Amazon Dodges Responsibility for Unsafe Products | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Dodges Responsibility for Unsafe Products

wsj.com

151 pointsJumpCrisscross115 comments

Shouldn’t these devices be UL or CE or TÜV rated so that we know they’ve gone through some kind of basic safety testing?

There is so much cheap untested crap that gets sold on these platforms. We should stop it.

Do you think counterfeit products are certified?

Certified potentially unsafe.

The counterfeit products just use the logo marks and say they are legit even though they are not certified. It takes a savvy consumer to look them up.

A lot of the product descriptions just lie about that. I recently wanted to buy some dust masks during the fires here in California. People recommended getting N95 certified masks, but when you go to Amazon and search for "N95" most of the listings will claim to be N95 certified but aren't listed on the government's lists of masks that are actually certified. I even found some masks that claimed to be certified and listed their certification number, but when I went to the NIOSH website the certification number was listed as "revoked".

The only legit ones seem to be the 3M masks, and there's no telling if the ones they're selling are actually real.

Thanks for posting this! I've been working around a lot of concrete dust lately, and it didn't occur to me that the N95 certs might be lies. Also didn't know there was a government website I could check against.

If you're really working around "a lot" of concrete dust, a 3M #7500 half-face base with a P100 (99.97%) filter eg #2297 will only cost you $30-$40. Much better at not fogging up glasses, too.

Following up on the OP's reference to an official list of N95-certified masks: [0] (see also [1])

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/respirators/disp_part...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/respirators/

> The only legit ones seem to be the 3M masks, and there's no telling if the ones they're selling are actually real.

I think the OP misunderstood [0]. That page is specific to products from 3M, but it also links to the pages for other manufacturers' products.

But isn't it incredibly illegal to claim false certification? Sounds like all those products should be recalled and some companies should be getting steep fines.

I don't believe it's a felony or misdemeanor crime, but it could be copyright or trademark infringement if you use a safety approval logo on your product without paying and certifying your product with the agency who owns the logo. A company like UL could sue an infringer for using the UL marks on products which UL has not certified, but I think that's about it.

UL enforcement info: https://www.ul.com/news/ul-teams-law-enforcement-brand-defen...

If you claim your device complies with regulations set forth by government agencies such as the FCC or OSHA when it does not, then I think the criminal or other special courts may get involved as it may no longer be just a civil matter. Although FCC violation investigation usually just involve recalling product and paying a "voluntary" fine (it's voluntary, unless you decide not to volunteer, and then it's no longer voluntary).

FCC enforcement info: https://www.fcc.gov/general/enforcement-primer

Wouldn't it be fraud? At least according to the UK definition of fraud (lying for profit) it would fit the bill.

Yes, it could be.

But if you order it on amazon and it’s shipped to you from China, then is it? And if it is you have no way to prosecute.

I guess it could also be fraud to use something like a UL mark without paying and being certified, which could have criminal consequences. If the vendor is attempting to deceive customers by using the mark, it probably counts as fraud for marks that are well known or for specific purposes or industries.

Some supplier in China doesn't care about that. The drop shipper or importer certainly doesn't care because they can point the finger at the supplier who claimed the certification. To further muddy things, the supplier may very well be knocking off a compliant design and producing a compliant product that simply isn't officially sanctioned as such.

Sounds like we need more liability for the sales platform.

Or perhaps, a greater distinction in the law between an actual sales platform (i.e. Craigslist) and a sales platform masquerading as a corporate storefront (Amazon). The latter is designed to trick consumers into believing they have the same level of quality assurance as if they bought from Target or Walmart or any other retail operation that purchases and vets products individually before reselling them.

Yes, lying about safety is illegal but the sellers can just close shop and phoenix into another seller.

Personally, I think anyone who purchases ANYTHING important off Amazon is crazy. Getting a fake shirt in one thing but getting fake safety equipment is another.

Amazon will die do to people suing it out of existence for selling fake stuff.

The same thing happened with fake eclipse glasses before the Great American Eclipse.

In concept, yes. My read of Amazon's argument is it's the buyer's responsibility to look for safety certifications and if that isn't available, the buyer shouldn't buy the product.

