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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

#161

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Hokusai wrote: post #103
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…

> Long-term That is the trick. If short-term Amazon accumulates enough money it can later on purchase businesses with a better reputation and repeat the trick again. I have seen this done by General Electric. It purchases a medium size company with good reputation and loyal customers. GE reduces costs (quality, employee salaries, etc.) and milks the cow for a decade. When many customers have left because higher price…

So the demos should be able to improve quality by increasing regulation - like the EU's goods regulations that dictate a minimum 2 year warranty (AIUI); which I hope they're going to gradually increase.

The people need to cede power from the Capitalists sufficiently to do that in USA; apply some democracy to the situation.

We need to build longevity into our planetary systems of production.

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

#162

Post by pm24601 »

bloaf wrote: post #35
kshacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe, maybe not. At least, it incentivizes Amazon to chase the culprits. The question is whether that incentive is big enough for them to fix / improve things.

If Amazon can get sued every time someone burns themselves with a knockoff product, I would think their incentives would shift from: "Pay as little as possible for quality assurance, down to a floor of $0" to "Pay as little as possible for quality assurance, down to a floor of $whatever number would convince a court that we made a good faith effort to prevent knockoffs."

Strict liability means that Amazon is liable for any defective product no matter how "hard" they tried

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

#163

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #126
CamperBob2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

I prefer the option of financial penalties. Amazon is a useful logistical system; you don't want to kill it (nor disproportionally punish employees with no real influence on the immoral actions), just make it not profitable unless it's moral.

The system should also be holding anyone in the decision tree accountable for fraud: something like "if test purchases show fraud in >1:20 cases then CEO fine := last month's income from all sources".

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

#164

Post by 7952 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #88
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.

Only within their refund period. I have had so many products break down after their return window. Most recent example: Expensive chargers which stopped work within a few months. The seller’s page was gone. Customer support was of no use. This seems to be a common pattern. Fly by night sellers whose pages disappear within a few days.

I had that happen and the agent advised me to do a chargeback!

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

#165

Post by pbhjpbhj »

manigandham wrote: post #130
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.

Cool, who's making the comparison website that shows which products are the same price in California, vs all the others that Amazon knows are mixed in with counterfeits and low-grade and defective items.

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

#166

Post by throwanem »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #141
ashtonkem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, the responsibility for chasing down the manufacturer for a refund is shifted onto the retailer, not the consumer.

Yes, and therefore the retailer is incentivised not to sell junk in the first place. The problem with being an "everything store" is that everything also includes an overwhelming majority of crap, looking at you crappy "genuine sony" camera batteries that held about 10 minutes of charge, fulfilled by amazon.

Yeah, no, you got lucky with that - I found out Amazon can't be trusted with high-ticket items by getting a $1200 lens that turned out to be gray market. Works fine, but I better hope I never need warranty service.

Amazon can't be trusted with high-ticket items, including but not limited to camera equipment. Go to B&H or Adorama, or Newegg or Micro Center for high-ticket computer parts (cf. the recent spate of GPU scams), or the like. And - preferably to any of those options - support your local small retailer, if any.

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

#167

Post by manigandham »

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.

You can definitely report items as "inauthentic" and they will be escalated to the seller. Amazon gates sellers by category and ASIN and will remove selling privileges based on complaints.

I don't think most people here have any idea 3P/FBA selling works. It takes a lot of work to get listed and move into new categories, and you can be removed very quickly for the slightest of reasons. This goes to show the scale of the problem in policing logistics at this scale (not to say that Amazon shouldn't be responsible for it).

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

#168

Post by markdown »

yomly wrote: post #152
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.

When I left Amazon the fastest growing team in the country was the antifraud team and they already had like 2 floors of agents working on it. But I also heard that issues which hadn't occured 3 times in a row were dropped on the floor because of Amazon's scale. This was quite a few years ago now, I can only imagine Amazon is spending more money on the problem now vs then. not to defend Amazon, but maybe the scale of…

> but maybe the scale of the problem is too big

They control the scale of the problem, and can raise the barrier to entry for new 3rd party vendors at any time.

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

#169

Post by flavor8 »

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…

Here's an example for anybody who doubts this; go search for:

a) an Oximeter

b) a medical thermometer

c) a blood pressure cuff

These are all fairly relevant devices. Spend 10 minutes really researching the categories, and actually read the reviews (in particular the 5* and the 1* reviews). Can you find a combination fo devices that you're actually confident buying? It shouldn't be this hard.

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

#170

Post by dilandau »

stickfigure wrote: post #61
jarym wrote: post #9

Common sense. Amazon want to ‘own’ the customer relationship and go to great lengths to that end then it follows they will have to ‘own’ any liability too. Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier/wholesaler/manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.

> Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product I understand where you are coming from, but there are lots of consignment stores and flea markets, at least in the middle parts of the US. The person you pay at the front counter simply records the transaction for the merchant. Amazon is a sort of cross between traditional retail and a consignment store, so it's not obvious (or "common sense") where product…

Finally we are being honest. Amzn is a flea market.
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