Common sense. Amazon want to ‘own’ the customer relationship and go to great lengths to that end then it follows they will have to ‘own’ any liability too.
Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier/wholesaler/manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.
Yes, and therefore the retailer is incentivised not to sell junk in the first place.
The problem with being an "everything store" is that everything also includes an overwhelming majority of crap, looking at you crappy "genuine sony" camera batteries that held about 10 minutes of charge, fulfilled by amazon.
Yeah, no, you got lucky with that - I found out Amazon can't be trusted with high-ticket items by getting a $1200 lens that turned out to be gray market. Works fine, but I better hope I never need warranty service.
Amazon can't be trusted with high-ticket items, including but not limited to camera equipment. Go to B&H or Adorama, or Newegg or Micro Center for high-ticket computer parts (cf. the recent spate of GPU scams), or the like. And - preferably to any of those options - support your local small retailer, if any.
I completely agree. For all of my big ticket items (e.g. bluetooth headphones, computer parts, phones, recording equipment) I go through places I trust. I end up doing a lot of shopping at Best Buy of all places again. For computer parts I mostly do Newegg and I do Sweetwater or Guitar Center for music stuff. I do still use Amazon for some stuff, but it tends to be connectors/converters and a couple of companies that have dedicated Amazon stores like Anker. I wouldn't trust something large like a TV to Amazon anymore, or something where counterfeiting is an issue like name brand clothes.
Most of the more boutique places I shop at use Shopify anyways so it's still pretty convenient.
Well, guess Newegg is losing a long term customer. The entire purpose of places like Newegg and B&H is to offer a slightly higher price in exchange for superior service and selection. If they're comingling inventory, there is no point to go with Newegg over Amazon.
Micro Center is nice if you live near one. The closest one to me is about an hour and a half away and the city I live in has no other computer parts stores. The mom and pop shops are all repair shops, so if I need, say, a new video card or want to buy a new processor I have to order it online, get lucky with Best Buy randomly having it in stock, it or drive the hour and a half to Micro Center.
I haven't had trouble with Newegg, but I think the last thing I bought there was a RAID controller, and that's been a year or two ago now. Mostly I prefer Micro Center these days, and mostly that's just because they opened a local store so I can just go there. That said, I've never had problems with gray market or counterfeit stuff ordering from Micro Center online, so if you're uncomfortable with Newegg and Micro Center can ship to where you are, they're who I would first recommend.
B&H is honest about it. The problem I have with Amazon is that they aren't. Based on price and representation, the lens I bought was indistinguishable from a US-market unit right up until I took it out of the box and checked the serial number.
To be clear, I suspect error and not malfeasance on Amazon's part. But I don't really care which it is, either.
Yup - B&H gives you the choice of whether you want to trade off price for potential issues down the road.
With Amazon you may get zonked and have no way of knowing until after the fact. And seeing the other comments about Newegg, that's disappointing too. Luckily I live near more than a few Microcenters - but finding reliable, trustworthy electronics retailers is becoming harder and harder.
That's honestly most of the reason I still go to the store, and all of why I'll go out of my way to buy there even for stuff I could probably get elsewhere for a little less.
Micro Center is the last of the old breed of computer stores, where you could expect to go and find a strong product selection and generally knowledgeable people - I can't remember the last time I've gone anywhere else and found the sales staff able to usefully consult and advise on complex questions; by contrast, I've learned through experience that I can go into my local Micro Center with nothing but a problem description and come out with a solution that will work.
I want that to go on being the case for a long time; after all, I'm not getting any younger nor are days getting any longer, and having kids around who are, by all I can tell, well paid and fairly treated precisely to develop and apply knowledge I don't have the time or honestly the desire to obtain for myself - that's something I'm not just willing, but happy, to support.
> For IMP items only, B&H provides a warranty identical to the provisions and limitations of the manufacturer's warranty for such items, with the exception of the time period, which is equal to the term of the manufacturer's warranty or one (1) year, whichever is less.* Your dated B&H sales receipt is all you need to obtain warranty coverage from B&H for a "grey market" product purchased from us.
This is not typically the case if you get a grey market lens on Amazon. It's also something you'll be told on the listing.
I highly recommend using a credit card with generous warranty coverage when purchasing anything of significant value from Amazon. My go to is an American Express Platinum charge card, but there are other cards with a lower annual fee (or none at all) that provide similar benefits.
You can't even report that the reason for your return is that you suspect or know that the item you received is counterfeit during the return process. If Amazon cared about a problem this big, they would collect metrics from customers on it.
You can definitely report items as "inauthentic" and they will be escalated to the seller. Amazon gates sellers by category and ASIN and will remove selling privileges based on complaints.
I don't think most people here have any idea 3P/FBA selling works. It takes a lot of work to get listed and move into new categories, and you can be removed very quickly for the slightest of reasons. This goes to show the scale of the problem in policing logistics at this scale (not to say that Amazon shouldn't be responsible for it).
> I don't think most people here have any idea 3P/FBA selling works. It takes a lot of work to get listed and move into new categories, and you can be removed very quickly for the slightest of reasons. This goes to show the scale of the problem in policing logistics at this scale (not to say that Amazon shouldn't be responsible for it).
I am not new to 3P/FBA myself. I ran a store in my college days 2010-2012, and know number of Alibaba, and Amazon employees who were directly involved into managing vendors.
Among Chinese vendors, there is a very ambivalent attitude towards Amazon. People know that Amazon is at a times can be n-times more profitable than an analogous listing on Aliexpress, or any other smaller platform, but at the same time an extremely zealous enforcement is a giant turnoff to proper vendors.
Nobody who is ready to play "by the rules" goes to sell on Amazon among Chinese vendors because you can spend tens of thousands of bucks invested in the store for it be deletes without any questions asked.
Add to that that better vendors will not be bothering with creating shell companies, or using fake IDs to get Amazon verification. This way, Amazon has driven off the few proper vendors from China they had, and now they have to deal with fly-by-night, quick money types as they are the only ones who are ready to tolerate this treatment.
Yes, this is what ended my side-income gig buying / selling used CD's.
I half think that its almost racketeering by amazon.
Lets suppose you go thru the work of finding low volume CD's...mainly from one-off bands that no longer exist or only had a single release. Then you establish an ASIN for each CD, eventually some fraudster appears and list under your ASIN (thanks to co-mingling of inventory). Once a 'fraud or counterfeit' charge is brought against that other seller, amazon 99/100 invalidates the entire ASIN.
So your inventory, although legit is now held captive by amazon in their warehouse. So they send you a nice little email that states: You can either pay us $4 to send you back your CD or you can "allow us to dispose of it for you".
That last bit is the real punchline. They will then proceed to sell your CD and keep 100% of the money. They routinely farm their sellers using such tactics.
Sorry, I'm a bit naive in this area.
How easy is it really for a Chinese vendor set up a shell company and build a fly-by-night business to compete with a legitimate seller who has to spend a considerable amount of money? Especially if they are only able to snipe a few sales away from the legitimate company before getting deleted?
As far as I understand, on Amazon you don’t have to compete with legitimate sellers anymore: many of them are simply gone.
If you are a legitimate seller, you want to be able to communicate with store representative. You want to be able to trust that the store wouldn’t suddenly pull the rug from under you without human contact. You don’t want your products to be displayed alongside fakes. It may be considered wiser not to engage with a store that lacks all of that.
Meanwhile, for a fly-by-night shady seller risk and uncertainty is par for the course, so they would remain and scout for new ways to game the system.
When I left Amazon the fastest growing team in the country was the antifraud team and they already had like 2 floors of agents working on it. But I also heard that issues which hadn't occured 3 times in a row were dropped on the floor because of Amazon's scale.
This was quite a few years ago now, I can only imagine Amazon is spending more money on the problem now vs then.
not to defend Amazon, but maybe the scale of the problem is too big - maybe there is a long tail of fraudsters similar to the long tail of illicit content on youtube.
Agree. I think the regulation should include “if your platform is too large for you to police then you and your platform must be broken up into smaller, manageable parts”
What about Walmart? They have a big online presence and sell a lot of 3rd party - anyone know what their counterfeit situation looks like? I've only ever bought diapers from them and if they were fakes it seems oily rags (or whatever is in the fakes ones) absorb as well as the real deal...
As a seller, you can generally create your own listings on either platform. Or sell on an existing listing. So nothing to stop you from selling counterfeits.
I don’t keep up with the marketplace requirements as maybe I should, but historically the biggest difference was Walmart.com required sellers to be based in the US, and amazon.com allowed sellers from all countries. This hurdle alone can make sellers much easier to chase down and throw the legal book at them.
> not to defend Amazon, but maybe the scale of the problem is too big
There is no defense for Amazon. The solution is simple. Put back the ability to filter for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com only, and stop commingling inventory.
Amazon will never do this because they don’t want to be in the retail business with 3% profit margins, they want to be in the platform business with 15%+ profit margins.
Hence I take my business to other retailers willing to sacrifice some of their profit margin to ensure I don’t receive garbage the first time.
My guess is that, in this case, "too big" actually means "above the fraud team on the org chart." They could presumably pull the rug out from under fraudsters, at relatively little cost. Perhaps by making some policy changes that alter the cost/benefit tradeoff for fraud, or that limit the blast radius so that it doesn't render he entire platform untrustworthy. But I'm guessing the changes in question would be tantamount to an attack on some executive's golden calf.
I could hazard a few specific ideas in Amazon's case, but really I'm just extrapolating from the fact that I've seen that this is how it generally works at any sufficiently large company.
If the scale is too big for Amazon to handle then Amazons business model has failed and they should be shut down until they get a handle on it. I don’t understand why common sense and the law went out the window just because we changed the medium?
Because if you were trying to make a case to Congress to get legislation passed that would them down you wouldn’t get past “even with the fraud Amazon is still delivering a huge amount of value to consumers because of their scale and we don’t want to disrupt that.”
Like you will get nowhere arguing that billion dollar US controlled giants should get shut down or broken up unless it’s a last resort.
They could shut out all 3rd party sellers until they are verified. Amazon would still be making truck loads of money from Amazon basics etc. Most customers might not even notice any change when buying.
Verifying is useless if you aren't also tracking inventory provenance, which Amazon can't do while also being able to compete in their own market, as they would have absolutely no way to argue they weren't operating on the basis of privileged access to third-party information via analyzing specific inventory granularity sales flow.
