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Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster.

As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by selling gift cards on its platform. Those too are excess reserves to be paid to suppliers once customers utilizes and buys something from a supplier.

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> but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing.

I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial.

I'm sure Amazon is taking it very seriously - when have they ever shown anything but "obsession" about positive customer experiences. But it is hard, and it will take time to do it effectively without completely blocking all 3rd party sellers on the site.

I disagree. There seems to be so much low hanging fruit to at least reduce the problem but they haven't taken even the smallest steps. This is because they're prioritizing revenue, volume, and selection over fraud prevention.

I've seen this in other companies. It's like Amazon had a bad revenue addiction. They can't go cold-turkey and cut every suspect seller in the marketplace, because that would cause a large impact on their quarterly numbers. But if this goes untreated, it will drive out good sellers and destroy consumer confidence.

You could not be more right. At least from my personal experience. I mean, try and buy a phone case on Amazon right now. Literally every single listing on their top two pages of results when filtered by "best rated" is stuffed with fake / paid reviews. Its literally impossible to tell if you're going to be getting a quality product. And if companies like Fakespot or whatever can tell if Amazon reviews are fake, Amazon themselves could easily do as as well, or even just buy one of the review validating services and integrate the score directly into their listings. None of this is that hard, and especially not for Amazon with their scale and resources, so literally the only reason for them not to do this is that it is more profitable not to. The average consumer may have a relatively high degree of trust in Amazon, but anyone who thinks even remotely critically about their purchasing decisions is going to quickly realize Amazon is mired in fake reviews and duplicity.

Not true, they banned incentivized reviews. That's a big step towards getting more accurate reviews.

I'm not sure how they're enforcing the ban because I still see tons of reviews that are openly declaring that they were incentivized with the boiler plate "I received this item at a discount in exchange for my honest review." tag at the end of their review.

There are any number of steps they could take to dramatically decrease the counterfeiting problem, chief among them to make sure the customer can choose which supplier the goods to fulfill the order comes from.

I think Amazon is making a bet that reducing the number of SKUs in their warehouses is of greater value than counterfeiting is a problem - and this is probably true for a ton of their more generic stuff that comes from the same factory in China anyway.

> I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial.

Yes, but:)

Fixing it is far from trivial, BUT there are trivial things that would help. It's the 80/20 rule again; sure, a full solution would take years and be a massive undertaking, but even a minor effort would make a big dent in the problem.

I doubt Amazon even considers it an issue. The effect of negative customer experiences from counterfeit goods and fake reviews on actual sales is likely negligible, certainly less than the cost of any "improvement" to the system. Most people aren't going to delete their Amazon accounts because of a bad item - they'll just return it, and stay customers.

Meanwhile, those counterfeits allow Amazon to fulfill orders more quickly and to list items at lower cost, undermining their competition, and any bad experience a customer has can be blamed on the vendor, not Amazon itself.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I have no particular insight, but to me this seems like an intentional part of Amazon's business model.

> actual sales is likely negligible

At the moment it might be negligible but in the long run they are hurting them self. 5 years ago I and a lot of my friends ordered everything on Amazon because it was fast and we knew that we will get the correct stuff.

Nowadays I (and most of my friends) almost stopped using Amazon because it is such a hassle to find stuff which is actually sold and shipped by Amazon and not some sketchy third party seller with only 5 reviews. And even if you manage to order something directly through Amazon you might still have problems with counterfeit items and other stuff.

And the same is true for my parents and their friends. Until 1-2 years ago Amazon was _the_ place to shop online but nowadays they switched back to more traditional methods.

Due to all this shady stuff Amazon lost me as a customer (who used to spend hundreds and thousands of euros per year).

If the same or similar item is available on Target.com, I now buy it there.

I trust Target's supply chain about 100x more than Amazon and I'm willing to pay extra for that assurance.

Amazon may not consider it an issue - yet, but if they don't before it make critical mass, it could seriously damage them.

