Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
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Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#2> "When consumers have tried to sue online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay for selling dangerous goods in the past, courts have ruled they aren’t responsible for products offered by third-party vendors..."
If there's one thing that makes me back away, as a consumer, from Amazon, it's this sort of thing, this lack of real accountability. Sure, Amazon, says they do things to prevent counterfeits from being sold through, but there doesn't appear to be any powerful outside force that consumers can bring to bear on the company when they screw up.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#3For some foolish reason I had notifications turned on for the Amazon app... it recently offered me a deal on some sort of supplements that seemed kinda strange / made some weird claims. I had never even searched for any kind of supplement or even food / drug items before.
Other offers were for what looked like seriously questionable quality things, that were semi related to items that I had searched, but looked like rock bottom quality, but they were a few $ cheaper.
It all has a very Kmart / Wallmart, but maybe worse vibe.
Amazon seems more and more like a wide open low cost kinda store where fakes, low quality garbage, and such aren't just too common, but even pushed by their own system. Sometimes Amazon takes some light action, other times they argue they're simply not responsible for whatever it is they sell: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/amazon-on-the-ho...
It's all the opposite of what I chose to go to Amazon for. I went to Amazon to find options I couldn't find elsewhere, and generally want good quality things BECAUSE the local retail stores already were in a race to the bottom.... But now Amazon wants me to wade through their garbage to find it and seems to want to join that $1 cheaper for $5 less quality type race .... and I swear I'm seeing fewer good quality items sold in areas where they used to exist, but now seemed to be dominated by garbage.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#4You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I realize they're trying, but Amazon is clearly failing to control the tide of fakes that is infesting their storefront. I find that for almost anything I search for, the knockoff/fake is actually the Amazon "recommended" item.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#5Awesome do Apple headphones next
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#6You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new". I realize they're trying, but Amazon is clearly failing to control the tide of fakes that is infesting their storefront. I find that for almost anything I search for, the knockoff/fake is actually the Amazon "recommended" item.
They've been "trying" for years. They may truly be trying, but the fact that they've neither succeeded in any meaningful way, nor made the choice to shut off the parts of their service that make the whole site scam-tastic and shitty until they can figure it out, show they don't actually care.
Probably this is because a non-trivial part of their revenue comes from the dark patterns and scams that make their whole site feel so much like the kind of flea market where you're pretty sure some of the stuff's stolen and if you ask around one of the vendors can get you some Oxy, but you wouldn't buy it from them even if you wanted it because it'd probably be fake. IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior, else they'd surely have stopped it by now.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#7For some foolish reason I had notifications turned on for the Amazon app... it recently offered me a deal on some sort of supplements that seemed kinda strange / made some weird claims. I had never even searched for any kind of supplement or even food / drug items before. Other offers were for what looked like seriously questionable quality things, that were semi related to items that I had searched, but looked like…
Amazon is busy shooting itself in the foot. The problem is, the gun is small and the foot is huge, so they probably don't feel it right now.
Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore. That probably doesn't result in much loss for Amazon right now, but what it does do is:
1. Makes me trust Amazon MUCH less, which means I'm much more likely to forgo purchasing additional classes of items from them.
2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon. Those vendors sometimes sell other items I would normally buy from Amazon as well. If I need those items, I'm not going to shop BOTH places. I'm going with the one I trust.
3. Makes me reconsider my Prime membership. (Among other things, like shipping having become less reliable recently.)
There's a tipping point here somewhere, where I'll just stop being an Amazon customer entirely.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#8For some foolish reason I had notifications turned on for the Amazon app... it recently offered me a deal on some sort of supplements that seemed kinda strange / made some weird claims. I had never even searched for any kind of supplement or even food / drug items before. Other offers were for what looked like seriously questionable quality things, that were semi related to items that I had searched, but looked like…
LockPickingLawyer (Youtube) has a series of videos on the poor quality of "Amazon Choice" for various locks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1_P5oqf6Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdJti43IgU (Branded Amazon Basics)
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#9It's a big issue: supplements, batteries, cables, headphones etc...
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#10Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law.
It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."
At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.
Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.