What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues
nytimes.com
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I first started hearing about it around the 2017 eclipse, when people ordering glasses designed to let you safely stare into the sun got fakes that wouldn’t do the job properly, but it seemed to already be pretty widespread by now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...
The "top reviews" are all positive, but all for different products (this is supposed to be a pack of Lightning cables) - phone cases, LG G6 accessories, a rifle stand - and it's the 4th product when searching for "lightning cable".
It looks like they can just completely change the content of an existing listing, including customer reviews, without any oversight.
If anyone is up for a good laugh you can check out reviews here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071WYNY6N/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i...
I've bought a few other things on Amazon that were counterfeit, which is why I cancelled my prime subscription and now look at other stores first. Never ordered climbing gear, but fake jackets are bad enough.
I ordered from BackCountry and loved the gloves just as much as I always had. I don't know if the Amazon listing had truly been hijacked by a counterfeit, but I'm glad I didn't risk it and I tend to try to go to other sites first now.
In all my years, I've never needed the shatter resistance offered by ballistic glasses. Think about how unfortunate it would be to find out on the range that your safety gear is a pair of $2 plastic lenses.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_eyewear#Performance_...
Another one is counterfeit tourniquets. It seems like you basically can't order them off Amazon with any confidence that you're getting the genuine article.
Legislation is already weak there. International legislation is none existened..
Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.
No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.
Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´
Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.
The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.
It reminds me of the case where someone got in trouble with customs because Amazon substituted a counterfeit for the genuine article he ordered and paid for.
It's bizarro world.
You can't even buy a slingshot at Walmart in my state.
They're everywhere. Amazon is just convenient.
If you want to see for yourself, well...
Unless you're plugged into the community for the activity enough to know the reputations of big online vendors, you've got the same problem of low quality, counterfeits, poor fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
Amazon might be easy, but knowing their products may be counterfeit, the company pays next to no tax, and has underpaid staff on awful contracts, I've not bought anything from them for years.
[1] https://www.patrolbase.co.uk/dk/airsoft-glasses-and-goggles
A quick search resulted only in less safety critical gear like maps, clothing etc.. Not saying that this isn't dangerous, too, but are their fake carabiners, ropes and helmets?
Which talks about fake safety logos and https://www.outsideonline.com/2073311/dangerous-climbing-har... which is about eBay rather than Amazon. My personal experience is that Amazon suggests obviously sketchy, NON-UIAA / CE gear rather than established brands. I've bought a lot of caving, climbing, and mountaineering equipment on Amazon and haven't had a problem yet buying Petzl, Elderid, BD etc.
Here is a warning that has been put up in our local climbing center: https://imgur.com/a/R0PGiGI
There are some sellers on AliExpress who stock top quality clones.
Now, if I try to get the original one I'll have to pay 5x and even then I might receive a counterfeit.
Getting it shipped from the source makes final price 7x of the clone.
It's 80DKK (€11) in Denmark.
There is no domination in capitalism. A new competitor always shows up. Consumers are not loyal to Amazon- they will shop anywhere. If you don't believe me look at the airline industry.
Don't blame Amazon if you can't be bothered to use another store. But I am Dutch, I would walk 10 kilometres just to save 50 cents as a matter of principle.
Capitalism is inherently self-destructive because it tends towards a monopoly and unregulated monopolies make competition impossible (especially if they're "vertically integrated", i.e. monopolies at every level of the value chain). Regulation solves this by restraining capitalism and actively working against it. But companies like Amazon and other US megacorps have been lobbying against regulation for decades and in the US they have been extremely effective.
"Don't blame Amazon" is a position from privilege. I make enough money to be able to waste hours clicking through various websites to find the best deal. Whether or not I shop local is largely a question of laziness. But assuming this holds true for everyone is absurd.
There simply is no direct competitor to Amazon. Sure, there are specialised shops and some of them may have put in the effort to gain their target audience's trust and brand recognition, but everyone already has an Amazon account and if you are already paying every month for Prime shipping (now included in your VOD package!) why not just shop Amazon -- you'll likely order something from them anyway, so just throw it in and maybe you pay enough to hit the threshold for that "plus" product that's been collecting dust in your shopping card.
Amazon is a profit-driven corporation. Amazon drives down prices to gain market share and starve competitors. Then it repeats that process with different markets so customers come to rely on them for most of their online shopping (ideally also reinforced via products like Alexa, Kindle or Fire). Then they ramp up prices or lower costs (i.e. quality controls) as customers are too heavily invested to switch to a competitor for any given niche and their service range is too broad for any competitor to meaningfully offer an alternative. That's how you succeed as a corporation under capitalism at this point.
I'm not angry with Amazon because Amazon is winning at the game of capitalism. I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't be forced to play the game because the way its rules work mean it will invariably end -- and that's something we generally don't want for our society as a whole.
It doesn't even matter whether we right now are experiencing "late game" (i.e. late stage capitalism) or not: the rules are already causing harm and literally killing people, so that's enough of a reason to want to stop.