As a fairly heavy Amazon customer for both home & biz, I was getting to the point where Amazon was just the default buying location, but now there are entire categories of stuff that are such a PITA to find a valid offering that Amazon is just about off my list.

Amazon recently keeps showing me a popup about a Biz account for some benefits, and while I probably would have jumped at it 2 years ago, I just haven't bothered now.

Yes, it's mere anecdote, but I'm seeing many complaints of the same. This is the kind of problem that doesn't show up in the numbers early, and by the time it shows up in the numbers to get Mgt's attention, it may be too late, because the reputational damage has been done.

Years to build trust, minutes to break it...

I disagree, I feel like around 30% of HN works at a big company, but most are at startups nowhere near the scale of Amazon.

> Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods ans fake reviews.

I flat out won't buy from Amazon unless I'm already in the market to get something that I know is cheap and may or may not work- which turns out is not very often. Because of this I very much doubt the reality of the retail apocalypse in the long term.

It is by far their biggest problem. Personally, I find 'ships and sold by amazon' to be a brand I trust; outside that? yeah, it's like buying from a shady ebay seller.

Personally, I think amazon needs to distance themselves from those third party sellers; if it's hard to tell the difference between amazon and joe rando, the amazon brand is going to become worth significantly less, and they will not be able to charge the premium that I'm sure their investors are expecting.

I agree. I think JD are taking a much better approach here and seem to care much more.

The solution to fake reviews is simple. Just ignore all reviews that aren’t verified purchase. Still leaves some room for manipulation but much less.

Unfortunately the value of a fake review is so high no ML will ever be able to defeat it. The only way to fix it is with trusted reviewers but there a lot of products on there and only so many trusted reviewers.

How do you mean ? From what I've observe all fake reviews tend to fall into a pattern. Usually a mix of broken sentences and hyperbole. I find the positive fake review patterns far simpler to detect than the negative review patterns. Nonetheless, a decent sentiment classifier can be modified and used to classify fake reviews, the fake positive ones at least.

They all pretty much start with the disclaimer "I was given this for free but that didn't influence my 5* amazing review that follows"

But amazon could hide by default reviews where no purchase has been made through amazon.

That would eliminate a lot of reviews of long-tail items. For example an old book borrowed from a library; I have one to hand now that I intend to review.

> Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods

Or you could say that Amazon is highlighting the comparative lack of quality of branded goods. A Lacoste shirt is so easy to replicate at a fraction of the cost, that Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.

Or quite the reverse, such as the last set of "Panasonic" batteries I bought off Amazon. After about 3 months all 12 had leaked and were dead. I'm damn sure they were not Panasonic. The reputation damage was to amazon, not Panasonic, and I resolved not to buy batteries from Amazon ever again.

No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt.

Know what's ridiculous? I trust Poundland more than I trust Amazon to supply genuine goods.

> No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt.

Such a statement has no grounds to stand on. There are non-genuine items which are of the same or better quality than the genuine ones. You cannot just put them all in one bin.

> You cannot just put them all in one bin.

Amazon do, that's the problem.

As you provide no citations either, your assertion seems to have no more grounds. The chances of counterfeit being better quality are so vanishingly rare as to be headline worthy.

On fakes being of high quality I imagine it varies by market and supplier. If real Calvin Klein underwear is better than the thirty I got in Thailand four years ago it’s made of angel feathers and adamantium.

One of my in-laws more or less pioneered the entire clothing manufacturing industry in Southeast Asia. Watching him and his wife tear apart garments by looking at the stitches and feeling the fabric is incredibly entertaining. It's on par with the way I tear apart other people's code on GPUs. 10,000+ hours doing anything gives one some serious skill.

I've even used their expertise as evidence that AI and machine learning could do the same if we only knew how to train it. They've written several books on the subject and they are recognized authorities in Asia.

Can you PM me the names of the books. My wife does a lot of that stuff and she'd either be very interested or insulted that I gave her more work to look at.

Look up Conway Liu with "garment" and that ought to get you the information you need. I do not appear to have the karma to PM yet.