Relevant context: there were no UL certifications for "laptop battery wired to a gyropscope and wheels" in 2016 when the hoverboard craze happened. So the devices were not UL certified but that didn't concern people buying them.

Source: UL first hoverboard certified May 2016 https://www.ul.com/hoverboards

I dont think its an undue burden to require retailers to verify things like safety certifications. Yes, it might make it impractical to have a company sell billions of different products, but I'd argue thats a good thing.

You might say "well, sellers will just counterfeit the certifications", but the fact of the matter is courts tend to look at actions, intentions, and motivations, they dont interpret laws like computers interpret code. The fact that Amazon co-mingles inventory and seemingly has near-zero interest in getting involved in their own supply chain means there is a lot of low hanging fruit that is being ignored in the interest of profits. Changing the law would a step in the right direction, even if imperfect.

>>The fact that Amazon co-mingles inventory

That is the biggest problem right there, and should be what shifts the legal liability from the seller to the platform

If they want to co-mingle inventory then they should assume the risk and have processes to ensure that the co-mingled inventory is actually the same product not counterfeit

CE is a self-certification (I don't know about UL). For this situation CE is worthless as anyone could put up a sticker.

They even give you the logo for free: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/ce-marking_en (which even legit products manage to get wrong, if you can't reproduce two overlapping circles...)

Some of those logos you see are not CE logos, they are "China Export" logos. The China Export logo is intentionally a direct ripoff of the real CE logo so they are difficult to tell apart. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+export+vs+CE&ia=images&iax=i...

That would seem like a trademark violation as they are clearly trying to make it look like the CE mark in order to fool consumers into believing the product is certified...

They're working on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#China_Export

CE certification is self-assessment. Usually there will be testing, but it can be hard to figure what is required and what has been done.

Then there's simple fakes and the "China Export" mark.

That is not really true, "CE marking involves self-certification only in case of minimal risks products. In most cases a notified body must be involved. In these cases the CE mark is followed by the registration number of the Notified body involved in conformity assessment." [0]

Also, if you import CE marked products into the EU you as the importer are responsible for the conformity, which is what Amazon tries to dodge here.

"Importers of products have to verify that the manufacturer outside the EU has undertaken the necessary steps and that the documentation is available upon request. Importers should also make sure that contact with the manufacturer can always be established.

Distributors must be able to demonstrate to national authorities that they have acted with due care and they must have affirmation from the manufacturer or importer that the necessary measures have been taken.

If importers or distributors market the products under their own name, they take over the manufacturer's responsibilities. In this case they must have sufficient information on the design and production of the product, as they will be assuming the legal responsibility when they affix the CE marking." [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking

This is even worse with Chinese webshops, where products have fake CE markings. When you order from a Chinese webshop, who is really the importer? The buyer or the shop? The shop would probably claim it's the buyer, but buyers tend to be ordinary consumers who have no idea and no means to verify any of this.

Yes, that's very true sadly, it hasn't really caught up to consumers doing international shopping over regulatory borders.

My interpretation would be if the shop does not have a European presence you are the importer. Though, I guess if the problem with non-conforming products would become big enough a more extensive declaration of conformity would be needed and actually checked going through customs.

For us in Sweden Aliexpress and similar basically died when the postal service started enforcing the customs checks in regards to value and VAT with a fee of $8 plus the VAT per package.

Related is their recently leaked internal AHM transcript: https://outline.com/ZrDE7w (section: "On bad actors on Amazon's marketplace")

Message is they seem to be on it. Contradicts the media reports, which happen to argue wilful shirking of responsibility.

That's better than what I thought, but they are hiding problems behind global numbers. Like the "99.9%" of viewed product pages not being counterfeit. That's not terribly interesting because lots of products aren't prone to counterfeiting. What percentage of a specific line of counterfeit prone products has issues?

I've personally received 3 counterfeit products, and I don't buy all that much from Amazon.

> we also ensured that 99.9% of all pages viewed by our customers were to products that had never received a counterfeit notice of infringement

While this initially seems impressive (i.e. 1 in 1,000 products are fake), Amazon has a power-law distribution to its sales, and thus likely to its views [1] [2].

