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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

#121

Post by donatj »

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…

> they anonymize the emails and don't allow sellers to send follow-messages to clients

Are you sure about that, I get emails from 3rd party sellers pressuring me to review the items all the time.

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

#124

Post by thaumasiotes »

rtkwe wrote: post #25
thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses. eBay used to have a service where you could take any random junk to their mall kiosk or a FedEx store and eBay would sell it on your behalf. That would pretty much require them to have warehouses. Is that service dead?

They have a Consignment Center [0] but that only really seems to hook you up with on the the various "I'll sell your crap on eBay" that exist instead of doing it themselves. [0] https://pages.ebay.com/rcp/consignmentcenter/#/

Well, I wasn't just hallucinating: https://www.cnet.com/news/ebay-drop-off-locations-coming-to-...

But the program does seem to be dead.

I found some interesting forum discussion taking the opinion that eBay strangled consignment businesses by choosing to heavily discourage auction sales (as opposed to fixed-price listing). They did that because customers on average strongly prefer fixed-price sales, but I'd be open to the idea that this could be a case where giving the customers what they want turned out to be a mistake for the business.

eBay saw themselves as competing with Amazon in the "buy things over the internet" space.[1] But by emphasizing fixed-price sales so much, they arguably made themselves much less distinct from Amazon.

[1] I was surprised to learn this, as I had always thought of Amazon as being for buying things new and eBay for buying things used.

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

#125

Post by furyg3 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #110
an_opabinia wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Amazon systemically refuses refunds for people who try to return counterfeit goods? It definitely doesn’t care if you don’t even notice. But they do the returns if you ask. The former is what needs to change.

You can't even report that the reason for your return is that you suspect or know that the item you received is counterfeit during the return process. If Amazon cared about a problem this big, they would collect metrics from customers on it.

There may be other reasons (legal) to not want to collect these metrics...

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

#126

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #87
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Long-term Short term, it would be a good idea to fine Amazon $1,000,000 a day until the problem is fixed. There's no way Bezos doesn't know how to fix this, he's a smart guy.

$1MM/day is a bargain compared to what ignoring and neglecting this problem is going to cost Amazon in the long run. It's inexplicable that search/discovery and commingling of substandard/counterfeit merchandise are not both considered five-alarm fires at Amazon HQ.

Rigtheo then.

Prohibit Amazon doing business until they fix the problem.

You can bet the problem will be fixed overnight.

My wider point is this: Bezos knows this is happen, and the only way he gets away with it is because the USA doesn't have enough consumer protection and no desire to.

This has gone beyond fraud, it's abuse of customers.

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

#127

Post by manigandham »

vkou wrote: post #95
stickfigure wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. There are plenty of subdivided retail marketplaces (with a single cashier) that sell new products. There's one here where I live in Winters (just north of SF), and I found them frequently in the midwest when I lived there. Merchants rent small blocks of space from the establishment; what they put on the shelves is really up to them. Yes, this is commonly secondhand goods. But not always. The shop…

When I buy a widget from Amazon, I'm not actually getting a widget from some particular merchant on Amazon. I'm getting a widget that was pulled out of a co-mingled inventory box at some Amazon warehouse. Amazon owns the entire shopping experience, end-to-end. They run the website. They design the website. They handle payments. They advertise the items ("Customers who bought Foo also bought Bar"). They handle shippin…

No, you buy direct from Amazon or from 3rd-party sellers. These sellers can store and ship by themselves, or pay to have it stored and shipped by Amazon (this is called FBA - Fulfilled by Amazon) because it's faster and qualifies immediately for Prime which customers want.

You can tell the difference when you buy, it's just not blatantly obviously unless the main Amazon listing is out of stock and you click on the "other sellers" link yourself. Go to your orders page and every product will tell you the "sold by" name.

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

#128

Post by manigandham »

I've had nothing but good experience with Amazon over the past 10 years. Very few problems but when there is, it's a few minutes to get a replacement or refund immediately, including complicated scenarios like promos, out of date returns, and warranty claims.

I must not be the only one with good experiences if they're doing so well. Then again I also check to make sure I'm buying direct from Amazon and reading the most recent verified purchaser reviews for any expensive items.

However this ruling needs clarity since Ebay would also qualify, especially since they also handle payments now instead of using Paypal, and potentially Shopify as well.

EDIT: what are people disagreeing with?

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

#129

Post by Karunamon »

icebergwarrior wrote: post #109
ComputerGuru wrote: post #65

I’ve finally figured out how to buy non-counterfeit items on Amazon: try selling it yourself and see if Amazon says 3rd party listings are allowed. In the very few cases where you’re not allowed to proceed to create a listing, it is safe to purchase.

I see this type of comment all the time, but I've never purchased anything but legitimate items off of Amazon. What are you buying that you consistently run into fakes / knockoffs?

Memory cards / thumbdrives are the canonical example here, I think. The fakes are plentiful, and comingling ensures that you are playing roulette every single time you purchase one, and the fakes are good enough that they'll stand up to visual scrutiny unless you know exactly what you're looking for, and sometimes not even then.

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

#130

Post by manigandham »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #92

Wow, here is the actual decision : https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2020-d07... It definitely looks like Amazon is going to have to accept strict liability in California. That will make it interesting to see what they do. Do they leave California? (their biggest US market) or do they clean up their FBA act? I'm hoping for the latter, as the justices argue in the decision that is exactly the intent…

Why would they leave CA? They would just remove 3rd-party sellers and implement higher standards if/when they allow them again. FBA sellers don't get to sell anything they want, you have to get ungated first per category.
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