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Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

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Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#111
It's a real problem. I have been buying and selling used products from Amazon to other marketplaces for the last 8 years. I used to get counterfeits once a month. Now, I get them 3 or 4 times a week.

Even when I bring it to Amazon's attention, I only get my money back half the time. When I tried to file a claim with my credit card company, my buying account was temporarily banned until I paid back the money (for counterfeit goods that I actually got inspected by the manufacturer and had the paperwork to prove it). The big problem is that Amazon will only give you your money back if you can prove it. It can sometimes take 5 months to get it actually inspected (if you are lucky) and by that time, you are well past the time to return it.

The worst part is that it nearly destroyed my business. I got two cease-and-desists in 8 months because I wasn't able to catch all of the counterfeits in time. Myself and my staff are well versed in catching these counterfeits, but it's still a very difficult task.

I had to hire an attorney, and I sent all of the sellers' info to the attorney of the manufacturer. I was lucky it ended here.

To this day, I still can't sign up with an Amazon seller account because 5 years ago, a single customer complained about an item I sold them. I returned their money promptly and even paid for a return shipping label. Amazon support didn't care. My account was closed, and I was out $500, because the buyer never sent it back to me. They no longer will even talk to me about it (all emails go into a black hole as if I never sent them) and I can't even manage another person/companies account without getting it permanently banned.

This is why it's so dangerous to allow a few companies to control so much of the Internet. They can potentially ban you from even making a living and there is really no appeals process. At the time, they had a few automated prompts that claim it's an 'appeals process', but I could tell it was just a bot.

I still don't understand how so many of these sellers can sell counterfeits, which is illegal in the US, and make multiple accounts, with almost no issues.

It has to be some sort of collusion with employees. It really doesn't make any other sense.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#112
Somewhat related - I use amazon price alerting services (camelcamelcamel.com and keepa.com) for some items that are on my wish list.

In the past few months I received much more price drops alerts than ever before. Most of these are by new stores that have no reviews.

Knowing that I'll be covered by Amazon, and tempted to give what I guessed would be a scum a chance, I ordered two items from different stores and as I expected I never got the items. Eventually got a refund from Amazon.

I'm not sure why Amazon isn't putting more effort to prevent these stores from popping up. Most of them I've noticed publish dozens if not hundreds of items for ridiculous prices. Even a simple capping mechanism for new stores would have made this much more difficult than it is to set up this scum.

While Ebay does not excel in that regard either, it does cap new sellers sales volume as well as allows buyers to report suspicious activity. Ebay's algorithm isn't especially smart - I often notice stores that were inactive for years yet retain good feedback record, pop up back to life with new low priced supplies and eventually turn out to be a scum (most likely hacked accounts).

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#113
post #24

Four or five times in a row, I bought what were supposed to be genuine Samsung batteries for my SGS4, and every single one was a counterfeit. Each time I had a chat conversation with Amazon, explaining the situation and each time I was told "an investigation" would be done. Ex: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1OV6G6YE4TXFZ/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p...

Similar story, but with 3 consecutive large capacity HGST hdds that were sold as new (SMART told a different story), switching sellers each time. Ultimately just went to Newegg.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#114
Is there anyone here who can shed some light as to why?

It's impossible for me to believe that it's part of Amazon's strategy to encourage, or even allow, counterfeits -- it might be fine for a smaller company, but it appears to be doing real brand damage at this point.

Yet Amazon shows no signs of stopping it -- this has been going on for years. Is it just a really hard problem for some reason that isn't obvious? (Like you catch one seller, and they'll immediately re-register under a different name? Or false counterfeit claims outweigh real ones?)

I mean, I still can't wrap my head around why Amazon would comingle FBA merchandise with merchandise Amazon bought directly from the manufacturer, and thus unknowingly sell counterfeits directly. People say this happens, that buying "Ships from and sold by Amazon" can still be counterfeit -- does that happen really? People certainly say it does... is it really something common? It's hard to believe Amazon could be so dumb to do that... why on earth would they?