This means that, as long as the products on the left side of the power-law aren't counterfeit, this claim can be true.

As a result, if you venture into niche product spaces, beware that you're looking at much higher odds of a counterfeit.

[1] http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/2010.09_Brynjolfsso... [2] https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/marketplaces-power...

Also whitewashing as it hides the scale of the problem - even if you do everything to make sure you get an original product, Amazon might still send you a fake or opened & repackaged item due to their mixing own & other vendors' stock.

Really appalling all the way and nonetheless profitable - so Amazon will not change until they get sued for billions.

Also, absence of a counterfeit notice does not mean the product is necessarily genuine. It seems to me that actively preventing counterfeits would entail much more than responding to notices.

> As a result, if you venture into niche product spaces, beware that you're looking at much higher odds of a counterfeit.

Yes, very good point. Stating by views is tricky. What percentage of listings? Huge numbers of items there are in the long tail, that's one of the claimed advantages of amazon, availability of weird things, and it's great. Is it 90% of all listings are in the long tail? And presumably nearly all fakes are there since high profile fakes would be discovered quickly. If 1% of views are rare long tail items and all fakes are there and .1% of views are fakes, then perhaps around 10% of long tail items are fakes. Of course these numbers are speculative, but amazon could answer many questions by disclosing more stats than % of views.

Speaking only for myself, it's at this point simply a matter of trust. I no longer trust Amazon to do right, so I've simply taken my business elsewhere. Maybe one day, far in the future, I'll trust them again.

They seem to be addressing fake labels, like Nike shoes not made by Nike. And they're working with Nike to identify the fakes.

But there are also whole sections dedicated to products that are labeled as approved by some agency that really aren't, like DOT approved LED lightbulb replacement for car headlihgts. Amazon is not doing anything about those, and DOT cannot do much either (DOT neither tests nor approves headligts).

I messaged Amazon support a month or so ago about fake N95 dust masks and the listings are still up with their fraudulent descriptions.

Anecdotally, I have heard around Seattle that Amazon employees have been very aware of fraudulent products as their main problem. This was ~1.5 years ago.

I feel like they are one 60 Minutes piece away from a minor disaster.

http://archive.is/N2sPz

I've been a Prime customer since the program started, a customer of Amazon before that, and probably order from them on average twice a week (including groceries). I would say when it comes to products from Amazon (not Whole Foods), 1 out of every 4 purchases of mine have been defective, expired, a return, or etc.

Examples include a 4 pack of Eneloops containing 3, a Magic Mouse with a scratch under it and the instruction booklet in a different font and language from what it's supposed to be, a glass candy jar with multiple cracks in it, a cell phone case with some sort of mold growing inside, expired food and drinks when ordering from Fresh, ordering two matching office chairs and getting two different models, etc.

It's gotten to the point where buying from Amazon feels like buying from a garage sale or dollar store. They make returns fairly easy, but I've found myself choosing other online and physical vendors that charge a bit more but who I can trust to have more reliable products.

I haven't had any product issues from Amazon Whole Foods delivery yet; one of the drivers told me they deliver from the store to a centralized warehouse before it gets delivered to me, so I'm hoping at some point groceries don't turn into how Amazon works in general, and I'll end up getting discount, bad food that they routed from a central location.

Is it a realistic target for Amazon to detect and manage this at the scale they operate?

Does a set of solution options exist, but Amazon doesn’t work on those?

Just thinking from solution angle, rather joining on Amazon bashing. (not that I lack reasons to do so)

It's as if the Wall Street Journal has conveniently ignored how markets work and the legal system governing them so that it could target Amazon for something that no other reseller has responsibility for.

How's that? If I buy something from Home Depot and it later turns out to have been defective and injured me in some way, I absolutely can sue Home Depot.

The fact that Amazon has tried to position themself in such a way as to take my money and ship me a product but "they're not really the seller" should be immaterial. They walk like a seller, they quack like a seller, I should be able to sue them like a seller.

