Hacker News Reader

Comment by pytyper2 | Hacker News Reader

They can't solve it because in many cases you are not buying from amazon, you are buying from some rando merchant who posted an ad. Unless it is sold by amazon (not FBA or seller fulfilled) the relationship is no different than Buy It Now on Ebay. The actual risk is that people realize this and generally stop thinking of amazon as premium and realize it is pretty much another eBay style marketplace in disguise. The only possible solution is to run a process like StockX, but good luck training seasonal workers to spot some fake Yeezy sneakers... I guess they could buy StockX and outsource authentication of Luxury brand items that are not received from an official supply chain. I'm with you though, it needs to be solved, not just accounted for.

View on HN

I was under the impression that all widgets are equal in Amazon's inventory and logistics system, so items from all FBA sellers and Amazon itself are intermixed. That is, buying from Amazon or a specific seller is no guarantee of a genuine product. Is this not the case?

(This is worse than eBay, since you can't even choose your supplier by reputation.)

This isn't correct. There are "comingled" and "non comingled". Sellers pay more for the latter.

Also, there's FBA and non-FBA.

Better distinction on the buyer side would go a long way

Of course, Amazon doesn't want any 1 seller becoming too poplular because that means they can stop competing on price.

You don't need to train floor employees to spot counter fits, they just need to fix ratings to enable customers to make an informed choice. Counterfeit items work because counterfeit ratings keep them promoted in search results.

Ebay works on a trust system, feedback is good/bad/neutral with a short dialogue and rolling seller ratings over a few timescales to help users guage product/seller quality. It works reasonably well.

With Amazon you need to use third party tools to filter out the bots get a similar level of information, but you have to manually wade through a bunch of bad results.

How about buying either at the stores of branded goods manufacturers, or their certified outlets?

Buying very expensive brands from Amazon is an invite to get a fake since no reputable brand (in the very expensive segment) will use Amazon as a retail channel.

Even with lesser brands you run a super high risk of not getting the real thing.

This story[1] is a reminder of what you're likely wind up with. Upon reading it I was just shaking my head and thinking "I could have told you so"

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...

This is what I do, my opinions on e-commerce have changed over the years, I source following this priority: locally boutique or small stores, boutique or brand websites, local big box, online big box.

This seems like a more difficult problem, is there any marketplace that has solved the fake review problem? Spotting a fake sneaker is probably 99% accurate for a trained buyer, but spotting a fake review, not so much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com