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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

#131

Post by graeme »

Raphmedia wrote: post #64
graeme wrote: post #62

Does amazon canada have a counterfeit problem? To my knowledge I haven't received any and I'm wondering if the same comingling issues exist. Or are counterfeits generally perfect visual frauds?

This year, I bought a lot of cosmetics and hair products from Amazon Canada. Most of what I received was fakes and knockoffs. Now I know that every time I buy a product, I have to look first at the 0-star reviews. It seems that sellers first build a reputation and then move on to counterfeiting. As a result, product listings have excellent reviews, even when they are clearly false. I'm talking things like a cream sha…

Interesting. I guess I always check for zero stars, so maybe that's how I avoided it.

Would it be clear the branding was different? Like, the brown water didn't have an immaculately reproduced shampoo bottle? Thinking of supplements, where it can be hard to tell what a legit one should look like.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#132

Post by toasterlovin »

x0x0 wrote: post #107
jdietrich wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon are playing a very dangerous game with their brand. I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress. I know that there's a fair chance that I'll get some kind of junk, but it's cheap enough that I'm often willing to take the gamble. Until very recently , Amazon offered the lowest-hassle online shopping experience by a considerable margin. I'd often buy from Amazon without bothering to compare prices, because the convenie…

I'm in the same place -- Amazon sold me a counterfeit charger. Well, not counterfeit, but with a fake ETL/Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark. I told their CS and they refunded me, then continued selling the charger with the fake ETL mark. I moved $40k/year of IT spend from my company off Amazon to BHPhoto. I also stopped buying any makeup / food / supplements / dog food / dog toys on Amazon. Hell, I bought my dog's…

We make speaker wire and sell it primarily on Amazon, so I have some experience on the manufacturer side of UL/ETL marks. My advice is to never buy any product with an ETL mark. As an organization, they are way less stringent about enforcing the integrity of their mark. And I would also never buy anything at a low price tier that bears a UL mark, since it’s probably counterfeit. If you want quality, pay for it. When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point, there’s a pretty good chance you’re getting something legitimate. The reason is that it’s hard to compete at a higher price point, so honesty is probably the only reason a brand would willingly choose to scale that kind of a barrier.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#133

Post by didibus »

michaelmrose wrote: post #33
didibus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that it isn't clear if Amazon can reliably have you choose from what vendor you are buying. That said, not all manufacturer have a storefront. A lot of items can only be purchased through some middleman. And it is hard to validate that a particular vendor is the actual manufacturer and not just pretending to be. So say you wanted that product, and googled for a vendor, and you found xmanifacturer.com. How wou…

It's actually trivial. If someone pretends to be from foo corp you call foo corps official listed number and inquire. If someone is an individual you ask for an identity document like a drivers license and keep that on file and associate that with all sales. You track who sends you widgets. This is trivial to do with increasingly cheap rfid tags. For reference Walmart individually tags 10pks of cheap socks so it can…

Sorry, I meant for the customer. I agree that Amazon could both better validate and indicate to the customers which vendor are the official manufacturer, as well as allow you to opt out of comingling and actually say you want the item to have been from that vendor (even if at an extra cost)

But if there were no marketplace such as Etsy, Amazon or Ebay, I think it would be harder for the customer to trust a random website. At least with these marketplaces, you can trust the payment channels, the security of the data you give them, that the support contact will be responsive, that the item will be delivered properly and at all, etc.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#134

Post by didibus »

mikeash wrote: post #35
didibus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that it isn't clear if Amazon can reliably have you choose from what vendor you are buying. That said, not all manufacturer have a storefront. A lot of items can only be purchased through some middleman. And it is hard to validate that a particular vendor is the actual manufacturer and not just pretending to be. So say you wanted that product, and googled for a vendor, and you found xmanifacturer.com. How wou…

If they’re at the top of the Google search results for “manufacturer” then you’re probably good. Cross check with Wikipedia if you want to be sure. If you find some random vendor with a cheaper price then you need to make a decision about how much you trust them and how much it’s worth to you. All of this is pretty standard and expected. The problem with Amazon is that people expect them to be trustworthy, and appare…

I don't know why Google results would somehow be less likely to be abused by fraudulent vendors then Amazon, Ebay or Etsy is for example.