Ditto Paypal and banking regulations. Someday, I hope.

I would disagree with this sentiment.

While I don't know what law says here - but, in my opinion, the mere act of selling a legal product by a merchant should not imply that the merchant is liable for all possible damages that the product may cause.

If I were on jury in a case like this I would consider punishing the merchant only of there is some sort of negligence on their part. For example not pulling the product after it has been demonstrated to be unsafe.

I was of the same opinion as you, but from what I read online, anyone in the distribution chain of a defective product can be liable for damages caused by it.

https://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/personal-injury/strict-...

Of course, I am not advocating that a merchant should never be liable for a product defect. All I am saying that there may be many mitigating or aggravating circumstances.

Note how the law that you cite also says "could be liable" - not that it is always liable.

I am also quite convinced that the "let's sue Amazon" bandwagon has a lot more to do with Amazon being a gigantic retailer with potentially large payoffs rather than the merits of the case.

Would you be so eager to sue the only retailer in your town, that is half broke, almost going out of business, that you happen to also need the most.

If that hometown retailer put a bunch of MoreFire Fraudbatteries in the box with genuine Duracells and labeled them as genuine Duracells and then they burned my house down, yes I absolutely would be so eager.

Providing a platform that is engineered to confuse, conceal, and mix counterfeit and dangerous products in with genuine and legitimately-tested ones, and then insulate the "real seller" from even being found much less held liable, I feel should make Amazon culpable in a very large way. It's not like they don't know their platform is being used this way.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and I hope the law finds them malicious.

> bunch of MoreFire Fraudbatteries in the box with genuine Duracells and labeled them as genuine Duracells and then they burned my house down,

I don't think the analogy is matching what has been claimed to have happened. Which elements of the real story correspond to the fake product having been partially mixed by the retailer with "genuine" then mislabeled as "genuine" by the retailer?

The analogy is more like: your hometown grocer sells fresh lettuce that they buy from a distributor. One week a small fraction of these turn out to be contaminated with E-Coli leading to various hospitalizations. The grocer pulls the product from the shelf. Is your grocer still liable for negligence?

This is my interpretation of what happened.

If the grocery store signs up with a new lettuce distributor, whose FDA paperwork is covered in Wite-Out but nobody at the store calls the FDA to see if it's legit, and who seems to have only been in the lettuce business for two weeks, and whose trucks are freshly painted, and whose proprietor looks a lot like the proprietor of a recently-disgraced lettuce distributor who was in trouble for peddling contaminated lettuce but THIS GUY wears a DIFFERENT HAT so it's definitely not him...

Then yes, the grocery store absolutely has been negligent.

As a consumer, it is not within my capability to find and verify the bona fides of the distributor. That information stops at the grocery store's back room. It is incumbent on the grocery store to do at least the most basic checks and act on them. I as the consumer am not buying lettuce from the distributor in the back room, I am buying it from the grocery store at the checkout lane up front.

Acting like nobody knew it was possible to get sick from dodgy lettuce, or like there was a whole health-and-safety regime to try to prevent that, and failing to diligently confirm that this distributor's safety certs were authentic, is the DEFINITION of negligence.

> All I am saying that there may be many mitigating or aggravating circumstances.

Apparently not, at least according to the article I linked you. The legal theory under which a retailer would be liable is strict liability. That means that even if they did their absolute best to only sell safe goods, they are still liable for damages. I'm not commenting on whether that's good or bad, but it is how it is.

> I am also quite convinced that the "let's sue Amazon" bandwagon has a lot more to do with Amazon being a gigantic retailer with potentially large payoffs rather than the merits of the case.

The ability of the respondent to pay is a valid consideration when considering the target of a lawsuit. I'm sure some of the glee at the prospect on this site does come from the anti-corporate sentiment that's common on here, but that doesn't change the calculus of choosing a lawsuit target.

The implied warranty of merchantability[1] applies to all merchants, not just manufacturers. In the case of a reseller like Home Depot or Amazon, a consumer can seek recourse from the reseller, and the reseller can in turn seek recourse from their supplier, and so on up the chain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty#United_States...

the question here is of course, how should one classify a manufacturing defect that affects a tiny percentage of the product?

