Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's gotten bad enough that there are entire product categories I completely avoid on Amazon due to the likelihood of counterfeit. If I'm looking for a specific brand of electronics (say, Anker or Apple) I'll buy it off Newegg or direct from a brick and mortar. If I can't be bothered or it's not at the store, I'll order it from that store or manufacturer's website (Home Depot, Fry's, etc.).

For a lot of other things, the price is so close or the exact same, I'll just buy it from the store. I do a lot of woodworking, so I buy a fair amount of stuff from a number of brands that people aren't really counterfeiting (yet)- for those I'll buy using prime, unless it's at one of the woodworking/hardware stores in the area. Then I'll just go get it myself, the prices are always within a small percentage of each other.

It feels like, for me, I do my window shopping at Amazon and execute my purchase locally, just because Amazon has gone downhill for me. I would be interested to know if other people are slowly coming to the behaviors I have.

Pretty much I get random small electronics components that don't need a great level of quality and just random other things that I don't care all that much about quality or origin. They've become my Alibaba in a way.

Acutally I trust Anker an Amazon because Anker is running the store, so their reputation is on the line.

I still shop Amazon for many categories, but my guard is always up. But for some categories like apparel, the Amazon experience is so horrible that I don't even think to look there.

The problem is that Amazon commingles stock, so an Anker-brand X could actually be supplied by company Y and come from counterfeit manufacturer Z.

I just checked a couple of their items, and they say "Sold by AnkerDirect and Fulfilled by Amazon", and it's very much Anker's option to not commingle their inventory, and I would expect they've chosen that option, they have a brand to protect.

Anker was probably a bad example because they seem to do a pretty good job and seemingly don't allow commingling of their product.

This discussion does highlight the issue though, we all had to go check, and check a number of different options, and are we still REALLY sure that we're getting an Anker product? Now, if you're my mom and you're not checking the right boxes and looking for the 8pt font of who it's being fulfilled by, what's your success rate with high counterfeit categories?

Bottom line, if I'm buying a brand, there should be NO DOUBT that's what I'm getting. Do you doubt the brand that you're buying when you walk in to Best Buy? I don't. When the prices are the exact same, I'm buying from Best Buy. If the price is significantly lower on Amazon, then I get super suspect about the authenticity.

Just bought a part for my Dyson vacuum cleaner and I found a number of suspect listings before I got the the one that seemed authentic- catalog shots, posting copy, lack of "Engrish". I was completely expecting to have to return it when I got it, but to my relief, it came in an "Authentic Dyson" labeled box and the fit, finish, color, and production seemed exactly the same as what came off my vacuum.

That's too much doubt for my liking.

How do you know Anker doesn't commingle? I don't think FBA vendors have any control over it.

edit: here is some discussion. FBA vendors appear to have control:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hel...

But I still don't think the amazon customer can see if an fba vendor allows commingling.

I don't know, as I said, "I would expect they've chosen that option, they have a brand to protect." They have a brand so good in this domain they've be absolutely insane to commingle.

But, no, we can't tell if a vendor commingles, we can only infer it in special cases like Anker as manyxcxi noted, or pick out vendors with high ratings and otherwise cross our fingers.

It's a colossal mess, and nowadays, if I'm not buying used books (where I go with < 95% rating and Very Good quality), I find a BS detector honed for decades, literally about 4 and half, is the single most useful tool in navigating their swamps. Which for me confirms they indeed have big problems, and that's not even counting their search engine, which as others have noted is bad; for me, by far the worst I regularly use, and like others I often use Google's instead.

All this implies to me that if AWS wasn't such a money machine, Amazon's stock holders ought to be very nervous. The company really need to get serious about these problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com