That's the issue Amazon absolutely does not want to happen. Getting locked out of their own marketplace or aggregated sales data would hugely undermine the value proposition in terms of de facto earning and profit taking potential, while at the same time undermining public faith in the overall market.
Amazon can't admit they can do anything about counterfeits because no one in their right mind wants to contribute to a platform that empowers and informs a potential competitor.
This is becoming what I consider velvet glove business combat 101 that no one openly admits to.
> I can only imagine Amazon is spending more money on the problem now vs then.
They might be spending money, but that doesn't mean the money is actually going towards fixing the problem at hand.
When I go to return an item, I can't even select that the reason for my return is that I suspect or know that the item is counterfeited. I have to lie and choose between several somewhat related options like "Inaccurate website description" or "Wrong item was sent" among other things.
To me, it seems like if Amazon were serious about addressing rampant counterfeiting on their platform, they would collect stats from the customers that suffer from Amazon's lack of quality control.
if these companies can’t handle the scale, then maybe they need to reduce their scope. “it’s hard to find a solution” doesn’t cut it anymore. either amazon and these giant tech companies find solutions (privacy, graphic content, insert big scale tech problem) to these problems or they suffer the consequences of liability. or they reduce the scope of the service.
Which is nice in theory but what happens when legislators (and customers) come back with the case that the value of them operating at their scale outweighs the harm of fraud.
> The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.
Would control fraud work in a company as big as Amazon? If you're that big, then there's a huge probability of a whistleblower or unhappy ex-employee exposing you.
Absolutely. The bigger you are the easier it is to claim plausible deniability for each of the "isolated" incidents. If the executives will even meet the people who they've put in this position, it's easier to lose or just never hear the complaints and red flags.
This sounds like the "we have so many cases of covid because we test so much; if we didn't test we won't have as many cases" logic. Jeff Bezos has no clothes!
I actually had them refuse a return on a blatantly counterfeit set of coffee filters (they were 1/4 size and didn’t even fit the brand they were marked for). Given that it was about $12, I didn’t fight them about it.
Only within their refund period. I have had so many products break down after their return window. Most recent example: Expensive chargers which stopped work within a few months. The seller’s page was gone. Customer support was of no use.
This seems to be a common pattern. Fly by night sellers whose pages disappear within a few days.
"duracell" cr2032s -- those little pancake batteries for your car keyfob -- that die within 4 months. Which is weird, because the duracells at my hardware store last like 5 years.
Yeah, I looked into buying batteries on Amazon. Prices seemed too good to be true. After reading some reviews, I confirmed that.
But I would imagine if you got in early enough, there weren't any negative reviews. There's definitely something wonky with how they aggregate reviews.
I see now Amazon has their own brand of battery. Presumably they don't have this problem. It's actually a pretty disgusting tactic: competitor brands are untrustworthy because of how Amazon handles inventory rather than the actual quality of the product.
I wonder what Amazon would do if you tried to sell your own Amazon batteries on their website.
I buy _all_ of my coin cell batteries from Digikey.
Yeah, it takes some foresight and planning sometimes, since they can only be shipped UPS ground, but they are cheap, come in bulk, and Digikey certifies that they are genuine.
If you bought it on Amazon.com and your credit card was charged by Amazon.com, you bought it from Amazon. Consumers shouldn't be concerned with what supplier Amazon gets their inventory from.
As a customer with agency, I have the ability to not buy things on the Amazon site that aren't sold by amazon. When FBA stock contaminates sold by amazon stock, I lose that agency. That is a problem for my own personal uses of the Amazon site.
That some large portion of Amazon functions like a more industrial Ebay is for others to enjoy - YMMV.
Amazon does not make it easy to know, not as a consumer do I even know what the difference is between those three options. I'm a pretty savvy shopper and world wide web surfer but from looking at a product page I have no idea which one of those it is not what the implications even are.
What on earth is "3P" and how does a consumer know? What is the difference between "sold by Amazon" and "fulfilled by Amazon"? Isn't anything sold by Amazon also fulfilled by Amazon? Do they not fulfill some products they sell? Do they fulfill some things they don't sell? I've never seen an item on Amazon that they didn't take your money for. Everything I've ever bought there Amazon has charged my card for.
As a consumer, the nature of the business relationship between Amazon and its suppliers shouldn't be my concern.
So there is Amazon the retailer. That is what Amazon originally did - buy inventory from vendors then sell them. As Amazon gained scale they launched 3P aka 3rd party selling. This is essentially Ebay at scale. Returns for these products are more or less managed by the seller.
FBA then came where 3rd party sellers can take advantage of Amazon's delivery and warehouse logistics. The stock is held by Amazon and can tap into Prime delivery. IIRC returns are also handled by Amazon so you get no questions asked returns.
I will usually filter products by Prime and will then usually look for the "sold by Amazon" text on a product page (as opposed to "Fulfilled By Amazon")
In the same way I think twice about buying random things on eBay, I also think twice about buying 3P (and FBA to a degree) on Amazon.
Filtering out 3P on Amazon is fairly straightforward. Filtering FBA is more manual and takes reading of the page.
If fake inventory is being comingled that becomes impossible.
Amazon the retailer is (from my experience) reasonably priced, delivers goods in a day (sometimes less) and offers me a return policy that is hard to compete with anywhere else.
I would never buy cables or batteries from a 3P seller. I would think twice with a FBA seller.
The problem there is that all Amazon stock is comingled. There isn't a difference between sold by Amazon and third-party FBA. It all gets sorted under the same UPC/SKU.
Amazon is attempting to be a physical CDN, and that's bad news when what you're looking for is a guarantee that some product will be delivered from some specific seller to you after getting comingled.
Normally, that isn't much of an issue when you've got procurement going sanely.
When it is predated by fake/damaged good sellers predominantly though is where you run into problems.
Thanks, that's enlightening and also a perfect example of what's wrong with Amazon.
No average consumer is going to know any of this. It's all Amazon as far as most people are concerned; Amazon goes to great lengths to make you think it's all them - right up until you have an issue.
Yeah - FBA is actually a really awful attack vector. I hope that they internally are able to track sub-ASIN level inventory, otherwise they have made a fantastic laundering platform.
Only if you notice within the return window. They wouldn't refund our purchase of The Wire box set (when DVDs were still a thing) unless we got it "authenticated" as being a counterfeit by HBO, and even then they were extremely difficult about it.
return? you mean knowingly transport illegal goods across state and international borders?
18 U.S.C. § 2314 (1994)) (indicating that
shipping counterfeit merchandise across state lines “may violate laws prohibiting the
interstate transportation of stolen property”
Dont know, google found this as a possible interpretation. Courier services usually have this somewhere in ToS, plus customs will confiscate it and you end up on the hook.
> Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product
I understand where you are coming from, but there are lots of consignment stores and flea markets, at least in the middle parts of the US. The person you pay at the front counter simply records the transaction for the merchant. Amazon is a sort of cross between traditional retail and a consignment store, so it's not obvious (or "common sense") where product liability should lie.
Amazon is sort of like a consignment store where all the products from all the merchants are mixed into one large bin and you need special equipment to figure out the seller of each item, but of course it's fully acceptable for them to just give a fake name and address. Plus nobody checks what you sell for legality.
If a consignment store would allow random people from all over the world to sell illegal and dangerous goods with a fake ID while dodging taxes... would anyone find that tolerable?
This is laid out in the judgement[1]. In California, if you are an integral part between the manufacturer and the consumer, especially if you are the one that "owns the relationship" you are on the hook for strict liability.
Now I'm wondering if I can establish personal nexus in CA sufficient to qualify for such protections, while continuing to reside in place without all the Californians...
There’s something off about this comment, and simultaneously I’m aware that my response is reading way too far into it.
The last phrase you use continues to perpetuate the odd perception that Californians are weird extreme hippie aliens that Middle America should avoid at all costs.
And then, your comment simultaneously envies California’s strong worker and consumer protections.
It’s almost as if Californians aren’t weirdo hippies and they’re just normal people who have demanded and received robust environmental, safety, labor, and privacy protection.
I’d love to live in California right next to those weird Californians and be able to make CCPA requests. I’d also love for non-competes to be illegal.
It’s almost as if other states’ citizens have been failed by their governments in comparison, and/or their citizens are too unaware of these issues to have lobbied for data protection laws.
It has astonished me that a certain political party has just gotten away with labeling an entire state in our country as a bad place, especially one as big and diverse as California.
Maybe that certain political party would have a chance to win California if Joe from Texas didn’t think California was a Mad Max liberal wasteland and considered taking a new job there.
Oh no, I love the weird extreme hippie aliens. And the strong worker and consumer protections. It's the Hollywood and the Disney and the Dot-com bros I'm avoiding at exactly those other costs.
That plus the completely unsustainable water situation that I refuse to be a part of worsening.
As I understand it, the water situation is all kinds of screwed up, but much of the residential water is sustainable. SF, for example, uses mostly surface water and has access to a lot of surface water. One might argue whether the dam that supplies the water is a good thing or a bad thing and whether the allocation of SF’s water is reasonable, but it appears to be sustainable. In addition, residential water usage just isn’t that much.
Agricultural water in the drier parts of California is an entirely different story.
And, on the converse, maybe a certain political party would have a chance to win the Midwest and the South if everyone on the coasts didn't think the Midwest and the South was a conservative hellscape and... oh what am I saying, they'd all move to the big cities, which are gerrymandered into impotency when it comes to setting policy and choosing who runs the damn state.
(god I am so glad that Louisiana managed to go into this pandemic with a DINO governor, it would have been even worse with someone licking Trump's bootheels setting policy)
I've come close to death multiple times because those conservative hellscapes can't be bothered to salt their roads. Big government does offer some perks.
That said, California (like Texas) is a large enough state that you can find pretty much any community you feel comfortable with here. You can also find any climate you feel comfortable with (except for Arctic), and you can find a house at any price you may want to pay, but you may not be able to find a union of the choices.
As such, generalizations rarely achieve the goal intended unless that goal is to inflame.
An alternative would be establishing a similar legal notion of strict liability in the jurisdiction where you happen to reside. This requires that you give up none of the features of your current residence, rather it involves becoming more active in its governance which, frankly, is something I wish more people would do.
California is big enough and the scope wide enough that Amazon will most likely have to address it for the entire country. I doubt we'll see some items taken off listings in California but still available in Texas. That would open up a whole new can of poop.