Is that a merchantability issue? Is it realistic for a merchant to test every single product so extensively to uncover a defect of such a rare occurance?

One of the greatest ingredients of justice in the USA is that laws can be interpreted by a jury. I would most certainly vote against applying this "merchantability" blindly - without more context and more proof of negligence beyond simply stocking a product. If one in a hundred thousand catches on fire and the product is pulled makes for a very different story than if every other ignites yet they keep selling it.

They don't need to individually test every single product, they just need to make sure that they can turn around and sue the supplier if the product turns out too be defective. If they have no means to hold their suppliers accountable for the quality of the product, then they should be testing every single product.

I have been encouraging anyone who will listen to not buy anything on Amazon. The co-mingling of goods (especially nutrition items) is going to result in some Chinese vendor sending a batch of poison in as supplements or baby food and get a bunch of people killed. That is the only way this is going to end.

>and get a bunch of people killed

That's what it will take for Congress to amend Section 230 in a way that exposes the tech industry to liability (other than for sex trafficking, which was only done because victims and their families advocated hard for it).

I'm not even convinced that would do it. They'll grandstand, and make a big fuss about it, and try to use the tragedy for personal gain, sure.

But at the end of the day, congress as a whole doesn't seem interested in fixing problems that affect actual people. They're only interested in making things easier for their corporate sponsors. They'll describe it as "we have to keep things in perspective" "don't want to stifle innovation" etc.

Extreme alarmism is going to make the Internet an over-regulated hellscape that mostly benefits incumbents and further reinforces monopoly positions. We would all be worse off if something like what you’re describing was implemented.

Its hardly extreme alarmism to suggest Amazon's negligence is going to result in deaths (It likely already is and has).

It’s already becoming an unregulated hellscape, where vendors are locked in a race to the bottom, only the least scrupulous survive and it becomes impossible to distinguish come classes of products on quality.

Yes maximal regulation would lead to much higher prices, fewer options and make it more difficult to find goods. I wouldn’t call that a hellscape but it’s not what we want. I do think the only way to dissincentivise Amazons behaviour is increased accountability. I am completely open to alternative suggestions on that though.

> It’s already becoming an unregulated hellscape, where vendors are locked in a race to the bottom, only the least scrupulous survive and it becomes impossible to distinguish come classes of products on quality.

You say this, but if it were actually a problem for people, it's not like they don't have alternatives. I think the evidence of harm here is pretty minimal.

The only way most people will know they need to use an alternative is when they get ripped off. Even then they might think, ok I'll not buy from that vendor on Amazon again, only to get ripped off by another vendor on Amazon.

They could ditch Amazon, but there's no guarantee any other site would be better. Trying multiple different options and getting cheated each time until you find one that isn't cheating you (yet) isn't an acceptable state of affairs. Individual consumers don't have the resources to evaluate each option available to them and make an informed decision, especially when much of the information in the form of reviews that they do have access to is poisoned by fakes.

In these sorts of circumstances, offloading that task from individuals to a delegate that regulates the market and establishes basic standards is I think reasonable.

Food is already regulated. This is not about regulating "the internet", it's about applying existing rules to a retailer that just happens to operate mostly online.

The argument that Amazon's suppliers are "retailers" to avoid any liability is disgusting. Imagine if Walmart did that in stores: "our shelves are just a vehicle for other retailers, take your health/counterfeit concerns to them". It's insane.

If that argument makes sense for the Internet, shouldn’t it also make sense everywhere else?

Food trucks. Why are there any regulations? Same for restaurants. What about automobiles? Why are their safety features over regulated? Doesn’t that just benefit incumbents? I shop for prescription drugs at a pharmacy. Why are pharmacists regulated? Isn’t it a gatekeeping scam? Shouldn’t I be able to buy Oxycodin at the corner-store if I want?

> other than for sex trafficking, which was only done because victims and their families advocated hard for it

Citation very needed, because I seem to remember a lot of cops, support groups and sex workers saying it made their jobs harder. (And less safe for the trafficking victims, too)

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/22/how-tech-lost-on-t...

