How counterfeits benefit Amazon
latimes.com
latimes.com
So Amazon wants the distributors of a certain brand to compete with themselves and push the prices down. But that opens the door for fakes on the site.
Nothing I said above should justify co-mingling inventory from different producers when a risk exists that fakes will be introduced in this manner, that's squarely Amazon's fault in their pursuit for faster delivery times. That practice leaves consumers without any ability to avoid fakes, destroying trust in the Amazon brand itself.
I think the solution is a system of financial bonds, where the seller would pledge a significant sum to be accepted in the co-mingling bunch and benefit from fast delivery etc. A single fake product traced back to it would result in loosing the pledge.
That is how most stores operate.
I don't like the fakes any more than the next person, but I think the problems are genuinely more difficult than the various armchair experts on HN seem to give credit for.
That is in fact the entire business of most stores.
Amazon is "the everything store", the exponent of long tail online retail. If Amazon would employ the same tactics as Walmart, it would be quickly be out-competed by other online stores with a larger selection of products.
And there's AliExpress.com already doing a good job of that.
Actually, a better job, apparently, because on AliExpress you know which seller will ship your purchase.
The only thing I really still buy from Amazon is Toilet Paper, which seems unlikely to be counterfeited (so far).
Handling the returns was mostly painless, but if I were to live in a country with a local Amazon-site I would only use it for books/similar these days.
But I had more trouble with fake reviews selling me mediocre (often Chinese) products. I check the same US Amazon product on Fakespot for almost everything now (but the fake reviewers will game that system too). Amazon is clearly outsourcing their job to the customers.
Been a (happy) Amazon customer since I'm legally allowed to buy there and liked marketplace in the beginning for second-hand products and buying from smaller scale shops (the scale of the family winery in Saarland), but rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese counterfeit "economy" is just dangerous given that Amazon's number one rule that made them successful is keeping customer trust. Co-mingling - I don't see how anybody at Amazon could have believed that 1-day shipping is a more important metric than selling genuine products.
I wish they temporarilly blocked Chinese marketplace sellers as a whole until these issues are solved, by whatever entity. As a customer I don't care that this is unfair towards a handful of moral sellers, I care about not getting shocks from electronic equipment that I bought at full price. When I want to buy terrible Xiaomi products for some reason (e.g. because I fell for the Apple counterfeit's fake reviews) I can still go to eBay or Alibaba like back in the days.
The other solution would be visibly and strongly separating marketplace again, like in the beginning, or putting it on a separate dedicated website that crosslinks with main Amazon.
That doesn't protect you from co-mingling of inventory. It just helps minimize the time between when you place your order, and when the order is shipped.
Shopping on Amz has no value to me if they're just a shitty webstore search engine.
Then we know when the shit has hit the fan in Amazon.
I think you misspelled "finger"
Sure I can get my money back if I get a detectable counterfeit, but what about my time dealing with it and without having what I ordered? And what about items that aren't easily detected as fake but which are notably substandard when used (e.g. odd-size or lithium batteries that die in 6 months rather than 2 years)? It's not like ordering from Amazon is really notably cheaper than other options these days anyway.
Grab a screenshot of the price outside the store as Amazon prices will change inside of some stores.
I've noticed that Target has, however, slowly begun to list inventory that I am guessing it doesn't have stock for, since there's literally pages and pages worth -- let's hope that Target does NOT pull the marketplace-sourced inventory scheme, because then there would be no difference between Target and Amazon anymore.
When I want commodity items that don't have a specific manufacturer (HDD enclosures, small tools, etc), I'll go to aliexpress because it's exactly the same things as sold on amazon but for a quarter of the price. I just have to wait 3 weeks longer than on amazon.
I don't even get books from Amazon anymore, because there are pirate prints of books.
It's all fun and games when it's just about having the item break after a couple of weeks because it was a low quality copy, but amazon also sells more dangerous things like Christmas lights with fake CE and UL markings or PPE that aren't sturdy enough to meet the norms they supposedly adhere to.
Not even mentioning the returned and used items sold as new for the full price, or the appalling way in which Amazon treats its workers.
It doesn't even make life that much more complicated, and thinking whether I want something so much as to go to the store or wait a month to get it from China is an excellent filter to block impulse purchases.
I once bought such a counterfeit. The amusing thing was that, apart from the utterly shoddy quality of the printing, the content of the book (Pierce) didn't even correspond to the title (Harper).
