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Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

californiaglobe.com

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Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#41

Post by jcrawfordor »

greggyb wrote: post #22

In what world does this not just become a contractually required insurance policy covering Amazon, paid for by the third party. Granted, whoever pays in name, the cost will be passed on to consumers.

On the upside, specialized insurance companies tend to be pretty thorough in managing their risk of paying out. Meaning that third parties will probably have a hard time operating a counterfeit scam on any scale, once an insurer pays out all the others will find out and refuse to underwrite. Insurers would likely also require a proactive anti-counterfeit program for their larger clients.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#43

Post by Swizec »

irrational wrote: post #26
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing these complaints on HN... Is co-mingling a bigger problem in some regions, or have I just gotten consistently lucky? Or maybe I'm a sheep and haven't noticed? In all honesty, I would appreciate an excuse to stop using Amazon, because the amount that I buy from them compared to any other store makes me uncomfortable. But the co-mingling thing just hasn't come up for me...

Probably depends on what you are buying. I am a board gamer and counterfeit board games from Amazon is a huge problem. I stopped purchasing board games from Amazon after getting three counterfeits in a row.

How do you tell a board game is counterfeit?

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#44

Post by smsm42 »

Amazon has been trying to play a parallel game for a while - from one side, they are a brand name store, with their own brands (Amazon Basics), they own loyalty club (Prime), and so on - they even own physical stores and a grocery chain now. On the other hand, they pretend to be a neutral marketplace that has no responsibility for any goods that are sold there and just renting out the space to independent sellers. It is a smart game, as they can resell all the reputational benefits of the established store brand to the tiny sellers who would never enjoy the same reputation, without actually spending the time to vet the suppliers and take responsibility for the goods being sold, as the brand name store would have to. However, looks like the courts are not buying this game. Which makes sense because Amazon not only does not separate the marketplace from the brand name store - they actually make as much effort as possible to mix both up, making distinguishing between goods sold by Amazon and goods for which Amazon bears zero responsibility quite hard to distinguish.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#45

Post by ineedasername »

Hokusai wrote: post #33
atum47 wrote: post #15

bought some wireless earphones from them a while back, the store sold me a knock off. open up a dispute and the owner told me their delivery guy was swaping fake ones for the real ones. took forever to send me new ones. after all that I went to post a review saying that this happened and guess what? my review never saw the light of day

> the owner told me their delivery guy was swaping fake ones for the real ones That seems a scam scheme. They send fakes and for the people that complains they send the real deal. > my review never saw the light of day Amazon does not want to give a good service, Amazon wants to sell products. Your review could have negatively impacted Amazon sells. I doubt that, currently, there is any law that forces Amazon or any…

Actually in my experience Amazon has always provided prompt and satisfactory customer service. I'm not talking about the sort of issue in this article of course, but just the normal things: Returns, billing problems, charging me for home pickup on two different returns I'm making at the same time instead of just once... I've never had one of these common place customer service issues that wasn't solved quickly & to my satisfaction. Sometimes they'll even go beyond what I was expecting and add a credit.

Of course none of that means they don't rig the review system, although the presence of products with near universally bad reviews would indicate that, if they do rig reviews, it's not a general practice.

No, in my experience, while Amazon is bad in plenty of other ways, good service isn't one of them.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#46

Post by jpollock »

This will have interesting impacts on all marketplaces.

Ebay, Walmart, NewEgg, all the app stores on every platform - if a game is malware (or trashes your machine with a bug), is that Steam's responsibility? It's delivered from their servers with their packaging.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#47

Post by justapassenger »

greggyb wrote: post #22

In what world does this not just become a contractually required insurance policy covering Amazon, paid for by the third party. Granted, whoever pays in name, the cost will be passed on to consumers.

Amazon wants to have all the benefits but no responsibility of being one of the largest commerce businesses in the world.

As Amazon customer, who had its fair share of bad experiences with items in recent years, I'm ok with prices going up. I've never used Amazon because of the prices, but because of comfort and safety. I'm willing to pay extra to get this back.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#48

Post by siruncledrew »

Long-term, it would be good business sense for Amazon to address the counterfeit issue to remove the bad actors from their platform to stay in good standing with consumers so people continue to use their platform and purchase items without worry about getting scammed.

Short-term, at least one idea to fix this is to implement more stringent checks/QA with their FBA policies. Do more stringent verification of imported items going into Amazon FBA warehouses. Or at least add a mark to branded items received from other third-party sources. Simply adding "Shipped by: X, Sold by: X" text on the product page doesn't really help.

There's probably other/better ideas out there. This has been a recurring problem that has kinda gotten swept under the rug so far, but at some point is going to need to be reckoned with.

If Amazon wants to be the best customer experience, then it has to position itself in such a way that it does not devolve into one big flea market + Aliexpress + dropshipping junk bin.

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#49

Post by brudgers »

judge2020 wrote: post #34
elasticventures wrote: post #21

eBay is not same-same, it's much more marketplace-esque. eBay does not use a consolidated product listing, much more like a bulletin board each sellers products being sold under it's own URL. Amazon consolidates the listing for all sellers into a single product and uses their own ranking algorithms to determine which seller is in the "buy box" (which accounts for 97% of the items sales velocity). Amazon treats the en…

> eBay does not use a consolidated product listing, much more like a bulletin board each sellers products being sold under it's own URL. Try searching for a product on ebay right now and it's the exact same experience as Amazon. Both Amazon and Ebay's algorithms determine which usb drives show up first when searching for "usb stick", which is where 99% of their commerce is coming from.

The eBay list will have a rating for the seller, full detailed customer feedback the seller received for the previous 90 days including the listing. It will also have verbatim customer feedback going back 12 months.

This is the top result of my search for "usb stick" -- a seller with 28k transactions and 100% positive feedback. https://www.ebay.com/itm/SanDisk-Cruzer-Blade-Flash-Drive-8G...

Re: Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court

#50

Post by smsm42 »

thoughtstheseus wrote: post #28
ashtonkem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or amazon just makes it more clear when you’re buying from a non-Amazon party that uses FBA.

Physical stores should do this too. Gets rid of the liability for what you sell.

I'm pretty sure if I went to Target and was told "this toaster was made by NoName Super-Quality Manufacturing in China and if you have any problem you'd have to take it with them, whoever and whereever they are, and we accept no responsibility for anything but processing the payment" I'd not buy it.
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