That said, you can't just decide to stop playing if you're deeply entangled in the system. If everyone around you pretends private ownership is a thing and you don't happen to already "own" everything you need to sustain yourself without interacting with them, "not playing" means giving up access to things you need to survive.
Jeff Bezos could probably buy a private island, gather a group of likeminded people and form a commune and not have to worry about the basic necessities of life for the rest of his days. But a wage employee living from paycheck to paycheck doesn't have that luxury. Being able to exit the game without losing everything is only possible if you're already winning.
TL;DR: Regulation is good because it changes the rules of the game of capitalism, not because it enforces them.
If I can avoid Amazon I will, if I can’t I try to order directly from the manufacturer and no other seller.
Often when I try to find something just a little bit out of the ordinary, Amazon tends to be the only option.
And when there is another option, even something like best buy, their experience can be pretty bad (my best buy account is in some sort of limbo where I have been able to create it but can't access it .. so I have to do all my purchases in guest mode).
For any readers from Germany, booklooker.de is great for books. You can buy used and new books with an extremely efficient, no-nonsense user interface. Fulfilled by large and small bookstores and even private sellers. You see the actual vendor before you buy.
And reviews only tell half the story. If a $700 product gets four stars but its $100 alternative does as well despite being nowhere near as good, what good are reviews? I mean people putting down reviews don't have both products to compare with one another.
I think it would pay off for Amazon in the long run. Right now, I avoid Amazon for any significant purchases, because I do not trust them.
From my understanding/experience, dealing with counterfeit items is mostly the responsibility of the IP owner and mostly handled at borders, for the United States you mostly find this in 19 CFR 133 for intellectual property rights.
For trade name stuff, the trade name must have been in use for at least 6 months.
For trademark it has to be registered in Washington DC at the Patent Office, is good for 20 years, has to be registered with Customs and has a fee to register.
Copyright stuff is similar to trademark.
If Customs has suspicion of trade name/trade mark infringement they will detain the shipment, notify the importer of record and the IOR has 30 days to respond and get owner's approval for release of the shipment. The IP owner will also be notified with the date of import, port, name of manufacturer and the importer of record, the country of origin and then the owner has 30 days to respond before release, if the owner wants to stop the shipment they have to post a bond for the value of the shipment at which point Customs will provide a sample and the owner can decide to release the shipment to the importer of record , allow the importer of record to export it out of the country or to remove the objectionable mark before it can be released.
For counterfeit merchandise, Customs will seize and/or destroy it and they will notify the IP owner the names of the importer of record, manufacturer, country of origin and quantity.
For patents, has to be registered with the Patent Office and is good for 20 years. If there is infringement a import survey can be requested and and exclusion order can be obtained from the International Trade Commission.
For grey market articles (genuine articles but not permitted to be imported into the united states, think licensing agreement/authorized reseller type thing) it will get detained, it will be checked against a database, if the importer of record is on the allowed list it will be released and if not the shipment is seized.
The problem with this is, Customs doesn't manually inspect every single shipment so it is fairly easy to get the vast majority of counterfeit goods in. Once it is inside the country, it's basically entirely on the company that's product has been counterfeited to identify counterfeit merchandise, identify sellers and pursue legal action.
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I've seen plenty of tales on reddit and elsewhere of individuals selling knock off Oakleys/Coach bags etc get letters from the owners/their law firms and some instances of suit.
If you're selling small amounts, one can fly under the radar, if you're insulated somewhat by Amazon/FBA then it can also slow down all but larger companies from coming after you.
If you do get caught, my understanding is they'll usually cease and desist you. If you persist, they can come after you under the Lanham Act for 3x profit or damages (whichever is greater).
But that's where customs should come in; counterfeiting products is illegal, selling fake brand clothing is illegal, and if Amazon sells them they can (and should) be held accountable. It's that branch of law enforcement's job to protect both consumers and brands from counterfeits, you pay taxes for that reason.
However, when someone DOES notice, the situation must be remedied. Amazon should be liable to some degree for everything they sell. Consumers should have recourse. Maybe they already do? Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product?
Yes, very easily but that's not enough because Amazon still profits so massively from everyone else that it doesn't even raise a bell in their accounting.
Amazon likely tells governments that being held accountable for things like this would dramatically hurt their business, and therefore cost jobs. No politician wants to be blamed for lost jobs.
when amazon warehouses will be all robots, they won't have this leverage. What a good news.
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/2/15/18225646/amazon...
The progressives still represent a fairly small contingent of the left, and don’t really have the influence to materially alter policy decisions, especially at the federal level. Much of the US still isn’t very interested in progressive politics, especially given the migration of moderate conservatives to the Democratic Party.
2020 is going to be a make-or-break election for progressives IMO.
More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?
Not a good analogy, ISPs are dumb pipes. Amazon boosts and profits from bad actors. None of them would have a chance to get the reach Amazon provides them. Of course Amazon should be held accountable. I don't buy the "open platform" angle when it comes to FB, Google, etc.
