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

washingtonpost.com

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

#141

Post by JohnFen »

siruncledrew wrote: post #127
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 e…

So I hear, but my experience with Amazon on this front has not been so positive. I pretty much count them as not having a return policy at all anymore. If I get broken garbage from them, I just eat the loss and get more suspicious of Amazon. It beats having the hassle of talking to Amazon in order to end up just eating the loss anyway.

This is in contrast to eBay, which has always done right by me when I've had a problem with something I've purchased.

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

#142

Post by dwoozle »

privateSFacct wrote: post #60
dwoozle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market opportunity is already occupied by Target! Great products, shipped to you or delivered to your car in the parking lot. I’ve shifted at least 50% of my Amazon spend to Target. I won’t buy anything that I eat, that touches my children’s skin, that plugs in, or that has a Li-Ion battery from Amazon.

I'll try them, though I just did some searches for some random categories like sailboat products and got nothing back. We have switched a lot of our home goods shopping to them (in person).

Yeah, sailboat products ain’t gonna happen at Target. Amazon is like a giant Goodwill: half the stuff is obvious crap, another 30% is non obvious crap, and 20% is quality products. If you want verified quality in specialty categories, you need to use a specialty retailer like West Marine.

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

#143

Post by cr0sh »

izzydata wrote: post #15
AlexandrB wrote: post #11

Amazon's fulfilment has also become shockingly bad. Most items are shipped in lightly-padded manila envelopes resulting in high percentage of damaged goods if you order books[1], CDs/DVDs/BluRays, video games, or anything else where the packaging is part of the product. eBay is a much better experience in this regard. [1] In an ironic twist, I absolutely refuse to buy books from Amazon anymore.

I've received many damaged books from Amazon. Whenever I report the items as being damaged I am prepared with photographs of the damaged goods as proof, but they always send me another one without caring. It just feels so wasteful to save money by mishandling everything to the point where it doesn't even matter if stuff breaks because it is cheaper to try a 2nd time.

> but they always send me another one without caring.

Had something like that happen to me, and for the product, it was a shock. I had ordered the item, it said it was delivered, but it never made it to me. I contact CS (via chat) and they said they would send out another one. I said ok - what happens if the old one shows up in the meantime. They told me to keep it.

A few days later I got the original item (it had been shipped to a completely wrong address via USPS). Then a few weeks later I got the "new" one. So now I have two of them.

The item? A Tamiya Grasshopper kit.

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

#144

Post by novaRom »

I stopped using Amazon because they sell mostly junk as recently: the same pictures but different names, incorrect overemphasizing statements and fake tech specs, mostly made in China objects. Examples: binoculars, microscopes, telescopes, monoscopes, digital amplifiers, bluetooth headphones, etc.

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

#145

Post by ummonk »

Retric wrote: post #17
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

I think this article seems like a good example of editorial independence. Even though both Amazon and the Washington Post are pretty much owned by the same person, the Washington Post has published a pretty negative article about Amazon.

Not to question their independence, but it seems to have a very positive spin for a negative article. Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products... Former executives say e-commerce giant, which last year spent $400 million fighting fraud and abuse is kind of saying well their trying really really hard, honest. I suspect this has less to do with the Amazon relationship than the tendency to give similar weight to both s…

At Amazon’s scale, $400 million seems a year seems like a minuscule amount.

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

#146

Post by tyingq »

jschwartzi wrote: post #88
tyingq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's even a reliable exception process to review items/sellers with lots of bad reviews. You would have to have that working first.

The problem here is that Amazon wants an automated process, which is fundamentally incompatible with how sales works. You can't reliably go through and identify all of the products you sell by trademark and verify that the pricing is within a certain reasonable percentage of the seller's price or MSRP. And if there's no posted MSRP you're stuck assessing the market price based on how much others have paid for the sam…

I'm not convinced they have automated processes for simple stuff like "> 500 sold AND > 50% returned"

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

#147

Post by nlfwhulsdhouv »

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…

My favourite example of this are cheap digital PH meters:

https://www.amazon.com/Accuracy-Measuring-Household-Drinking...

If you can find any listings with real reviews, it turns out that these are pretty terrible, usually floating around 2-3 stars. Magically, there are consistently listings with 4.5+ stars and thousands of reviews for a relatively niche, barely functional product.

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

#148

Post by non-entity »

Akababa wrote: post #62

It's the same as Wish and all the other "third-party" online marketplaces. They don't give a shit because they're making so much money from the "unsuspecting consumer" segment.

I've run across a few places on the web that use photos of high end products to advertise with, with luxury sounding names and legitimate look ads, but googling the "company" shows low quality ripoffs and enraged customers.

From what I've read, they're pretty much immune from any legal action too.

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

#149

Post by avgDev »

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…

Thanks, I like the convenience of amazon but will be cancelling my membership this weekend and just use walmart or something else.

It is $120 a year and I'm tired of it. I have seen cases where my pricing was higher than non-prime members for the same item/seller, going to same address.

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

#150

Post by novaRom »

Glyptodon wrote: post #64

Forget counterfeits for a second. Even trying to find something like an ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon is like straight going through AliExpress. But wait! Unless you're buying a very very expensive lab model all the "name brands" look to be sourcing the same way and adding a label too. So the name brands are AliExpress with maybe better QC and 200% markup. But wait! Even looking everywhere else it's the same situation…

Exactly to the point! It's a recent phenomenon, I still remember I could find anything of a decent quality on Amazon like 5 years ago, but not anymore. Review system is now totally broken, most products are cheap crap. I don't even try anymore. Amazon is good only for books and probably cables.
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