Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#141

Post by 8note » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

sabalaba wrote: post #47

NathanKP wrote: post #24

Full disclosure I work for Amazon (on the web services side). The author of this article clearly doesn't know much about selling on Amazon, because what he is asking for is possible. It's called the Amazon Brand Registry. You can contact the infringment team using the details here and initiate the process of getting your brand / ASIN locked so that other people can't sell it without your permission: https://www.amazo…

Since you work on the web services side it's forgivable that you would think that link to reporting infringement is an effective solution / something that Amazon pays close attention to. We've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product on Amazon, found a company selling a counterfeit version of our product, and submitted a complaint to that URL. That was on 4/5/2016. We have yet to receive a response. The…

I recently got reorged into brand protection.

you can probably get somewhere by messaging seller-performance@amazon.com

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#142

Post by ymerej » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #5

Amazon will replace whatever stupid crap you end up with. This is why it doesn't hurt their brand. You know they will fix it, so it's just a minor inconvenience to the customer, most of the time. Meanwhile, it shuts down businesses. You'd think politicians might care about this, but they're too busy handing out billions to get them to move to their state.

I went through what must be five cycles of returning counterfeit Samsung batteries (easy to detect counterfeit -- the NFC didn't work) to get replacements which were counterfeit. Chatting with customer service was an exercise in futility.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#143

Post by bitmapbrother » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #124

bitmapbrother wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is the new eBay as I like to say. Ever try searching for a Chromecast on Amazon? The number of Chinese counterfeits available is staggering. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_6?url=search-alias... And since Amazon profits from these third party sellers they are complicit.

That's a special case because Amazon intentionally hacks their own store to block people from buying Chromecasts.

Not only does Amazon intentionally hack their own store to block people from buying Chromecasts, but they also junk up their search results with Chromecast knockoffs just to make sure their customers have the best shopping experience.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#144

Post by URSpider94 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #74

discoursism wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reminding me every PHB who ever said, "it'll just take a day or two." "It's just a little machine learning."

I agree in general, but literally all you have to do is reverse image search new product listings against existing products and then add a call out to manually review this. This isn’t even complicated stuff. To get fancy you could compare against the millions of known frauds and apply that to new products. The thing that bugs me is that they do nothing. This stupid “it’s all on you to register your brand and yadda ya…

You are missing the point. They are not creating a new product that is a copy of the original, they are registering with Amazon as a supplier of the genuine product, but shipping counterfeits into the warehouse. They are then pricing their counterfeits dynamically so that they always get the “buy box”.

There’s no machine learning to do. The only way to find the counterfeit is to inspect each shipment by hand vs a reference sample to determine if it’s legit.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#145

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

discoursism wrote: post #63

prepend wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers. Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers. He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this. I don’t sell, but I can barely buy from amazon beca…

This is reminding me every PHB who ever said, "it'll just take a day or two." "It's just a little machine learning."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#146

Post by prepend » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

discoursism wrote: post #115

elefanten wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this strongly. Have basically stopped shopping from Amazon entirely. Haven't ever read a single word from Amazon to reassure me (as a buyer) about counterfeits. At least nothing beyond completely cookie cutter PR stuff that my brain just dismisses. Let's see some stats. Let's see some action plans. Let's get all these sellers' horror stories out of my various feeds. Where's all that?

> Let's see some stats. Let's see some action plans. Let's get all these sellers' horror stories out of my various feeds. Where's all that? Not sure if you're aware, but Amazon's doing pretty OK by all publicly available signs. To the extent what's bothering you is even a real issue, it's not bothering anyone else enough to stop them shopping on Amazon. I doubt Amazon feels much pressure to post action plans to satis…

Ultimately this harms them. People said the same thing about Comcast sucking for years. It’s finally starting to catch up with them and will take decades to go out of business.

See also other shitty companies that made money.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#147

Post by CamelCaseName » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

Keverw wrote: post #104

I always thought the counterfeit good program was fulfillment by Amazon mixing items with the same UPC code. I ordered a power supply once and it had all chinese writing on it, and plus it didn't power up unless I kept turning it and fiddled with the connector. Was concerned, so sent it back. Didn't want it to catch on fire. It had a English brand name on the listing though too. I was looking at new earpods, and even…

>"Ships and sold by Amazon" is something to look out for I guess

Don't get too comfortable. Malicious sellers can open a vendor account with Amazon and sell their counterfeits this way.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#148

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

fencepost wrote: post #33

The writer advises people to "look at the seller," but Amazon's commingling of products means that doing so is often useless. I believe I've also seen mention that there's a way to prevent that by assigning your own numbers and paying Amazon more, but for something like this where there is only one legitimate supplier I'm not sure it would do any good. (edit: NathanKP posted relevant links as I was posting) What's am…

> The writer advises people to "look at the seller," but Amazon's commingling of products means that doing so is often useless.

Only if the seller is Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon, since those are the only ones affected by commingling.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#149

Post by hemoglob2 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

hhw wrote: post #50

hemoglob2 wrote: post #11

while i agree with your post, "The current counterfeit seller, suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd (yeah they sound legit), " could be construed as a racist comment

Anything can be construed as a racist comment by an unreasonable person. I don't see any legitimate cause for a reasonable person to construe it as such however. And although it shouldn't really matter, I say the above as a person of Chinese heritage, who does not speak for others of Chinese heritage. But if you aren't even of Chinese heritage, and are attempting to be outraged on our behalf, I would take a long, har…

if the company were based in Africa, one would not dare to call it an "illegitimate" company

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#150

Post by smilekzs » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #91

Spooky23 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

File a credit card dispute.

That's a great option until you realize they can close your Amazon account for chargebacks, which in my case would mean the loss of thousands of dollars worth of Kindle books.

Then find a lawyer to sue them?