Very dramatic. If you don't want to be subject to Amazon, run your own shop. It's easier than ever before. I really don't understand how counter-fitters should be under any kind of protection by Amazon. And why Amazon should not be held to a standard that does not make them accomplices to black sheep.
Amazon could handle that problem by helping the small merchants more though. Bezos does claim to be "obsessed with the customer" after all, and those businesses are his customers.
Allowing people who buy things on Amazon to get fake products is failing everyone in the whole supply chain apart from the business that supplies the fakes and Amazon itself. If I were Bezos I'd be quite unhappy about that.
Yes, if that's what it takes.
Yes, exactly that, since they've proven to be so utterly inept (or complicit) when it comes to regulating counterfeit products.
Amazon's not just an "open platform" here. Through deliberate features of their logistics system and customer-facing storefront, the primary branding on anything bought via Amazon is _Amazon's_.
Take for example the FBA program with shared stocking. Amazon relies on a supplier's assertion that their goods are not counterfeit and are identical to others of the same SKU, but it then repeats that representation to the consumer on Amazon's own behalf.
The advantage of Amazon's model is that it provides an integrated storefront, but it is not an "open platform" as a result. eBay is closer to an open platform, and there the difference between individual sellers is a first-order feature, where even sellers of identical goods manage their own listings and product descriptions.
Apparently you can get “brand protection” in some special cases, but it should be default.
The government is not likely to step with criminal enforcement unless they are presented with proof that Amazon purposefully ordered the fakes, or knowingly sold fakes.
Generally speaking, retailers are considered victims, not perpetrators, of counterfeiting. That's because when a retailer sells a counterfeit, the retailer has to process the returns and deal with angry customers, and then they're left with worthless inventory.
Again, the exception is if the retailer knowingly traffics in fakes and tries to defraud their customers. Proving that takes some pretty specific evidence though.
I often buy things from amazon-like storefronts here in asia and sometimes they refund no questions asked but sometimes they require you to ship it back and 90% of the time it's not worth it. All of these "free returns" policies sound much better than they actually are.
One of more recent anecdotes: I bought a new keyboard for my Thinkpad which said "genuine" and serial numbers in decription match ones with Lenovo's. The keyboard turned out to be fine but had no backlight. My point is that packing it up and sending it back to neihbouring country is just not worth it. I clicked refund and left a negative review and that's pretty much as far as I'm willing to go for 60$ that I've spent.
Returning means you need to repack and re-ship the item. Sometimes they cover the shipping cost but not always
Sometimes the counterfeit item only becomes evident after the return window has expired, like buying a wireless adapter for game controllers that breaks in 2 months. (It turns out one of the earliest rampant counterfeit issues on Amazon was people selling knockoff USB adapters for XBox controllers, oddly enough). At that point you can't return, all you can do is leave a nasty review for the product you bought From Amazon.
Some counterfeits are basically indistinguishable from the real product unless you're an expert. If you buy some vitamins or Tylenol off amazon, do you really have the resources and expertise to identify whether they're fakes or tainted or a batch that failed to pass quality control? So now you have to convince Amazon to take this thing back.
In the end at this point Amazon knows very well how much counterfeiting is happening on their platform and they aren't taking enough effort to stop it. It can't all lie on the individual customer to spot and combat counterfeits, they aren't able to do it.
The equivalent would be holding a shopping mall liable for the fraud and lost business one of their tenant caused by sourcing counterfeit goods. I don't see any brick and mortar shopping mall getting more than a tap on the wrist under this premise.
This is the same crap that Uber tries: if you want the power to control the (work|sale) experience to such a degree, then you have to take responsibility when it goes wrong.
1) There's a single unified storefront 2) Supplier of a product is transparent to the customer shopping experience 3) The checkout, payment, and shipping experience is singular and unified
The unified and efficient experience is amazon's strength, and I still make 90% of my purchases there. But yes, they should police and be held accountable for bad suppliers. It is amazon's store they are being sold at.
Regardless of the eventual outcome of the suit, this ruling may have implications for other online storefronts. Here, the Court saw online storefronts as the sellers of goods sold, regardless of whatever business arrangements may be in place between the suppliers and the storefront. Under this interpretation, it's likely that fewer antitrust suits could get thrown out on questions of standing against storefronts. With these prospects, it's likely that more suits will be brought.
My prediction is that to mitigate this, storefronts will try to introduce more visual separation between first-party store and the third-party sellers' stores, even if the items are still found from a unified search and catalogue. The purchasing of the third-party item will take place at the third-party storefront, but the payment will be processed by the captive aggregator and fulfilled and supported by them as well.
It's strange (ok, not really, and not surprising) that one of the biggest, richest, smartest companies is given a pass on following the same rules that little people have to follow.
Amazon has no legitimate excuse, period. And if Bezos is the high performing micromanager that we've read about, then it's a certainty that he knows that they are flagrantly selling (or facilitating the sale of) counterfeit goods.
Let's put this a different way: If some of the products on Amazon were known to be hollow shells filled with drugs, you can bet that Amazon would suddenly become capable of identifying and preventing the sale of illegal products.