I do think your point about these big vendors maybe providing a false sense of security is a good one, though I think it applies to Google results as well.

I don't know about legally liable though. I think that's where I'm more nuanced. If you impose that rule, than you kill marketplaces, everyone becomes individual retailers again, and Amazon, Ebay and Etsy becomes newer Walmarts. The selection shrinks again, prices go up, most manufacturers stop selling direct to customers again, since there are no cost effective ways for them to be a store anymore, and now you have fraudulent storefront opening up as websites again which will play the SEO game and potentially do even more damage to the customer then counterfeit, like just outright not shipping the item at all, or charging your CC for more money, or reselling your data, etc.

At the minimum, I'm not saying this could happen, but before enforcing these new regulations that you are proposing, we'd need to evaluate that it won't actually make things worse for the consumers. And in this case, I can see a case for it.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#135

Post by toasterlovin »

deogeo wrote: post #115
IanCal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As a brand I think you can stop others listing your products. I tried to sell something a while back and was refused because I was a third party seller.

I should have known this would be used as an excuse to even further expand corporate control at the expense of individuals. Now they're trying to use it to restrict the second-hand market. Instead of making it clear you're buying second-hand goods, or from a non-authorized seller, they are deliberately conflating what you're buying, with who you're buying it from. This way their anti-counterfeit efforts will convenie…

On the flip side, for many brands, if it’s being sold by someone other than an authorized reseller, it is almost certainly counterfeit. We have a private label brand that sells on Amazon. If anybody else is selling our products at the same prices we sell them for, then it is almost certainly a counterfeit, since we only sell at retail prices. The only exceptions would be somebody selling one of our products used. But then we offer a lifetime return policy.

And believe me, as a seller I have some insight into the bullshit black hat tactics at play in the Amazon marketplace. Amazon needs tools to fight the bad guys. For the sake of consumers.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#136

Post by toasterlovin »

tracker1 wrote: post #44
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…

Or at least require a deposit for sellers of a non-insignificant amount, a hold on new seller payouts for up to 30-60 days and per-seller stickers on intake inventory so sellers of counterfeits can be rooted out better. Also, allow product manufacturers who sell directly, to block other sellers on the platform for their products and handle reports for alike-named and-or brand confusing products. Amazon does very litt…

FWIW, they’ve started a program to apply serial numbers to individual units. It takes time to shift large platforms like this.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#137

Post by panda88888 »

darkpuma wrote: post #90
thaumasiotes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, in this case is Fry’s selling a returned product as new. This is actually the main reason I stopped shopping at Fry’s. It could be the case that the customer re-sealed and returned, but I’ve seen it often enough at Fry’s that I suspect the store is re-sealing returned product and re-sell as new.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#138

Post by panda88888 »

starsinspace wrote: post #77
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.

Even the seller information on Amazon may not accurate due to inventory commingling.

Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

#139

Post by smt88 »

toasterlovin wrote: post #132
x0x0 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same place -- Amazon sold me a counterfeit charger. Well, not counterfeit, but with a fake ETL/Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark. I told their CS and they refunded me, then continued selling the charger with the fake ETL mark. I moved $40k/year of IT spend from my company off Amazon to BHPhoto. I also stopped buying any makeup / food / supplements / dog food / dog toys on Amazon. Hell, I bought my dog's…

We make speaker wire and sell it primarily on Amazon, so I have some experience on the manufacturer side of UL/ETL marks. My advice is to never buy any product with an ETL mark. As an organization, they are way less stringent about enforcing the integrity of their mark. And I would also never buy anything at a low price tier that bears a UL mark, since it’s probably counterfeit. If you want quality, pay for it. When…

> When you pay for a brand which markets on quality at a higher price point

I think what others are saying is that you can't do this on Amazon, even if you want to, because of fakes.

I've personally moved all my online shopping to Target and Walmart, and I only buy products that they stock in their stores.

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