This is not correct. There are plenty of subdivided retail marketplaces (with a single cashier) that sell new products. There's one here where I live in Winters (just north of SF), and I found them frequently in the midwest when I lived there. Merchants rent small blocks of space from the establishment; what they put on the shelves is really up to them.
Yes, this is commonly secondhand goods. But not always. The shop in Winters is all new products, more like a brick-and-mortar Etsy. It's a thing.
That starts to be somewhat comparable, but still doesn't feel much like Amazon.
Amazon isn't separate blocks of space, and merchants don't really rent their own areas. On a website that'd look like amazon.com/mycrapcompanystore/ or something.
As a customer I just go to amazon and search for what I want. They choose what specific items I should see, in what order, and I am barely aware of who actually sent the item to Amazon. You have to look pretty closely to even tell. In many cases it's just not even possible to choose, with the way Amazon combines their stock.
Ebay is a good contrast here, as while it has the same general search-for-a-thing idea, it makes it very clear that you're buying this one specific item from this one specific merchant.
And I'd argue that's a far superior model. I go to eBay for a lot of items that I suspect may be graymarket but I'm willing to risk it, specifically BECAUSE I know exactly which seller sold me the thing, and I can go back on them if it's bad, and eBay has pretty good protections for buyers.
I could buy the same goods on Amazon but have none of the traceability or protections.
Plus Ebay incentives sellers to upload their own photos and written descriptions of the product they're selling, rather then having generic product pages for multiple listings.
If I'm buying a second hand item like an old video game or something I always use Ebay since I can see what the product actually looks like and can make my own judgement on condition based on the photos. Something you can't really do on Amazon.
Overall I'd agree, though -- Amazon has gone out of their way to take focus away from the individual merchants on their site and give customers the impression that they're buying items "from Amazon".
When I buy a widget from Amazon, I'm not actually getting a widget from some particular merchant on Amazon.
I'm getting a widget that was pulled out of a co-mingled inventory box at some Amazon warehouse.
Amazon owns the entire shopping experience, end-to-end. They run the website. They design the website. They handle payments. They advertise the items ("Customers who bought Foo also bought Bar"). They handle shipping. They handle refunds. They handle warehousing.
But they don't seem to want to own the responsibility. I'm assuming that's because it's not the profitable part of this equation.
No, you buy direct from Amazon or from 3rd-party sellers. These sellers can store and ship by themselves, or pay to have it stored and shipped by Amazon (this is called FBA - Fulfilled by Amazon) because it's faster and qualifies immediately for Prime which customers want.
You can tell the difference when you buy, it's just not blatantly obviously unless the main Amazon listing is out of stock and you click on the "other sellers" link yourself. Go to your orders page and every product will tell you the "sold by" name.
I didn't know about it before, so I tracked it down and it sounds like such a nice place! I used to drive up and down 505 all the time visiting family in Oregon. It's been a while, but a stop in Winters will be in store for my next trip.
"a unique collection of vendors who work in partnership to market as a group and showcase the goods of several small businesses in one creative space."
We have a thing like that in Michigan called Gibraltar Trade Center. At least, parts of GTC operate that way. There are also individual booths with individual cashiers.
It's a great place to get a hepatitis tattoo, scam "6,000,000-watt" car stereo amplifier, or dubious candles that all smell like crayons plus whatever they claim to smell like. And these days, covid too.
Winters Collective is... not like that. It's a small storefront (maybe 1000 sq ft?) selling local handmade crafts. Etsy really is the best comparison. It's nice, but probably appeals mostly to tourists.
Downtown Winters is a great stop if you're coming up/down the 505. It's cute. Main street is closed off to vehicles and set up with tables for open air dining and wine tasting. There are two wineries, two breweries, and remarkably good restaurants for a town pop 7,000.
Actually, on the contrary, imagine you went to Safeway, and they sold you a carton of juice. You came home, and found out the juice was poisoned.
According to this ruling, Safeway, the delivery company, the guy who moved the boxes, and everyone in between you and the manufacturer, are all at fault.
Isn't that plain crazy? Safeway has no control over the juice in the box, except for being able to follow their own guidelines on refrigeration, and check the expire date.
Short of manufacturing their own laptops, how is Amazon to ensure those batteries won't malfunction. How is your corner 7/11 able to ensure that your Gatorade does't have piss in it. How is your gas station able to ensure that those M&Ms you bough don't have nails in them?
If you make stores liable for the products they sell, it removes all the incentive to make good products. Manufacturers can ship anything, who cares, the stores are at fault!
Amazon (and all the others you've mentioned) have the ability to choose their suppliers. There isn't piss in the Gatorade nor nails in the M&Ms because this is a solved problem: make companies liable for their supply chains.
Interesting. I view it as the opposite. Making the retailer liable forces them to use established supply chains and that is why we end up with M&Ms and other junk food at gas stations, instead of home-made buns, sandwiches and other food that doesn't come in a tube.
I am note sure what's the right answer. Just thinking out loud.
Retailers will keep Product Liability Insurance and make sure their suppliers have the same for this very reason. When a claim arises there are 2 perspectives:
1. The customer only has to deal with the place they bought from.
2. Every merchant up the chain will have to go through their liability insurance to figure out who pays out.
Consumer protection laws are this way for a reason and when they're respected they work really well.
Is this a common thing in the US? I am from Australia and the cost for managing individual product returns is a cost of business, something you take into account when pricing. There is an insurance product called 'Product Liability', but it's to insurance against large payouts, not individual returns.
That's pretty much the point of chain-of-custody systems, because everyone in that supply chain is involved in ensuring that food is safe. Chain of custody systems help identify the error which lead to an incident, and all parties are held accountable for their part in that process. For example:
- The store refrigerators may have lost power. Those products are now waste or potentially hazardous and must be tossed. (Otherwise risky, temperature can be tracked, but in a loss of power scenario is more difficult)
- The delivery truck broke down. Perhaps the temperature in the trailer went above acceptable food safety thresholds.
- The packaging company potentially stored a product outside of the coolers, leading to a food safety hazard.
Refrigerator trucks for food and many refrigerators in stores typically have chart recorders (or the digital equivalent) to keep track of historical temperature.
Some transportation companies even upload that to their freight dispatchers in real time.
> According to this ruling, Safeway, the delivery company, the guy who moved the boxes, and everyone in between you and the manufacturer, are all at fault.
I downvoted you because that's not what this ruling says. If you want to have an honest discussion be honest, don't use hyperbole.
I actually see this from some manufacturers though. A lot say somewhere something like "if you have an issue with this product, DO NOT RETURN TO THE STORE...contact us."
The products I see with a plea like this tend to be difficult to set up or use for some reason or other. I always assumed that they have a higher than usual return rate and are trying to reduce that by asking people to call them for support.
Also, I imagine the number of returns a product gets factors into whether stores want to carry it, so reducing that return rate can be important.
Even if the manufacturer refunds/replaces the item, I can see it being better for the manufacturer in some instances. If they are relying on store prominence instead of brand recognition, it's very important that stores want to actually carry those items, and low overhead return could factor into that.
This is a different case -- usually in this, it not that the retailer would not accept the item back; it is the manufacturer trying to prevent you from asking the store to take it back, as the store would then charge the expenses to the manufacturer.
If the manufacturer thinks a customer are missing some parts (for whatever reason, even if they broke them yourself) they will ship extra parts to avoid dealing with the store.
It's typical with most brick and mortar stores to be refused a return. I'm unsure if they are simply never challenged on this or intentionally mislead their customers while knowing the law.
Everyone should know you never have to do an RMA if you don't want to and it's only been 30-90 days.
>It's typical with most brick and mortar stores to be refused a return.
I've never been refused a return on any product from any brick and mortar store store unless it was for something I was explicitly told was final sale or it was my own fault by losing the receipt or destroying the packaging or something.
I even returned a $500 laptop to a Futureshop the day after getting it after dropping it off my lap onto the carpet and the screen completely dying. There was no hassle and I walked out with a brand new laptop.
So you damaged the item from your own carelessness and then returned it next day to get a new one? Why did they accept it? Mistakes happen, but why should the store be liable for this? Further, is this not fraud?
This is reminding me of my friend who because of the work-from-home orders wanted a standing desk. He buys one, uses it everyday and then returns it a day before the last return day. He’s on his 5th one now. He absolutely has the money (software engineer). To me that’s outright fraud.
People who abuse return policies likely increase the prices for everyone.
No, it was part of their return policy. I explained exactly what happened. The store explained they would contact Toshiba, return it for repair and resell it as refurbished when it was returned. The repairs and damage was covered by Toshiba as far as the store explained to me.
It's just the store as the seller was taking on the responsibility for sealing with this as part of selling Toshiba products and the store and Toshiba are clearly alright with this arrangement.
What I am trying to say is most of the time there is no such thing as final sale. E.g. a hobby store near me says final sale on electronic parts. As I am aware this is not allowed, they actually have to prove the customer broke the part to refuse the return. This is pretty hard to do.
They also can't charge restocking fees or refuse the return if you've destroyed the packaging. Losing the receipt possibly, but they need to be tracking sales as well and I think you would win that.
I bought a Sonata Antec PC case ~15 years ago. Quite expensive, first (and last) time I shelled out so much for a case.
The PSU was weird, it didn't work with my new mobo but did work with an older one. Got the mobo sent back for checking (I had to pay extra fees for “repairs“, bought in the same shop), came back okay.
A week of intense pondering with one of my friend on the floor of my bedroom. Two weeks top of back and forth with the shop.
Then it hit us: the 24watts 4-pin sugar was missing internal cabling. This explained the hit and off working.
Back to the store with the case and the PSU (again). I am told they won't replace it because it's not an hidden defect, it's a “physical damage” and I'd have to send it back myself to the manufacturer and they can't do anything.
I bought a 20€ no-name PSU on the spot and never again bought anything from this shop.
To this day I am still using all the clot I have on people asking for PC advice to convince them not to go there.
It's not just small pesky shops that screw the consumer. You step out of the EU/NA and consumer protections quickly disappear.
Reliance is one of India's largest companies, they have a consumer electronics brand like Best Buy. The worst return experience I've EVER had was trying to return a DOA pair of Bluetooth headphones to them.
