I have literally no interest in being involved in this insanity just because I shop on Amazon.
I can't be the only one who feels this way.
It's the first seemingly non-third-party listing on Amazon.com for the search term, "iPhone lightning cable." It's the 4th search result. If you hover over the first of "Other sellers" you'll see a store which has a 67% satisfaction rating. If you click through and read the negative reviews, almost all of them list getting a fake product. Amazon lists the brand of the cable as "Apple." The item description says that it comes in "non-retail packaging."
no. the answer is no.
http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...
On a related note, is this an AmazonBasics knock-off? https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert... or are they really selling a product that bad (looking at the reviews/photos)?
Same $19.99 price as an Apple original. Amazon lists "Apple" as the brand. But read the reviews--2.5 stars over 379 reviewers. First review: "Fake Apple cable. Doesn't work."
Under "Other sellers," Amazon.com is listed as an alternative, albeit for $5 more. That one is surely authentic, right? But what if the inventory is co-mingled with that of the other sellers for the same product?
For a lot of things I buy on amazon, being authentic or not is irrelevant, being of good quality or not is my only concern. Of course for a lot of brands 'authenticity' and good quality go together, but that's only a signal to me, authentic products can also be crap.
Perhaps that's also why I don't buy most brand stuff on amazon, as it gives me nothing more than the official retailer's site, prices should be the same, and customer service will be on par or better.
To be clear I don't condone selling fakes, I just think it's a fool's errand to look for 'good deals' on amazon or any third party site when it comes products where brand matters over all.
It's bad out there for some products.
I buy photography components off Amazon, buying a B&W UV filter has become impossible on Amazon. The fakes are actually a lot better than bottom-end UV lenses which is fine, but I didn't spend $45 for a knock-off. I spent that money for the real thing. If I could get the fake at a knock-off price I'd even consider it, but the fakes are being sold as the real thing at full price.
After I found out how how to spot the fakes I found that half of the UV lenses I already had were fake. The real ones are made of brass and have better glass coatings. The fakes are made of aluminum and the threads are not as good which is important for lens filters, you don't want one getting jammed on a $1200 lens. They are painted black so the main way to tell them apart is to weigh them.
The amazon review comments for B&W filters have extensive coverage of how to spot the fakes: https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coa...
The fact of the matter is that today China is such an important market for Nike that it's probably easier to get a rare authentic Air Jordan in Shanghai than it is in your local American city. Greater metro Shanghai is larger than any single American city.
But that's partly because they do a dang good job in selecting good stuff.
You can walk into Costco, buy anything there and know that you got a pretty good thing for a pretty good price. (Not the best thing, or the best price, but pretty good.) And if you didn't, there's always the ridiculously good return/warranty policies.
They're a little challenging for us New Yorkers though, all those massive sizes and so on.
I've already moved basically all my electronics purchasing to B&H. Maybe I should just stop expecting Amazon to be something that it isn't.
See also: voice interfaces. Your nifty paid version that's entirely local? Good luck competing against free, cloudy, and data-stealing, especially when the data-stealing helps the competing services get better. There's a reason local voice-to-text seemed to be getting really good for a while then suddenly dropped into obscurity.
See also also: any paid (or even free and volunteer-based!) website or service that might compete with ad-paid and/or information-harvesting and free. Uphill battle to gain user-share. You'll almost certainly fail, because information-harvesting is a possible business model and no matter how much people hate it they can't organize to stop it, realistically, because game theory (ahem, which is we have governments, in the short-short version)
Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing that really ought to be handled by government. Up-to-date, freely (or very cheaply) available map data should be considered infrastructure, and government(s) ought to already be generating/collecting it. Let the private market get it to consumers, but governments ought to be providing good-enough data that there's no need for private collection of it, in the general case. Leave street view and business reviews and such to Google and friends, but enough data to build a pretty damn good navigation app should just exist for anyone to use. It's a huge waste of effort to have multiple organizations trying to put all that together and it's something governments should to already have the data to provide, given some coordination—great candidate for a government service, or at least one of those government-coordinated public-private shared-cost-shared-benefit projects, post-war Japan style.
I hesitate to say it's impossible to scale this way, but all of the forms of editorial control we're looking for the Amazons and Facebooks of the world directly impact their ability to scale.
You may say "that's fine", but of course they won't win on price against the thing that DOES scale, so there needs to be some outside force acting on it. Regulation, or every single consumer deciding they prefer X level of service over Y level of discount, or similar.
2.I'm not sure that this works: Amazon sellers can choose not to co-mingle. You got higher chances that brand's own Amazon store will prefer to be on the safe side.