I feel like this just doesn't make sense. Amazon isn't Uber. Shady practices don't seem like their thing at all. So why is this still happening?

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#115

Although not the point of the article, I find it upsetting that someone could link my HN comments to an article, as was done here to another HNer.

Really? They're pretty clearly public. Would you be upset if someone (who didn't know you personally) linked a friend of theirs to your comment? How about a radio broadcaster announcing "I saw a comment on Hacker News yesterday... here, let me read it to you..."? (Trying to pin down exactly what bothers you.) Or is it that news articles seem official, while HN comments are off-the-cuff? It does seem strange to me tha…

The latter.

I don't post on FB because it's me. But I am not cautious on HN and write more freely. I always knew it could get in the public but once I saw this article I knew it could - did - happen.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just fakes. I bought a new, high-end, fulfilled-by-amazon kitchen aid mixer for my ex-girlfriend. It looked legitimate, but it had clearly been re-boxed at some point, was missing parts, and had grease all over it. IIRC, it wasn't sealed in a normal way either. Amazon accepted our return, and like you I just went straight to the manufacturer to make the purchase again.

What is Amazon thinking? They're slowly destroying their brand.

Not even all that slowly. Their reputation has been significantly tarnished by this in about a year.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#117
post #91

Then Amazon closes your account for trying to return this garbage they illegally sold. Short of million dollar fines for every incident, this will never change. I doubt Amazon is even trying to fix this. It's so much easier to shut down the people that complain.

This is why I've largely stopped buying physical stuff from them.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#119
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a phone battery on amazon. Looked legit, was the top result for my phone. It was counterfeit and wouldn't work. I don't even know how to get a battery because the phone stores didn't have it anymore. Can't trust amazon.

Same thing happened to me. The funny thing is that the Samsung website sends you an Amazon seller. I noticed this the second time I needed a battery. The batteries look identical. The only difference was that the counterfeit battery only lasted a couple months.

While I agree that buying phone batteries is a lottery on Amazon, in this case you might have got a genuine battery which had simply been in storage for a long time (which applies to batteries for any phone that's out of production).

Li-Ion batteries won't necessarily work after being stored unless they were charged to a specific level and stored in a very specific way. And you have to go back and check the charge and maybe recharge them regularly. More in this article:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batt...

Needless to say none of this would have happened if it was sitting on a shelf in some warehouse for 3 years.

Re: Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers

#120

Is there anyone here who can shed some light as to why ? It's impossible for me to believe that it's part of Amazon's strategy to encourage, or even allow, counterfeits -- it might be fine for a smaller company, but it appears to be doing real brand damage at this point. Yet Amazon shows no signs of stopping it -- this has been going on for years. Is it just a really hard problem for some reason that isn't obvious? (…

Amazon is likely stats blinded: their internal metrics say "all good", so they ignore the stories people are telling as anecdotes without ever doing the analysis on how often those "anecdotes" happen. Further, that their stats are ungrounded (not tied to any hard-to-attack real world tests) and fail to capture data which would demonstrate the issue.

I believe the FBA and FMA teams are a fundamental blunder opposed to Amazon's core values (and the business model they espouse), and that while the people on them are clever, they're not very prudent.

I think that the idea could be salvaged with some genuine mea culpa and revamping of FBA/FMA systems. I just don't think anyone at Amazon with the political capital to do so understands or acknowledges the issue.

Honestly, Amazon should just send someone on the team out with $50,000 in $50 giftcards to one of the shopping centers in downtown Seattle and hand them out to anyone who orders something on Amazon for them (on Amazon's dime; shipped to Amazon HQ). Will you get a disproportionately high number of bad purchases? Yep.

But that's sort of the point: isn't it a problem if a large fraction of 1,000 people know how to get bad purchases out of regular items, but you still operate your store that way?

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