Their literal return policy is that you don't, unless it's defective, then you can exchange. It was only after opening two more pairs of Sony crappy-developing-market-special-models that were also defective that they refunded me and sent me on my way.
I have no doubt that the only reason they did that for me in the end was because I was a tall white foreigner.
Once you step out of the EU, consumer protections quickly disappear.
Your experience in India would not be not unusual in NA for consumer electronics or computer components. "No returns, all defective products must be handled, at your shipping expense, by manufacturer's warranty" is a very common policy in this sector in North America, as is "final sale, even if defective or counterfeit."
We had this issue down here in Australia with a firm called MSY. They refused to offer returns on defective products. That is not legal down here (we are somewhat like CA in terms of consumer protection) and the ACCC fined them $200K AUD.
The incredible thing is they still found those pesky customers returning defective products too much trouble and started telling people that there were no refunds. After another few years of that, the ACCC fined them another $730K AUD.
If you have an issue with something and have to return it now they are very easy to deal with. :)
>“Most courts have said they’re not a seller at all which makes California’s case interesting. They’re pretty much saying that, in California, if it’s on the website for sale, they’re selling it.
What kind of monkey circus are we living in where this is not common sense. Is Amazon really taking the same position as OfferUp? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bmBxQHbZQQ
Regrettable, when I lived in Bolivia I dreamed of being able to purchase things online. Having that security was priceless to me. Now that I live here it seems Amazon has become a fleamarket website. I buy things through Walmart now, only the things sold by Walmart themselves.
Shopping on Amazon has become unbearable for like 95% of categories these days. The experience is like rummaging through some shady tourist market with a dozen stall owners trying to scam you. The pricing is all whack with lots of counterfeits that have gamed the ranking and review systems. It’s just not worth trying to filter and find things that are actually competitively priced and sold directly by Amazon.
Have no idea how they are so dominant still when they seem to not care at all about these things.
I wouldn't know. I stopped shopping on Amazon in 2016. It really irks me when I see a product I'm interested in and only see it on Amazon! I'll often pay the $10~$15 more to buy it straight from the manufacturers website to avoid Amazon (and a lot of times, it's cheaper outside of Amazon).
I miss the days of PriceScan/PriceWatch and other comparison sites.
Recently I bought some new camera parts. I noted the price of the body and lens I wanted on B&H, Adorama, Newegg .. and then went to Google shopping and found a smaller store called TriState Camera out of NY. Their website is old school; but I saved nearly $400 of the big retailers for the exact same parts.
> (and a lot of times, it's cheaper outside of Amazon).
is not true. Amazon does not let sellers list products on amazon for a higher price than than what they list on the sellers website. It's 100% against TOS and they will shut down your listing if it's your first offense and will permaban you from selling if you continue to do so.
Amazon is hardly “cheap” even for things they sell directly these days. it’s either outrageously overpriced (most often in categories they don’t sell and is all third party sellers) or it’s in line with other retailers.
In my experience it depends on how the product is sold, some manufacturers have a very tight supply chain and prices do not very much. You can often find products that sit on a retail shelf on sale at some point. It takes more time/searching - and expect slow shipping. Its not the same as the Amazon experience but cheaper, its hunting down the right deal and waiting for it. Be ready to use some scrappy web sites.
Seriously. So much absolute garbage. And woe if Shipped and Sold by Amazon but its in the same bin they put the counterfeit garbage from other sellers. Which they do.
It has gotten to the point if a 3rd party seller is on an Amazon page, it is a no-buy.
Sadly Walmart is the same. So far Target does not allow third party sellers so they're my go to for anything I need to guarantee is legitimate. That or the manufacturer's website if they happen to sell direct. Amazon's heyday has (IMHO) come and gone as a seller of anything but their own brands.
I am saddened that Walmart continues to chase the 3rd party seller gimmick, but they at least allow you to filter results by seller. I always select Walmart.com, ignoring everything else.
BestBuy too, at least in Canada. I think BestBuy has done OK financially, but I'm always surprised at how much the "brilliant" executives get paid when their plan is to copy the worst half of Amazon's business model.
IMO BestBuy would have been better off extolling the virtues of having a trustworthy supply chain that doesn't circumvent regulations like Amazon does. Their retail business also means they have a better distribution system then Amazon, at least for now.
I wonder how many people buy the marketplace stuff because I know that when I go to BestBuy it's because I want something immediately or I want something where I don't trust Amazon (chargers, memory cards, etc.).
Here's an example for anybody who doubts this; go search for:
a) an Oximeter
b) a medical thermometer
c) a blood pressure cuff
These are all fairly relevant devices. Spend 10 minutes really researching the categories, and actually read the reviews (in particular the 5* and the 1* reviews). Can you find a combination fo devices that you're actually confident buying? It shouldn't be this hard.
The reason for this is the reputable products are all sold out. The usual response would be to increase prices to keep them in stock, but currently amazon bans sellers who do that because of price gouging laws, and so sellers list their stock on other platforms instead.
Oh the other hand, you can also find a "knock off" device that costs 1/4 of the original price and works just as well. It's manufactured in the same factory as the original, but cuts corners and doesn't have fancy packaging, or anything fancy really.
The argument is that in a free market a consumer should have a choice. You want a great branded product, go with a known brand. You want to save money, try the little guy, with all the caveats that come with it.
The problem with Amazon is counterfeits. Counterfeits go against the idea of a free market. You almost certainly can’t know that the “Apple 5W wall plug charger” is legitimate until you receive it. It says “Apple” on it, but it’s not genuine. Why is that the consumer’s fault?
See, there's a level of hypocrisy here in that the average consumer wants the assurance of getting what they want without any of the burden of specification, or compliance verification.
There's a level of savvy everyone should have but doesn't; and I'm just not sure the best way to facilitate it.
The point is that Amazon's listings are overwhelmed by cheap / no-brand items. As a consumer it's basically impossible to know what items in a category are of reasonable quality or not. My guess is that the eventual competitor who disrupts Amazon will figure out a way to curate listings to make it possible for customers to buy something in a category with confidence that it'll work to stated spec.
To be fair pretty much all thermometers sold everywhere are fake, it's not just Amazon. You really need to look at Consumer Reports or Wirecutter if you want a real one, and who knows if you can even get one right now anyway.
I mean just go through the thermometers you see on Amazon or in your local drug store, and look up the data from the independent tests on their accuracy.
Now, imagine you are using Amazon.ca where many of the legitimate .com vendors aren't even there or are there and are price gouging or have massive shipping fees.
Amazon.ca has become such a cesspool and so much worse in the past 6 months, I've just stopped buying from it.
Amazon.ca still fulfills a purpose for me... It’s AliExpress with faster shipping.
If it’s something I’d consider buying from AliExpress but need it before 3 months from now, then I’ll go take a look on Amazon and pay a premium on the cheap Chinese stuff they sell to get it in a day or two.
Anything else... like others are saying, major retailers or manufacturer direct are the way I go.
100% agreed. I was shopping for some recording gear earlier, and (habitually, I guess) checked amazon to see what was available. Zillions of things with brand names like "foofer" and "fifine" (yeah, I'm making those up, but you know what I mean).
What are those things, really? I don't know.
I hit Guitar Center instead, and there's this clearly presented list of brands that I mostly kind-of recognize, a simplified set of products.
The thing that amazon does really well is deliver things fast.
I now use amazon to buy Anker products and that's it. I recently was shopping for a heart rate monitor - the Wahoo TICKR X was out of stock everywhere except Amazon. I couldn't get over the feeling that it was in stock only because it was fake, so ordered a Garmin from a bike store instead. There is no store I trust less.
Generally that is what I try to do for anything I want to buy — get it from the producer directly. Sometimes it is prohibitive in some way (e.g. shipping time or cost) or more expensive but most of the time the experience is perfectly fine and I can be totally confident in what I will be getting.
Interesting. They used to only sell through Amazon in the UK but this is no longer the case.
Something I’ve learnt - a reason I’m tempted to shop at Amazon is because I have an account there. But many suppliers now allow shopify or Paypal without needing to set up an account. By avoiding the temptation to set up an account (ie ignore FOMO of offers), using other sites becomes as seamless as Amazon.
I now believe shops that push customers to set up accounts and don’t use shopify etc, drive people to Amazon for convenience.
Wirecutter is an affiliate marketer. If they reviewed 15 pieces of shit they'd recommend a top 3 to buy based on taste. Almost all of the review sites are like that now. Look up the story of Casper and Sleepopolis. Today's review sites are predominantly filled with advertising disguised as reviews.
They're good enough. To me the alternative is Reddit or online reviews on the seller website which are even more unreliable. And the alternative to that is to spend countless hours researching things myself.
I’ve never used consumer reports. Reddit can be really good if you find the niche communities. It’s basically impossible to research yourself these days because nothing has decent specs.
Sites like Wirecutter aren’t completely useless because they give a relatively decent overview. It’s just worth being aware most review sites border on being advertising, so they won’t tell you if a whole product category is trash.
As someone with 2200 purchase on amazon over the last several years, you're definitely wrong. I have to use every trick up my sleeve to not get pure hot alibaba trash. It USED to be that amazon best seller items were good at least, and now those are an absolute trash garbage fest as well too. Go try to buy a strainer, charger, literally any appliance, anything, and tell me you get good results.
I recently bought Amazon's best seller hot oil frier. When we turned it on, the cheap thin metal of it bent from the heat so that the hot oil dripped on the floor. Turns out it was straight from a Chinese noname brand but marked as "sold by Amazon" on the website. When I tried to refund it, they told me that Amazon had just purchased the items for resale and that I should contact the original manufacturer for warranty. And they gave me a Guangdong address and a Gmail email.
By now every product listing on Amazon should be treated like SEO spam.
Plus there's now all these sellers trying to buy a 5 star review by promising a gift card. I recently saw a baby carriage with lots of 5 star reviews from teenagers who tried it out with plush toys because they didn't have kids yet.
They did give in and give me a refund eventually. It's just that I was surprised by their laissez-faire attitude that their topseller was some random no-name factory in China.
Attorney General would still be interested in the fact that you were sold a deep fryer with such a potentially dangerous flaw by Amazon, and the run around they initially gave you.
They really are like low quality SEO blog spam. I can't believe how many products I see with almost all 5 star ratings...for a completely different product.
Yes, I actually quite literally fear for my life from factory chemicals or defects. A few years ago I saw a charger that was amazon's "best seller" and it had tons of 1 star reviews of peoples houses catching on fire...
