People think they buy from "Amazon" and not a "marketplace", as it's how it used to be. Even though it's now more or less just a high-valued ebay clone. Hundreds of duplicates, lots of shitty items.
Is this not accurate?
Even with books, there are many copyright-violating counterfeits, alongside many “printed on demand” copies at horrible quality (but not advertised as such) under some kind of shady deal Amazon forced down publishers’ throats.
Unfortunately Amazon has driven many alternative vendors out of the market, so it’s sometimes hard to find things elsewhere online.
That's not actually relevant for this case, however. In this case it sounds like the item in question was not fulfilled by Amazon but was directly shipped by a seller who is no longer active and cannot be reached using whatever contact information Amazon has.
I'm actually kind of surprised by this ruling because it seems like it is requiring Amazon to maintain current contact information for former sellers for some indeterminate amount of time. I guess the closest thing that I'm thinking of in terms of another business working like this is dropshipping where you sell items without maintaining an inventory but instead have the order shipped directly from a manufacturer or wholesaler to your customer. That's actually fairly common with a lot of computer equipment, where you'll see on a website a mention of "ships directly from manufacturer"
I think the Fire tablets have severely undermined people's opinions of what a non-Apple tablet is.