Although they probably still wouldn't face any legal liability, going back to your parenthetical comment "not surprising".
It could be because:
1) Fake product issue is not as widespread (per user, seller or per transaction)
2) Fake product cases are usually resolved in a satisfactory enough way to dissuade the consumer/seller from seeking alternatives
3) The annoyance of getting a fake product is outweighed by other conveniences offered
If any of the above is true, well, there is not a real problem for Amazon to address.
Of course, the assumption is that there are theoretical alternatives to Amazon for getting stuff you need, minus the convenience perhaps, but with higher degree of trust in product quality.
> Heavy metal poisoning may take years to show effects.
> Shoddily made laptop chargers may be a fire/shock hazard that kill in 100/1,000,000 instead of 1/1,000,000 cases.
> Not every dangerous counterfeit is immediately obvious as such.
> If you're slathering it all over your body but you have no idea where or how it was made, do you suppose that you might suffer from deferred regret at some point in the future?
So, yeah, if the counterfeit is just as good, then fantastic. If it's not, that's a problem. If it's not in a non-obvious way that affects health or safety, that's a big problem.
To me, the real victims are the original product sellers.
But, take the case of USB chargers. If the name-brand bursts into flames at a rate of 1/1000000 and the fake 1/1000, most consumers will never know they received a fake. But, for those that have their house burst into flames, the fake was not worth the savings.
If this hit rate is normal across electronics on Amazon I have to imagine it's just plain ignorance on the part of the customer. Because there's no way Amazon could live with a return rate > 50%, which is what I'm at right now.
Amazon is able to hide behind the fact that more than half of what is sold on the site is from unvetted 3rd party sellers.
I don't think books are a good indicator of what will befall real products. There's no doubt Amazon is causing major pains in that area, but I don't think they'll ever "complete" that domination.
I actually see a different future. Artificial scarcity becomes easier with improvements to cryptography. I think the future is full of artificially scarce goods, such as music, video, crypto kitties, etc.
https://corydoctorow.miraheze.org/wiki/DRM_and_MSFT:_A_Produ...
For example my Galaxy S9 phone has a locked bootloader. It only boots software signed by Samsung's private key. Google makes DRM software, Netflix and co. sign on, Samsung puts the DRM in their phones because they're useless without Netflix.
The only way to find out how to decrypt the video is to crack the hardware. And some companies might make shitty hardware, but Apple has shown that it's very possible to make a locked down device that takes millions+ of dollars to hack.
Intel iirc had special paths in their processors for video DRM. Google's Widewine DRM is available in all the major browsers. MS has been pushing restricted boot for a while. All that's left is for them to make it mandatory.
Of course none of this matters because you can just record the screen or the speakers... If you're serving content into Bob's eyes or ears then he can use fake eyes or ears to record it.
Crypto kitties or hats as part of a central service like a game, that stuff can actually be kept artificially scarce.
Unlike banks, Amazon is now simply too big to fail.
(Because unlike banks, Amazon has a million and one services that all more than compensate for each other. Amazon, the website, is barely a fraction of Amazon, the corporation)
A generation ago, you could have said that about Microsoft. Somebody can indeed force them to "fix their shit" -- government. ...and they will. You can already see some ripples on the pond. Watch out, though, because the government can have a heavy hand and often the cure is worse than the disease.
Turned out to mostly be typical human drama, fear & pandering, media headline bait, and bullshit than anything else. The exact same will prove to be true in the case of Amazon, and it's extraordinarily obvious that will be the case.
If you have the time, I'd love to hear more about the ripples on the pond, because the only thing I see governments look at right now is getting Amazon to pay more money for continuing to operate all its ventures, which it can _easily_ do if it were legislated into paying more than it does now.
Well, I do agree with that, with two large caveats:
- their capability to seek rent is still enormous, they are still one of the most powerful companies in the world on that;
- and I have no idea how much of that loss comes from government intervention and competition, instead of previous bad management.
genuinely curious, what kinds of things do you order? I place 1-2 orders every month and I've never received anything that I suspected was counterfeit.
- a car battery maintainer that doens't really charge the battery
- 2 puzzles that the pieces don't fit together and many of them broke.
- a snowboard edge tuner that ended up breaking after about 5 uses.
- an iphone charging cable that fell apart after about a year even though it claimed to be kevlar braided.
- a spatula that must have been 24 gauge sheet metal stamped into a "spatula" shape.
- some glass screen protectors for my iphone that don't fit.
- an air filter for my car that doensn't fit the car it's listed for.
- a wireless charger that the micro-usb port broke within 2 months.
All of those were from 2018. Now that I look through my history I'll change the 7/10 to 5/10 but in my book that's sill absolutely unacceptable. I'm sure there's more diligence I can do to make sure that I only buy name brand products but Amazon has lost my trust.
Example:
1. Search for "car battery charger"
2. "Amazon's Choice" result is a brand called Ampeak
3. Google "Ampeak trademark"
4. Ahhhh, "AMPEAK is a trademark of SHENZHEN JIADING ECOMMERCE LTD."
Exercise of trying to find any information about "Shenzhen Jiading Ecommerce LTD" left to the reader.
