Yes, I've stopped buying from Amazon because of their stickerless commingled inventory program and get all my electronics from B&H Photo, and more and more other goods from Target.com. Amazon is getting to eBay levels of lawlessness.
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.
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).
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.
Grab a screenshot of the price outside the store as Amazon prices will change inside of some stores.