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Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

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Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#291

Post by Groxx »

jarjoura wrote: post #208
habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

Yup, I use Best Buy for all electronic purchases now. They have a great return policy and I enjoy that most things I could want are available same day. I pretty much only rely on Amazon for Kindle purchases now or to read reviews on big ticket items that I'm curious about.

Ironically, I stopped using Best Buy at all due to their return policies.

More than once I've had missing components from what I purchased. And they won't accept refunds or replacements unless all parts are included.

Amazon takes nearly anything back, from my attempts.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#292

Post by OnlineGladiator »

dannyw wrote: post #272
cm2187 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most reviews aren’t seller specific. What I see is reviews for a product, but some of the sellers for that product will sell a counterfeit version (Intel NIC in my case). The top (default) seller when the reviews were written may be replaced by a bad actor a couple of years later.

That’s because picking by Amazon is not seller specific. You get something in that tray; it can be from any seller.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to filter by this though? Surely Amazon has a history of who bought what from who - why not make it an option for consumers (apart from the obvious fact that Amazon makes money letting people sell shit on their platform)?

Amazon could easily solve this problem but they've decided it's more profitable to let it fester. Whether or not it's a good decision in the long run, the same way Sears permanently ruined their reputation by selling shit through their established in-house brands, remains to be seen.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#293

Post by earthshot »

dv_dt wrote: post #286
earthshot wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a recent Amazon all-hands meeting, the company leadership talked about how there are something like 5,000 employees working on various marketplace frauds, including using ML on some of this. I have no idea why it's so hard, but I don't think Amazon is being as complacent as it seems from the outside.

Frauds where Amazon loses money, or frauds where Amazons customers do not get the product of its purported reputation, or maybe not even the product they thought they ordered.

They were specifically talking about marketplace fraud, where Amazon customers are misled but no money is lost. Customer fraud (against Amazon) is a different thing, though there's a bit of overlap when it comes to fraudulent returns.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#294

Post by dmix »

habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

The Fakeslot chrome extension is pretty good at spotting fake reviews. I’m curious if it can detect transferred reviews...

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#295

Post by basq »

habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

But then you're ordering from walmart...? A company decidedly worse than amazon by nearly every metric.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#296

Post by jcrites »

imtringued wrote: post #290
spookthesunset wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So easy for armchair quarterbacks to make snippy remarks. Truth is that fixing this kind of issue is probably way harder than you think.

Ebay doesn't have this problem and the solution is extremely obvious. Amazon has no third party seller rating. There is no way to confirm the trustworthiness of a third party seller. People cannot review sellers, they can only review products so sellers can easily get away with reputation loss without having to create new accounts by simply moving on to the next product because Amazon as a whole absorbs the reputatio…

> Amazon has no third party seller rating ... People cannot review sellers

Sellers have reviews and ratings just like products. You can leave public feedback and a star rating for sellers you've purchased from [1]. On the 'Your Orders' page click on 'Leave Seller Feedback'. This page also describes how to do it [2].

You can see these ratings while selecting which seller's offer to buy from. For example, many 3Ps are selling '5 Hour Energy Shot Berry - 24 count' [3]. Alongside each seller's offer, you can see their star rating and positive feedback percentage. For the first seller I see a 5-star rating and "96% positive over the past 12 months (1,122 total ratings)". You can click on that to see individual feedback.

It's my understanding that these ratings influence whether a seller's offer will be chosen for the 'Buy Box', which is the default offer that's shown on the product detail page. When an offer appears in the BuyBox, underneath it will say something like: "Sold by 7-Eleven, Inc and Fulfilled by Amazon". The seller name is a hyperlink to the seller's profile page where you can see their ratings and reviews [4].

Amazon also has a slightly different problem than Ebay, as I understand it, because Amazon is trying to have a single product detail page for each "product". There should be in theory exactly one page for "24-pack of 5 Hour Energy Berry". I'm not experienced with Ebay, but it looks like every Ebay listing is completely separate and independent. Doesn't that make it harder to comparison-shop for the best offer for a specific product among multiple sellers? Is there an easy way to see all offers for one specific product? I couldn't see an easy way to do this while experimenting with Ebay search right now. Amazon is trying to make this comparison shopping easy by consolidating all offers for the same product into one page, and then selecting a recommended offer based on various factors (including seller rating, shipping speed/reliability, etc.) that matter to customers.

(However, because there is a single page for each product, and sellers have some ability to create and modify pages, that occasionally leads to abuse, like the kind being discussed elsewhere in this thread.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/feedback [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0021L9XK4 [4] https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfi...

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#297

Post by Ididntdothis »

blunte wrote: post #105

Bezos is famous for being a micromanager to the extreme (and a very good one reportedly, if rather tyrannical). So there is no question about whether he has been personally aware of this situation for years. This follows a similar pattern (MS/Gates) where very unscrupulous business practices are employed until the company becomes a juggernaut and can do anything it wants, and the top executives become fabulously weal…

Carnegie did the same thing. First injure a lot of people in your factories and then suddenly become a noble philanthropist.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#298

Post by sidlls »

My wife has run a business for some time on Amazon. It's not big, mainly for baby related products. She's in the process of issuing removal orders for all the stuff in their warehouses and will discontinue the business there. Partly this is due to the numerous cheap knockoffs and imitations of things she worked pretty hard to source quality materials and manufacturing for driving prices into the dirt, partly it's due to Amazon's outrageous fees (FBA can take over 30% of the gross on some items), and partly it's Amazon's inconsistent deactivation of products and demanding she "request approval" to sell them--products she's been selling on Amazon for months or years.

The marketplace on Amazon is a dumpster fire.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#299

Post by sidlls »

heavyset_go wrote: post #92
Glyptodon wrote: post #64

Forget counterfeits for a second. Even trying to find something like an ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon is like straight going through AliExpress. But wait! Unless you're buying a very very expensive lab model all the "name brands" look to be sourcing the same way and adding a label too. So the name brands are AliExpress with maybe better QC and 200% markup. But wait! Even looking everywhere else it's the same situation…

> But wait! Even looking everywhere else it's the same situation as Amazon! It isn't a problem on Walmart or Target's websites, because they don't allow white-label Chinese goods to be sold on them.

Almost everything you'll find in either of those stores is made by a Chinese manufacturer that provides the same kinds of goods to multiple businesses. The store brands, especially, are essentially white-label Chinese goods.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#300

Post by heavyset_go »

closetohome wrote: post #289
heavyset_go wrote: post #96

If you receive a counterfeit item sold by Amazon, make sure to report it to the company whose product was counterfeited. When I went to return a counterfeit item to Amazon, I made it very clear that the item I received was fake. Amazon decided claim that the reason for the return was because it was damaged, not counterfeited. That's pretty shady in my book. There's liability for selling counterfeited goods, especiall…

I'd just put "Item defective" or "Wrong item was sent." Both will net you a free exchange.

It's the principle. Other people shouldn't have to be sent counterfeit items like I was after I make it clear that I was sent a fake item. Amazon certainly shouldn't profit from it, either.
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