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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

thewirecutter.com

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#81

Post by greenyoda »

mindslight wrote: post #47

The switcheroo problem described in the article simply does not exist say over on Ebay. On Ebay, you directly know if you are buying from a legitimate distributor, small time grey market / surplus dealer, or a knockoff shop. There are plenty of products for which knockoffs/generics are good enough, so simplistically "banning fakes" is not the solution either. The problem is this obscuring of the actual supplier, whic…

> On Ebay, you directly know if you are buying from a legitimate distributor, small time grey market / surplus dealer, or a knockoff shop.

Would you mind explaining how you can figure this out? (I've never bought anything on Ebay, so I'm completely ignorant about how it works.)

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#82

Post by ilamont »

Amazon third-party sales have been steadily rising for the past decade and now account for more than 50% of product sales on Amazon. More than 70% of searches on Amazon are for non-branded merchandise.

Unless these trends reverse, or there is a massive rise in the number of complaints from customers who've been cheated or injured by fakes, there won't be any significant changes.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#83

Post by skizm »

Just add Twitter certified check marks to third party sellers. Have official amazon quality control for those sellers and everyone else is a gamble. If I buy from the Nike seller with the blue check mark, I know I’m getting the real thing. Seems like that could work.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#84

Post by ethanbond »

Nasrudith wrote: post #77
squarefoot wrote: post #45

Fake reviews also contribute to more fake and low quality products being sold. It looks like Amazon simply doesn't care. https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews FTA: "One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables." “Do you actually like the products?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she wrote. “I never use them.”

I'll bite - how would them caring make any difference in terms of quality of "fake" reviews? The way I see it the problem is unsolvable. There is no mathematical way to absolutely determine truth of reviews and it is fundamentally an arms race. No measure they could do could keep it true and free of deception.

For sure. This is why we let financial institutions launder money, fund rogue states, and aid in tax evasion with no fear of legal consequence. Because otherwise it’s hard for them to operate.

No measure of KYC could keep it the financial system completely free of illicit activity, after all.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#85

Post by miked85 »

skizm wrote: post #83

Just add Twitter certified check marks to third party sellers. Have official amazon quality control for those sellers and everyone else is a gamble. If I buy from the Nike seller with the blue check mark, I know I’m getting the real thing. Seems like that could work.

As long as Amazon continues to co-mingle products, that wouldn't matter.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#86

Post by pmart123 »

erentz wrote: post #2

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 de…

I agree from in some capacity in the growth or greed to increase DAU and engagement for social networks is similar to Amazon’s desire to grow SKUs and purchase volume. Amazon mixing SKUs maybe relates to when press piggy backs off of the same initial headline as it creates distrust and makes people question the quality of the product.

There’s a big difference though. Social media allows many individual voices, and much like the printing press, allows previously unheard voices to be heard and to have reach. Therefore, the world’s expert can call out a journalist for being wrong immediately, making it seem like “fake news” is more common than it was previously.

Amazon is actually causing distrust around product quality when there wasn’t any before. Consumers may have trusted Colgate’s toothpaste, but if it isn’t actually Colgate’s toothpaste, yet it poisons someone, it becomes Colgate’s problem too. This would be like Facebook or Twitter allowing any account to adopt a WSJ or NyTimes verified badge, one of those accounts publishes fake news, and then the paper itself has a problem too.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#87

Post by pas »

amylene wrote: post #58
the_snooze wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Wait, do you really believe that amazons retail business has had little or no significant innovation besides whiz bang tech goodness? I’m guessing you were exaggerating to make a more strong sounding statement, but if you meant it, then I strongly disagree.

What exactly are they adding in value compared to any regular webshop? It's just as incomprehensibly bad as the standard run of the mill default PrestaShop.

At least Shopify is a real platform you can build stuff on.

Amazon is just this giant bullying machine. The Dalek of retail.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#88

Post by ThePhysicist »

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.

Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#89

Post by JKCalhoun »

erentz wrote: post #2

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 de…

Yeah, been going to AliExpress more and more. If Amazon is going to a platform for other companies, I'll go with the cheapest one....

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#90

Post by russh »

nappy-doo wrote: post #22
someonehere wrote: post #5

I have friends who are no longer buying from Amazon. Especially friends with kids. You can’t trust anything safe for your kids when crap like this is allowed. Amazon is in a race to flood the market with availability at the cost of consumer confidence. Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in min…

My neighbor bought a set of woodworking clamps from Amazon. When the ~25lb. box arrived, the driver threw them up onto his porch (his house is quite raised from the street), and he has video of it damaging his siding as it took three attempts for the driver to get them over the railing onto his porch. When he contacted Amazon, they said to contact some insurance company they had. When my neighbor called the insurance…

Did your neighbor call the insurance commissioner and attorney general to tell them that they were operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts?
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