Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 303 posts

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#91

Post by ikeboy »

my_first_acct wrote: post #90
ikeboy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has "not as described" as an option. You can put in text explaining what wasn't as described: if it has keywords like "counterfeit" or similar, it will go into that seller's CCR (counterfeit complaint rate), and sellers with a bad CCR get suspended.

Good to know. Thanks.

The exact thresholds aren't known, but they're pretty low: https://www.awesomedynamic.com/amazon-prime-wardrobe/ mentions thresholds of 30 PPM (and 500 PPM for just Materially Different Complaint Rate) to get into some seller program. Presumably the threshold rate for suspension is an order of magnitude or so higher than that. 500 PPM would be one complaint every 2,000 orders.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#92

Post by billpollock »

msbarnett wrote: post #82
oarsinsync wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the tweets by the authors, the current situation is the bad seller is amazon.com. This is apparently not a commingling problem. Amazon is sourcing illegal counterfeit products directly.

Link to the tweet that claims Amazon are themselves buying counterfeits from suppliers? Are you sure you’re not misunderstanding the situation re: comingling? It’s precisely because of commingling that, just because you buy a book “Shipped From and Sold By Amazon” you have no guarantee that the book they ship to you was actually bought and entered into their inventory by them. Their books and every other “fulfilled b…

These books are counterfeits. Counterfeiting is illegal and intent doesn't matter.

This is not a matter of some other seller providing Amazon with inventory. These are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory.

There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#93

Post by wongarsu »

ikeboy wrote: post #43
lawkwok wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably old news to seasoned Seller Central users, but I was surprised how easy it was to "take over" product pages from already existing products. Our sales figures definitely weren't high. I think it may have been related to how much stock we had for all the sizes of the product. Soon the product images and descriptions we provided became the canonical version and overrode whatever was there before. Even p…

Product reviews are meant to be of the product, so it shouldn't matter which seller it is if you're all selling the same product.

If the product is a "Philips Boilermaster 3000" kettle then this is true (if we ignore counterfeits).

But not all Amazon products work that way. The "t-shirt with eagle print" could be made by a number of companies with wildly varying quality, all fitting this product description. Similarly there are lots of 10m Cat 7 S/FTP lan cables.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#94

Post by ohgreatwtf »

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B452QQS/

Check this product out. It's made in a chinese guy's garage in northern california using equipment he imported in 2014.

It doesn't have legitimate GMP or FDA licensing.

This is the kind of problem we are talking about.

And the issue is worse than it appears, just as toast0 mentioned, because the same exact product with same product page and AMAZON barcode, NO UPC, is also in the online walmart marketplace now! Amazon so controls the market that the other companies just do whatever amazon does. This is a literal antitrust situation we are in- sherman act violations.

There are international food products on amazon marked "made for/picked exclusively for amazon". That's a violation of the FTC act. We are in a situation where our government is failing to regulate.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#95

Post by ikeboy »

wongarsu wrote: post #93
ikeboy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product reviews are meant to be of the product, so it shouldn't matter which seller it is if you're all selling the same product.

If the product is a "Philips Boilermaster 3000" kettle then this is true (if we ignore counterfeits). But not all Amazon products work that way. The "t-shirt with eagle print" could be made by a number of companies with wildly varying quality, all fitting this product description. Similarly there are lots of 10m Cat 7 S/FTP lan cables.

If you buy a generic product with no brand name and no intellectual property, then all you have is the pictures. If they all look the same, they could technically be different quality but there's no reason to expect a certain level of quality without a brand name.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#96

Post by Scoundreller »

beerandt wrote: post #70
toast0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Walmart has integrated a 3rd party marketplace onto their site too; so who knows when they will start fulfilled by Walmart and comingling. There's also persistent stories of Walmart demanding lower priced items and being ok with the lower quality, not always with different UPCs.

The funny thing about Walmart 3rd party, is it always seems to be drop shipped by a competitor, and comes in a clearly branded box. I've gotten boxes from Newegg, Target, Wayfair, and even Sam's Club. Still a better option than Amazon (for now, at least).

