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Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

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Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#71

Post by scruple »

therein wrote: post #14
cgriswald wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

Normally I'd just upvote and continue on my way but with the expectation that maybe someone from Amazon is reading and thinking "surely not everyone feels that way". We all feel this way. Inventory co-mingling will have major long term costs. If you think about it, it is pretty crazy how big of a reputation hit Amazon has taken in the last few years.

> We all feel this way.

Absolutely. I order direct from the manufacturer for most of my supplements these days and the rest I pick up from Target and CostCo. I used to buy all of them from Amazon.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#72

Post by AnssiH »

gamblor956 wrote: post #39
michaelmrose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doctrine of first sale means you can't keep people from reselling your branded products and if you don't offer your products on Amazon at this point others will offer fakes and with Amazons cooperation acquire your customers while offering them cheaper competitors products. Its a lovely situation to say the least. All strategies are sub optimal. Logically we need a law forcing them to divulge who your actual prod…

The issue isn't reselling branded products. The issue is selling fake products as a branded products. Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items. This fact by itself would probably make Amazon liable for product liability claims in any court in the US, it's traditional CDA liability sheild notwithstanding. EDIT: Products liability law is complicated, but…

> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items.

That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier:

> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.

I.e. commingling only means that any sellers' inventory can be used for fulfillment, not that the inventory is physically commingled.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#73

Post by CJefferson »

AnssiH wrote: post #72
gamblor956 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't reselling branded products. The issue is selling fake products as a branded products. Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items. This fact by itself would probably make Amazon liable for product liability claims in any court in the US, it's traditional CDA liability sheild notwithstanding. EDIT: Products liability law is complicated, but…

> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items. That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier: > The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can a…

I think thats pedantic. If I can't demand the seller I want, from my point of view it is commingled.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#74

Post by jimktrains2 »

c3534l wrote: post #70
amluto wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon Logistics is... special. I regularly have packages “delivered”, but they mysteriously show up a day or two after the claimed delivery. I assume this is the logistics “contractors” missing their quota and making up for it later.

That would be UPS doing that, not Amazon.

No, there are defiantly people delivering stuff our of cars and cargo vans. I haven't had an amazon order come via UPS or FedEx in a while.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#75

Post by la_barba »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
zaroth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more to the point, you cannot claim they are being sold directly from the manufacturer.

Sure, but even if you're openly a reseller, Amazon doesn't have to let you on their platform. They could say "we'll only let Apple sell Apple products here".

I think it would be challenging to keep track of who the original trademark owner is for every single item and creating a system for them to prove it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses with thousands of products. And sometimes companies re-brand their products, or buy other companies, etc, etc. Or sometimes the original vendor doesn't ship in a particular country, its always through a distributor, etc, etc.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#76

Post by AnssiH »

CJefferson wrote: post #73
AnssiH wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon makes this easy to do by commingling inventory and not matching/tracking sellers to inventory items. That is not correct. Amazon's seller help pages and Amazon spokesperson comment on e.g. this FT Alphaville article https://outline.com/4R7fp6 say that Amazon tracks the original supplier: > The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can a…

I think thats pedantic. If I can't demand the seller I want, from my point of view it is commingled.

Sure, I completely agree. That's why it's called commingling.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#77

Post by starsinspace »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #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 throu…

And IMO it's even worse on Amazon than on eBay. At least on eBay you know that it's not sold by eBay themselves, because that's how the whole website works. And also, eBay prominently shows who the seller is on the listing pages.

Amazon's product pages make it so easy to overlook who the actual seller is, and I don't think that's coincidence.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#78

Post by AnssiH »

gervu wrote: post #17
throw20102010 wrote: post #10

Amazon 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 th…

It seems like a lot of things that sound an awful lot like fraudulent practices from a lay perspective don't actually reach a useful or provable definition when it comes to legal liability. But saying something is sold by a specific party which I then choose to do business with, then substituting goods that are likely to be from any of numerous other parties, some of which I may be explicitly trying to avoid doing bu…

Well, one can think of it as follows:

1. You place an order from supplier A.

2. Supplier A buys the unit from supplier B (and pays the balance by transferring another unit A => B).

3. The now supplier A's unit gets sent to you.

I.e. somewhat similar to e.g. dropshipping and other such practices which are traditionally perfectly legal.

It seems it would be quite hard to argue false advertising on that (as you got the item from A - generally it does not matter who A got it from, unless A claims to be the manufacturer), which I guess is why it has not happened yet.

But I could still see it happen, especially if the counterfeiting problems worsen. Maybe the fact that Amazon does it automatically for the sellers (with their approval) could be considered a factor that makes this different from the traditional stock supply cases.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#79

Post by vernie »

empath75 wrote: post #60
20years wrote: post #47

I don't buy anything that I would put into my body from Amazon. This also includes creams, make-up, etc. Way too many counterfeits to trust them and trying to figure out which are legit is a huge task in itself.

Yeah my wife bought ‘tylenol’ that was a bunch of individually wrapped packs of two marked ‘not for resale’. I made her throw them out.

Why?

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#80

Post by ceejayoz »

AnssiH wrote: post #69
amluto wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw the deposit. Amazon itself should be liable if they don’t track who actually sold the merchandise.

Amazon does track the original supplier. From their seller help pages: > Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process. > Important: Amazon ensures that the exact same units from two sellers, participating in the commingling programme, are always physically segregated. This means that Amazon storage logic does not allow same ASINs of different sel…

The next sentence of your last paragraph says:

> Sellers are able to choose whether to share identical inventory or not.

That seems to indicate physical commingling. IIRC, avoiding commingling has an additional cost to the seller.

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