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Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

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Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#81

Post by HoppedUpMenace »

nkrisc wrote: post #55
HoppedUpMenace wrote: post #7

Its ridiculous the amount of energy and effort you have to waste in order to find a product that you don't suspect as being counterfeit on Amazon these days. The other day, I wanted a super bright flashlight that ran on AAA batteries and was of decent quality and price. I had to pour over the millions of listed flashlights, most looking physically identical, with the exception of the brand name printed on the flashli…

Let me guess, those millions of listings of the same flashlight also ranged in price from $1.55 to $67.99, right?

Yep, super sketchy to say the least.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#82

Post by OJFord »

stagbeetle wrote: post #50
komali2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is go-to strategy for /r/entrepreneur's crowd. If I remember correctly, Tim Ferris even recommends it in "4 Hour Workweek."

It's the go to of the (small-business) entrepreneurs all over the web (TheFastlane, /r/entrepreneur, etc.). I'm fairly certain it started around 4 years ago with Matt Clark's "Amazon Selling Machine." A friend who paid the $1000 let me watch the course and it was a pretty simple (and old) tactic. Buy wholesale and sell at markup. Except this time you would have it under your own "private label" (i.e a Chinese factory…

> $1000 ... course

Wow. Surely the best advice such a course could possibly give would be 'convince people you can teach them to make money, and charge a lot for it'.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#84

Post by dlubarov »

paulcole wrote: post #69
benmorris wrote: post #45

Amazon is turning into a mine field for legitimate sellers. I have a customer I work closely with to integrate their customer products into Amazon. They have a catalog of 3,000 stock parking signs listed on Amazon. We took considerable time to buy custom SKUs and get them listed. We discovered in the last month two separate Chinese sellers utilized the Amazon buy box feature and listed on our product page for less mo…

>In the end Amazon has banned the two sellers, but moving forward it is difficult to police 3,000 listings so we have not been expanding what we are doing on there. Does the API still return offer count? If you're truly the only legit seller, set up an alert if offerCount >> 1. Even without the API this should be pretty trivial to scrape.

But the first sale doctrine means there can be other legit sellers. There's no way to be certain whether a third party seller is selling a counterfeit (except by buying it).

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#86

Post by HoppedUpMenace »

spatulon wrote: post #48
HoppedUpMenace wrote: post #7

Its ridiculous the amount of energy and effort you have to waste in order to find a product that you don't suspect as being counterfeit on Amazon these days. The other day, I wanted a super bright flashlight that ran on AAA batteries and was of decent quality and price. I had to pour over the millions of listed flashlights, most looking physically identical, with the exception of the brand name printed on the flashli…

Out of interest, what torch did you end up buying?

J5 Hyper V Tactical Flashlight. Was really bright as advertised. No complaints but its hard for anyone to understand how bright a flashlight is until you actually use it, but youtube videos definitely help and so do legit reviews.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#87

Post by danjoc »

Ohh, I get it now. HN hates Amazon. I wasn't aware of that. It's not Google defenders or Python for Kids people clicking down. It's people who have a visceral hate for Amazon. I knew HN basically hated Apple, but this is news to me. Thanks for the clarification guys :)

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#88

Post by ericd »

HoppedUpMenace wrote: post #7

Its ridiculous the amount of energy and effort you have to waste in order to find a product that you don't suspect as being counterfeit on Amazon these days. The other day, I wanted a super bright flashlight that ran on AAA batteries and was of decent quality and price. I had to pour over the millions of listed flashlights, most looking physically identical, with the exception of the brand name printed on the flashli…

Not a handheld flashlight, but if you're still looking, I highly recommend the Black Diamond Spot found here here: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-headlamp/ . Super bright, but adjustable, durable, good spread and throw distance, and sips power at reduced brightness settings.

And related, I've had very good luck with just going with The Wirecutter's/The Sweethome's picks when I don't feel like poring through a bunch of reviews on things. As a warning, though, I'm normally immune to the desire to buy random crap I don't really need, but they seem to break through that for some reason.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#89

Post by chx »

Animats wrote: post #40

There's no way to report a counterfeit on Amazon unless you're claiming a violation of your own IP rights. I've complained about fake solid state relays. There are lots of fake "Fotek" solid state relays. UL has noticed.[1] The fakes are usually marked with much higher amp ratings than they can handle safely. Look at this "100 amp" fake "Fotek" relay on Amazon.[2] Fotek doesn't even make a 100 amp relay in that packa…

Oh yeah, there's a charger which has a fake ETL Mark, Intertek put out a notice http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359... but the product is still out there.

Re: Sellers printing counterfeit books and selling under Amazon's brand

#90

Post by OJFord »

user5994461 wrote: post #17
justboxing wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Looks like it. And from @danjoc's comment, the book in question "Python for Kids" has been uploaded to google drive by someone and it's out there... This was (and still is) 1 major factor holding me back from trying to publish a technical book. They are so easily pirated.

Publish hard paper and sell to entreprise. That's where there is a money. A company will pay 49$ for a book they want. A dude won't.

> A company will pay 49$ for a book they want. A dude won't.

Perhaps you meant to say that you won't.

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