And that workee out horribly for everyone involved - sex workers went back to pimps, sting operations got cut off, and because Backpage coopeated and got eliminated now they follow the standard "don't talk to the police no matter what you say". Even the evil bitch behind all of this knowing it wouldn't work lost re-eelection so I think we should learn from it instead of blindly repeating mistakes.

If someone blindly criticizes Section 230 hit them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. I know it is hard - rolled up newspapers are hard to come by these days.

Co-mingling is fine for books or, really, the vast majority of products. That in itself is not much of a problem... returns are free.

Supply chain definitely matters on anything you eat or ingest, though. Are you sure they co-mingle food and medicine?

> Co-mingling is fine for books or, really, the vast majority of products. That in itself is not much of a problem... returns are free.

I couldn't disagree more.

One of the big reasons co-mingling works well for Amazon is because many counterfeit items aren't detected by consumers. But just because they aren't detected doesn't mean they don't do harm.

If I buy an Apple USB charger, I expect to get an Apple USB charger. I don't have the equipment to check it for loaded voltage sag (check out some videos of knock off USB chargers for examples). However fast it charges is however fast it charges, but I'm still being harmed by an inferior product.

If I buy a SpyderCo knife with expensive steel, that's what I expect to get. I don't have the equipment to determine whether something is AUS6 or S110V, so I'll probably just use it and sharpen it as needed. But just because I don't realize I've been sold a counterfeit doesn't mean that I haven't been harmed by an inferior product.

> If I buy an Apple USB charger, I expect to get an Apple USB charger. I don't have the equipment to check it for loaded voltage sag (check out some videos of knock off USB chargers for examples). However fast it charges is however fast it charges, but I'm still being harmed by an inferior product.

There's a very good chance you could be harmed when it bursts into flames.

Last time I bought any apple stuff I actually went to the Apple store to avoid shady knockoffs.

Any well known physical shop would do, no need to go to Apple specifically. Last my wife went there, they were trying to charge £40 for one plastic protective film.

> Co-mingling is fine for books

Actually, its No Starch Press's counterfeit book examples that have served as proof for why Comingling is bad.

https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202

At a minimum, it means that payment for counterfeit products go towards fake scammers instead of the actual publisher. You're basically paying for pirated goods.

Maybe you're fine with piracy, but paying good money for it is probably a step too far for most people. Especially if the pirated books have smudge-marks and low-quality paper.

> That in itself is not much of a problem... returns are free.

Are you able to tell the difference from a counterfeit book on bad paper and an official book? Are you going to blame Amazon for the fake, or are you going to blame the publisher?

Are you able to tell the difference from a counterfeit book on bad paper and an official book?

You may, from the bad paper quality. But are you able to tell that the Canada Goose coat you just paid 1000$ for is fake? [1]

In Italy, for example, when you - the buyer - is caught with a fake brand product the fine is up to 7'000 Euro. France, with a range of strong brands, also takes a very dim view on fakes.

I wonder if they're more careful in fulfillment in Europe or if they hope that the same argument (we're only a platform, guvnor) will be acceptable to European courts.

I don't think it will wash and it would be nice to see criminal charges laid at them for being a distributer of fake goods.

What is clear to me is that they don't give a flying fuck, unless it gets expesnive for them or turns into a pr nighmare.

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

> In Italy, for example, when you - the buyer - is caught with a fake brand product the fine is up to 7'000 Euro

That's amusing. In the US the buyer is usually considered a victim.

More amusing: In the US, the buyer is often considered smart.

Really that just highlights fundamentally the true purpose of the law is guild style protectionism and not any of the pretenses of protecting consumers. That law is just a Freudian slip or a political gaffe in the "accidentally tell the truth" vein like a scandal afflicted organization head saying their highest priority is to "restore trust" instead of preventing the wrongdoing.

>>> I wonder if they're more careful in fulfillment in Europe or if they hope that the same argument (we're only a platform, guvnor) will be acceptable to European courts.

There are more regulations and norms. However given the amount of fraud over Amazon, think of the CE sign for example, I'd thought the regulators would have prosecuted and fined them to hell already. I can't explain the inaction on that part.