I once ordered a USB charger from Amazon that said you needed to have 3m of empty space in every direction to avoid the fire risk. I just wondered how anyone could satisfy that and put the charger into a wooden cupboard. Maybe I should revise that decision now :/
Yes, I would for your safety with anything even remotely dangerous, like electronics (I watch out even with a strainer which is just steel, but can be covered in loads of carcinogenic chemicals from china etc).
I recently just got fooled again, I needed to buy a cooking butane torch for grilling cheese. The "best seller" was quite nice looking, had great reviews, great photos.
I actually got it in my hand and it essentially fell apart. I immediately threw it in the trash as there's no way I'm putting highly flammable gas into this junk. I went to a head shop and bought one for the exact same price with amazing quality... its funny how we started out with brick and mortar, migrated to online... and now I'm going to start migrating back to brick and mortar.
I didnt mention anything about amazon's inclination to fix it. I said that it's pure garbage on amazon and it takes an astronomical amount of work to find NOT trash, and even after this many orders I still get fooled when using all the fake review spot apps, etc.
It's impossible by design to find "the good stuff."
Even when purchasing from "legitimate" product pages, they'll send you co-mingled counterfeits. You have absolutely no assurance that what you're buying is legitimate.
I think it's often impossible to distinguish whether something is good on amazon. For many products there are often 100 chinese clones with fake brand names and suspect reviews. I only use amazon now when I need something specific and if I know it will be difficult to find elsewhere. Specifically for PC and tech products, I've actually found best buy is great these days at stocking popular stuff at about the same price as amazon.
what’s a category of good that Amazon excels at where they are the dominant seller e.g. where the search term has not been gamed by a dozen marketplace sellers?
even with Amazon as the direct seller I don’t find them to be cheaper than other stores for almost anything. it’s really only when the pricing is competitive and directly from them where it makes sense to buy given convenience of fast shipping if you have Prime.
the only thing I can think of is their own private label, but even there it seems extremely hit or miss just reading some of the reviews - sounds like everything is just sourced from bottom of barrel Chinese manufacturers that slap an Amazon logo on things.
I don’t think there is a category where amazon shines, but I have had good results with car parts, gardening supplies, tools, books, household items.
I usually find a brand name seller with a website or a specific part number.
Or if I don’t know/care about a brand I read some reviews and look at review pictures I don’t buy the cheapest item and still scrutinize best selling item.
The top results could be garbage as people are saying, but somewhere in the first page of top rated results is the best item for a great price.
In a rural place, prime is a huge time and money saver, have had good customer service. I still don’t think other online retailers have caught up to amazon, I hope they do .
I agree with you completely. I've yet to have a shoddy counterfeit product with thousands of purchases over a decade. Any actual problems are also solved within minutes.
Can someone link a product listing that they received a counterfeit from?
"HIFI Audio Decoder Amplifier - Aimpire AD10 MINI USB DAC CSS XMOS XU208 ES9018K2M OPA2134 Audio Amplifier Decoder"
This is a fake. Strange how the URL says TOPPING but the product is from "Aimpire". Aimpire has been photoshopped into some, but not all of the product pictures (where TOPPING is still visible in a few).
Turns out that Aimpire has had a contentious relationship with Topping (the designer and manufacturer of the real thing), started making their own (inferior and unlicensed) versions of the Topping product.
Looks like this one is "sold by amazon.com". Huh. Guess it slipped by their counterfeit checkers.
This is a strange case. The reviews seem to say people are buying the Topping product but getting the Aimpire product. But if you buy from this page, you're knowingly purchasing the Aimpire version. Are people buying Topping from another listing and getting this?
EDIT: never mind, looks like this product used to say Topping and was changed, and that's why the URL is still the original wording. That's clearly a scam then.
Amazon has been trying to play a parallel game for a while - from one side, they are a brand name store, with their own brands (Amazon Basics), they own loyalty club (Prime), and so on - they even own physical stores and a grocery chain now. On the other hand, they pretend to be a neutral marketplace that has no responsibility for any goods that are sold there and just renting out the space to independent sellers. It is a smart game, as they can resell all the reputational benefits of the established store brand to the tiny sellers who would never enjoy the same reputation, without actually spending the time to vet the suppliers and take responsibility for the goods being sold, as the brand name store would have to. However, looks like the courts are not buying this game. Which makes sense because Amazon not only does not separate the marketplace from the brand name store - they actually make as much effort as possible to mix both up, making distinguishing between goods sold by Amazon and goods for which Amazon bears zero responsibility quite hard to distinguish.
I’ve not experienced the neural marketplace element myself. They still have the A-to-Z guarantee and still have the best return and customer support policies in the game. I spend 10s off thousands of dollars a year and return anything I don’t like. Never had an issue with feeling like they had my back.
Honestly, I'm confused as to why Amazon -- or any retailer -- is responsible for injury from defects in the products they sell in the first place.
Why is it the retailer's responsibility, rather than the manufacturer's responsibility?
No store has the expertise to independently conduct safety testing of every item they sell. That would be ludicrous, whether you're a mom & pop store with 1,000's of items or Amazon itself with 1,000,000's of items. Plus it would be incredibly redundant.
What is the justification for this law at all?
(And if you say it's for international products, then the onus should be on the importer who takes responsibility on behalf of the manufacturer.)
EDIT: virtually every comment that has replied so far is talking about defects, warranty, etc. But that's not with this article is about -- it's about liability for INJURY which is a very different thing. It makes total sense that if a product doesn't work, you return it to the store and not the manufacturer. But if a product is dangerous I still fail to see how it makes any sense to make retailers liable rather than manufacturers. If you get a batch of improperly made baby formula that makes your baby sick... shouldn't the onus be 100% on the manufacturer? In what universe is a retailer expected to be liable for that? How would they ever know? If Nestle makes a bad batch... what good is it to go around suing Amazon, FreshDirect and 1,000 other local supermarkets? Shouldn't there just be a class-action suit against Nestle?
If the store is liable, the consumer benefits in multiple ways:
- They know who to talk to in case a product is defective. In most cases, it's easy to find out who was the original manufacturer (e.g. when their name is written on the box), but in other cases it can be quite difficult to find out who to go to if your product breaks.
- If the store is liable, it is in their best interest to not sell you products that are likely to break quickly. Alternatively, if the store still decides to sell those products, they will want to take the risk of breakage into account when setting the price. That means the price of the product is a more accurate representation of the value of the product.
> Why is it the retailer's responsibility, rather than the manufacturer's responsibility?
Because the customer has a relationship with the retailer, not the manufacturer.
If this doesn't get overturned, I would expect Amazon to just require anybody who sells through Amazon or supplies Amazon with products to provide indemnification of some sort. Either that or they would just buy insurance to cover payouts due to defective products and their margin would shrink by some tiny amount.
If a store put a random baby formula from a sketchy Chinese factory on its shelves and it made babies sick, they're going to get demolished by the FDA. "Hey I'm just a retailer" is not at all a defense.
As a customer I can't be expected to know about the intricacies of the supply chain for every product I use, so I establish a relationship with one entity - the retailer.
> so I establish a relationship with one entity - the retailer.
My thinking is precisely opposite.
Because I can't be expected to know about the intracacies of the supply chain, I consider the quality to be determined by one entity - the manufacturer.
I trust Crest toothpaste over some no-name generic toothpaste that might be made by anyone precisely because it's Crest. I can buy it from the immigrant family which owns the corner bodega, and I don't have the slightest idea where they buy it from... but it's still Crest.
In my mind, my primary relationship is with the brand. The retailer I couldn't care less about.
Also, I don't want my health to be determined by where the store sources its stuff from. I want that to be determined at at a governmental level, by the FDA. Sketchy formula shouldn't be allowed in the country in the first place. It's the importer who should be held criminally liable. Again, what does a corner bodega owner know about determining the safety of consumer products? It's the government's job to set safety standards, not store owners making their own uninformed decisions.
IMO the supply chain and knowing your supplier plays an extremely important role in making sure products are legitimate and conform to all regulations. A big problem with Amazon is that you can end up with counterfeit products or products that have fake safety certifications stamped on them and you'll never nail down the culprits that orchestrated it. It'll be a transient company in China that's gone by the time anyone knows what happened.
So yeah, you can trust the brand, but if a retailer has no incentive to keep counterfeit products off the shelf there's no guarantee your toothpaste is actually being supplied by Crest. You aren't going to have much luck suing a counterfeiter in a foreign country, especially since they'll be set up to disappear.
It's important for everyone in the supply chain to be liable and making the retailer liable to the consumer is the easiest way to do that. If a supplier sells a retailer a fake unsafe product and the retailer gets sued because of it, the retailer can sue the supplier. If the supplier is buying from a respectable manufacturer they can sue the manufacturer (or settle with them).
As soon as you make the consumer go directly to the supplier or manufacturer, there's a huge incentive to set up a supply chain like Amazon has where a ton of low quality garbage gets foisted onto consumers and there's no recourse because all of the liable parties are in foreign countries.
Thanks for explaining, but I still don't see the logic here.
First of all, how is a retailer supposed to vet their suppliers? They don't have the expertise or time to audit the supplier's own supply chains.
Second, if the (non-counterfeit) manufacturer puts out a shoddy batch, it doesn't matter which suppliers it goes through. Why should the store be responsible for the shoddy product when it could have come through any supply chain?
And third, I don't think lawsuits work the way you think they do. If you get sued, you can't just sue your supplier to pass it on and be done with it. You still lose $$$$ hiring lawyers.
You're seizing on the idea of counterfeit products, but I'm not talking about counterfeits. I've never seen or heard of counterfeit toothpaste in my life. And I'm not talking about foreign producers either -- if you import it, then you're liable.
I'm talking about a store purchasing merchandise from a domestic supplier that is genuine. If that merchandise produces injuries, why on earth would the store be liable, instead of the manufacturer? It makes zero sense.
I guess the way I see it is that most manufacturers are foreign rather than domestic, so that leaves you with making the importer liable for bad products. I think it’s a lot easier to implement that part of the supply chain with a bunch of zero asset, disposable companies, so it doesn’t really leave anyone that’s going to actually assume liability.
The retailer relies on the value of their brand and often have significant domestic assets. So by making the retailer liable you’re pinning down someone who can’t just fold their company and walk away.
