don't feel like "took this long" is unreasonable.
And it became an issue immediately or was it only an issue in the last 2-3 years as bad actors found and exploited holes in the system?
It was an issue from the outset. By 2016, Apple was claiming 90% of Apple chargers on Amazon were fake. If there's truth to that, it was way past being an "issue" then. I'd consider 5% fakes of a popular product to be a serious issue.
Edit: I'll concede that it's been a serious PR problem for Amazon only in the last 3 years. It's been a problem for brands, sellers, and buyers for much longer, and Amazon has known about it for more than a decade.
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#28No reason to link to blogspam. The actual release of information is here: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zer...
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, how will this help with things like fake SD cards? Those are usually sold unbranded. How can an unbranded SD card be fake? Fake with respect to what? A brand brings this value: expectations. If I buy a no-brand item, I'm not sure what expectations I can have, and I'm not sure I can even claim that it's a fake, since I have no reference point as "the true item". I mean that's literally the biggest value that a b…
A fake SD card is one that doesn't store all the data it claims to. There are SD cards on Amazon that claim to store 64 GB (or whatever), but they really store a fraction of that, with firmware that lies to the user and corrupts the data they try to store beyond the actual capacity.
What you are describing is quite orthogonal to brands: it is simply fraud, ie selling something with specs that you know are bogus. I've seen it called "false advertising" too.
That is exactly what a brand is supposed to protect you against: if a reputable brand is caught doing this, it won't take long for its reputation to go down the drain.
You won't see many reputable brands engage in this, and that also explains why they rightfully complain when someone else uses their brand to push their bogus products, as their reputation can take a hit due to a malicious player.
Intellectual Property protection around brands (brand names, logos, etc...) is serious business.
Re: Amazon to give power to brands to remove fakes from website
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, how will this help with things like fake SD cards? Those are usually sold unbranded. How can an unbranded SD card be fake? Fake with respect to what? A brand brings this value: expectations. If I buy a no-brand item, I'm not sure what expectations I can have, and I'm not sure I can even claim that it's a fake, since I have no reference point as "the true item". I mean that's literally the biggest value that a b…
> How can an unbranded SD card be fake? Fake with respect to what? In respect to not being the claimed capacity, but modified in a data-destroying way to make that difficult to detect: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326059# (from 2015, capacities have obviously changed since then): > Tests by the Counterfeit Report found that the cards will work at first, but generally speaking, buyers are purchasing wh…
Please see my reply in sibling comment. It addresses this.