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.
