Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

californiaglobe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 386 posts

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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #127
vkou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "o…

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by lozaning »

donatj wrote: post #118
vkou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not entirely true. Some sellers keep their stock in amazons warehouse but others, I believe most, drop ship their items themselves. Like 12 years ago I used to build stock/cart systems for said drop shippers.

Anymore if you're not FBA you'll never get the buy box.

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

#133

Post by manigandham »

tedfernau wrote: post #66
xoxoy wrote: post #60

Shopping on Amazon has become unbearable for like 95% of categories these days. The experience is like rummaging through some shady tourist market with a dozen stall owners trying to scam you. The pricing is all whack with lots of counterfeits that have gamed the ranking and review systems. It’s just not worth trying to filter and find things that are actually competitively priced and sold directly by Amazon. Have no…

I could hardly disagree more. It takes some effort to find the good stuff, but Amazon is the superior way to shop online for most things.

I agree with you completely. I've yet to have a shoddy counterfeit product with thousands of purchases over a decade. Any actual problems are also solved within minutes.

Can someone link a product listing that they received a counterfeit from?

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

#134

Post by ss64 »

foepys wrote: post #79
bitcoinbutter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product. How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with c…

How does blockchain help here? The database would be extremely large - too large to hold for any ordinary computer system. The basic problem is solveable without blockchain by simply registering products by their serial number on the brand's website, which a lot of brands actually already do for higher priced products.

Then the scammers would just copy the serial numbers, you would have to link every number with a customer name

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

#135

Post by leoc »

furyg3 wrote: post #125
heavyset_go wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199343

> The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.

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

#136

Post by ss64 »

ratiolat wrote: post #119

So, I'm currently living in mainland Europe. Amazon UK (native English) will be out of EU in the near future. Given this article and also shady 'is this real thing or not - order and find out' - what would be a not shady general kind of store in the EU with native english? I'm ordering mostly books, but sometimes electronics. There's tons of e-shops. Telling apart which one is shady and which one is not is really dif…

In the UK John Lewis

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

#137

Post by jacobush »

manigandham wrote: post #127
vkou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "o…

It sounds like a judge must decide if it’s co-mingled or not, from the consumer’s perspective.

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

#138

Post by irrational »

Swizec wrote: post #43
irrational wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What djur said, plus some board games you register the serial number on a website. If the serial number is invalid you know you got a counterfeit copy.

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

#139

Post by freeone3000 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #20
kylecordes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big fan of Amazon here... I’ve been using Amazon since 1990-something… yet the co-mingling counterfeit items has caused me to stop using it for many items I formally purchased there. Amazon make inefficient use of truck rolls for delivery, often sending many trucks through my small residential subdivision every day, needlessly delivering one non-urgent item at a time. This is probably the key competitive challenge fa…

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...

Co-mingling with counterfeits seems to not be present in Canada - most merchants don't want to deal with filling out customs forms, FBA barely exists here, and most items sold on Amazon.ca are either sold by the manufacturer or by Amazon.ca. still a ton of unknown brands doing self-sales, but you're at much less risk of counterfeits so far.

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

#140

Post by opencl »

bitcoinbutter wrote: post #55
siruncledrew wrote: post #48

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…

It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product. How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with c…

They already have exactly that, minus the unnecessary blockchain bit. It's called Transparency.

The problem is that manufacturers need to opt into it and there is no way as a consumer to tell on a product listing whether or not the product is part of the registry.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency/learnmore

Post reply on HN