Also:
1. Try to find a website for both the brand and the manufacturer. "Ampeak" does have a website but lacks company information.
2. Note if the listing is dominated by gushing 5-star reviews and 1-star "what the heck did I just buy" reviews, something you can observe in the Ampeak charger listing.
Because a lot of people kept doing that their entire life. Just now, it's becoming normal for people in America
But I didn’t get him one of those because that would have cost more than the entire assortment of arduino, wire, power suppliers, soldering iron and other components that I got him.
If he really likes it, then I’d buy him a nice one, but here Amazon was great for the use case of I want to knowingly buy cheap stuff and risk it might break.
5. Keep looking down Amazon's product listings.
6. Notice that _every single thing in the list_ is a weird pseudo-brand whose products are presumably drop-shipped from China.
7. Notice that many of these things, although nominally having different manufacturers, are obviously pretty much the same thing, probably coming out of the same factory.
8. Try to find some suitable products somewhere in the list that actually come from companies you might have heard of and that aren't just reselling the same probably-low-quality Chinese products.
9. Give up and go to a bricks-and-mortar store.
(For me, looking at Amazon UK, for the particular search mentioned above there do seem to be a few real products in among the deluge of fake-brand junk. But often >90% of the products in the list are fake-brand junk. And of course then there's the possibility that the real products are actually fakes too.)
my usual shopping workflow is 1) lookup the wirecutter article for the item I want, then 2) go to amazon and get the top or budget wirecutter pick (depending on price and how much I care). I've never been disappointed by the item I got, but I definitely understand if you don't want to work this hard for a spatula. I guess I have some sort of amazon stockholm syndrome if I never noticed the problem with my workflow. for me, it's just a warehouse full of random items with free two day shipping. the index to the items is external to the service.
For awhile, iPhone accessories were either fake or grey market. I think that improved recently.
I think amazon is very aware of that and is working towards their own shipping service for a reason. They are still a shitty company, but at least i dont have the hassle of running after my shipments.
Even though I'd preferentially avoid Amazon much of the time, this is true. I wish Apple Pay for web purchase would become ubiquitous (and my credit card issuer would add support) to sidestep this issue.
We have two couples living in our house and receive 5-15 Amazon packages a week and have never had a single "OMG this is counterfeit/fake/literal garbage" moment. And all of us LOVE to complain about any opportunity that has a sliver of a chance at a discount. Meanwhile, I have read numerous HN accounts of "OMG, Amazon is always sending me counterfeit/fake stuff"
At this point, I'm honestly thinking there are troll(s) on HN bashing Amazon. Also, the returns are EASY, so... What gives? I hate that Amazon is TBTF and Bezos controls more resources than some Nations, but the facts for me are: Amazon delivers what I want very quickly at reasonable prices. They often have items that I literally cannot buy locally. I wish I could always support my local people, but often as not, Amazon does a better job with less friction.
Seriously? 7\10?? You buy 10 widgets and (want to) return 7 of them? I'm just going to say this now: you are either pulling numbers out of your ass (on a technical-loving web site) or you are outright lying.
THAT'S what it means for Amazon to be too big to fail: the consumer does NOT have any power anymore. We passed that point. Simply by participating in society, some of your money will end up in Amazon's hands, because they own the infrastructure on which society now runs.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's true that they have a ton of money, but they also have a lot of exposure. Lobbying is most effective for companies that are obscure and their interests are adverse to either very few people or to everybody but only in a virtually unnoticeable way.
Even very wealthy industries that are high profile and piss off everyone tend to eventually get regulated. See e.g. banks.
Please do let Amazon fail if they do not go out of their way to fix this as soon as possible.
Amazon moves in and takes over an industry due to both economies of scale and scope (i.e. shared services/costs). If they allow lower quality, niche or competing substitutes can exist.
If they offer inferior products, people will substitute away to a better quality option. This is why Walmart is not the only retailer, and space for mid quality retailers like Target or grocery chains exist.
If it were just a handful of cases, you wouldn't have a million "bad actors" getting caught. You'd have a handful. A million people a year aren't trying this because it's unprofitable.
A million accounts a year being banned means folks are seeing all that trouble (it's not anywhere near as easy a process as just signing up for a consumer Amazon account) as worthwhile.
If the item is shipped by a third party directly, tracing the counterfeit origin is easy.
It's the comingling at the Amazon fulfillment centers that muddies the water. However, why not just tag each individual item with the supplying vendor as it arrives? You must of course credit them with stock, so just assign a code for that unit or box or pallet connected to that seller. They can still cross-fulfill (though I don't think they should) and record the origin code with each order as it's packed. Don't tell me this is too complicated for Amazon. It's an extra code like a second SKU per item, not conceptually challenging. Of course there are process issues to solve, but this should be a huge internal priority for Amazon. I see it as a weak spot that leaves room for a competitor to do better.
