Shit, Amazon’s already doing this with other stuff. They have a giant counterfeiting problem across the board, and internal systems that only make it worse by fulfilling an order from one vendor with stock from a different one if that happens to be closer to the customer.
I first started hearing about it around the 2017 eclipse, when people ordering glasses designed to let you safely stare into the sun got fakes that wouldn’t do the job properly, but it seemed to already be pretty widespread by now.
The "top reviews" are all positive, but all for different products (this is supposed to be a pack of Lightning cables) - phone cases, LG G6 accessories, a rifle stand - and it's the 4th product when searching for "lightning cable".
It looks like they can just completely change the content of an existing listing, including customer reviews, without any oversight.
I made a huge mistake ordering the top rated boxer-briefs from amazon mindlessly - the reviews seemed good! It turns out that they were terrible and when I did a little digging I found out the reviews were completely fake and if I had looked at the "unhelpful" reviews which were all 1 star I could have avoided some problems!
I ordered headphones from Amazon that had good reviews, over 1k. I was looking for a cheap pair to listen to music at work. What I got were really poorly made Chinese rip-offs of Sony. I went to process the return and all of the review except for a handful of 1 star reviews had been removed. Luckily the return went off with a hitch but it seems clear Amazon is at least trying to do something, even if their efforts are not sufficient.
I've started to ask people in the climbing community if they bought anything besides the guide or their pants on Amazon. I'm not climbing with any gear from that store.
I've bought a few other things on Amazon that were counterfeit, which is why I cancelled my prime subscription and now look at other stores first. Never ordered climbing gear, but fake jackets are bad enough.
Some manufacturers do list directly on Amazon. If it's a huge discount I've done this but double check the seller. In general, I'll just use backcountry.com or REI though since I don't have to worry about a fake.
I ended up buying a pair of replacement snowboarding liner gloves from BackCountry after several Amazon reviews mentioned "sudden decreased quality from the last time I ordered". I doubted Burton quality had suddenly dropped off a cliff, so I suspected the listing was now pointing toward a counterfeit product.
I ordered from BackCountry and loved the gloves just as much as I always had. I don't know if the Amazon listing had truly been hijacked by a counterfeit, but I'm glad I didn't risk it and I tend to try to go to other sites first now.
I needed ballistic glasses for the range that have some shatter resistance. I misplaced a spare set, and needed them sooner than later for a friend. I start looking on Amazon. One of the top results at the time for Z87+[0] was a pack of 3 or 5 glasses for about $8 USD, and it hit me that there is a good chance these small companies are slapping ANSI and MIL-PRF tags onto their products. (Edit: I did the search again today. That listing does not show when searching "Z87+")
In all my years, I've never needed the shatter resistance offered by ballistic glasses. Think about how unfortunate it would be to find out on the range that your safety gear is a pair of $2 plastic lenses.
> The counterfeit climbing gear with fake safety logos in particular bothers me...
Another one is counterfeit tourniquets. It seems like you basically can't order them off Amazon with any confidence that you're getting the genuine article.
All of these examples sound like they should be rather serious crimes. Are people going to prison over this? There's quite a big difference between fake brand clothes or copies of novels, and fake safety/medical gear and badly copied medical books.
You can get fined for selling counterfeit goods, and apparently if you sell through Amazon you can get fined for it even though the goods were put in Amazon's warehouse by some other merchant.
Sorry, but on. The people responsible sit in Seattle, Washington. I didn't ordered anything from a random guy in China, Japan, Malaysia or God knows where else. I have ordered a thing from a respectable looking, USA business.
Well, but in some cases you did. Many, many items on Amazon are not sold by Amazon. Quite a lot of Amazon's business these days is just acting as a marketplace for independent sellers. This is how they keep an arm's length ("plausible deniability") from the problem. I agree, however, that it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.
But the issue here seems to be that even if you order directly from Amazon or a reputable seller, you could still end up with a product coming from a less reputable seller if it has the same barcode.
The problem here is Amazon making it ridiculously easy for people outside of our legislatures reach to commit crimes. So, the logical option is to punish Amazon (and similar companies) for distribution of counterfeits.
Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.
IANAL, but I am not sure if they're legally selling counterfeits, or if they're even (legally speaking) involved with any crime at all. Maybe (to the law) they're victims as well? Common sense tells me: Yeah, what Amazon is doing should be considered criminal activity. But common sense and laws sometimes tend to disagree.
Anyhow, I think generally we agree: Amazon should be punished for this. If the legal framework does not allow for this, it needs to be adjusted accordingly.
They sell illegal goods. Yes, I'd say they're doing something illegal. Now the illegal goods happen to be supplied by other people without Amazon's knowledge, but Amazon is still the one selling them, and they have a duty to know what they're selling. And once they know that some of their suppliers are selling them illegal goods, they have a responsibility to do everything they can to stop that and prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, they choose to describe it as not a big problem.
IIRC they use the defense of just offering a marketplace where other vendors sell stuff. That did not work for places like Silk Road, and given that Amazon handles the delivery I doubt it holds up - at least not in all legislations Amazon is active in.
This is the same bullshit companies like Airbnb and Uber try to pull.
No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.
Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´
Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.
The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.
Yes, Amazon has had ample opportunity to self-regulate, and they are passing on it because--contrary to outdated theories--it's been more profitable to ignore the problem.
I'm probably too much of an adult to be quoting Fight Club but this reminds me of that infamous monologue about car companies comparing the cost of a recall vs the cost of lawsuits from faulty cars that kill their customers.
I'm not sure what you're calling outdated but it's been like this at least since whenever that book was written. The only thing that has changed is that consumer rights have been eroded in the US over decades, reducing the financial risk of inaction.
People may do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Corporations only do what is either directly profitable or inevitable. Expecting a corporation to do something because it is "right" is absurd. Corporations -- contrary to US legal opinion -- aren't people.
It took seven years and well over £10 million in police costs to get him, and that's from the territory of one of our strongest allies with an extradition treaty.
We don't even have an extradition treaty with China.
From one and only reason - because Ecuador helped him. The minute he left the embassy, he was taken, and that would've happened 7 years ago if it wasn't for Ecuador. The average Joe is not going to have help from foreign governments and their diplomats.
Let me check I understand this correctly: You could be a seller of genuine articles, but could be fined if Amazon substitutes a fake supplied by someone else?
It reminds me of the case where someone got in trouble with customs because Amazon substituted a counterfeit for the genuine article he ordered and paid for.
Yep. Amazon offers a service where items with the same SKU from multiple vendors are intermingled at their warehouses. This is no problem as long as they are really the same item.
But clearly when they mix up real items with fake ones, it's Amazon and the fake vendor that are at fault and need to be held responsible, not the real vendor or the customer.
All the investigator sees is that someone went to a website with your name on it, bought product X, and received a counterfeit of product X instead. It doesn't matter how that happened; all that matters is that your business enables counterfeit goods to find a market. Of course if you run a business that sells via Amazon you have to specifically opt out of this inventory mixing, even though it increases your costs. Either that or you shouldn't do business via Amazon at all, or you should gang together with other businesses and force Amazon to change it's operations. But no matter what you do it's likely to increase your costs.
It's not clear to me whether this problem is present in the EU, where consumer law generally works a lot better. A poster below mentions fake CE logos?
A little while ago I was trying to get into Airsoft (paintball with plastic bullets as opposed to color) to have a reason to spend more time with my brother. The little bullets have quite decent momentum and can penetrate normal low-grade safety glasses, and so I was browsing around for glasses with a certain rating. Found the exact pair I wanted for a good price on amazon, but I just couldn't run the risk of getting fakes from China. Needless to say, I haven't played any Airsoft yet..
They have secured a place in the minds of people as being the only place you can get anything - or, get anything conveniently, I guess. I hope there's still physical stores out there that do e.g. airsoft goods. The real "problem" is of course that consumers are then faced with real consumer prices, where they have to pay $15 for a good pair of safety glasses instead of $1.50.
They've gotten good enough at SEO that it's honestly hard to Google for alternative or niche vendors.
