91–100 of 252 posts
The underlying problem, it seems to me, is that Amazon made a decision early on to do very little curation of the products they sell. During the years when they were mostly selling books from established publishers, this wasn't a big issue. When Amazon began selling everything under the sun, the number of vendors exploded. In retrospect, Amazon should have made a big effort to carefully curate all these vendors and t…
I am curious about the advice at the end: > Torres said she encourages customers to verify the seller is legitimate before placing any orders. How? Is there some way to verify that a seller on amazon is legitimate among the slew of fake reviews and stock mingling in warehouses?
As you note, due to stock mingling that doesn't ensure that you won't get a counterfeit, but it probably does at least give you better options to deal with it if you do.
If you buy from Aspects, and Amazon's mingling means you get a cheap counterfeit, I'd expect you'd be able to get an exchange from Aspects.
If you buy what purports to be an Aspects feeder from "Sneed's Feed and Seed" [1] and you get sent a cheap counterfeit, you might be out of luck.
[1] formerly Chuck's
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can still filter by vendor, at least on the European websites.
They let you filter by vendor, but they don’t let you choose Amazon.com.
I am curious about the advice at the end: > Torres said she encourages customers to verify the seller is legitimate before placing any orders. How? Is there some way to verify that a seller on amazon is legitimate among the slew of fake reviews and stock mingling in warehouses?
I was just asking this to myself today when browsing safety-razor blades on Amazon. (I was not able to buy them directly from the manufacturer’s website.) When I tried to start filtering by who sells it, I just got a bunch of names that meant nothing. I eventually bought them on Walmart’s site because, I guess I trust it more? Some of the comments on Amazon had the dreaded “this has changed recently,” and the last th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're in agreement regarding Amazon: They don't take an active role in policing their marketplace. They have a "report this listing" mechanism that essentially bans a seller outright, with no effort to validate the claim. They just assume it's legit by default and the seller is always in the wrong. But to be clear, the brands are the ones taking action (and thus the defendant in these lawsuits), Amazon has es…
I'd mostly agree with that, with the caveat that they will often restrict particular listings or brands that got a high volume of complaints, and require proof of purchase to sell. They also flag sellers that have large sales increases in a short period of time. >It's my view that Amazon themselves should be taking action on behalf of both consumers and sellers to ensure that: 1) products are authentic, and b) consum…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They let you filter by vendor, but they don’t let you choose Amazon.com.
I just searched for an item and had no trouble selecting a "seller" filter for Amazon.com; on what basis are you making this claim?
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 muc…
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…
The problem is the long tail of sellers operating on the marketplace. With a long tail of sellers, you get a long tail of fraud and bullshit too. When you search on Amazon for random basic goods, you'll get thousands of results from insane numbers of gibberish sounding sellers. But there might be only a few dozen unique results. It's going to be basically impossible to combat fraud when this is allowed. I'd even cons…
For goods we can't risk counterfeit we go Walmart and Vitacost. Vitacost is really great.
It's now to a point I weigh everything coming in, and over half of the items are off weight, some egregiously so (0.2 oz of jalapeno, but billed for 1 pound; .5 pound of chicken but billed for 3; a sliver of broccoli but billed for 2 pounds; the list is endless).
>>In a statement on its website, Amazon also said its employees “work hard every day to help ensure all products offered in our store are safe and authentic.” Bullshit. The front line employees that receive inbound product don't enforce any policy and actually Amazon encourages to deal with disputes only after a product is sold, shipped and a customer complains. That's the Bezos way. Fact. Let's discuss grocery produ…