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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#211

Post by ShroudedNight »

VLM wrote: post #29
miked85 wrote: post #6

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.

Very few products on Amazon are sold by the creator. Virtually everything is sold by a mixture of middlemen and importers and drop shippers. Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between a product I'm middle-manning that's interpreted by investigators as real, vs a product that's interpreted as fake. With books, nobody really minds if conceptually a book sat unopened on a bookstore shelf with the general pu…

I agree that the ambiguity between 'like-new' and actually new, but mildly shopworn would make it hard to tell a material difference between the two occurrences, however this:

> nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet

This is conflating dishonest substitution of counterfeit goods with consensual purchase of a lower-quality product. If I'm not explicitly purchasing the 'international' version of a book, I would consider myself harmed and defrauded if its materials and construction are not up to expected [North-American / Western / ?] standards.

The user explicitly consenting to purchasing a knock-off is another thing entirely from having the seller 'fulfill' a purchase for a genuine item with the same knock-off.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#212

Post by agumonkey »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #207
agumonkey wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web feels like a huge fine grained stress test to reassess all the reasons why most of the world was the way it was.

We had to steamroller all of Chesterton's fences to figure out which ones we'd miss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

thanks for the reference as it's often seen in many places of society and culture

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#213

Post by [deleted] »

sk5t wrote: post #196
hrktb wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are going in the expected direction, but we’re not at the end yet. About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need t…

After reading about the Wirecutter's attempts to extract a commission from a maker of standing desks[0] and observing their general high churn in product picks, it seems hard to argue that WC isn't buyable. [0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

[deleted]

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#214

Post by erik_seaberg »

caro_douglos wrote: post #205
heavyset_go wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be solved with an "I believe the item I received is a counterfeit" option alongside the "Item is defective or doesn't work" option already present during the return process.

My personal favorite was the manufacturer who purchased an item from us (a third party merchant) who claimed it was counterfeit. This product was originally purchased from the manufacturer and had its original sales receipt. Amazon’s project zero uses a hammer to fix this problem by removing all sellers (even ones that have a right to sell the item). Sometimes in rare cases legal action is taken and they do get the r…

Does Amazon know you are not a manufacturer? How do the customers benefit from the risk of involving orgs like yours?

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#215

Post by rogerdonut »

> You can probably tell at a glance that a “Chanel” handbag going for $20 at a flea market is fake

Amazon sells these exact items with Prime as well.

> Although Amazon has taken many measures to prevent counterfeits and unsafe products from showing up on its site, plenty of fakes still slip through.

I don't believe this one bit. There are blatant fakes being shipped through Prime. They're not flying under the radar or bait and switching. Go on Amazon and search "Yuangu belt" -- you will quickly find Gucci & Hermes fakes being shipped through Prime. Are you telling me their "counterfeit measures" could not detect this before allowing it to be sold with Prime?

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#216

Post by j-c-hewitt »

rubidium wrote: post #146
andrewfromx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are…

There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.

They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day.

However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.

There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.

This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#217

Post by asiachick »

reaperducer wrote: post #105
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

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…

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place. I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option. When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled g…

Apple's machines are great. Apple's accessories not so much (see reviews on Apple's site). The 3rd party products Apple carries in their stores and on their site can be downright trash. I once made the false assumption that being sold by Apple was a kind of stamp of approval but I've since realized it's just which ever sales person managed to negotiate to get in the store. As a very concrete example, Apple used to carry Morphie battery cases which at the time were not actually Apple certified (lightning connector certification) as compatible with iPhone and yet other 3rd parties cases were but were not in the store. Also Belkin (not a fan)

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#218

Post by j-c-hewitt »

askar_yu wrote: post #140
jahnu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only allow reviews from verified purchasers

I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews. This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.

One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation.

However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#219

Post by j-c-hewitt »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #163
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

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…

I think Amazon should employ a hundreds of everyday people to review products full time. When you list a product on Amazon, you have to pay 10-20 of those Amazon Employees to review the product at arms length. Say each reviewer is given 2 hours for each product, before you can list a product on Amazon you have to pay $2 x 20 x hourly rate. These should be the only reviews. Or you can sell your product with no reviews…

They do, but it's not a job nor is it compensated except by delivery of the products. It's called the Amazon Vine program. There is also something called the Early Reviewer Program which is different. Sellers opt in to the ERP for new products. People who participate in the reviews sometimes get a tiny incentive from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#220

Post by jimmaswell »

fortran77 wrote: post #166
dimnsionofsound wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mildly related, here’s another instance of harmful things you can buy on Amazon: “negative ion” trinkets that are actually radioactive [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0

I'm amazed that a person making "negative ion wellness bracelets" would go to the effort and expense of putting a radioactive material in there to actually generate negative ions! Why not just put a copper-colored thread in there and claim it makes negative ions?

Maybe they're actually deluded and believe their product works instead of just a scammer, and they think the radioactive material is necessary.

> In this video we go through all of the testing I did over the last few months to determine what's in these products and if they're dangerous.

I wish for something important like this they would just say the result in the description. Gotta get that ad money I guess.

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