Of course identifying fakes is still a challenge, manufacturers have long had systems for verifying authentic units. If a $20 webcam has a unique serial number I don't see why we couldn't have one for an $80 board game.
The base problem is that UPC. Amazon wants to use it to identify everything, as it's already there, and easy to use. However, it's also easy to counterfeit along with the item.
It would also be a significant technical challenge, as it would increase the size of Amazon's item database by at least an order of magnitude, and would increase the amount of unique bins they need to maintain in the warehouse by a lot too.
They clearly need to do something, but understand why they don't want to go down the road of tagging per-vendor if they can avoid it. On more expensive items, they seem to be trying the alternative of allowing vendors that control their supply chains to also exercise control of the amazon supply chain. It's starting to hit for more prominent vendors. I can no longer sell used Canon lenses on Amazon anymore. To do so, I need approval, which consists of "At least 1 purchase invoice for products from a manufacturer or distributor, 1 letter from Canon authorizing you to sell their products". (Note, this is for selling used gear, not new, or like-new. Just normal, used camera lenses that I bought and no longer need.)
The standard policy in China is x3 refund if the product is fake.
The all online sellers have this policy but it makes it a lot easier to tell if something is likely to be fake. Also if you get a fake then you get a triple refund...
Suppliers may not be using 100% fakes, making them much harder to catch. Customers may also be a significant part of the problem, due to Amazon's return policy. Customers can easily claim a fake, then ship a fake item back, blaming the supplier.
There's no way to know for sure without Amazon themselves testing the products, which would be costly. Most items do not have unique serial numbers, and even if they did, opening boxes to confirm matching serial numbers would likely be cost prohibitive.
Amazon does track the original source of the items it fulfills already.
See e.g. Amazon comment in this article: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/04/03/1554287401000/Amazon-...
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
And at any rate, white label organic foods are just generic foods (like you find in bags at the bottom of the cereal aisle) that were grown using different types of fertilizers. It's not like "365" is an actual company. It's a label slapped on any number of generic stuff.
Instead, your argument seems to reject the idea that Whole Foods - or any brand - has a brand image, and associated cachet, which people are willing to pay for.
This is the difference between manufacturer's brands and white label brands.
Using your brand model, can you explain why Unilever paid $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club, when Dollar Shave Club razors are Dorco products?
Speaking of Chinese watches, people by MVMT watches for the brand, yes?
(Yes, it's not an 'arbitrary Chinese watch' as MVMT does quality assurance. But brands aren't created on "arbitrary Chinese watches" so I assume you were using hyperbole rather than making a meaningless statement.)
But your statement "white Label brands tell you nothing about the product" is not correct.
I gave two examples (razors, watches) where people buy white label goods and pay more because of an attached brand.
That's because brands don't provide only a product but can also provide a service. That service might be quality management, or it may be cachet, as in "selling a lifestyle".
Hence why I point out there's good market evidence that your original statement is "overly dismissive" of brands.
In this case for Amazon, it's reaching a limit of capitalism: only selling the most common and profitable items in order to maximize profit and minimize waste (which itself maximizes profit). This will have the side-effect of making the "things they no longer sell" have greater value due to their scarcity, and in turn greater profitability as a 'boutique' product.
Similar theory to the unrelated topic of coal versus renewable energy, in that as renewables gain popularity the demand for coal will go down, and therefore the price goes down as well, lowering the point at which coal and renewables compete for being the cheaper source of energy (carbon price notwithstanding).
Another example, although far more theoretical, is that of personality profiling. What are the fringes? Once you've removed the "terrorist"-level fringes, does the system re-adjust to a new normal and give a new set of fringes to target?
Forced normalization as an end-result of pure data analytics (AI, ML whatever you want to call it).
I'm assuming these effects are covered by fairly basic economic theory (which I haven't studied, but somehow find more and more interesting as I get older).
Is the inventory commingled, are the sellers better vetted, is it obvious that you are buying from a 3rd party and not Walmart, all that I don't know. Just pointing this out.
- https://www.axios.com/former-snapchat-exec-launches-an-amazo...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/18/former-snap-exec-imran-khans...
I regularly buy from a small website that isn't run by Amazon - some months after every order I get a different credit card in the mail because someone hacked the small website. They really need to give up on running their own secure payment processor and hire someone bigger. (I order from them because for the obscure parts my car needs they have the right one in stock and know which are right)
Amazon has the infrastructure to deliver anywhere in the US in a reasonable time and their size allows them to offset that guy in the Oregon woods ordering a pair of socks with a Manhattanite hipster ordering a $1500 coffeemaker.
The raw numbers are impressive, but they clearly aren't in the game of profit maximisation as we knew it back in the 80s. That is why nobody is really managing to compete with them.
I don't really see how they could maintain a monopoly and a margin at the same time. If they had actual profit margins then other companies would compete with them. The reason they look like a monopoly at the moment is because they have no margins. If they change that, competition will spring up like mushrooms.
Amazon is basically a web services provider by profit. All the other stuff they do is a mysterious distraction. If you want a company making for-profit decisions, look at how Apple runs itself.