And I don’t agree the retailer isn’t capable of vetting their supply chain. I’ll agree it’s not easy, but they’re in the best position to do it because they have a lot of leverage over their direct suppliers.
Better alignment of incentives. The retailer (especially for a huge company like Amazon) has more resources to pursue manufacturers with defective products, they have more information about their supply chain which is useful for issues with international manufacturers, and putting the onus on the retailer encourages the retailer to not allow shoddy or counterfeit products into their marketplace.
For stuff that’s shipped straight from China to the consumer, whom do you propose should be liable when a product catches fire? I think that’s the situation in this case - the court has ruled that Amazon is responsible.
In germany, the retailer is responsible for handling defects and warranty. This makes it easier for the customer, as they can just go the store they bought it from and handle it in person or send it to amazon and they have to deal with the manufacturer.
This isn't about safety testing, this simply means that a mom&pop store needs to either trust the manufacturer, buy insurance for defective products or contract with the manufacturer so that they can just send back defective items in bulk at non of their cost. Up to them.
In germany this works perfectly fine with mom&pop stores.
If Amazon chooses to let counterfeiters etc sell on their website, why should they not be held accountable for that? Maybe they will finally show interest in what the heck they are showcasing on their own platform.
Long-term, it would be good business sense for Amazon to address the counterfeit issue to remove the bad actors from their platform to stay in good standing with consumers so people continue to use their platform and purchase items without worry about getting scammed.
Short-term, at least one idea to fix this is to implement more stringent checks/QA with their FBA policies. Do more stringent verification of imported items going into Amazon FBA warehouses. Or at least add a mark to branded items received from other third-party sources. Simply adding "Shipped by: X, Sold by: X" text on the product page doesn't really help.
There's probably other/better ideas out there. This has been a recurring problem that has kinda gotten swept under the rug so far, but at some point is going to need to be reckoned with.
If Amazon wants to be the best customer experience, then it has to position itself in such a way that it does not devolve into one big flea market + Aliexpress + dropshipping junk bin.
That is the trick. If short-term Amazon accumulates enough money it can later on purchase businesses with a better reputation and repeat the trick again.
I have seen this done by General Electric. It purchases a medium size company with good reputation and loyal customers. GE reduces costs (quality, employee salaries, etc.) and milks the cow for a decade. When many customers have left because higher prices and lower quality then GE sells the company and repeats the trick with a new one.
For mega-corporations there is no incentive for quality beyond what regulations force them to assure by law. Making Amazon liable for defective 3rd party is the only way that Amazon will care about fraud and counterfeits.
So the demos should be able to improve quality by increasing regulation - like the EU's goods regulations that dictate a minimum 2 year warranty (AIUI); which I hope they're going to gradually increase.
The people need to cede power from the Capitalists sufficiently to do that in USA; apply some democracy to the situation.
We need to build longevity into our planetary systems of production.
It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product.
How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.
This is as good a time for blockchain as any. Register genuine products on a blockchain and have them scanned once they hit the Amazon warehouse to ensure they are authentic.
How does blockchain help here? The database would be extremely large - too large to hold for any ordinary computer system.
The basic problem is solveable without blockchain by simply registering products by their serial number on the brand's website, which a lot of brands actually already do for higher priced products.
You don't need to link it to any customer details. The way it usually works is the website records every serial number checked, and warns you if somebody has already checked that serial number. For additional assurance the serial number can also be concealed with tamper-evident packaging, e.g. scratch-off paint.
D’Addario has a “serial number” check webpage for their guitar strings. If you enter an invalid (or previously used) serial number, supposedly (I’ve never had a counterfeit set) they’ll send you a genuine set for free.
Sure, some people will input fake serial numbers to get a free product, but they probably weighed the cost of counterfeit strings affecting brand image (if I don’t know mine are counterfeit, I’ll assume it’s D’Addario’s fault if they’re bad) with the cost of sending a free set of $5 strings.
> How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.
> Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.
This has been a solved problem for any legitimate business. The only other place I've seen such lack of quality control were at flea markets, which doesn't say anything good about Amazon.
They already have exactly that, minus the unnecessary blockchain bit. It's called Transparency.
The problem is that manufacturers need to opt into it and there is no way as a consumer to tell on a product listing whether or not the product is part of the registry.
I think a big theme in tech in the last decade has been there's a lot of extra margin to be made if you can find a way to circumvent regulations designed to protect the general public.
> Simply adding "Shipped by: X, Sold by: X" text on the product page doesn't really help.
Amazon doesn't even do this, though.
Recently I was helping someone look for memory on Amazon. We couldn't tell the difference between two different listings for crucial ram, both with the same model, speed, size, etc. Figuring out who the seller was can be difficult; the place that used to say the store name simply had a link to Amazon's products manufactured by Crucial. We eventually noticed that in the comparison at the bottom it says who's selling the product you're looking at; searching the page for this store name found no other instances of it.
Prohibit Amazon doing business until they fix the problem.
You can bet the problem will be fixed overnight.
My wider point is this: Bezos knows this is happen, and the only way he gets away with it is because the USA doesn't have enough consumer protection and no desire to.
This has gone beyond fraud, it's abuse of customers.
I prefer the option of financial penalties. Amazon is a useful logistical system; you don't want to kill it (nor disproportionally punish employees with no real influence on the immoral actions), just make it not profitable unless it's moral.
The system should also be holding anyone in the decision tree accountable for fraud: something like "if test purchases show fraud in >1:20 cases then CEO fine := last month's income from all sources".
I’ve finally figured out how to buy non-counterfeit items on Amazon: try selling it yourself and see if Amazon says 3rd party listings are allowed. In the very few cases where you’re not allowed to proceed to create a listing, it is safe to purchase.
I see this type of comment all the time, but I've never purchased anything but legitimate items off of Amazon. What are you buying that you consistently run into fakes / knockoffs?
Memory cards / thumbdrives are the canonical example here, I think. The fakes are plentiful, and comingling ensures that you are playing roulette every single time you purchase one, and the fakes are good enough that they'll stand up to visual scrutiny unless you know exactly what you're looking for, and sometimes not even then.
I would never buy any discreet component of any kind from online marketplaces in general. It's gotten so bad that sometimes you just get packaging with no silicon inside. For some components the prevalence of fraud is nearly 100%. Supply chain integrity is a majorly underappreciated value of traditional vendors.
I mean, the obvious question is how do you know that you’ve only got legitimate items?
Some counterfeiters are of course, shit, so it’s pretty easy for most of us to notice when we order a board game and all the text on the cards is 20% off of centre. But you have to figure that somebody out there is capable of taking a high resolution scan of the materials and printing it without making obvious mistakes like that.
And like... in Apple’s testing over 90% of Apple accessories (chargers, cables, etc) were fake. Obviously they’re outwardly convincing enough that 90% of people aren’t returning them despite dropping $35 on a USB cable that’s worth about $4 from a third party. A lot of the counterfeit chargers are outwardly identical — unless you tear them apart to see where they’ve cut corners and risked burning your house down you’re never going to know.
I've ordered clothes, furniture (desks, chairs), books, supplements, rugs, and probably a few other things. Everything shows up, seems to be exactly as claimed, is functional, and has worked.
So my initial question still stands on what people are complaining is rife with fakes and knock-offs. It seems to be quite niche electronics (huge hard drives, computer components, etc)
And if the knock-offs are so good (in your game example) that the end user can't tell the difference (and no one else can either), what does it matter?
If I'm paying a 500% margin on a product, I want my money to go to the person that actually put the work in to create it so they can make more products, not to a counterfeiter?
But that's just my personal preference.
You've completely skipped over "90% of Apple products are counterfeit". They are not niche, are not easily discernible, and pose a safety hazard.
It definitely looks like Amazon is going to have to accept strict liability in California. That will make it interesting to see what they do. Do they leave California? (their biggest US market) or do they clean up their FBA act? I'm hoping for the latter, as the justices argue in the decision that is exactly the intent of California's strict liability.
Why would they leave CA? They would just remove 3rd-party sellers and implement higher standards if/when they allow them again. FBA sellers don't get to sell anything they want, you have to get ungated first per category.
Cool, who's making the comparison website that shows which products are the same price in California, vs all the others that Amazon knows are mixed in with counterfeits and low-grade and defective items.
California's one of the top economies in the world, they aren't leaving. California has a ton of power. Do auto makers even make "49 state" cars anymore?
bought some wireless earphones from them a while back, the store sold me a knock off. open up a dispute and the owner told me their delivery guy was swaping fake ones for the real ones. took forever to send me new ones. after all that I went to post a review saying that this happened and guess what? my review never saw the light of day
> the owner told me their delivery guy was swaping fake ones for the real ones
That seems a scam scheme. They send fakes and for the people that complains they send the real deal.
> my review never saw the light of day
Amazon does not want to give a good service, Amazon wants to sell products. Your review could have negatively impacted Amazon sells.
I doubt that, currently, there is any law that forces Amazon or any other website to publish all reviews. They can pick and choose to float or sink any store.
Actually in my experience Amazon has always provided prompt and satisfactory customer service. I'm not talking about the sort of issue in this article of course, but just the normal things: Returns, billing problems, charging me for home pickup on two different returns I'm making at the same time instead of just once... I've never had one of these common place customer service issues that wasn't solved quickly & to my satisfaction. Sometimes they'll even go beyond what I was expecting and add a credit.
Of course none of that means they don't rig the review system, although the presence of products with near universally bad reviews would indicate that, if they do rig reviews, it's not a general practice.
No, in my experience, while Amazon is bad in plenty of other ways, good service isn't one of them.
Maybe it’s because you’ve always made sure to buy only from Amazon and not from 3rd party sellers? Around the time Amazon posted their 1st quarter profit, we weren’t allowed to return a defective 3rd party marketplace item that cost us about $300. It was infuriating and it was also the last time we mindlessly bought from Amazon without being on autopilot. Fast forward to today, we are very paranoid about buying an item if we find any 3rd parties are selling the same item.
Hmmm. I recently ordered an item (pack of quicklinks) and the package itself arrived with a hole in it and no product (looks like the bubble-envelope seam failed). After clicking around on Amazon's website, the closest way to solve this was "return because of missing items" and they seem to still want me to ship back the original item (which is obviously impossible). The replacement was shipped quickly, but I have no idea what will happen when they don't receive a return.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to communicate this to a human. I'm not impressed with their service.