They looks at the gain, the loss and the balance. Ultimately actions or lack of actions are driven by the balance.
You can draw your own conclusions from the lack of actions.
As a business user, I won't consider signing up for their business account, for which they keep pestering me with popups.
As a vendor, I've held off on putting products on Amazon for exactly this reason of getting hosed by the counterfeiters and knowing that Amazon will not only not have my back as a vendor that is helping them profit, but will actively fight against me on any attempt to force Amazon to responsibly police their warehouses.
I may still take the risk in order to access Amazon's huge customer base, but I'll certainly be costly taking costly countermeasures from the start, and factoring those into the decision of how profitable it might be to sell on Amazon vs or in addition to directly.
They really have a significant problem, and are sadly, becoming another big tech firm that is creating increasing levels of problems in our society and economic environment.
The question is when those problems will exceed the benefit they bring to society.
IMO, FB is well past the bad/good breakeven point, GOOG & AMZN are still on the good side, but trending badly.
I'm going to call in a few days to cancel my Prime. Amazon as a whole is just not worth investing in anymore as a customer.
I will also move off all my photos from Amazon photos and onto my own manual drives until better cloud solutions come out (not goog).
Full four months of engagement and commitment, that's pretty impressive.
It’s true that many traditional publications and houses are slower to adapt to changes in the digital landscape ever since print as an output has been sidelined. They like to find something that works and stick with it, even if it’s not optimal.
It would likely explain LA Times’ delay.
It’s taken teams I’ve been on a year to procure a ten dollar a month VPS because the request would continually get turned down by infra.
Amazon's responses on this are purely bullshit.
In no way would adding an extra logistic step to every single package entering amazon’s warehouse something of ”minimal” cost, but it might be worth it.
How much does adding one the sticker cost relative to the average Amazon product? 0.1%? How much does it cost relative to the cost of the counterfeiting problem?
There are already shipping labels placed on every outbound item, tiny little tags per item would be minimal by comparison.
1: create a problem that should not exist
2: sell a solution to the fake problem
3: profit!
The basic idea: Vendor places unique 2D barcode on each unit of a branded product, only products with those barcodes get placed into Amazon warehouse inventory, consumers can scan the barcode themselves to verify it's legit.
Seems like a win for everybody. (Also, you're putting the codes on your items yourself, Amazon's not doing it.)
It seems like companies would be all over this, but this is the first I've heard of it. What are the obstacles? Is Amazon charging too much for it? (Honestly it seems like it's better for them to subsidize it, if anything.) Is it not fully rolled out yet?
They'll probably start moving towards it; especially since it'll also give better control over getting feedback on product quality from consumers or communicating recalls. Right now, it's kind of cumbersome, because things that are coded with lots or manufacturing code dates aren't really that easy for consumers or retailers to use.
In order for the counterfeiter to win, the counterfeiter would have to get the fake item with the real number into an Amazon warehouse before the real item arrived. Add to this the fact that the vendor of the real item will be told their item was rejected as dupe, and there's nothing I can see in the program documentation requiring the tags to be sequential, and this raises the bar quite a bit.
A zero tolerance policy doesn't mean much if you don't give out enough first strikes.
I don't really care about the ~$50-100 in suspect cables, microsd cards, and batteries I've bought over the years, it just seems like something this broad would probably be the only way to get Amazon to consider fixing their inventory co-mingling issues.
Sometimes counterfeits come from the same factory using the same materials, just running overtime.
Sans the quality assurance.
I was too lazy to go the physical Apple Store for a claim and bought a second Earpods headset on the Online Apple Store that also broke in 3 months.
Then I went to the physical Apple Store, waited for an hour to get an Apple Genious attention and got it replaced on warranty.
The third EarPods have not broken yet after one year, so according to my data points, you have a 66% chance that the EarPods bought directly to Apple break in 3 months and a 100% chance that EarPods bougt directly to Apple on its Online Store break in 3 months.
> Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court
> We each agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class, consolidated or representative action. If for any reason a claim proceeds in court rather than in arbitration we each waive any right to a jury trial.
EDIT or let me rephrase that question: what's the original purpose of such forced arbitration clauses existing? How do they contribute to the public good?
Almost no one reads them. Even of those that read them, most couldn't understand the finer legal points and implications contained therein.
But even in the case of Amazon, TOS is forced on you in the sense that you have no way of negotiating it. It is not a meeting of the minds; they write it and you sign it, often without even reading it. This is not the assumption with which contract law was written.
