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Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

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

#141

Post by Jb6 »

beerandt wrote: post #83
ceejayoz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine customs can identify "that came on a boat from China but says 'made in USA'" more easily than "the internal electronics in that charger aren't up to snuff".

I'm sure. It's just become so normal to doubt every aspect of a product, that it's strange to have some element of consistency. Of course the label of origin still isn't likely to match what was on the product page. But that's almost a plus in helping to ID fakes.

Because when you import stuff to the U.S. it has to have the country of origin clearly marked somewhere. That's why it says Made in China.

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

#142

Post by bootlooped »

wenc wrote: post #102
ohgreatwtf wrote: post #94

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…

I wonder if we could catch counterfeits by checking a code against some sort of ledger on the manufacturer's end, and do this at scale.

Amazon has a voluntary program called project zero where a manufacturer can serialize every unit they send in. I'm not sure how widely it's used. For a lot of A-list brands it's almost certainly better if consumers lose faith in Amazon (and buy directly from their sites instead).

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

#143

Post by bootlooped »

crooked-v wrote: post #15
mikece wrote: post #14

I would think a little bit of piracy is okay with Amazon as vetting the authenticity of every seller would be too expensive and time consuming, and making it harder for a seller to get onto Amazon will only encourage the growth of competing platforms. I wonder if Amazon has a policy by which it makes payments to sellers cheated by counterfeit goods so long provided they sign an NDA about it?

This twitter thread is about books being directly sold by Amazon being counterfeit, not seller marketplace items.

I think there is a presumption they got into the supply via 3rd party sellers. They end up being "sold by Amazon" due to comingling inventory.

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

#145

Post by bredren »

lawkwok wrote: post #31
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 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…

Haven’t taken over images but have sold into oem equipment on ebike stuff before. It’s pretty cool because you get sales you can’t from an independent listing of the same product.

When I’ve done it, it is legit the same thing and verify it, but I can easily see scale or greed causing people to do the wrong thing with this.

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

#146

Post by dilyevsky »

alienallys wrote: post #17
mjfern wrote: post #2

As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.

Holy moly. I thought it was a thing with my phone and not a wider problem...

This has been going on for years. Twitter is just really bad at this software thing

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

#147

Post by astura »

paulcole wrote: post #98
nextos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Grey market items may say things like "not for sale in [your country]" on the box. They may contain labeling that's not consistent with the standard labeling for your country. They might not have certain disclosures that your country requires for certain types of products. Certain features may not work. Stuff like that. They aren't always identifiable though.

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

#148

Post by swang »

ikeboy wrote: post #47
mjfern wrote: post #2

As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.

They implemented a mitigation for an issue that had this as a side effect. See https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2... and the last time this came up at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20123942 Terrible engineering on their part.

thanks for this. when they released their new twitter version, i started getting all these pages where it would error out and none of the reload buttons would work. couldn't search the cause for this very well. i can't believe the resolution to this is to force users to reload yet again to load the site... ugh.

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

#149

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

2ion wrote: post #33
mjfern wrote: post #2

As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.

Oh, when I open Twitter in Firefox on Android tweets fail to load in 95% of the cases, however the Twitter site itself loads fine enough to show me a Retry button I can press to fail at loading the tweet again. All the while accessing via 'app' and even embedded tweets on 3rd-party sites load fine. Can't recall when this started; must have been some time in 2018. On the desktop (in Firefox also, same addons and addon…

On Reddit, I almost always downvote the "broken" link, just to make Twitter marginally less visible.

At this point, the platform is so full of horrible UX and dark patterns that I want it to die.

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

#150

Post by remotecool »

I have been selling books for the last decade and started seeing an influx of counterfeit books on Amazon about two years ago.

I've even gotten cease and desist letters from lawyers representing the top publishers because I resold a few by mistake.

The worst part is that there is no clear way to tell if a book is counterfeit, the publishers wont actually tell you specifics, and the only way to know for sure is to send the book to the publisher.

When you send it to the publisher, you will get an answer in about 6 months (yes/no) and the answer is always yes.

You have no way to get your original money back for the counterfeit and nothing is learned about how to more easily detect counterfeits.

I feel like this is intentionally vague so they can go after anyone for counterfeits and there is really no way to know if you have a counterfeit or not without a lengthy court case.

I finally had to get an attorney involved and I just had to pass along Amazon seller information. They went away and I haven't had any issues since then (about 2 years ago).

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