Thanks... the menu structure is somewhat different on the website, but I finally found it. I spent 20 mins looking for a way to contact someone before giving up, assuming it didn't exist.
The next logical step here is that Amazon is also liable for the counterfeit products they sell and seemingly do absolutely nothing to police.
Consumers currently get blamed for this (eg [1]), sometimes through absolutely no fault of their own. Imagine walking into into Best Buy or Macys, buying something, and then getting in trouble for buying counterfeit goods.
Just watch how quickly that problem gets solved once Amazon is liable.
These companies really want the best of both worlds. Amazon wants to own the customer relationship but have none of the responsibilities ("we're a third party marketplace"). Uber wants to control what drivers do (as in, not drive for Lyft at the same time) but not have them as employees. Airbnb wants to run (illegal) hotels by arguing they aren't running hotels and it's really the hosts who are responsible.
The real issue is that Amazon has turned into Alibaba/Aliexpress and is filled with low quality products. Amazon will sell anything as long as its cheap.
I think this will only hurt Amazon where there is some injury beyond a defective product. Amazon already uses its contracts and terms of service to push the cost of returns and such to the third party supplier. Amazon will do its best to deflect most or all of the pain through better contracts.
OK, a California decision on this. I thought the dog-collar case in Pennsylvania was going to be the one that turned this around. Amazon is re-appealing that one.[1]
Uhm, no? Obviously, as a consumer, I couldn't care less about who is the manufacturer - I have no business relationship with them. The person who sold me the item is responsible for it because they are the ones I entered into a purchase contract with.
That's how it works in all of EU already - the seller is responsible for sold items, because....it just makes more sense?
The legislation treats used items differently. Unless the seller purposefully hid something from you then you accept used items as-is with no further responsibility accepted by the seller. So the chain ends on the first sale on a new item. There are exceptions to this for certain items(say cars). But if you buy a second hand phone and it explodes a month later then whoever sold you the item is not responsible.
If Amazon can get sued every time someone burns themselves with a knockoff product, I would think their incentives would shift from:
"Pay as little as possible for quality assurance, down to a floor of $0"
to
"Pay as little as possible for quality assurance, down to a floor of $whatever number would convince a court that we made a good faith effort to prevent knockoffs."
On the upside, specialized insurance companies tend to be pretty thorough in managing their risk of paying out. Meaning that third parties will probably have a hard time operating a counterfeit scam on any scale, once an insurer pays out all the others will find out and refuse to underwrite. Insurers would likely also require a proactive anti-counterfeit program for their larger clients.
Amazon wants to have all the benefits but no responsibility of being one of the largest commerce businesses in the world.
As Amazon customer, who had its fair share of bad experiences with items in recent years, I'm ok with prices going up. I've never used Amazon because of the prices, but because of comfort and safety. I'm willing to pay extra to get this back.
How does this apply to eBay or Newegg? I've written about how we've lost a lot of smaller independent websites and everyone has to have a store on Amazon/eBay/Newegg/Reverb these days:
I imagine this wouldn't affect eBay since it's clearly a site where you are buying from a seller. eBay is more of a newspaper listening. But what about Newegg or Reverb which try to create these tight models just like Amazon so you're not always sure who exactly you're buying from? Newegg even does the "sold and shipped" by newegg (it's not clear if these are actual products from newegg inventory or if they are leasing warehouse/inventory pipeline like Amazon).
The decision (linked above) makes the distinction based on Amazon placing itself in the supply chain between distributor and customer. eBay seems safe from this one, Newegg will have liability for those 3rd party products they actually ship.
I find it perplexing that Amazon is still so dominant in e-commerce despite being an all around strange and confusing experience with weird pricing and no name brands that's more like an eBay than a Walmart these days.
I just go to Costco and Walmart now for 99% of the things I used to buy on Amazon.
If you ever happen to run into a seller that's motivated to fight your claim, you'll actually realize that Amazon is the new eBay. They now play the exact same game where they sit in the middle, giving each party time to respond, etc. and it just bounces back and forth forever. In my case I had ordered a print on white background and it arrived on a yellowish background and the seller kept fighting. It took 2 weeks and several escalations after which Amazon finally issued me a refund. Noteworthy as well that it was a "goodwill" refund, ie they didn't rule against the seller despite having ample proof in the form of screenshots of the listing and pictures.
eBay is not same-same, it's much more marketplace-esque.
eBay does not use a consolidated product listing, much more like a bulletin board each sellers products being sold under it's own URL. Amazon consolidates the listing for all sellers into a single product and uses their own ranking algorithms to determine which seller is in the "buy box" (which accounts for 97% of the items sales velocity). Amazon treats the entire experience as their transaction, they anonymize the emails and don't allow sellers to send follow-messages to clients or market other products to them (package inserts).
The cart-checkout process isn't broken down by seller either, it's a unified payment and "1 click" checkout. I don't feel bad for Amazon at all - they've had it coming!
FWIW .. I was the first person (as a 3rd party) to develop an integration with Amazon's marketplace. I also personally won eBays' star developer award. I recall the year the Internet Retailer show was in San Diego and Amazon didn't have an employee there. It was against Amazon corporate rules to allow employees to spend the night in CA in fear it would create sales tax nexus. Amazon employees would need to fly back to Seattle and then fly back to San Diego if they came down for a friday meeting and wanted to spend the weekend on personal time!
Amazon has gamed the rules, they compete directly with their clients (sellers) using the sales data to decide what product to source. They ran their warehouses as 3rd party entities to avoid nexus and begrudging accepted 3rd party (non-Amazon owned) sellers when the courts ruled that wholly owned entities would create sales-tax nexus. I feel no pity for them.
> Amazon treats the entire experience as their transaction, they anonymize the emails and don't allow sellers to send follow-messages to clients or market other products to them (package inserts)
That hasn't been true for a quite a while. They changed this because product liability lawsuits used this to argue Amazon owns the customer relationship. As a result there were several HN posts outraged about no longer having privacy when purchasing products.
> eBay does not use a consolidated product listing, much more like a bulletin board each sellers products being sold under it's own URL.
Try searching for a product on ebay right now and it's the exact same experience as Amazon. Both Amazon and Ebay's algorithms determine which usb drives show up first when searching for "usb stick", which is where 99% of their commerce is coming from.
The eBay list will have a rating for the seller, full detailed customer feedback the seller received for the previous 90 days including the listing. It will also have verbatim customer feedback going back 12 months.
That doesn't contradict my point. Both have a generic search list that combines multiple sellers onto one page, making the OP's statement "eBay does not use a consolidated product listing" incorrect.
So, I'm currently living in mainland Europe. Amazon UK (native English) will be out of EU in the near future. Given this article and also shady 'is this real thing or not - order and find out' - what would be a not shady general kind of store in the EU with native english? I'm ordering mostly books, but sometimes electronics.
There's tons of e-shops. Telling apart which one is shady and which one is not is really difficult. Amazon used to be trustworthy in my eyes and that feeling has faded.
amazon.de is fine and the personal does speak English.
More also it's the EU, hence free returns and no questions asked (by law) for 2 weeks. plus 2y warranty.
I can't say bad words about the EU version of amazon when it comes to customer service. Yes the counterfeit stuff is there but the free returns mitigate that.
To the grandparent poster: you wont be able to order e-books off the uk version... and would have to use .com one.
Note that when ordering outside the country you still have to pay for the shipping fee of the return yourself _to_ the amazon store of origin you selected, making this a lot less flexible (and slower) than you'd think.
As a frequent traveler across the EU, this bit me both on amazon.de/fr.
I'm not sure if there are exceptions to these rules, but free returns are frequently only free if within the same country and it's not unique to amazon.
>Note that when ordering outside the country you still have to pay for the shipping fee of the return yourself _to_ the amazon store of origin you selecte
That is false - I do order outside and it costs around 10 + 10euro/kg for around 7-10days delivery (express within 2-3days is around double). When I returned anything (3x times) - amazon paid back the shipping costs, BOTH my own sending and the bill sending back to them. If the item was part of a bigger order, they paid back partially my own cost for sending it to me initially. And they always foot the bill for the sending back in full.
More also, there was a hard drive that failed 2nd day I installed, I complained, they called and did send one immediately prior I even returned the original one to them, which they reimbursed the bill for. The drive arrived the next day (shipped by courier/air). Like I've said - I cant say bad words about their service in the EU.
What do you mean by "BOTH my own sending and the bill sending back to them? When did this happen, and from where?
My last cross-country return was in 2017 for a lens (sold and shipped from amazon) and I had to pay for the shipping myself to amazon.fr from italy. Didn't get a refund for the shipping cost, although the replacement arrived for free. Note that the lens was originally shipped to france. I was substituting for an identical item, which usually gets shipped right away. However, in this case, I had to wait for the return to be processed.
I had the same scenario in 2016, but from germany (shipped to germany, returned to france).
Note that I cannot complain for the service itself. I only had great experiences in return from amazon in general, but your description comes unexpected from me.
Note that you have to specifically ask customer service for the return shipping refund afterwards, it is not automatic if you self-paid the shipping (or they might only provide a small allowance automatically which is usually not enough for international shipping).
I've gotten my international return shipping always refunded when returning to amazon.de, amazon.it and amazon.fr (when the item was faulty or the item was otherwise eligible for free returns).
The initial shipping cost to me and then the return shipping from me to them (plus the cost of the goods).
In my case all the shipments were outside Germany, and the returns were from the same country originally shipped to. All the returns were back to Germany.
Edit: However, they should tell you in advance (before you order) if you will have to pay if you decide to return your order. If they don't tell you that you must pay for your return, the trader will have to pay for it. You don't have to pay any other charges that you were not informed of. [0]
Particularly for electronics or expensive items I'd always prefer a shop specialized in the product category in question. Here in germany there's almost always a better, often cheaper alternative to Amazon when it comes to specific product categories.
I'm currently dealing with a situation as an Amazon seller where I think the buyer is trying to scam me (claiming I sent the product wrong/late, hoping they can manipulate the return process to both get a refund and keep the product because of Amazon's notoriously customer-biased policies). I wonder how this plays in.
I'm not so sure this will hurt Amazon. I'd imagine if this decision holds (for more regions), Amazon will decide to stop acting as a platform for individual smaller businesses and focus on its own assortment. And since this decision is most probably not limited to Amazon itself, competitors would face the same problem.
