Hacker News Reader

Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

I've actually become concerned enough about Amazon's utter unwillingness to address their counterfeit product problem that we've stopped buying food, makeup, sunblock, lotion, or anything that uses electricity on Amazon.

See also just this year their recall of eclipse glasses.

After four tries to get name brand and working batteries for my car remote on Amazon, I gave up and purchased them at a local hardware store. It wasn't as convenient as Amazon, but it was a lot more convenient than Amazon allowing scum to sell repackaged no-name crap instead of the particular batteries I needed over and over again...

View on HN

When I ordered replacement batteries for my phone I bought them from LGs website at triple the price. Amazon had them cheaper but I had already gotten burned ordering replacements from them. The counterfeits were labeled as LG batteries for my phone. They would read fully charged but the phone wouldn't actually turn on with them installed. Also the date code on the battery didn't match what was printed on the packaging.

It's made me pretty leery of ordering anything from Amazon.

You will only have this problem if you buy from the amazon market place. If you restrict your search to seller=amazon I would expect you to be pretty safe.

I don't think this is true anymore. I'm sure most items in Amazon's inventory are commingled with third-party sellers using FBA.

I'm sure this is helps Amazon with logistics, but it also makes it difficult to catch counterfeit goods.

That sounds like a horrendous idea. How could amazon possibly think it made sense to do that?

Because the losses from the fraud (that's bound to happen) are less than the cost incurred by having separate inventories.

I hope they include the loss of trust from the customers to whom this happens in this cost of fraud.

There are always new sheeple waiting to have their lives enriched by ordering groceries on Amazon Prime...

I only wish this were true.

We needed a refrigerator water filter a month back. So I head to amazon and look at different products available, including cheaper. Didnt like the reviews for the 3rd party and went the samsung filter. And I see what they offer is retail price.

I read the reviews and I see a trend on the comments "counterfeit", "counterfeit", and "not real product". And that was from Amazon, on a verified product's line.

So I went to Lowes. They had them in stock for the same price. Except with 0 chance of counterfeit.

Buying a water filter for my fridge from Amazon was a terrible experience. Everything was mislabeled, obviously counterfeit, or had terrible reviews. Buying from home depot was much easier.

On the flip side it is near impossible to buy standard cylinder filters at retail establishments because they are all Hawking proprietary systems.

How does one do that? Is there a filter you can use somewhere? I really hate Amazon's inability to filter.

When you search for something, once you selected on the left which part of store, you can select at the bottom left the seller.

Only for certain categories. Rule of thumb is that if it’s a commodity-like product, proceed with caution.

> After four tries to get name brand and working batteries for my car remote on Amazon...

Is there something wrong with the AmazonBasics brand? I’ve never had problems with them.

For items shipped from Amazon warehouses you basically need a brand only available through Amazon - AmazonBasics, Anker, etc. because there's really no room for counterfeiting there, though I think Anker products are now showing up elsewhere which may now mean they get hit with counterfeits from third party "FBA" as well.

These days I'll absolutely check elsewhere before making a purchase, and I'll pay a bit of a premium to either buy from a different store or to get items shipped from the seller instead of from Amazon.

Remember to fill for refund "this item doesn't match the description" every time this happens to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com