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Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

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Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#121

Post by freeAgent »

freeAgent wrote: post #100
habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

I reported a specific instance of this to Amazon before and they declined to take any action to police it. In the case I reported, it was a more subtle change. I had purchased some replacement brush heads for a Philips Sonicare toothbrush in the past which worked well for me. When I went to re-order them, I was shipped a completely different design and brand of brush head which was terrible and immediately started to…

Oh wow! I just checked the SAME listing again (that's in my order history) and they have changed it YET AGAIN so now it is a listing for a complete knock-off Philips Sonicare toothbrush...not just the brush heads, but the brush body itself. Of course, I still have an "order again" button in my order history. For reference, when I originally ordered the brush heads, they were $15.99. The brush in the listing now is $59.99. This is insanity!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NN07IMW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

EDIT: It does appear they finally removed swaths of old reviews. Finally.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#122

Post by caro_douglos »

Havoc wrote: post #95
habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

>Until you have a listing for your headphones that comes with 5,000 pre-made positive reviews! Fk. That's possible? How has Amazon not done anything about that? Like I can get keeping fake stuff out is a losing battle, but that seems like a rather significant design flaw if you can "transfer" reviews like that.

I've sat in on calls with Amazon Employees where they tell you to do exactly this to boost sales.......and then deny that they ever did it when you are contacted by the IP rights holder.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/projectzero

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#123

Post by wufufufu »

rasz wrote: post #3
kilo_bravo_3 wrote: post #2

>Hermès’s $640 Clic H Bracelet is one of those luxury baubles that’s financially out of reach for most shoppers. So how is it that Amazon shoppers could recently search for the Hermès piece by name and find a bracelet for just $24.99 on the e-commerce giant’s website? I think this is why I've never received anything fake from Amazon. I'm not stupid enough to think I can get something priced at $640 for $25. >Still, P…

This is one side of the equation, the other is people ordering the real thing, repackaging it with fake from aliexpress and returning for full refund. More enterprising folks sign up as Amazon supplier, register for some expensive products, ship real thing once or twice and then start throwing more and more fakes into their shipments, all nicely co-mingled by Amazon.

> ... the other is people ordering the real thing, repackaging it with fake from aliexpress and returning for full refund.

Can't you do this to a retailer?

> More enterprising folks sign up as Amazon supplier, register for some expensive products, ship real thing once or twice and then start throwing more and more fakes into their shipments, all nicely co-mingled by Amazon

Seems like a fast track to getting your account suspended. Why compromise a profitable business to basically skim off the top?

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#124

Post by Spooky23 »

privateSFacct wrote: post #58
Spooky23 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulating that a retailer selling genuine products is nothing at all like zoning or funeral homes. We need to empower states to regulate Amazon like any other retailer or have reasonable federal standards. In some cases states can apply the death penalty to retailers (revoking sales tax license) if they are perpetuating a fraud. You need regulators with teeth to compel positive behavior from a company are large as A…

It is the same. If the only folks who can sell products are ones who have a deal with the rightholder and can prove they have the rights to sell - obviously the big players will be the ones able to do the deals with Nike, Apple, etc and little guys will not. If the federal government actually cared they can ALREADY intercept and even destroy imported counterfeit products - they do not because it's a bit time consumin…

No it is not. Why would you socialize a problem by requiring the government to spend taxpayer resources and slowing down shipping with inspections in a stream of hundreds of millions of packages?

It would be much easier to empower states to enforce existing concepts like the warranty of merchantability in interstate settings or have a regulatory framework that would allow predatory platforms like Amazon to be held accountable for their behavior.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#125

Post by heavyset_go »

Glyptodon wrote: post #114
heavyset_go wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But wait! Even looking everywhere else it's the same situation as Amazon! It isn't a problem on Walmart or Target's websites, because they don't allow white-label Chinese goods to be sold on them.

Walmart has very similar results to Amazon, just not quite as much, and limiting results to Walmart.com helps a tiny bit more. So I don't agree there. You're mostly right about Target, they pretty much only sell stuff that they carry or brand themselves, but the other side to it for Target is that often you can't find what you want there at all - they have a pretty limited selection, and in any case the stuff they br…

Walmart partners with their suppliers because they have a direct liability for selling dangerous or counterfeit goods. Amazon's lawyers try their best to shift all liability from themselves to their suppliers.

If I buy a product from Walmart that is faulty and injures me, liability falls on Walmart.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#127

Post by siruncledrew »

privateSFacct wrote: post #22

All the ballyhoo about Amazon Transparency and UUID per item. This is a relatively well solved issue in other areas. Make become a seller a bit more difficult with some skin in the game ($2,500 deposit if you sell more than 15 items per year? In person identity verification?). Sellers used to meet with buyers agents (cost money and added identities). Caught selling garbage (product marked new actually used, totaly fa…

Amazon's active "solution" is customer service to address these problems.

"Oh jeez, you ordered a GoPro and got a "YiGorProHD" knockoff. Here, we'll credit your Amazon account with a gift card or try to resend you the item again. Thanks so much for your patience, I'm so sorry for the error."

Amazon doesn't give a shit about everything being sold on the marketplace. They aren't going to track down who put the rotten egg in the basket. It's cheaper and more effective to just give the customers what they want so they shut up and go away happy to continue buying stuff. Plus, in the returns/refunds area, it's the sellers who pay for those costs, so Amazon has nothing to lose by just being a marketplace and customer service sounding board. It's a win-win for Amazon.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#128

Post by lashieloo »

This must be intentional on Amazons part. Other e-commerce companies like eBay completely removes these sort of counterfeit luxury goods from appearing on their site. Amazon could easily do the same thing if they wanted to. Also eBay has even less seller verification than Amazon. So that excuse doesn’t work.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#129

Post by JohnFen »

I remember when Amazon was a relatively safe place to shop, and I didn't have to be as suspicious of what was sold there as I had to be in other places (such as eBay).

But that stopped being the case a while back. I learned the hard way that I can't be so casual about buying from Amazon anymore. This has eliminated a large part of the advantage that Amazon had for me.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#130

Post by ch4s3 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #108
dv_dt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality is back to the time of robber barons of industry, and so too is the lawlessness of many of the industry practices, where we are in the same state where technology and scale of organization are outrunning the philosophical theories of government operation to regulate them.

Inequality goes back far beyond that. The slaves who built the pyramids in Egypt were pretty unequal from the Pharaoh. And even that wasn't the first society with inequality. It goes back far beyond recorded history.

Not that it particularly matters, but the pyramids weren't build by slaves [1]. They were built by skilled/payed workers and some corvée labour by farmers during the flooding of the Nile as a form of taxation.

[1] https://archive.org/details/pyramidscomplete00vern

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