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Comment by na412 | Hacker News Reader

Probably they will be the only sellers for these items, so no counterfeit problem there. I doubt this will fix the situation for other items.

Personally I've switched away from amazon, after twice in a row getting a box with a switched item (HDD and SSD, respectively, both replaced with smaller and cheaper versions, and both "Sold by and shipped from Amazon"). Amazon support was good, they replaced the product, but it's a hassle to have to return-ship and wait. Now I either buy off aliexpress (if I'm okay with cheap/counterfeit, which is fine for many items) or local stores (if it's a product where I really care about quality).

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> I doubt this will fix the situation for other items.

That's the point. The only way to buy genuine product, not co-mingled, will be buy it Amazon labeled.

Many Chinese brands have official stores at Aliexpress by the way, so you don't need to be okay with fakes if you don't want to. Not so many as at Tmall, but still.

Explains the apparent indifference to counterfeiting, destroy trust in every brand except amazon's own?

If that were the case the products would be clearly labeled "Amazon" rather than a bunch of private labels that sound nothing alike, I should think.

I don't think so. Amazon is huge corporation and most often corporations do not follow 'The Secret Plan', but move chaotically.

Agreed. It's most likely a sin of omission, creating a broken system because it's not in their interests to fix the general counterfeiting problem.

There may be ancillary benefits, like increased seller competition into their monopsony, but it's not a priority for them to fix, because apparently it doesn't affect their bottom line enough.

It's not like it's hard to come up with a solution to the problem - they have lots of ways of surfacing prime-eligible items, you could have a similar way of surfacing manufacturer-approved resellers for some items. And as others have mentioned, there are no counterfeit kindles on amazon.com

> it's not in their interests to fix the general counterfeiting problem

But really it is, because judging on comments here, people are looking at aliexpress when they don't care that they are buying a cheap chinese product.

If Amazon is known as the place where you pay for a brand and get a counterfeit, and aliexpress is where you can just pay less for the counterfeit, that seems to me like a problem Amazon would want to fix.

If the hacker news crowd was the target market, then sure.

But honestly, we're probably just a blip.

You had a problem with counterfeit items on Amazon so you switched to AliExpress because... You're "okay with cheap/counterfeit"? I'm confused.

I'm okay with cheap/counterfeit goods for some items, if I know what I'm buying and the price reflects that. I'm not okay with paying full price and receiving a worse product than I paid for.

Examples of things I would not buy knockoff/counterfeit would be power supplies, battery packs or anything dealing line voltage due to the obvious fire hazard. Examples of things I am fine with buying off aliexpress might be flash programmers, project boxes, clothes, etc.

Also, the examples I gave off amazon were not counterfeits, but rather wrong products. I bought a 12TB HDD and received a 6TB one from the same brand. Obviously I'm not okay with that, having paid full price for the 12TB one.

Seems pretty simple, right?

when you can buy 10 for the price of 1 at a store on aliexpress I usually use them.

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