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

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

#251

Post by kazinator »

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.

> 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

Far from unheard of, sadly.

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

#252

Post by Exuma »

fxtentacle wrote: post #116
Exuma wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I actually quite literally fear for my life from factory chemicals or defects. A few years ago I saw a charger that was amazon's "best seller" and it had tons of 1 star reviews of peoples houses catching on fire...

I once ordered a USB charger from Amazon that said you needed to have 3m of empty space in every direction to avoid the fire risk. I just wondered how anyone could satisfy that and put the charger into a wooden cupboard. Maybe I should revise that decision now :/

Yes, I would for your safety with anything even remotely dangerous, like electronics (I watch out even with a strainer which is just steel, but can be covered in loads of carcinogenic chemicals from china etc).

I recently just got fooled again, I needed to buy a cooking butane torch for grilling cheese. The "best seller" was quite nice looking, had great reviews, great photos.

I actually got it in my hand and it essentially fell apart. I immediately threw it in the trash as there's no way I'm putting highly flammable gas into this junk. I went to a head shop and bought one for the exact same price with amazing quality... its funny how we started out with brick and mortar, migrated to online... and now I'm going to start migrating back to brick and mortar.

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

#253

Post by throwanem »

ikeboy wrote: post #207
throwanem wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

Every retailer you mentioned deals in grey market products. Here's B&H proudly admitting to it: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/HelpCenter/USGrey.jsp

B&H is honest about it. The problem I have with Amazon is that they aren't. Based on price and representation, the lens I bought was indistinguishable from a US-market unit right up until I took it out of the box and checked the serial number.

To be clear, I suspect error and not malfeasance on Amazon's part. But I don't really care which it is, either.

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

#254

Post by marcrosoft »

gambiting wrote: post #146

Wait, so....previously in the US Amazon wasn't responsible for the products it was selling?? Lol, what? So who was responsible then??

Obviously, it should be the manufacturer. You know, the people that made the product??

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

#255

Post by AkelaA »

myself248 wrote: post #182
crooked-v wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebay is a good contrast here, as while it has the same general search-for-a-thing idea, it makes it very clear that you're buying this one specific item from this one specific merchant.

And I'd argue that's a far superior model. I go to eBay for a lot of items that I suspect may be graymarket but I'm willing to risk it, specifically BECAUSE I know exactly which seller sold me the thing, and I can go back on them if it's bad, and eBay has pretty good protections for buyers. I could buy the same goods on Amazon but have none of the traceability or protections.

Plus Ebay incentives sellers to upload their own photos and written descriptions of the product they're selling, rather then having generic product pages for multiple listings.

If I'm buying a second hand item like an old video game or something I always use Ebay since I can see what the product actually looks like and can make my own judgement on condition based on the photos. Something you can't really do on Amazon.

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

#256

Post by thatguy0900 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #199
flavor8 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair pretty much all thermometers sold everywhere are fake, it's not just Amazon. You really need to look at Consumer Reports or Wirecutter if you want a real one, and who knows if you can even get one right now anyway.

Googling this just comes up with a bunch of one off Chinese scams. I'm really curious, any links to further reading on this? I've never heard of it.

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

#257

Post by R0b0t1 »

kazinator wrote: post #251
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.

> 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 Far from unheard of, sadly.

It's typical with most brick and mortar stores to be refused a return. I'm unsure if they are simply never challenged on this or intentionally mislead their customers while knowing the law.

Everyone should know you never have to do an RMA if you don't want to and it's only been 30-90 days.

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

#258

Post by bleepblorp »

oasisbob wrote: post #236
pjmlp wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many countries that is sorted out via the consumer protection agency, links below for the German and Portuguese ones. https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/ https://www.consumidor.gov.pt/ And across Europe we have, https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/consumers/reso... Usually those pesky shops get gently very quickly if you are willing to bring them into the fight.

It's not just small pesky shops that screw the consumer. You step out of the EU/NA and consumer protections quickly disappear. Reliance is one of India's largest companies, they have a consumer electronics brand like Best Buy. The worst return experience I've EVER had was trying to return a DOA pair of Bluetooth headphones to them. Their literal return policy is that you don't, unless it's defective, then you can exc…

Once you step out of the EU, consumer protections quickly disappear.

Your experience in India would not be not unusual in NA for consumer electronics or computer components. "No returns, all defective products must be handled, at your shipping expense, by manufacturer's warranty" is a very common policy in this sector in North America, as is "final sale, even if defective or counterfeit."

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

#259

Post by Spivak »

rorykoehler wrote: post #214
yomly wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the scale is too big for Amazon to handle then Amazons business model has failed and they should be shut down until they get a handle on it. I don’t understand why common sense and the law went out the window just because we changed the medium?

Because if you were trying to make a case to Congress to get legislation passed that would them down you wouldn’t get past “even with the fraud Amazon is still delivering a huge amount of value to consumers because of their scale and we don’t want to disrupt that.”

Like you will get nowhere arguing that billion dollar US controlled giants should get shut down or broken up unless it’s a last resort.

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

#260

Post by Spivak »

dutch3000 wrote: post #200
yomly wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

if these companies can’t handle the scale, then maybe they need to reduce their scope. “it’s hard to find a solution” doesn’t cut it anymore. either amazon and these giant tech companies find solutions (privacy, graphic content, insert big scale tech problem) to these problems or they suffer the consequences of liability. or they reduce the scope of the service.

Which is nice in theory but what happens when legislators (and customers) come back with the case that the value of them operating at their scale outweighs the harm of fraud.
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