An emerging black market offers Amazon sellers ways to cheat the marketplace
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The reviews are verified reviews, but there's no way for me to know which third party they bought it from so I could avoid them.
I ended up buying them on the manufacturers website. The shipping might not be as fast, but I got a great discount by signing up on their newsletter and it ended being significantly cheaper than Amazon.
This isn't my first experience like this. The biggest pain point of shopping outside of Amazon is the checkout experience of a lot of smaller sites and slower shipping, but I would much rather get my items a couple of days later than have to deal with returning counterfeit items.
I'm surprised about how Amazon is dealing with this issue. It's the growth at all costs approach, taking care of this would hurt their sales numbers -- but that's a pretty myopic view of things. It's the kind of attitude that flooded Twitter with bots, since taking care of that issue would hurt their growth numbers that investors love.
I really hope Amazon fixes this since I like the idea of a one stop shopping experience, but maybe people buying from the manufacturers directly might be better for everyone involved. A universal checkout experience (one login, saves CCs and contact information) would make Amazon obsolete in my opinion.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-Burgundy-Cabernet-Merlot-Glass...
Even on Newegg, I'm usually avoiding the 3rd party sellers, unless it is such a specialized item that it isn't sold by Newegg themselves.
And I too am often looking at the manufacturer's website to see if I can order there. If they support Paypal for checkout, then I don't necessarily have to create yet another account and type in all my shipping details.
At this point I find eBay more trustworthy than Amazon.
I can only assume that's all intended to get more people to buy from sellers without realising.
"Sold by Spark Maestro and Fulfilled by Amazon."
While this is a 3rd party sale, it will be fulfilled from the inventory Amazon has from any other seller. It has to ship from the 3rd party to be safe from counterfeiting.
https://feedvisor.com/university/stickerless-commingled-inve...
The problem is that the "SKU" concept is set up for selling things like drug stores selling bottles of Coca Cola, where hundreds of different franchised bottling plants will produce the same product under license, and so all have the right to slap the same SKU on the result, and it's kind of irrelevant to the consumer what licensed manufacturer produced the bottle.
While this is a common case for consumer products purchased in physical stores, it isn't at-all common for products purchased online. Apple doesn't license the manufacture of iPhones to anybody; thus, nobody but Apple should be considered a valid input for the iPhone-SKU bin in the warehouse.
Ideally, if you, as an Amazon seller, were to print the "Apple iPhone X US-version 64GB Black" UPC code on a box and send that box in to the Amazon warehouse, you should probably immediately get charged with mail fraud. Or maybe trademark infringement. (In fact, I can't see any reason why you couldn't literally trademark your own products' UPC codes, if you don't want anyone else using them.)
Trademarking your UPC would not work, as someone reselling your product is protected by the first-sale doctrine. If I buy a bottle of Pepsi(tm), I can use Pepsi's trademarks when selling that bottle to someone else.
1. buy an iPhone from Apple,
2. install a wiretap into it,
3. repackage it as if it were a Brand New In Box iPhone,
4. and send it to Amazon to dump into their regular BNIB iPhone SKU bin.
That seems nonsensical, right? Maybe trademark won’t work, but something should be preventing that. Maybe Amazon would have to do it themselves—marking certain SKU as “allocated” to particular sellers, and voiding the SKU claim of any other seller who sends them said product, instead slapping a replacement UPC code on that product giving it a namespaced SKU particular to that seller.
To me, this would be like one of the key guidelines of journalism: if you can’t verify a claim from a source, you shouldn’t use that claim, but only mention that claim. I.e., Apple sells iPhones, but everyone else can only sell “iPhones.” They claim that they’re iPhones, but Amazon certainly doesn’t have a way to verify that they’re the exact iPhones Apple sells, so they can’t remove those quotation marks (or bin them in the same bin as Apple iPhones.)
I would note that this is already partially done, in that Amazon warehouses do bin products with a given UPC code as a different SKU if they come in marked as “used.” All I’m suggesting here is a business rule that would change the definition of “used” used by the inventory system to include any secondary-market resale of the product—regardless of the condition of the product—if the product is anything that could be either cloned profitably or tampered with to some useful end.
Aside from the excellent checkout experience Amazon also offers good product search, a near complete product catalog, and cheap fast shipping.
