Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)

One important part of our solution here has to be that we force these companies to take a position one way or the other. So in Amazon's case it would need to decide - am I a platform for companies to set up there own online shop and provide fulfillment services to? Or am I myself the online shop?

In the later case they become responsible for product, like any business. In the former, they aren't. But in the former they now need to act as just a platform and not provide all the branding that makes it look like you're buying from Amazon. So they'd be more akin to Shopify or something I suppose. Every fly by night shop that wants to set up needs to set up its own branding and that way brand reliability and recognition still works and items are no longer commingled.

I think you solve it by making amazon directly liable for fraud on their platform. They’d clean up the problem pretty quickly after losing a few billion dollars in lawsuits.

I have started buying most products directly from manufacturer's websites or in physical stores now. The amount of fake products on Amazon is appalling, I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.

Disclaimer: I don’t own amazon directly but do own funds where Amazon is a significant chunk.

I don’t agree with this kind of regulation. It’s simply not the governments role to decide. You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon. I say that as the spouse of a seller who owns a store on EBay that’s continued to be successful. We had a bad experience selling on Amazon and are better off without them. Of course that’s just our experience but I’m not convinced Amazon is a monopoly here.

I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers. Amazon simply selling goods with no liability of fraudulent items is a disgrace, and I don’t think they will change until we ram some regulation down their throat.

>I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)

These companies innovate by showing off a layer of whiz-bang techy goodness so people don't notice that they've simply externalized all the responsibility and internalized all the profits.