As long as it takes to get the monopoly.
This can't be rushed. Their competition is from i.e. Walmart. These competitors are big and a single major event isn't going to take them down. It requires a series of major events for a company of that size to fall out of serious competition. But it does happen: look at Sears. It took almost three decades, starting with a pricing scandal in 1992 to declaring bankruptcy in 2018, with many mis-steps along the way, but they did eventually fall.
> I don't really see how they could maintain a monopoly and a margin at the same time. If they had actual profit margins then other companies would compete with them.
By that logic, monopolies can't be profitable, but they clearly are profitable, so your logic must be faulty.
Once a company reaches a certain scale, it becomes very difficult to start a competing company for a bunch of reasons:
1. First to market advantage: name recognition. Amazon is a household name. A new company isn't. A new company could overcome this with marketing, but marketing costs money, and then they have to pass that cost on to consumers, and Amazon will win on price.
2. First to market advantage: pre-existing infrastructure. Amazon has warehouses everywhere, so they can deliver to most places quickly. In places like NYC or SF they can deliver something from a few miles away, so they can deliver it on the same day. They have already spent this money, so they can provide this speed at a lower cost. A new company could overcome this by building out their own infrastructure, but this costs money which they have to pass on to consumers, and again Amazon wins on price.
3. Efficiencies of scale: Amazon is already huge. If it costs them $10 to write a line of code or lay a brick, that cost is amortized across millions of purchases that occur each day. A new company has to write the same line of code and lay the same brick to provide the same feature or distribution center, but that cost is amortized across only a few hundred purchases a day when they're new.
There are more reasons, but basically, Amazon is well past the point where new companies could pop up and reasonably compete with them based on profit margins alone. They still have competition, but it's from the likes of Walmart--other giant companies that already have some of the same advantages Amazon does. It would be possible for a newcomer to compete, but it would require an extraordinary innovation which is highly unlikely.
> The reason they look like a monopoly at the moment is because they have no margins. If they change that, competition will spring up like mushrooms.
They don't look like a monopoly because they aren't yet. They have major competition with, for example, Walmart.
Ok, probably not, but if we're talking about the dystopian end state of a system where the middlemen have gotten out of control then maybe we should look out for things like that.
In _Anathem_ (a sci-fi novel) Stephenson describes a future where for every authentic version of a document on the net there are millions of fake ones--bogons, they call them. The history of how the bogons (and the defence system that successfully ignores them most of the time) is somewhat left to the imagination, but I imagined it like this:
- Content creators set up special channels where they can get paid for access to the content.
- Parasites infiltrate the channels and resell access the content, undercutting the Creators.
- The Creators ban the Parasites from the channels, so they can't make copies of the content.
- The Parasites re-infiltrate without much delay.
- The Creators stop banning the Parasites, and instead--after identifying them--serve them slightly degraded content, so rather than having to compete with themselves, the Creators now compete with a slightly shittier version of themselves. They hope the Parasites don't notice the content degradation.
- The Parasites notice the degradation and get new identities, and continue reselling the original content.
- There arms race between these parties produces better and better fakes, to the point where there's so much fake news (or whatever content) that the only way to verify its authenticity is to re-do the journalism yourself to see what you find.
In my version, the Creators win by establishing an economy of trust (part PGP, part cryptocurrency) where being a parasite is less profitable than either making good content or helping distribute good content (in a way that benefits the creator and gives the consumer reason to believe that they're not being lied to).
I'm not sure if I think this will actually happen, but if it does then we'll have to go through the pre-web-of-trust darkness (where the light of truth is occluded by bogons) before things are reliably authentic again.
The kickstarter plan would be to either sue Amazon as class, or sue based on the best individual cases in all available jurisdictions, or failing all of that, to lobby the government to bring Amazon under control. Assuming it got enough funding, is there any chance that the lawsuits or lobbying would work?
However, as is the trend nowadays, Amazon's Conditions of Use[1] include an arbitration clause, so that will probably make it rather difficult to bring a suit anyway.
EDIT: clarification
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
The article points out how sellers are creating unique, non-fungible goods. So how does a customer even initially know that they're discovering 'the original' and not something that has been re-branded? With a Lamborghini, re-naming the car to another brand isn't a problem since the customer won't find it (and a supply chain integrity solution might work.) But how would you solve the Amazon problem?
I suppose you could have a time-locked escrow account where sale funds had to be locked there for N days. That way there would be time to challenge counterfeit sales and re-distribute the funds to the original authors (and / or make customers whole) when fraud was detected. But I am pretty sure people would hate that. Everyone would have to agree to use it for it to work and it wouldn't stop the potential for brand damage from low-quality counterfeits.
If it were a short enough time-lock though, it might work? High enough that it removes the incentive for fraud, low enough that it doesn't frustrate vendors.
Amazon lacks basic search filters. And it has a lot of other annoyances. For example when I search for shoes in my size, Amazon won't display the price of the shoes in my size until I click on the shoes. Instead of shows the price range for all sizes in the list of shoes. Makes it a huge hassle to browse through a lot of shoes.