>Or you could say that Amazon is highlighting the comparative lack of quality of branded goods. A Lacoste shirt is so easy to replicate at a fraction of the cost, that Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.

And so does Alibaba, except for it is in China and is outside of US IP enforcement regime. If Amazon were not to do a great pivot towards 3rd party sellers back in 2012-2014 and do the same thing Alibaba does, we could have been talking about Alibaba swallowing Amazon's online retail business by now. Alibaba is a type of company you can do nothing about, yet it can do a lot of things about you, and I can throw a couple examples for you:

Paypal - they used to have a "partner agreement" with Alibaba, but the moment they began to carve into eBay's domain, Paypal's board was foolish enough to antagonise them.

Alipay was the result of all of above, as well as Paypal's almost complete loss of Chinese market, and few others where Alipay made inroads.

Apple - they had pretty much to bribe Alibaba along with Sony to have their products delisted and prohibit trade in refurbished electronics on their platform (which was also eating into Apple's sales big big time).

Also, Alibaba strongarmed Apple into letting them send payments and selling virtual goods without paying "Apple tax." Knowing that, Tencent and few other big Chinese dotcoms followed the suit, which gave them enormous commercial advantage against foreign competitors for in-app payments.

And all of above is on a minute scale of societal impact in comparison how Aliexpress singlehandedly nuked a big big chunk of the brick and store retail industry in the former bloc countries. (Alibaba makes more profit in Russia than in all other foreign markets combined)

Not everything related to quality can be easily identified by the end consumer. I trust major food manufacturers to have products without high levels of arsenic, lead, and mercury. I don't trust that counterfeit food manufacturers are ensuring the same.

Probably not the best example.

Maybe you're talking about a different kind of shirt, but I tried Amazon's brand of collared long-sleeve button-up shirts and found the quality so low that I'd consider them unwearable.

The material was very thin, extremely wrinkle-prone, the collars were wilted and didn't keep their shape at all, and the cut wasn't very good.

I'm not the type to be easily fooled by marketing/branding psychological tricks, quite the opposite. But every off-brand collared shirt I've ever bought in my life has been a cheap unwearable disheveled mess.

I know designer brands are just cranking these things out of Cambodia for $3/unit, but no-name brands still just can't seem to compete at all on quality. They're not even trying as far as I can tell.

> At a fraction of the cost

That’s exactly the problem. Brands can be held accountable. Unbranded goods can’t. Me personally, I don’t want to live in a world, where all standards are given up just to have the lowest price.

'...Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.'

I don't know about Lacoste, but of the brands I do know about, they do a pretty good job on their own of undermining that rationale.

This comes up every time Amazon is a topic on HN, and yet, from the article:

"Amazon is rich with the most important resource in asset management: trust. The firm earned the highest reputation ranking in the U.S. in a 2017 Harris Poll. It was ranked as both the most influential and most trusted company in a 2016 survey by SurveyMonkey. It was the only company to land in the top 5 for both categories."

If the above is true, then counterfeit goods are probably not ultimately a significant problem for them.

It's important to seperate Amazon the market place and Amazon the merchant here. Amazon is a market place where you can find all types of merchants. In this role, it's not so much Amazons issue what these merchants sell.

It's similar to how there are all types of websites running on AWS. Amazon is not responsible for their content.

Amazon is also a merchant on their own market place. I would expect Amazon and other big name merchants to usually sell you genuine products.

I don't really use the reviews on Amazon any more for making decisions. Typically if I'm buying something on Amazon it's a book, and I already know I want it because someone I trust recommended it, or it's some random thing I want like speakers or a bike tool or something and I just research what to buy online before I go to Amazon.

One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier

Why would one think that?

Especially because AI/ML can used to generate fake reviews as well.

Generate fake reviews in AWS then post them in the main site, the perfect crime

Amazon sells gift cards. You can even specify one-day shipping on gift card. Amazon does a wholesale business in Amazon credits that have the effect of lowering transaction prices. For example, Coinstar machines don't charge a fee if you take an Amazon credit in return for your coins.

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