Arbitrage at its finest!

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#97

Post by nebulous1 »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #76
billpollock wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this case may be a bit different. When you order this book by pressing just the Buy button, as in shipped and sold by Amazon, you get the counterfeit. I know because I ordered two copies last week. Both came and both were counterfeit.

Do we know that Amazon doesn't comingle their "sold by amazon" stock with FBA third-party sellers? I can't see anywhere that they say they don't on some research, and it would seem to be an obvious thing to do.

I found this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...

Which says they do commingle their "sold by Amazon" stock with their FBA stock. I'm actually pretty surprised, I had no idea this was the case.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#98

Post by paulcole »

nextos wrote: post #36
mariomariomario wrote: post #24

This happens because Amazon allows inventory commingling. For example Amazon has their own, legitimate inventory in a West Coast warehouse, and a third party seller has the same inventory with the original UPC manufacturer bar code on it, sitting in an East Coast warehouse. Amazon considers this 1:1 inventory. Amazon will debit their inventory on the West Coast, and credit the inventory that belongs to the third part…

This is sadly so true. I have stopped using Amazon after 15 years due to the unacceptably high rate of counterfeit, grey market or used items I got on a daily basis. It's totally insane. I have even emailed Jeff Bezos and got into the trouble of talking to all middle managers. They don't care.

How could you identify a grey market item? And what/how much were you ordering that this was a daily issue?

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#99

Post by beerandt »

ikeboy wrote: post #88
msbarnett wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon knows which seller sent in the inventory for every order, so they know to punish the right seller when a complaint comes in. Huuuuge citation needed. It’s precisely because of comingling that they don’t have the ability to do this: they put multiple sellers goods, including their own, in the same storage bins, provided they have the same UPC. By what means do you suggest they can distinguish Seller A’s widge…

I link to it every single thread like this, but here goes: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?... "For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit." Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549623 , https://news.ycombinat…

I know they claim that, and it may be their official policy, but it obviously is not working in practice. Either that, or it's become direct fraud in their part.

And it may work to benefit Amazon in finding problematic sellers, and it may scare most legit sellers to never supply fake products.

But it doesn't seem to do anything to actually benefit sellers or buyers, at this point.

For one, I suspect resold returned items to be a major weakness of this policy. Or orders of multiple quantity with different sources, which are picked, boxed, then returned to inventory for whatever reason.

Re: Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

#100

Post by mariomariomario »

billpollock wrote: post #67
mariomariomario wrote: post #24

This happens because Amazon allows inventory commingling. For example Amazon has their own, legitimate inventory in a West Coast warehouse, and a third party seller has the same inventory with the original UPC manufacturer bar code on it, sitting in an East Coast warehouse. Amazon considers this 1:1 inventory. Amazon will debit their inventory on the West Coast, and credit the inventory that belongs to the third part…

Unfortunately this case may be a bit different. When you order this book by pressing just the Buy button, as in shipped and sold by Amazon, you get the counterfeit. I know because I ordered two copies last week. Both came and both were counterfeit.

No this is classic inventory commingling, for brevity let's say that Amazon has 100 fulfillment centers (FCs). When you ship in 10,000 units, Amazon will then take those 10,000 units and spread them to the FCs closest to the top of the bell curve of the normal distribution of your orders. And the same goes for any third party sending inventory to be sold on your listing. When you use a "manufacturers barcode" ie. UPC / ISBN as the only identifier on the product, that's the only way Amazon can identify what it is unless you use an Amazon barcode.

If people didn't sell counterfeit products, we would enjoy the amazing logistics network that Amazon has built.

My recommendation is that you become Brand Registered on Amazon, you get a hell of a lot more weight to throw around on your listing, ie. kicking off sellers who are not authorized to sell your products. Go look at any Anker product, you will see that "AnkerDirect" is the only seller on any of their listings because they are Brand Registered.

You could also go the Seller Fulfilled Prime route for full quality control, which allows you to keep access to the Amazon marketplace but you are responsible for logistics end of the bill which is a tall order but there are 3PLs that can help with that sort of ask.

Post reply on HN