Still sounds like negligence. Obviously non-trivial to fix too.
Still, it's Amazons responsibility to do so.
Amazing mental gymnastics over there :-)
I refuse to believe that a company with these values: https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/principles, a pretty thorough recruitment process, probably 100k engineers (including many, many data engineers) on their payroll, etc. can't do better about identifying fakes.
It's just not in their interest because $$$.
Meh, I'd call that negligence. They're knowingly allowing harm to come to others, through putting in a token effort (CYA style) rather than instituting meaningful change.
And it's their marketplace, so they get to set the rules, and they have significant resources if they actually wanted to engage.
https://stallman.org/amazon.html
And it looks like the list needs to be extended.
There are a variety of justifications for copyright in various legal systems around the world, and I can't think of any of them where information being digital as opposed to analog would make a difference.
All digital really changes, as far as I can see, is that it makes it possible to make perfect copies and it makes the cost of copying essentially zero. None of the copyright justifications I'm aware of are based on copying being hard or expensive.
up to the internet any digital (or analog) copies needed to be transfered along with a physical (thus exclusive) object.
of course none of the copyright justifications are based on the cost of copying becuase it had never been so easy to do. I can't imagine the legal justification of anything being based on technological possibilites from future times.
in any case I think about it "from the other direction" (so to say). I start from the fact that digital copying is so increadiby cheap/easy that we should take advantange of this technological ability instead of trying to diminish it because of "the market's business interests"
Technological changes that lower the cost of copying and make it faster to copy make the case stronger, not weaker, for copyright under that justification.
> in any case I think about it "from the other direction" (so to say). I start from the fact that digital copying is so increadiby cheap/easy that we should take advantange of this technological ability instead of trying to diminish it because of "the market's business interests"
Copyright under the cost of copying type of justification is based on artificially giving things like music recording the same attributes as physical goods, so that the free market can determine what new works should be produced. This trade-off with this is that this does mean that the price of a recording to the consumer is higher than it should be (which is close to the marginal cost of making a copy).
There's no reason we have to try to make the free market handle deciding what gets produced. By giving that up, we can make the cost to consumers near zero like you want, but we then do have to come up with a different way to decide what gets produced and how that is paid for.
An author asks for money upfront. This amount is going to fund the creation of the work. Then a copy goes to the preparers to do as they wish (including making copies to distribute). I foresee crowd funded prepayments to be the norm in the future, and also sponsorships (like patreon) style payments would be the alternative model.
why would this be necessarily true? And prepayment could work if the payment is discounted enough for unknown creators.
I take it there aren't too many pirate movies being sold so that Hollywood won't get involved.
Lots of interesting thought experiments and research could go into separating the differences between, and collating the similarities of, the two.
The original Pirate Bay founders were pursued internationally to be held accountable for their intellectual property facilitation. Will Jeff Bezos join Kim Dotcom in New Zealand to hide from US prosecution for facilitating the sale of counterfeit books? Will there be any follow-up or holding to account? Hahahaha, NO!
How does this sit within the context of the US-China trade war?
(Physical) Counterfeit products versus (electronic) intellectual property breaches, with seemingly more importance placed upon the less tangible, electronic, law-breaking.
You've found the entry to a labyrinthine rabbit hole.
I do. On Amazon you pay real money to get the real thing, potentially for something important like medical texts or safety equipment. You expect to be able to trust them, and that trust is broken. Customers get defrauded.
On Pirate Bay, you pay nothing to get something you know is illegal and might be malware. Users are not getting defrauded; they are the ones doing something illegal, and the "sellers" are not directly profiting from it. So what Amazon is doing is significantly worse and more dangerous than The Pirate Bay.
What a bullshit article, in the usual fashion: collecting a bunch of anecdotes, to convince readers "emotionally" that Amazon is the devil.
The reality is probably that at the scale of Amazon, some issues are bound to happen. "Journalists" looking for "evidence" can always find some anecdotes to relay.
Counterfeiting is big business in China and other places. It's presumably a difficult problem. It would exist with or without Amazon. Article does not give any indication that it would be easier for Amazon to fight it.
Although this doesnt change anything. Given how easy it would be for a competitor Fortune 500 to dump resources and marketing into a competing store, they could never 'get away with murder'.
FAANG has more to worry about the tech bubble, than the world with FAANG.
Uh... this seems like an unsubstantiated claim. It's my understanding Amazon has multiple team actively working on manual and automated anti-fraud including for counterfeit.
I think there's more inherent problems to this:
1. Making it easier for sellers to sell, mean it's also easier for fraudsters to do so. 2. Being so popular and central means all fraudsters focus their energy on it.
Saying that there's zero counterfeit implies that quality is always the same (good quality, most of the time).
By not acknowledging the existance of counterfeit, Amazon doesn't allow us to publicize and hence compare the quality of different sellers.
Even if the quality of the counterfeit (not sure why you used scare quotes) is fine and you save a few dollars, in the following years you'll find fewer and fewer new books you care to by because few people are writing them.