This is a good place to ask this question: Lately, we’re trying to buy products on Amazon only if it says, “Sold by Amazon.com.” Is that a good way to ensure that the product is not counterfeit? The assumption is that if Amazon is selling something directly, it would be getting it directly from the real manufacturer.
Your assumption is wrong - FBA means that 'Sold by Amazon' will often be supplied by a third party, so you have to dig through all the offers to see if any are FBA.
Amazon has yet to confirm or deny if all, or any, "Sold by Amazon" product is commingled with 3rd party FBA product. In that sense, they are not 100% safe. I really wish Amazon would take a stance here.
On the other hand, the vast majority of report of counterfeit anecdote I have seen indicated they bought from 3rd party but with FBA. So me personally I still place trust on Sold By Amazon product.
More recently I have seen product where that explicitly points out that Sold By Amazon is "authentic", which is kind of funny and sad. (energizer battery)
> The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance, noting that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had facilitated payment, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus being liable under California law.
eBay does not meet the second qualifier and rarely meets the last. Additionally, it is more obviously a marketplace - the seller of a given item is highlighted and their credibility made known in the form of their star ratings. Amazon de-emphasizes the seller name for non-Amazon sellers and completely hides their rating on the product page.
Of course, the only way to know for sure is if eBay's liability is litigated.
Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses.
Had facilitated payment: Maybe, but eBay typically just links one Paypal account to another Paypal account. eBay does not actually touch the funds. (Paypal has been it's own separate company for awhile now.)
Shipped it out in eBay packaging: Unless they're using a service, typically shipping is up to the eBay seller.
They do now. They are in the middle of moving most of their sellers to a program called Managed Payments. eBay handles the payment processing through the program. Sellers do not receive money via paypal, but their own bank accounts. eBay batches the proceeds of the sales and ACHs the money daily M-F.
The transition is ongoing, but the goal is all sellers with stores will move to it eventually.
> Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses.
eBay used to have a service where you could take any random junk to their mall kiosk or a FedEx store and eBay would sell it on your behalf. That would pretty much require them to have warehouses.
They have a Consignment Center [0] but that only really seems to hook you up with on the the various "I'll sell your crap on eBay" that exist instead of doing it themselves.
I found some interesting forum discussion taking the opinion that eBay strangled consignment businesses by choosing to heavily discourage auction sales (as opposed to fixed-price listing). They did that because customers on average strongly prefer fixed-price sales, but I'd be open to the idea that this could be a case where giving the customers what they want turned out to be a mistake for the business.
eBay saw themselves as competing with Amazon in the "buy things over the internet" space.[1] But by emphasizing fixed-price sales so much, they arguably made themselves much less distinct from Amazon.
[1] I was surprised to learn this, as I had always thought of Amazon as being for buying things new and eBay for buying things used.
I think a lot of people didn't understand or know about how the eBay auctions worked [0]. I only learned about eBay being a second price auction, effectively, ages after eBay was a thing. Without knowing how the proxy system works doing an auction would be pretty frustrating because it'd look like you were usually instantly outbid.
[0] At least the later version I don't know if they used a different scheme earlier. They must have because the sniping services that existed in early eBay don't really make sense with proxy bids.
For international, they have GSP. It's different from Amazon in that sellers ship send items after completed order to eBay's shipping center, where it gets forwarded to the buyer. A nice thing for the buyer is that the predetermined price includes customs clearance fees.
Yesterday I purchased the first thing in a long time from eBay. I was surprised that I could just use my credit card and no longer needed to use PayPal.
Big fan of Amazon here... I’ve been using Amazon since 1990-something… yet the co-mingling counterfeit items has caused me to stop using it for many items I formally purchased there.
Amazon make inefficient use of truck rolls for delivery, often sending many trucks through my small residential subdivision every day, needlessly delivering one non-urgent item at a time.
This is probably the key competitive challenge facing Amazon today: somehow keep up with the rapid growing overall demand while simultaneously improving execution fast enough to not leave the door open too long for someone else.
I keep seeing these complaints on HN... Is co-mingling a bigger problem in some regions, or have I just gotten consistently lucky? Or maybe I'm a sheep and haven't noticed?
In all honesty, I would appreciate an excuse to stop using Amazon, because the amount that I buy from them compared to any other store makes me uncomfortable. But the co-mingling thing just hasn't come up for me...
Probably depends on what you are buying. I am a board gamer and counterfeit board games from Amazon is a huge problem. I stopped purchasing board games from Amazon after getting three counterfeits in a row.
Poor print quality and materials, incorrect/missing pieces. I don't know if you've seen counterfeit DVDs before, but they often have badly printed (misaligned, pixelated, even watermarked) graphics and cheap packaging (a basic jewel case with a printed slip of paper vs. a cardboard fold-out, for instance). But at least the DVD itself stands a chance of being a good rip. For a board game, the print quality and materials are kind of what you're paying for.
What djur said, plus some board games you register the serial number on a website. If the serial number is invalid you know you got a counterfeit copy.
Co-mingling with counterfeits seems to not be present in Canada - most merchants don't want to deal with filling out customs forms, FBA barely exists here, and most items sold on Amazon.ca are either sold by the manufacturer or by Amazon.ca. still a ton of unknown brands doing self-sales, but you're at much less risk of counterfeits so far.
I've occasionally seen such listings at 10x, but commonly 2x-3x is common (as with this listing, after exchange). You also lose all 'shipped by Amazon' protections, and if the listing at .ca was FBA, you'd have free shipping in .ca.
(As a note for .com / US users, Prime membership on .ca does not give any discount when shipping to Canada from .com, as Prime membership is restricted to the .XX property which you buy it on. EG, .ca in my case.
Nor does buying a .com prime membership help, for that only gives speed/discounts/free shipping for US addresses.
When I travel to the US for the winter, I basically have to axe my .ca prime membership, and buy a .com membership. So as a result, I don't buy yearly memberships. And when I travel to/from, I cancel .ca early, and .com early, upon return.
It's not like I order a lot of stuff 3 days before leaving, or while traveling, or the second I arrive.
A result of all this is that Amazon loses out on sometimes 4 months of Prime membership, which they would have if it just worked everywhere.
It's not that much of a stretch to say that the entire business model for sales and gig economy platforms is to provide investors with a legal revenue stream from dubiously legal activities ranging from civil fraud to regulatory arbitrage intended to evade tax law, consumer protection law, employee protection law, and minimum wage law.
Hard to tell between lucky and have you gotten some and not noticed. Some things are definitely more faked than others so it can really depend on what you're buying and when.
> The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance, noting that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had facilitated payment, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus being liable under California law.
> Physical stores should do this too. Gets rid of the liability for what you sell.
That is the only way to compete with Amazon. It is a race-to-the-bottom of quality and safety for the consumers.
Amazon takes what are common rules with their customers and their retailers and has broken all of them. Amazon competes directly with its retailers using the information that got from them. Amazon brands 3rd party retailers products as if server-by-Amazon but it takes no responsibility on delivery or quality.
Or Amazon is forced into compliance or we are going to go back to the middle-ages experience where everything is a flea market and weights and measures are never correct.
I'm pretty sure if I went to Target and was told "this toaster was made by NoName Super-Quality Manufacturing in China and if you have any problem you'd have to take it with them, whoever and whereever they are, and we accept no responsibility for anything but processing the payment" I'd not buy it.
Physical stores don’t really have anything analogous to what’s going on here with Amazon. No random small business can sign up and get their products shelf space in Target or WalMart next to what Target buys and resells. Literally everything physically in a Target is something they bought, warehoused, and are reselling themselves.
I hear a lot of complaints about counterfeits in Amazon in the US.
But not as many back here in India. I've bought electronics, chairs, phones and appliances without too much hassle. Always with fulfilled by Amazon though.
I'm curious if the problem is more prevalent in different locations.
This will have interesting impacts on all marketplaces.
Ebay, Walmart, NewEgg, all the app stores on every platform - if a game is malware (or trashes your machine with a bug), is that Steam's responsibility? It's delivered from their servers with their packaging.
Yes, steam is responsible for refunding. In EU there is protections like this so you are allowed 14 days (if I recall correctly) to return an item bought online because you had no way to review it "in person". If you consider this law sans Internet it still makes 100% sense. It applies to phone-ordering from TV shopping channels, or mail-ordering as well. It keeps merchants honest for at least 14 days of products use, forcing them not to (re)sell items that will quickly disappoint. It overall makes it much easier to be a consumer which should be in everyone's interest.
Depends on how much effort is shown to have been made by these app stores to prevent malware. For example, if Steam shows significant cases where malware games have been removed, and can prove they actively work to remove these cases, then it won't be much of a problem for Steam. They are doin their best.
Hmm.. this is like if section 230 was written in an opposite way such that sites that hosted content were liable for the things posted by 3rd parties aka you and me.
They're not even good at that. They seem to have forgotten how to package books so they won't get damaged in transit. Ordering books from Amazon is a last resort for me these days.
I've had nothing but good experience with Amazon over the past 10 years. Very few problems but when there is, it's a few minutes to get a replacement or refund immediately, including complicated scenarios like promos, out of date returns, and warranty claims.
I must not be the only one with good experiences if they're doing so well. Then again I also check to make sure I'm buying direct from Amazon and reading the most recent verified purchaser reviews for any expensive items.
However this ruling needs clarity since Ebay would also qualify, especially since they also handle payments now instead of using Paypal, and potentially Shopify as well.
Agree with the experience: Amazon has never done me wrong.
Disagree with the context: You're making the mistake of saying that you do things the proper way and if others would follow your lead, they might have better experiences also. People who have been wronged don't like to hear that other people think it's kind of their fault. Not saying you think, or said, this: but there's a bit of victim-blaming going on. This should not be something Amazon customers need to worry about. And for the record, I am less careful than you. But it's possible that the products I purchase are less attractive to counterfeiters...
Disagree on the comment about eBay. They do not warehouse or ship. It is very clear that the seller is responsible for product description and delivery.
Most products I don't really check and have been fine. What I was trying to convey was that expensive, specialized or esoteric items have more scam potential which should require more review before buying (not that Amazon isn't still at fault).
However people are claiming here that 95% of orders are bad and that's just hard to believe. The business would collapse tomorrow if that were the case for any serious number of people, and why would a person keep buying if that's all they were getting?
Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier/wholesaler/manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.