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.
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.