Unless you're plugged into the community for the activity enough to know the reputations of big online vendors, you've got the same problem of low quality, counterfeits, poor fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
I can't remember the specifics, but with the certain model I wanted, at a reasonable price, and with shipping to Sweden I'd like to remember that Amazon was the best option. Regardless, although my last sentence might've been a bit dramatic, the point of the anecdote was to share how Amazon lost me as a customer because of their counterfeit problem.
The first search result for "airsoft safety glasses" is [1], which shows me Danish prices and a delivery cost to Denmark.
Amazon might be easy, but knowing their products may be counterfeit, the company pays next to no tax, and has underpaid staff on awful contracts, I've not bought anything from them for years.
I must qualify what I said by saying that I've found this much harder the more specific I need to be. I could find 0 results for short M3 screws when I searched domestic sellers a few weeks ago. No hardware- or electronic stores carried them. One had them listed with a 3 month delivery and at about $3 each. After that hour+ you Amazon it, without putting hours into finding it in other countries who's languages you don't speak.
Airsoft glasses is something I can find in any mall here.
We're pretty well of the beaten path of Amazon here, but I had a similar need (#1 slotted flat-head brass wood screws) that McMaster-Carr didn't sell a little while ago and found them on microfasteners.com. It looks like they stock metric machine screws as well.
If nobody goes to retail stores to _ask_ for a specific type of security glasses, how will they ever know to stock it? We, the consumers making Amazon's monopoly.
While security glasses are something that you will hardly find in a typical mall retail shop, it is something, that shops with tactical gear do stock. They also haveh a clerk, who can give you an advice for your specific needs.
I don't climb, but oh yeah, that's a no brainer all right.
Unless they can fix this then buying direct from the manufacturer has to be the only safe way. Otherwise you have to trust a retailer who even if trustworthy, has to trust a wholesaler.
That sounds extremely terrifying. Got a source, please?
A quick search resulted only in less safety critical gear like maps, clothing etc.. Not saying that this isn't dangerous, too, but are their fake carabiners, ropes and helmets?
Which talks about fake safety logos and
https://www.outsideonline.com/2073311/dangerous-climbing-har... which is about eBay rather than Amazon. My personal experience is that Amazon suggests obviously sketchy, NON-UIAA / CE gear rather than established brands. I've bought a lot of caving, climbing, and mountaineering equipment on Amazon and haven't had a problem yet buying Petzl, Elderid, BD etc.
I've found myself using Aliexpress more and more over Amazon due to this reason. I mean if it's something cheap you want - just get it straight from China. There are of course things that can't wait for the 2 weeks it takes for packages to get across the other pond.
I still like Amazon more for physical goods due to having to pay no customs (and more importantly, not suffer through the Kafkaesque process of handling customs in my country) on orders from within the EU Amazon sites.
If I can't wait 2 weeks, I go on Ebay :) It's usually a few dollars more, or sometimes even the same price (probably a US retailer buying bulk from Alibaba instead of Aliexpress). Make sure you check the "Ships from North America" box, though.
Yeah Amazon will likely be beaten by a Chinese company at some point.
There is no domination in capitalism. A new competitor always shows up. Consumers are not loyal to Amazon- they will shop anywhere. If you don't believe me look at the airline industry.
There is plenty of domination in capitalism, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, political influence. Once you get to a certain size you become too big to fail and the government is then in your pocket.
The current trade war with China is probably being fought in the interests of big business rather than the consumer
Allow me to say: in a well regulated capitalism. We all know Standard Oil.
Don't blame Amazon if you can't be bothered to use another store. But I am Dutch, I would walk 10 kilometres just to save 50 cents as a matter of principle.
Capitalism is inherently self-destructive because it tends towards a monopoly and unregulated monopolies make competition impossible (especially if they're "vertically integrated", i.e. monopolies at every level of the value chain). Regulation solves this by restraining capitalism and actively working against it. But companies like Amazon and other US megacorps have been lobbying against regulation for decades and in the US they have been extremely effective.
