Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M

In my simple understanding of the law isn't Amazon liable to pay damages?

You can plausibly sue Samsung for it. Does AMZ have the same accountability?

I was browsing for bird feed recently on Amazon DE and FR sold by Amazon themselves as I mostly don’t trust third parties. Some reviewers said they received just a transparent plastic bag with different seeds in it.

All those reviews were from 2019. So my guess is that they’ve started to commingle in Europe too.

More like rant against dressing standardized components a thousand different ways to make it seem there's more options than there are.

What standardization could enable, in a better world, is customizability - the ability to cheaply compose standard parts and some dressing on top to match a particular demand of an individual customer. Instead, we get common customizations prebaked and deployed on the market in a shotgun fashion. It's extremely wasteful, and a reflection of the fact that matter is too cheap these days.

Have sellers post $1,000 bond to sell, scaled up based on sales volume.

This is interesting. I've looked over various pages, starting at https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/pricing.ht... and I can't find anything where FBA stores need to do anything like this (post bond).

Compare this to Chinese stores tmall.com (operated by Alibaba) and jd.com. Both tmall.com and jd.com are focused on trying to ensure that customers can trust the authenticity of their products and similarly can host 3rd party stores. Their corresponding webpages say:

https://about.tmall.com/tmall/fee_schedule

This one-time fee (frozen on Merchant's Alipay account) is used as collateral in the case of any damages incurred by Tmall.com or any customer, unfrozen upon termination of the Tmall.com Service Agreement.

    - Flagship Store, Franchise Store:™100,000RMB; ® 50,000RMB

    - Specialty Store: ™ 150,000RMB; ®: 100,000RMB

    - Specialty Categories:

        Flagship Store of a multi-brand marketplace - 150,000RMB

        Specialty stores sell merchandises produced outside of Mainland China and the trademarks of those merchandises are not registered in China(Fruit, import products, etc) - 150,000RMB

        "Book/Audiovisual" primary category operators: Flagship store and franchise store - 50,000RMB; Specialty store - 100,000RMB

        "Service" and "E-tickets" primary category operators - 10,000RMB

        "Online Gaming and QQ", "Mobile Fees", and "Travel" primary category operators - 10,000RMB

        "Medicine/Medical Service" primary category merchants - 300,000RMB

        "Cars and Car accessories" and below 1st class "New and Used Cars" primary category merchants - 100,000RMB

        For information on first-class categories, please consult: //a.taobao.com/detail/2011/11/10/533509/1.php

Tmall.com reserves the right to deduct from the Deposit an amount equivalent to the damage incurred by Tmall.com or any customer. Should the Security Deposit be less than the required amount, the merchant must cover the difference within 15 days. Should the merchant exceed the deadline, Tmall.com will close the store until the payments are received.

Correspondingly, for jd.com, I couldn't find a similar official company URL, but I found this one.

https://www.tmogroup.asia/how-to-sell-using-jd-com/

Although companies who are registered inside mainland China are eligible to sell on the JD Marketplace platform, it is important to take into account the costs associated with operating a store. Roughly the costs can be divided into the security deposit, service see, and commission.

    First, the security deposit ranges between 10.000 and 100.000 RMB depending on the product category. This deposit is refundable if you decided to leave the JD Marketplace.

    Second, the service fee is a monthly payment between 500 and 1.000 RMB depending on the chosen product category.

    Lastly, JD will charge a commission based on your sales. This commission ranges between 1% and 8% varying with the shop type and product category.

I'm sure they also take various other measures to ensure authenticity and punish misbehaving sellers. Both of them basically are market responses to Chinese consumers being fed up with counterfeit products.

I am surprised that to date, Amazon has not done something similar to weed out all the bad sellers.