Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M • Hacker News Board

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#31

Post by alister » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

Along with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Walmart might have 30 kinds of wall clocks with wood vs plastic frame, with or without Roman numerals, but the actual clock mechanism on the back is the same cheap black box. Home Depot has dozens of kitchen exhaust hoods with well-known brand names, but it looks to me like the internals (fan/filter/exhaust parts) are all made by the same company. A pharmacy gives the illusion of hundreds of different cold medicines, painkillers, and antacids, but it's the same few drugs packaged in hundreds of different ways.

I don't know the solution to this. I wish there were some way to signal when stuff is 90% to 99% identical to cut down on pointless duplicate products and/or to make comparisons easier.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#32

Post by meritt » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #25

meritt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure about that number Based on what? Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" [1]?. The fact that it's revenue and not sales doesn't somehow make the headline false. It's still a loss of revenue. The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers. >…

>Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" Because it's presented without any explanation or context, and it's difficult to see how it could be reasonably estimated. The headline is literally false. Losing revenue, even if that estimate is accurate, is not correctly described as losing money. It's kind of how cops inaccurately report "street value" of confiscated drugs…

Yes I'm aware of your case [1]. You sold non-retail unpackaged electronics on Amazon, you are not an authorized reseller, and were accused of selling counterfeit goods. TP-Link got you banned from Amazon. Now you're suing TP-Link for $5M-10M because you lost ~$100k/mo profit.

But the story above is about actual counterfeit goods. Not people reselling wholesale goods for below MAPs to retail customers.

[1] https://pdfhost.io/v/zU6v@9u0_Microsoft_Word_TSI_complaint6d...

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#33

Post by warent » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

alister wrote: post #31

Along with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Walmart might have 30 kinds of wall clocks with wood vs plastic frame, with or without Roman numerals, but the actual clock mechanism on the back is the same cheap black box. Home De…

The solution starts with manually verifying products. I'm not convinced that it's impossible for Amazon or other stores to have a quality verification system where they have people hired specifically for this purpose. Maybe even a third party could specifically do this. You don't have to do it for every single item, just do it once whenever someone wants to list a product on the platform. Whenever reviews start complain about bogus products, investigate, and if they changed the product from the last time you verified it, remove them from the platform for a period of time.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#34

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

Jaygles wrote: post #2

I wonder if this is an oversight by Amazon on failing to scale its anti-counterfeit measures. Maybe they didn't appropriately evaluate how large the issue would become and they're stuck with trying to amend a system that wasn't designed to combat the issue at the scale they are operating at. I'm interested in what sort of solution will eventually be effective at stopping this. Hopefully for Amazon it won't be inspect…

Personal, expensive, and hard to evade, liability is the solution. Make Amazon liable for the products they sell and in turn Amazon will move mountains to make their sellers more liable.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#35

Post by dman » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

occamrazor wrote: post #30

lotsofpulp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cared, they would let you filter for items only sold by Amazon.com and not commingle inventory. What they really want is for others to take all the inventory risk and liability and take a 15% cut of all purchases. They used to let you filter for items sold by Amazon.com, but they removed it, so I think that clearly proves their goal of being a platform rather than a retailer one can rely on for quality goods,…

I can still filter by vendor, at least on the European websites.

Does not mean anything because of commingling. If you have 500 merchants selling the same item you have no way to control whose inventory you get things from. No filtering by merchant doesnt help, I wish it did. As a result I have mostly stopped buying from Amazon after running into a few obvious fakes.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#36

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

anonymousab wrote: post #18

duxup wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they care. There was a story about a guy who self publishes his own book and on Amazon there are cheap fakes with identical title, cover and etc... Amazon just doesn't do anything.

Well, once in a blue moon they'll take action and ban you and your original products for 'copying' the counterfeits.

Probably after the original competitor hired someone, probably an examz employee, to backchannel the takedown for a princely sum.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#37

Post by jacobkg » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

alister wrote: post #31

Along with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Walmart might have 30 kinds of wall clocks with wood vs plastic frame, with or without Roman numerals, but the actual clock mechanism on the back is the same cheap black box. Home De…

Fun aside, if you buy a cheap wall clock from a big box store, you can often swap out the clock movement with a vastly superior one for very little money. A nice Seiko movement with a sweep second hand can be had for under $20.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#38

Post by ikeboy » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

meritt wrote: post #32

ikeboy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" Because it's presented without any explanation or context, and it's difficult to see how it could be reasonably estimated. The headline is literally false. Losing revenue, even if that estimate is accurate, is not correctly described as losing money. It's kind of how cops inaccurately report "street value" of confiscated drugs…

Yes I'm aware of your case [1]. You sold non-retail unpackaged electronics on Amazon, you are not an authorized reseller, and were accused of selling counterfeit goods. TP-Link got you banned from Amazon. Now you're suing TP-Link for $5M-10M because you lost ~$100k/mo profit. But the story above is about actual counterfeit goods. Not people reselling wholesale goods for below MAPs to retail customers. [1] https://pdf…

I'm responding to your point that Amazon does "little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers."

I disagree, and I'd imagine the plaintiffs in the following cases would as well:

Or for that matter, the 12,000+ people who've signed a petition complaining about Amazon's overzealous enforcement at https://www.change.org/p/jeff-bezos-amazon-com-should-only-s.... Read through a few of the comments there.

False positives rates go up when trying to minimize the false negative rate. As such, evidence that the false positive rate is high shows that actual counterfeits are being enforced heavily as well.

Anyway, OP doesn't mention any specific actions they expected Amazon to take that weren't taken. It doesn't say, for example, that they asked Amazon to take down counterfeits and were refused.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#39

Post by destitude » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

Amazon has caused this to itself in order to maximize its own short-term profits. In the past 1-3 years their goal has been to reduce their own inventory by shifting it to 3rd party sellers and let them deal with the overhead of inventory. This is why counterfeits and crappy products have been proliferating on Amazon and why I have started to avoid purchasing from Amazon all-together. I wonder if they realize how much damage this is costing them in reputation or if they don't care because it still results in more profit for themselves.

Re: Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

#40

Post by erik_seaberg » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #13

Jaygles wrote: post #2

I wonder if this is an oversight by Amazon on failing to scale its anti-counterfeit measures. Maybe they didn't appropriately evaluate how large the issue would become and they're stuck with trying to amend a system that wasn't designed to combat the issue at the scale they are operating at. I'm interested in what sort of solution will eventually be effective at stopping this. Hopefully for Amazon it won't be inspect…

I don't think they care. There was a story about a guy who self publishes his own book and on Amazon there are cheap fakes with identical title, cover and etc... Amazon just doesn't do anything.

I seem to recall an author complaining about some random on Amazon "selling" a book that the author hadn't finished writing yet.