Amazon cares about counterfeit products as much as YouTube cared about copyright videos in its infancy. It's just here to enable growth until they start to fight it.
Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
141–148 of 148 posts
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you’re buying from the manufacturer and there are no other sellers, then you’re fine on Amazon. Where you have to watch out is when there are multiple sellers on an item.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The doctrine of first sale means people can re-sell your products. It does not mean you have a right to do so on Amazon .
It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market without a contract with the buyer that may or may not be legal or enforcable based on jurisdiction. It also doesn't seem likely that people willing to defraud people with any agreement.
> It's not clear that you can limit a buyer's ability to resell it on any market
Depends on who the "you" is here.
Nike can't forbid me from reselling shoes. Nike can ask Amazon to willingly forbid me from doing so on their platform, and Amazon can agree.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 market…
You can pretty easily observe that they aren't. Try to find a company where googling the company name shows you a top result that is actually another company with a storefront selling the same products. Now try to find an Amazon listing for a company's products that includes a third-party seller.
It's easy to see why. Google's entire reputation is based on providing good search results, to the point that "to google" has become a verb meaning to search the internet. They put a vast amount of effort into ensuring that they provide good search results. It is possible, with nefarious SEO and such, to beat out legitimate results sometimes, but it's not easy or reliable.
Amazon, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care. Sign up to sell a product, done.
Why would a liability rule kill Amazon? They can make it a part of their seller agreement that the seller indemnifies Amazon for all liability. This is different from making the seller directly liable because if the seller bails out, Amazon it stuck with it. This means that Amazon will have to make sure they can actually get satisfaction from sellers. There are many ways this can be accomplished, such as requiring the seller to have liability insurance with sufficient coverage.
I'm sure that such a rule would result in Amazon losing a bunch of tiny, no-name, untraceable sellers. Which is, of course, the whole point.
How is failing to ship the item or charging too much worse than counterfeiting? Both are trivial to counteract: initiate a chargeback with your credit card company. The same is true for counterfeits, if you detect them. The whole problem with counterfeits is that it's hard to detect them. If it was easy, this whole thing would be moot.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#145Earlier 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…
Same. In fact, I basically only use Amazon as an AliExpress with free 2 day shipping. For anything that could be counterfeited (which is really anything these days!), I won't touch them anymore. B&H is the same price and I can always show up at their store and be annoying until they fix my problem.
B&H is certainly better, but I've occasionally gotten something that was obviously open box from them and its always a bit of a pain to convince them this is a problem. It came to a head recently complete with a salty response from their social media guy on Twitter and a complaint to Anton Bauer about used product being sold as new.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#146Amazon also has issues with returned items. If they judge the returned package to be cosmetically sellable, even if the item is used or half gone, they'll re-sell it.
When I bought an Instant Pot from Amazon, the first one I got was obviously used (it smelled of food, and some of the accessories were missing). I had to exchange it for an actually new one.
Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#147Re: Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think they either use old empty bottles, dilute genuine product or steal the content for themselves and then refill the empty bottles.