The role for government to step in and aggressively resolve unfair trade practices is clear when arbitration is forced on monopoly customers and customers for whom there is no ability to meaningfully negotiate contract terms.
I always wondered if this was a major structural folly.
It sort of worked when contracts were mostly B2B things, or rare B2C dealing with significant okay-better-talk-it-over-with-a-lawyer financial stakes. But these days, a typical consumer is incidentally tangling themselves into hundreds of pages of contracts a day, written by people with far more access to legal support and presented with little option for negotiation.
I wonder if we'd be better off with just standardized "Mad Libs" style contracts. There'd be only one standard retail sales contract, one standard software license, one standard website terms of service, etc, codified into law. Nothing else is binding.
A lot of contract law would become cut and dry because there'd be no easy way to introduce new ambiguities or surprises into it-- we'd have most of the precedent we needed pretty fast.
It would also force a lot more transparency into some of the skeezier applications of contracts. There's no room for an unexpected cost or caveat when it's the same contract template every other business in your category uses. If the firms that all slapped "no class actions" and "mandatory arbitration" into every little clickthrough had to instead had to lobby a regulator to change the standard contract template, it would likely trigger public backlash.
The US Constitution was designed for stability, and explicitly (Madison) to protect the opulent. That’s why the Bill of Rights is a series of amendments, i.e. an afterthought. It’s working as designed (how many other constitutions have survived over 200 years?), and almost impossible to change from within the system.
Right now the only way to get a genuine product is to buy only those items which have exactly one seller, with a legit name, and are not under prime shipping or fulfilled by Amazon.
That's amazing. How it works, I wonder - some Chinese factory just print from PDFs?
> the cheap LADDA rechargeables that Ikea sells might actually be rolling off the same production line as Panasonic’s pricier Eneloop Pro batteries.
https://gizmodo.com/are-ikeas-7-rechargeable-batteries-actua...
But commingling the stock so even genuine buyers get the knockoffs is plumbing new depths of sleaze.
I would have to say that well over half of torches on Amazon exaggerate their claims by at LEAST 100%. You'll see the same exact 5-mode style with 20 different max output numbers. Most sellers get a counterfeit LED that's half as bright as the real thing, then list the max straight from the CREE spec sheets, ignoring that the numbers come from properly cooled, properly driven, and much more efficient legit bulbs.
Battery sellers on Amazon generally tack on 30-80% capacity, but some go bonkers. Go ahead and search for 18650 batteries for those flashlights. Amazing! Panasonic and LG can't get past 3600mAh for theirs and charge ~$25 for a pair, but multiple sellers have 9000mAh+ options for ~$2/cell. And they ALL have 4+ star reviews. It used to be that the garbage sellers would claim around 3500mAh capacity so that there was some plausible deniability, but now they're probably bordering on nuclear fission energy densities. They're selling a 2 liter bottle of water and claiming there's 3 liters in it.
Oh, and any 'emergency' or safety related product is fair game. If it fails, either they'll rationalize that it wasn't properly maintained prior to the emergency or the buyer isn't around to complain about it.
Needless to say, I don't order anything I actually care about from Amazon. I actually just looked through my 2018 purchases and it reads like the orders I used to place through cheap Chinese sites 5 years ago. I guess I now treat Amazon like a shipping option - $2 premium to get the same junk, but I don't have to wait a month.
As for 18650s I would never buy anything but Panasonic or similar, the risks are just too great, but commingling robs you of the opportunity make an educated decision - you might get genuine Panasonics sourced through Amazon's own supply chain, or counterfeits from anywhere.
A lot of this stuff is obviously coming out of the same factories too... reputable brand X will order Y units of their product, which will be made to spec, then the factory will simply keep the production lines running afterwards with much cheaper materials/components and dump that into the supply chain too. Whether it's electronics or clothing or anything else. It's inevitable at some point that someone will die of hypothermia in a fake North Face jacket when the genuine version would have kept them warm.
Some fake products add features, especially the best features from the competitors product that the 'genuine' products couldn't include for licensing reasons.
If you are trying to buy product X and what you get is a fake made with inferior materials, what use are extra features that you didn’t even expect to have?
But seriously, the reason these Amazotrash sellers get away with it is in part due to consumers not actually needing top of the line stuff. So, if you thought you needed 1000 lumen, but in reality you only needed 500 lm, and then get tricked into buying a torch advertising "5000 lm", but it does the job and has extra modes, plus a bike mount, you kinda come out ahead. It also coexists with that old marketing trick used in movie theater concession sizes to get people to spend more than they intended. (Which is the best deal: S: $5, M:$10, L: $12? Most people would opt for medium, but large is only $2 more (at nearly zero cost to the theater).