Typing in "<product I want to buy>" into any search engine offers me a near-complete product catalog, with all the same guarantees of consistency and quality (That is, none) that I can expect from Amazon, circa 2019.
Over the last 3 years, I've cancelled standing orders for cereal, hand lotion, granola, cat food, dog food, dog shampoo, human shampoo and human toothpaste because Amazon isn't trustworthy. They simply don't care about counterfeit products.
Better known as PayPal?
For example, here's a fake: https://www.amazon.com/Jeffree-Star-Blue-Blood-Palette/dp/B0...
Another example: I need new brush heads for my electric toothbrush. I haven't bought them yet, in part because I can't be sure that the toothbrush manufacturer-branded refills on Amazon are genuine. Going with a generic, compatible refill with good reviews is preferable in this case, aside from the lower price, because presumably no one will counterfeit it.
And my immediate thought was: 'amazonbasics'.
1. https://www.riedel.com/en/shop/fatto-a-mano/cabernet-merlot-...
Ah, that explains several incidents where I rebought a previously purchased item by searching through the listings in my order history, only to receive a completely different product (I once received lace underwear when rebuying a specific shampoo for example).
This seems like something that Amazon could solve by having humans in the loop, but they probably have too much inventory.
I'm surprised they don't automatically scrub the rating and reviews (why not just automatically generate a new listing and list the old one as unavailable?) for such consequential changes to a product listing.
So some number below 100% apparently.
It's natural language. Conciseness is high value.
But in this case the imprecision could very well be deliberately weasely. The kind of people whose job it is to offer official comment are also the ones whose profession is to exploit the ambiguity of natural language to lead you to think one thing while the reality is a less obvious interpretation.
They aren't lying, exactly.
Is 1/5 a small fraction? Yeah, I guess. Would 1/5 be a ridiculously huge amount of fraud? Also yes!
It really needs to be quantified.
> Concision (alternatively brevity, laconicism, terseness, or conciseness) is the cutting out of unnecessary words while conveying an idea.
It sounds so much more natural.
Don't get me started on "comfortableness".
I'm sure Amazon has stats on fraudulent transactions; would it hurt them to say "two sales per thousand are fraudulent"?
Also, the light that burns twice as bright burns one eighth as long.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-04-22/as-amazon-ge...
The way you get around this, by the way, is by doing the hard work of establishing a brand that customers are willing to pay for. Even then, a certain segment of the market is going to go for low-price. Nothing you can do about that.
Oh the other thing that definitely turned me off is searching for something like a hoodie and getting a page full of results that each give ranges of prices from $10-$50 and the only one for $10 is an xxs in dingy white and everything else is $50. (Just made that example up)
If they put a quarter of the effort into seller fraud they put in to making in as difficult as possible to actually comparison shop in their store...
What finally pushed me over the edge was when 3rd party sellers started text messaging me. Fuck that noise, Bezos, I'm out. (No, not a direct Amazon action; no, that seller did not need my phone number; and yes, it is Amazon's problem.)
Once you've built up a buying history and reach the level of VIP you get a guaranteed refund policy while claims are being investigated. If you request a refund you get the refund while they investigate.
Also refunds for counterfeit are triple on Tmall (optional on Taobao) which makes it fairly easy to figure out if something will be real or not. The seller also has to have a bond of different amounts which is public so you know how much they trust their own products.
I thought that this would be interesting since Amazon just pulled out of China. This is probably one of the main reasons they struggled here. (I live in Shanghai as an expat)
The question is what Amazon will do about it.
Create an association of manufacturers, selling on Amazon , with guarranteed no-co-mingling, and authenticity.
I wonder if Amazon will go along with that?
I think Amazon usually catches on and starts suspending sellers after 6 months to a year after an exploit is discovered but that is a really long time. Even then a lot of these issues are probably small beans compared to the major abuse I see on their platform from Chinese sellers. I can't imagine what kind of counterfeit problems they might have but they have been making changes so I'm sure they'll figure it out within the next year or two. Changes like more seller suspensions for manipulating sales rank, TOS updates, requiring photo ID for new sellers, vendor central updates, and more.
In the long run, it won't matter what third party sellers do because Amz will probably sell directly themselves the 20% of the catalog that makes 80% of their sales whether through their own secret private label brands or their vendor program.