101–110 of 133 posts
This why I buy Brother cartridges from Staples, and one of the reasons I cancelled Prime. Amazon can’t be trusted thanks its inability to manage 3rd party sellers and grey market inventory.
AMA, I led the eng team that built Project Zero (named in the article) and also designed or helped design most of Amazon's automated detection systems for Brands. Disclaimer: I haven't worked at Amazon for 3 years - my info is likely stale.
Did that Transparency thing with the code stickers and the verification app ever make an appreciable difference?
I would say Not enough for how many engineers they had. It had all of the promise, and was frankly mismanaged.
They kept promoting engineers who wanted it to become an AWS service (agnostic of Amazon) rather than solving the Amazon problems at hand.
For example they built a new product identifier… Amazon did not need yet another database of products. This stuff was constantly slowing them down to less than a crawl.
Last I heard all of that was canceled, and their focus brought back to Amazon Retail only problems. But tech debt and culture issues like that are really hard to unwind.
None of the examples given in this article are counterfeit. A counterfeit HP ink cartridge says it's HP, but it's not. None of these products claim to be HP. One bears no brand mark at all. One is "Ankink" brand. Same for Epson: we have "MYTONER" and "LEMERO". Amazon is a flea market trafficking in huge quantities of suspect goods. When I go on there I know to be on guard. But the article is wrong when it says that g…
I ordered an All-Clad frying pan, was at the same price as other online retailers. Only when it arrived I realized it was unfortunately, “Shipped by Amazon, sold by XYZ”.
The pan was in a suspicious brown box, with zero product/marketing images, and inside was the pan in transparent plastic bag. On first look it did feel ok/genuine/unused, but I didn’t have anything from AllClad to compare. I did notice some minor imperfections though, such as the riveted handle not being fully flush with the pan and a minor scratch in another place.
The brown box did have a number imprinted on it though. Upon searching online, I found it was a product code from some legitimate store that sells factory-seconds for around 1/3rd the price. These are original items, except they didn’t pass quality inspection and hence sold for less.
This scammer seller was buying seconds and selling them as new at original price. I looked at the seller info which had the name and the business registration info. I ended up finding that it’s some dude peddling courses on how to successful in FBA, found their IG profile. What he did with me reselling a factory second as new is pure fraud, I wish the worst to scum like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that has been fulfilled by a third party without my knowledge can be counted on zero fingers. Since they commingle products at the warehouse level and handle *actual* fulfillment at the SKU level and not the vendor level - how do you know this? At the warehouse there's a bin of widgets that are all supposedly the same. Regardless of who the vendor is purported to be when you buy it, if it's coming from that warehou…
>Since they commingle products at the warehouse level and handle actual fulfillment at the SKU level and not the vendor level - how do you know this? Because Amazon does not commingle first and third-party inventory and I do not buy, since it is so easy to avoid, from third parties (or drop shippers) unless it is an extremely niche item like a 0.1" to 0.025" 10-pin header adapter. Unless, of course, they are lying. D…
My wife purchased a Stanley cup through Amazon and 5 months later its thermal regulation stopped working. She contacted Stanley about their lifetime warranty and after some back and forth with Stanley's rep, they determined that the item was counterfeit and because Amazon is not one of their authorized resellers there wasn't anything they would do. This was purchased through the "Stanley" store but was fulfilled by a…
btw, they seal the vacuum in those things with lead. If shoddy workmanship is in evidence, you may want to discontinue using it.
Pro tip: avoid buying expensive electronics or power tools on Amazon. For instance, Amazon is not a distributor for Milwaukee power tools. Milwaukee will honor the date of manufacture stamp for the warranty, but not the date of purchase from Amazon. I bought a ‘new’ Milwaukee power tool off Amazon which had a manufacturer date of three years ago. Another “new” tool was obviously used. Milwaukee will however honor the…
It should be illegal for companies to sell products like this without a giant warning. "Your warranty will not be valid, since we're not even supposed to sell this product." It feels like fraud. Wild that it's A-OK for Amazon to profit on this at the expense of the consumer.
AMA, I led the eng team that built Project Zero (named in the article) and also designed or helped design most of Amazon's automated detection systems for Brands. Disclaimer: I haven't worked at Amazon for 3 years - my info is likely stale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why lead?
They use lead pipes in the UK. Why I don't know, but I guess it's got some properties that make it ideal for keeping water where it's supposed to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Since they commingle products at the warehouse level and handle actual fulfillment at the SKU level and not the vendor level - how do you know this? Because Amazon does not commingle first and third-party inventory and I do not buy, since it is so easy to avoid, from third parties (or drop shippers) unless it is an extremely niche item like a 0.1" to 0.025" 10-pin header adapter. Unless, of course, they are lying. D…
Do you have any proof they are not commingling? Have they outright said it at any point? Because there's more than enough anecdotes out there (and in previous threads about it on HN) that show that 1st party products are not treated any differently.
If they were commingling every single report would be a lie.
Also, they explicitly state that:
>Generally, we recognize gross revenue from items we sell from our inventory as product sales and recognize our net share of revenue of items sold by third-party sellers as service sales.
If they were commingling, those figures would be a lie.
The reason that would be lie is that Amazon has defended itself from product liability lawsuits for harms caused by defective products sold by third parties by repeatedly claiming in court that they do not take title to the goods in their possession that are supplied by third parties.
When you take title to something it is yours.
If it is yours, you need to include its value in an inventory valuation.
If inventory that you have title to and inventory you do not have title to is commingled there is no way to track which of the two have been sold, who holds title to what remains in inventory, and what that is worth.
Their inventory valuation would be a lie, their product sales figures would be a lie, and their service sales figures would be a lie. The amount of insurance they carry would be wrong, and that would open them up to legal vulnerabilities if anyone can demonstrate that the toaster they bought from a third-party seller which exploded was actually a toaster Amazon had title to and was shipped to them due to being commingled.
The only thing an investor has to do to sue the shit out of amazon is establish that their numbers are wrong, and are wrong on purpose, and they have been harmed by their numbers being wrong.
None of the examples given in this article are counterfeit. A counterfeit HP ink cartridge says it's HP, but it's not. None of these products claim to be HP. One bears no brand mark at all. One is "Ankink" brand. Same for Epson: we have "MYTONER" and "LEMERO". Amazon is a flea market trafficking in huge quantities of suspect goods. When I go on there I know to be on guard. But the article is wrong when it says that g…
This is only partially true. There very much *is* a counterfeit problem on Amazon as well. I've had a number of products that are clearly labeled as Brand X and clearly were *not* Brand X. And that's just the ones where I noticed (usually after they failed spectacularly). It is also true that there's a flood of cheap knockoffs that don't claim to be Brand X. That's fine, although I usually go to Aliexpress when that'…
Bought a belt for the vacuum recently--thought I was buying the real thing. Really, now? Wrong markings, wrong size. Returned it, tried another listing and got what seems to be the real thing. My review was rejected because it supposedly didn't address the qualities of the product. Yet one remains for another product where I said it was excellent except for not being the size described.