There are theoretically fines for carrying counterfeit but hardly anybody care about that. Just don't try to cross the Andorra to French border with a trunk full of clothes and handbags.

Where the US and EU differ, the EU leave official agencies take care of it and distribute fines, it's slow and easily half a decade after the fact, whereas the US leave anybody to sue the perpetrator for punitive damages or a class action. Strangely, neither have happened so far.

Currently, products that expire, are consumable or topicals aren't eligible for commingling (now called manufacturer barcode).

>Have no expiration date Not be consumable or topical products such as skin creams, shampoos, or cosmetics

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...

Is there a way for a consumer to tell if a given consumable product is correctly tagged for Amazon to apply this restriction?

I'm not sure. I'd like to know as well.

Just look at the category. If it's in groceries or similar it will be correct. If it's in like electronics or something weird like that then something is up.

They don't, at least there policies say they don't.

Co-mingling of books is a huge problem. I can't/won't buy books from Amazon any more because the last time I bought some tech books I got counterfeits. The text was blurry and gave me a headache; the counterfeits were that bad quality. Amazon, as expected, denied any responsibility and even claimed the books were legit.

>supplements or baby food

These are the things I buy locally... well I did buy the Amazon Elements which I believe is an Amazon original... but I will probably go with Costco next.

I think there is probably a greater risk with chargers and fire. I remember Amazon banned the lithium balance things...

Consider me a pessimist it may be going there, but I surely don’t think it will end there.

Amazon is too entrenched.

I would point out that individual consumer choices don't affect the system as a whole, only a coordinated boycott would have a hope of changing Amazon's behavior. However, I do think your efforts prepare the ground for it when it happens by changing people's sentiment.

Edit: Interestingly, against Amazon's retail business, even a small boycott would have an effect because their individual products are cut to extremely low margins. AWS is their cash cow with fat margins.

Even AWS's fat margins come from the comfort of having the retail site as the biggest customer least likely to leave the service.

Amazon.com does not pay anywhere close to list price.

My wife ran a successful supplements business selling primarily on Amazon. She was very strict about testing every batch (which costs money), ensuring quality, etc. As an MD she approached the business with a seriousness we now know does not exist in that domain, well, on Amazon anyway.

Things got seriously ugly when her products started to get to the top of the search results. This took time and a ton of money and effort. That's when the attacks started.

Two forms of attacks prevailed: Fake reviews and click fraud.

Competitors would post completely fake reviews about her products. They would claim things such as having had to go to the hospital or having diarrhea for three days straight. All false, unverified. The other way you could tell the reviews were fake was when the review posted before the product shipped out of the Amazon warehouse. I could not believe Amazon didn't have just a little bit of common-sense code to automatically reject such obviously false reviews.

Sellers can advertise on Amazon. We did. Once her products started to show up at the top of search results her ad budget would be consumed in its entirety by 4 or 5 AM every day. You could look at the analytics and see, plain as day, that all the clicks happened during the span of an hour between 3 and 4 AM eastern US time. Thousands of clicks every day. This meant that our ads did not show by the time people got up.

Oh, yes, the other method competitors used was to contact Amazon and make false claims about her products. They'd claim we were not disclosing true ingredients; fake copyright violations, etc.

It was all-out war against her in the worst possible way. At the time I remember thinking that this experience had to be an approximation of what it would be like to deal with the mafia. I had never seen such dishonest, criminal behavior in my life.

I captured analytics and put together analysis to show Amazon what was going on. Her business was being destroyed at a rapid rate. It was relentless. Amazon could not care less. It was impossible to deal with them. I persisted. It took them about six months to finally admit our data showed a coordinated effort on the part of competitors to destroy her business. They also claimed they identified who did it but refused to give us the information. They issued a refund that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales, nobody paid for that.

In the end we decided we had zero interest in dealing with the mafia and quit, which, ironically, was probably exactly what these criminals wanted. We make more than enough money with our day jobs and tech business, no need to complicate our lives in that kind of an environment.

