Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 403 posts

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

#81

Post by nikolay »

toasterlovin wrote: post #63
jklinger410 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here for this. Amazon actually buries the cheapest price products in many searches I have done. eBay is not any better at this point. They are all squeezing to show higher priced products so they can make more money, obviously. Hate to say this but Walmart still seems committed to providing the lowest prices.

FWIW, speaking as a seller, the conventional wisdom is that number of separate orders for a given item as a result of a given search term is the primary driver of search result ranking. Not revenue maximization, in other words.

Maybe you're right, but this is self-serving and not serving the goal of presenting the cheapest products to customers. There are so many low-quality products on Amazon. Often the packaging is outrageously wasteful as well. For a bottle of supplements, they often sent a box within a box, filled with so much plastic, paper, etc. The environmental impact on Amazon is huge!

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

#82

Post by ikeboy »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #79
ikeboy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's been discussed to death Where? >overseas sellers simply have a massive advantage in starting new seller accounts on Amazon. Why would it be any easier for an overseas seller to start a new account after being banned? Amazon blocks related accounts whenever they can track it. Sellers can get around that by having employees or relatives open accounts in their name. This is just as easy or difficult in the US as e…

>Where? In fairness, mostly in FBA-related forums. I'm a 3P seller so I apologize for that comment as I certainly have a skewed view of what is commonly known. >This is just as easy or difficult in the US as elsewhere. Wrong. How much would I have to pay you to borrow your passport to set up a seller account? $100? $1000? $10,000? -- You can get this in rural India / China for $20-$100. (And maybe even less than that…

>How much would I have to pay you to borrow your passport to set up a seller account?

My passport would be useless, because I was banned from Amazon after dozens of frivolous complaints by a competitor, who I'm currently suing. I've discussed that elsewhere.

Having talked to many US sellers who operate multiple accounts, some of them dozens, I stand behind my claim that it's pretty easy for determined sellers to run multiple stealth accounts.

>I really don't know what to say other than that this is patently false. It really appears you do not know what you're talking about.

I've heard from plenty of people who got suspended for opening another account after suspension, without going through all the effort to cloak it. It's clear that Amazon enforces that, if they know about it. When duplicate accounts aren't suspended, it's because Amazon doesn't know, or is unable to prove it enough to justify a suspension.

Of course there's a both a false positive and false negative rate. But the claim that Amazon doesn't care about this is wrong. Just in the last year they started enforcing ID verification on all new signups, in large part to make it more difficult to open multiple accounts.

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

#83

Post by Timberwolf »

There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefield of fakery and shortcuts that are outright dangerous (e.g. UK plugs lacking fuses and with pins the wrong shape/size) that I'd rather have the extra work and expense of going to a local shop where I can inspect what I'm buying.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #17
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

I think this article seems like a good example of editorial independence. Even though both Amazon and the Washington Post are pretty much owned by the same person, the Washington Post has published a pretty negative article about Amazon.

Not to question their independence, but it seems to have a very positive spin for a negative article. Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products... Former executives say e-commerce giant, which last year spent $400 million fighting fraud and abuse is kind of saying well their trying really really hard, honest. I suspect this has less to do with the Amazon relationship than the tendency to give similar weight to both s…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by tentboy »

AlexandrB wrote: post #11

Amazon's fulfilment has also become shockingly bad. Most items are shipped in lightly-padded manila envelopes resulting in high percentage of damaged goods if you order books[1], CDs/DVDs/BluRays, video games, or anything else where the packaging is part of the product. eBay is a much better experience in this regard. [1] In an ironic twist, I absolutely refuse to buy books from Amazon anymore.

Yep. Got a BluRay recently with a badly cracked case because it shipped in little more than a paper envelope, and im sure was chucked up my front steps from 10 feet away.

I usually buy them from Best Buy's online site which always seems to have the same price as amazon now

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

#86

Post by jschwartzi »

AlexandrB wrote: post #19
izzydata wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've received many damaged books from Amazon. Whenever I report the items as being damaged I am prepared with photographs of the damaged goods as proof, but they always send me another one without caring. It just feels so wasteful to save money by mishandling everything to the point where it doesn't even matter if stuff breaks because it is cheaper to try a 2nd time.

It also flies in the face of Amazon's promise of convenience and "2-day delivery" guarantees when you have to have the same item shipped to you twice and make the trip to the post office to return the first one.

That's if they can reliably deliver it in the first place. They kept mis-delivering or losing packages so much that I took my $5000/year spend elsewhere.

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

#87

Post by uoaei »

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…

What could the problem be, then? Do we point fingers at capitalism?

As far as I see it, this is the logical conclusion to capitalism and free markets. Manufacturers produce a product and sell it to many suppliers who all rebrand and mark up in their own ways, competing with each other for market share. As consumers, we are presented with basically only this option because the suppliers have all won the race to the bottom. There's no more room in the market for slightly-more-expensive things unless they work way better than the slightly-less-expensive copycat stuff, because it's not worth the time or energy to compete with the poor-quality stuff. But as a result, we as consumers no longer have "choice" in the market because of China (et al.)'s manufacturing capabilities and leverage driving this phenomenon. Coupled with the consumers' relative disinterest in products of proper quality, because what they have access to is already good enough for the moment, how can we ever expect the crapification of commodities to reverse?

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

#88

Post by jschwartzi »

tyingq wrote: post #20
chadash wrote: post #18

The article talks about fake Hermes bracelets being sold for $25, when a real one is closer to $600. It's obviously a counterfeit. Does Amazon not have any requirement for a human to review a listing before allowing it up for sale?

I don't think there's even a reliable exception process to review items/sellers with lots of bad reviews. You would have to have that working first.

The problem here is that Amazon wants an automated process, which is fundamentally incompatible with how sales works. You can't reliably go through and identify all of the products you sell by trademark and verify that the pricing is within a certain reasonable percentage of the seller's price or MSRP. And if there's no posted MSRP you're stuck assessing the market price based on how much others have paid for the same piece. This isn't a process you can automate. And Amazon is so deeply a software company that they can't conceive of a way to do this without using software.

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

#89

Post by benologist »

Retric wrote: post #17
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

I think this article seems like a good example of editorial independence. Even though both Amazon and the Washington Post are pretty much owned by the same person, the Washington Post has published a pretty negative article about Amazon.

Not to question their independence, but it seems to have a very positive spin for a negative article. Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products... Former executives say e-commerce giant, which last year spent $400 million fighting fraud and abuse is kind of saying well their trying really really hard, honest. I suspect this has less to do with the Amazon relationship than the tendency to give similar weight to both s…

I wish they broke that $400m down so we could see how much went to AWS.

> the company has developed algorithms to sift through the more than 5 billion changes to its worldwide catalogue each day

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

#90

Post by post_break »

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…

An ultrasonic cleaner is like a hair dyer though. It's not rocket science it's like banging rocks together. My $100 ultrasonic cleaner I have for cleaning brass that is for reloading ammo probably does the same work as the cheap no name brands just with different settings. My no name chinese ozone machine works great for detailing cars. If you're going to bring this up stick with a product that is actually going to be a problem if you buy no name, like batteries, chargers, etc.
Post reply on HN