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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

#81

Post by ck2 »

there's a new trick/scam on amazon I am not sure if anyone else has noticed yet

seems designed to trick not only buyers but also sites like fakespot

a vendor lists an item for awhile, something cheap and reliable enough to gather plenty of legit 5-star reviews

then they leave the listing and ASIN but delete and change out the photos and the title/text with another item, not even similar item in some cases

so the ratings/reviews remain but the new product is given all their weight instead

cannot believe amazon does not detect and stop this

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#82

Post by ajross »

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…

That phrasing is part of the problem, not the solution. You're conflating the idea of a manufacturer (Proctor & Gamble in this case) with a reseller. Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements", and worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?).

It's not the comingling that is the root cause here, it's the fraud. It doesn't matter whether or not Amazon buys their pills from Joe or Sally, what we care about is that they're not selling fake pills. Focusing on comingling seems to be missing the point. We have even less ability than Amazon to detect the fact that Joe is selling fake pills, so they'd still make it into people's mailboxes.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#83

Post by LinuxBender »

I've bought supplements from Amazon on a regular interval without issue. Maybe I just jynx'd myself. If I ever received fake supplements, I would treat that as being poisoned and report it to the CDC, FDA, FBI and local news.

My only bad experiences with Amazon to date was with NVidia video cards. Twice. Shame on me for falling for it twice. Each time they swapped out the cards with slower clock speed video cards. They also censored my feedback. Apparently nobody else checks their cards clock speed once installed?

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#84

Post by nordsieck »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #74
c3534l wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> 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.

That is the delivery person doing that. The worst is when delivery personnel don't ring or knock, they just slap a "tried to deliver" slip on your door because it's faster for them.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#85

Post by AnssiH »

ceejayoz wrote: post #80
AnssiH wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I understand it, that just means that sellers have the option to opt in/out of the commingling program (Settings => Fulfillment by Amazon => FBA Product Barcode Preference).

Yes, there is a cost for the seller if opting out - they need to apply their own barcodes to the products in that case.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#86

Post by CobrastanJorji »

empath75 wrote: post #58
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I slightly disagree. The item was sold by Proctor and Gamble. They got the money I paid, and I got a product back. Proctor and Gamble happened to use a third party for fulfillment and as a marketplace for handling the sale, and they are to blame for choosing a fulfillment company which may occasionally send me fake products that Proctor and Gamble didn't make. We should fault the sellers for using Amazon in the first…

That is bizarre dream logic. Amazon is the one commingling inventory. P&G are sending legitimate product. I would never purchase anything from amazon other than books, personally. Too much of a chance you’re going to get counterfeits or faulty merchandise.

You're not wrong, but why does the seller get a pass? If I get a catalog in the mail labeled "Bob's Swimsuits for Portly Gentlemen," and I call the 800 number and order one, and instead I get an angry bobcat, my beef is with the folks at Bob's Swimsuits.

The fault may be with the company Bob hired to manufacture swimsuits, or maybe the shipping company for confusing boxes, or maybe Bob's catalog contractor got some model numbers switched around, but I'm just the customer. None of that stuff is visible to me, and I have no control over it. If the catalog company or the fulfillment company or the manufacturer part of the pipeline is known to occasionally produce bobcats, it's Bob's job to fix it.

Yes, this is Amazon's fuckup, but it's not the customer's job to conduct the postmortem. The customer has the privilege of blaming the entity they do business with.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#88

Post by arkades »

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.

I didn’t used to fee this way. Or rather, I kind of did, but didn’t really /care/.

Then I had a kid, and the question of “do I trust this thing to go into or onto my kid’s body?” actually mattered.

Suddenly, my purchases from amazon drop like a rock. Partly for classes of item I don’t trust getting from them, and partly because I’m just getting habituated to shopping at different outlets.

Moreover, this has become a “known thing” in the online mommy groups in our area. My wife has told me she’s heard exactly the same thing on her fb and mailing lists; increasingly, “don’t buy amazon” is a given for conscientious parents.

I’m spending a lot of money on this tiny human, Amazon, and none of it is going to you.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#89

Post by wvenable »

ajross wrote: post #82
gervu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That phrasing is part of the problem, not the solution. You're conflating the idea of a manufacturer (Proctor & Gamble in this case) with a reseller. Amazon tells you both, but since the retail products are (should be) identical, neither they nor you really care whether or not this particular box came from "Joe's Nutrition" or "Sally's Supplements", and worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fung…

> worrying about that distinction is like arguing against the fungibility of money (did that dollar bill in your pocket, which you got from an ATM, "come from" your job or your side gig?)

That's an interesting argument except for the fact that the source of money is extremely important for fraud and tax purposes. Money laundering is specifically the co-mingling of "inventory" to hide the source. Amazon is product laundering.

When the product comes from "Sally's Supplements" then if there is an issue with the product then that's first and foremost Sally's problem. It might go up to Procter & Gamble or maybe it doesn't get that far.

The source of the product and who supports it is very important.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#90

Post by darkpuma »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #43
ADSSDA wrote: post #4

You'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.

> You'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 bought a new mp3 player from Fry's once which, oddly enough, turned out to be stocked with a sizeable music library already. I'd still be pretty comfortable buying a candy bar from them though.

In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.

In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.

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