From that perspective, most of the counterfeits are better because you could either afford more of them or afford counterfeits of higher priced versions. Looking to buy a legit 16GB flash drive for $15, but find a seller with what you think is a legit 32GB version for $15? If it's not broken and actually has 32GB, but is slightly slower than the brand one that was faster than you really needed anyways, seems like a win for you.
On batteries, I just don't buy them often enough to really get screwed over. I try to to get Panasonic or LG, but if it's for a random project I'll look for any that have good review with pictures of the protection board. Then, if they claim something reasonable for capacity, I subtract 30% from that number and buy them if it's in the range of what I need.
As for counterfeits in general... Growing up middle class, counterfeits weren't a bad thing most of the time. Cheaper materials, worse/no warranty, and higher failure rates? Sure. Don't get a counterfeit if it's a matter of health or safety. But, if you could only afford the Thingy X Basic Model, a good counterfeit might mean you could get Thingee X Deluxe Ultra Championship Edition. It might not be as good as the real Thingy X DUCE, but it was usually better than the Thingy X BE.
I never understood the obsession with genuine items in fashion, since most of them were as good or better than the designer versions. Instead of paying $1000 for something, you paid $20 and got the exact same thing with the same materials and slightly different stitches in an unnoticeable location.
People are weird and the topic of counterfeiting really puts that on display.
Ugh, how cynical.
"Your reputation is my opportunity."
Straight up theft on not only IP, but all the management admin costs to manage production, and the marketing efforts to build the brand.
From every single account of people I've encountered who have worked in/with China, this and every other sort of ripoff is absolutely expected and par for the course unless you take serious countermeasures (e.g., make all critical components in another economy, ship over to China only the goods that just need final process and assembly). It's just how they do business.
And obviously, now, they have significant hordes scanning Amazon for products selling well, which they'll promptly counterfeit. And Amazon's happy to help them undercut you.
Sort of like old software activation codes?
The serial number on the product and a token to claim that number as a pair would work, at least in so far as someone would then have to obtain a large number of units and fake exact numbers. That should increase the chance of tracing a buyer; more so if the unit number is also on the outside of the box and it's registration can be checked prior to opening the box.
By the way, for example, you know that e-cig products marked 'authentic' on e.g. Fasttech are really authentic, because (tens of?) thousands of people bought there, and checked the codes, and if that wouldn't stay true, all the people at all the related forums know that. I find it kind of funny when Chinese shop from Guangdong happened to build better reputation than the biggest American retail corporation.
...or it could just be that they were originally flawed anyway or somewhat damaged in transit. It's not like manufacturers don't make minor changes to a product after starting production either --- mass production doesn't mean every product is exactly the same.
Amazon Corp bots make financial decision that blocking unauthorized sellers is cheaper than fighting lawsuits.
As a customer why would I care if Microsoft have authorised you to resell Xbox One's or not?
I'm pretty sure a clause like that would be an infringement of rights grants by the First Sale doctrine [0] and would be void (in the US at least).
(original post) I can't recall the name of the product or find it with some quick searches, but I recall stories of one product that did precisely that after their product started being counterfeited heavily and undercut on Amazon - they have a cheaper version that's available on Amazon and a higher quality version available only directly from them.
I believe it was basically a stiff synthetic material blanket with a bunch of large holes and attachment points such that those points could be attached together in a bunch of different ways to make a wide variety of configurations for cats to play in.
Los Angeles Times shows this:
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
I'm curious about people's experience in practice. I would think this unlikely to help but Huang is smart and has lot of relevant experience. Bitmark's javascript laden and (to me) slightly off putting site is at: https://bitmark.com/
I guess because they couldn't trust supplies, they said no longer and we have to go closer to the supplies for tracking
What's the counterfeit situation with chips that can be installed in computers post factory? Cloning a GPU or a PCI card that requires vendor-specific drivers would actually require copying the chip instead of substituting with another one in the same product category for the genuine driver to work. Can we still expect PCI cards to be genuine if the genuine driver works? What about RAM, which doesn't require vendor-specific drivers?
If you have a use case where genuine article is important, there are companies that you can use to inspect and certify the parts or systems immediately after import.
I find that a bit hard to believe. Try searching for earpods and finding a real one amongst all the fakes.