"Don't blame Amazon" is a position from privilege. I make enough money to be able to waste hours clicking through various websites to find the best deal. Whether or not I shop local is largely a question of laziness. But assuming this holds true for everyone is absurd.
There simply is no direct competitor to Amazon. Sure, there are specialised shops and some of them may have put in the effort to gain their target audience's trust and brand recognition, but everyone already has an Amazon account and if you are already paying every month for Prime shipping (now included in your VOD package!) why not just shop Amazon -- you'll likely order something from them anyway, so just throw it in and maybe you pay enough to hit the threshold for that "plus" product that's been collecting dust in your shopping card.
What makes you think I'm "angry with Amazon"? Amazon isn't a person. How I feel about Amazon doesn't matter. It's like being angry at the wind for blowing over a tree.
Amazon is a profit-driven corporation. Amazon drives down prices to gain market share and starve competitors. Then it repeats that process with different markets so customers come to rely on them for most of their online shopping (ideally also reinforced via products like Alexa, Kindle or Fire). Then they ramp up prices or lower costs (i.e. quality controls) as customers are too heavily invested to switch to a competitor for any given niche and their service range is too broad for any competitor to meaningfully offer an alternative. That's how you succeed as a corporation under capitalism at this point.
I'm not angry with Amazon because Amazon is winning at the game of capitalism. I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't be forced to play the game because the way its rules work mean it will invariably end -- and that's something we generally don't want for our society as a whole.
It doesn't even matter whether we right now are experiencing "late game" (i.e. late stage capitalism) or not: the rules are already causing harm and literally killing people, so that's enough of a reason to want to stop.
That said, you can't just decide to stop playing if you're deeply entangled in the system. If everyone around you pretends private ownership is a thing and you don't happen to already "own" everything you need to sustain yourself without interacting with them, "not playing" means giving up access to things you need to survive.
Jeff Bezos could probably buy a private island, gather a group of likeminded people and form a commune and not have to worry about the basic necessities of life for the rest of his days. But a wage employee living from paycheck to paycheck doesn't have that luxury. Being able to exit the game without losing everything is only possible if you're already winning.
TL;DR: Regulation is good because it changes the rules of the game of capitalism, not because it enforces them.
The integrity of B&H over my years of ordering from them is literally unparalleled in my experience. Only if I can’t find an item from them will I check elsewhere at this point. If Amazon wants inspiration as to how to do things right...
Often when I try to find something just a little bit out of the ordinary, Amazon tends to be the only option.
And when there is another option, even something like best buy, their experience can be pretty bad (my best buy account is in some sort of limbo where I have been able to create it but can't access it .. so I have to do all my purchases in guest mode).
Sometimes you can find a merchant on Amazon, search for its name (they are not allowed to link), then buy from the merchant's own store.
For any readers from Germany, booklooker.de is great for books. You can buy used and new books with an extremely efficient, no-nonsense user interface. Fulfilled by large and small bookstores and even private sellers. You see the actual vendor before you buy.
It's getting to the point where I'm wondering if "fulfilled by Amazon" is a negative when I'm adding to my cart.. Been shipped a lot of opened, damaged, and returned items from Amazon... Maybe my 700+ purchase is better served through a 50k+ reviewed seller instead; still get the same Amazon shopping and checkout experience without the Amazon fulfillment BS.
Reviews should also be taken with a big grain of salt, you know there's farms of people and bots just giving out good reviews for bad products constantly.
And reviews only tell half the story. If a $700 product gets four stars but its $100 alternative does as well despite being nowhere near as good, what good are reviews? I mean people putting down reviews don't have both products to compare with one another.
Yep, and plenty of people don't realize seller reviews != product reviews. You shouldn't complain about shipping times in a product review or talk about how much you disliked the plot of a book is in a seller review, but it happens all the time. Many people don't even realize you can rate a seller for shipping time, description accuracy, and responsiveness, so a legit seller might have a lot of happy customers but not much to show for it while a counterfeit seller has a boatload of paid reviews.
I first started hearing about it around the 2017 eclipse, when people ordering glasses designed to let you safely stare into the sun got fakes that wouldn’t do the job properly, but it seemed to already be pretty widespread by now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...