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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?

#261

Post by Dylan16807 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #78
tyingq wrote: post #41

"Getting the fake gloves removed from Amazon can be a long process, Hirsch said, taking weeks or even months of playing whack-a-mole with counterfeit sellers" That's the brand owner saying that. I'd love to see an Amazon response to that.

Personally the brand owner makes me trust them as far as I can throw them as they have a fundamental interest in hampering secondary markets and undermining right of first sale. Sure there are valid concerns but it becomes "CEOs claim higher CEO compensation main factor linked to better company performance".

There's not a big secondary market in unopened $15 gloves. And I really doubt the used listings are a big deal. So I don't think that's a notable factor here.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#262

Post by jimmaswell »

wombat-man wrote: post #73
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…

Cancelled my prime this year, haven't looked back. A lot of retailers offer free shipping if you order a certain dollar amount and while they have a smaller selection, I can be pretty sure I'm not receiving anything fake. They also tend to have a lot less noise in search results. main downside is I'm having to order from multiple places, but it hasn't been too bad.

I was tired one night and looking for a replacement brake set for my car (oem has a known problem with seizing I was experiencing). Followed a link from a reddit advice post to some company's site with the parts. Said it would take weeks but I needed it so oh well. Realized the next day Amazon had the same exact thing for less and 2 day shipping. Emailed support of the other site to cancel and days later they said they'd "try" but some of the order was "already printed" and there was "nothing they could do" (BS). Amazon one got here in 2 days, other one got here in 2 weeks, all of it. Returning would leave me out their "free shipping" cost so I'm just keeping it.

I'm never going outside Amazon ever again unless the product or a suitable alternative doesn't exist on Amazon.

Another thing i'd like to note is I've ordered dozens of "Amazon Basics" products and I've yet to be disappointed. The company overall has been great for me. Painless returns with no gotchas, lower prices, superior shipping, better ease of use, 5% back with the card.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#263

Post by toomuchtodo »

ebg13 wrote: post #258
toomuchtodo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you like them to pay for their writing?

I'm saddened that you don't see any middle ground between linking to a site with a very long history of actively facilitating counterfeits through product commingling and not getting paid at all.

I’m sad you didn’t think I was genuinely asking for potential solutions.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#264

Post by heavyset_go »

gowld wrote: post #184
heavyset_go wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted about this on HN recently[1]. Within the last month, I've been getting an increasing amount of native ads on different platforms for "Free [Product]!". If you engage the ad, you find out that the ad-purchaser wants you to buy the advertised product and leave a positive review for it on Amazon, after which they'll refund you for the cost of the product. Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1…

Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them? Another approach might be to reach out to the ad network to complain about these illegal ads. (Fake paid reviews are illegal ads, and soliciting illegal activity is illegal.) The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews. Amazon should be happy to cooperate.

> Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them?

They are mostly on Facebook. They're native ads[1] because I have various layers of ad blocking implemented, and only native ads get through.

> The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews

I'd have to disagree. There needs to be incentives against unscrupulous business practices by sellers who are arguably the bad actors in this situation, and not the unsophisticated consumer caught up in a confusing offer.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/audience-network/native...

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#265

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

chrisseaton wrote: post #92
Marsymars wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the average Amazon buyer sees "eligible for Prime" as an Amazon-backed indicator of quality.

It’s a delivery flag, never was a quality flag.

And it's not even that any more. You ALWAYS have to check the guaranteed delivery date. ALWAYS. At least half the stuff I start to order -- even with the "Prime" label -- will take longer than 2 days. This situation has caused me to start shopping retail again, whenever I can. It bites me EVERY time I don't specifically check, and stuff winds up coming on a slow boat from China. Prime literally means nothing to me anymore, except their video service (which has a pretty good selection).

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#266

Post by onetimemanytime »

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,

Amazon used to be that brand for me, I trusted that I'd get a real product vetted by real reviewers and by Amazon. Adios

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#267

Post by nl »

ebg13 wrote: post #254
nl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article implies that, but it's not true. It's at least mostly true. They usually link to the official seller, so while it's possible they either get that wrong, or the seller starts shipping the wrong product it at least saves some of the work.

These official sellers are using Amazon order fulfillment. Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.

Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.

Do you have any evidence at all that this is the case? It's the opposite of what is said in the article - all the examples given are for non-official sellers.

Notably the article say "encountered a few instances in which a _seller_ switched in an authentic product but from a discontinued or lesser-quality line" and "The authentic ‘Ove’ Glove is available for purchase through a page indicating that it is sold and shipped by Amazon.com or sold by Joseph Ent, the Amazon storefront for Joseph Enterprises."

Also none of the sellers in the article that the Wirecutter contacted made this claim which would be surprising if it was the case!

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#268

Post by heavenlyblue »

amylene wrote: post #62
heavyset_go wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they already have a pretty generous return policy. Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one. One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the li…

Another way to read it is that amazon doesn’t believe the consumer is a reliable counterfeit detector, versus “crappy product”, etc.

And the seller is? Amazon never even receives the product in this scenario - how do they then try to deal with the issue?

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#269

Post by toast0 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #54

You could tell by looking at the two gloves in the story that they were different, but the "fake" actually looked better to my eyes - the blue rubber appeared thicker and more pronounced. Which brings up a really interesting question about fakes - if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"? I fully recognize that there is a need to protect copyright / product dress / b…

I think there's certainly a terminology issue here.

A product that looks like a name brand product, but doesn't claim to be that product is one thing.

A product that claims to be the name brand product, but isn't is a different.

The name brand probably doesn't want either to be easily avaialable, and will call them both fake. A purchaser might want to take a chance on the former, but shouldn't have to have a chance of getting the latter.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#270

Post by balola »

If e-commerce in China is any indication, platforms only lead to the supreme status of predatory marketing. Those who spend the most on marketing win, in this process, marketers of garbage goods get stable revenue, platforms reap most profits.

It's destined to be a vicious cycle. The only losers will be consumers and honest producers.

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