My experience with Amazon, in this regard, was an eye opener. Today I do not buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I want nothing whatsoever to do with their third party sellers. That entire ecosystem is permeated with people you just can't trust, even if all you are buying from them is a spoon.

I still have friends I met along the way who sell on Amazon. The stories, years later, remain the same: Amazon does not seem to care about criminal behavior on their platform so long as they are making money.

I think all you said must be true. I just wonder what they could do about it? Better ML models to identify ad click fraud? Get rid of reviews altogether?

What do you think would have helped?

Policing. By informed humans.

Yes, it's expensive and carries its own risk of corruption and insider fraud, but either Amazon polices itself or others will police it, and they will be less kind on the organisation as a whole.

If Amazon manages to get a reputation among the public for fakes (rather than just us, a specialised audience), it will be extremely expensive and hard to shift.

Not allowing reviews from people who never purchased the product would be a start.

The next level would be no reviews until the product is actually delivered.

One more level up, no reviews until a reasonable amount of time post-delivery.

Yet one more level: Require contacting the seller with grievances before posting a review.

I would also add a finite impulse response filter to reviews in order to control rate of change.

Rapid negative review posting rates should red flag and rate-limit these review.

Also, the star rating math has to change. If you get just a few negative star ratings it can absolutely sink your listing. Unless you have thousands of positive ratings the math is such that a handful of one star reviews will destroy you; requiring hundreds of 5-star reviews to counteract.

The battles being fought behind the scenes on Amazon are beyond what anyone would believe.

Someone can take out any competitor instantly by making a few fake quality reports to Amazon. It’s insane, really.

> Today I do not buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon".

After this experience, why do you buy anything at all from Amazon? They surely deserve not a single penny of your money.

Why wouldn't they?

They figured out which products are manipulated.

As long as Amazon are offering other products and services that are worth purchasing makes no sense to not use those.

It is excellent advice and worth keeping in mind.

> My experience with Amazon, in this regard, was an eye opener. Today I do not buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon".

That'll show them!

The OP is not trying to punish Amazon.

They are sharing valuable insights into which range of products are manipulated.

Thanks OP, the writeup was quite valuable.

> My experience with Amazon, in this regard, was an eye opener. Today I do not buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I want nothing whatsoever to do with their third party sellers.

After all you and your wife went through, this is the measure you've chosen to put into place? You state that Amazon cares more about making money than about "criminal behavior on their platform", so why* would you continue to support Amazon at all? Not to mention the fact that "Sold and shipped by Amazon" is meaningless given that they comingle their own inventory with that of third-party sellers. If you're buying supplements via Amazon, it's entirely plausible you're still directly supporting the sellers that drove your wife to shut down her business!

* EDIT: I suspect the answer to this question is "convenience." So the follow-up question is: at what point does your convenience become trumped by your principles?

Are you saying that the products shown "sponsored" in the search results are paying amazon for every click I do?

Yes. It’s a PPC ad. If you click on it the vendor pays for your click. Depending on the product this can be a few cents or many dollars per click.

Those categories of products aren't commingled though, so what you described wouldn't happen.

Edit: Well it could, but it would be from the actual seller you bought it from.

Products that have expiration dates or best by dates don't get commingled for example.

Here's a non exhaustive list of the product categories that aren't allowed to be commingled by sellers:

  OTC Medication
  Medical Supplies and Equipment
  Dietary Supplements
  Feminine Hygiene
  Contraceptives
  Industrial Supplies
  Professional Medical Devices
  Baby Food and Formula
  Baby Topicals
  Baby Stroller and Carrier
  Topicals
  Infant Toys
  Baby Feeding
  Kid and Baby Furniture
  Sports Equipment
  Baby Activity Gear
  Baby Diapering
  Baby Car Seats
  Toy Models and Kits
  Toy Building Blocks
  Learning Toys
  Outdoor and Sports Toys
  Laptop Batteries
  Phone Batteries & Chargers
  Fidget Spinners
  Solar eclipse glasses

Normally, the categories are anything that could cause harm if it wasn't what was advertised and categories that they keep identifying as having a large volume of fakes.

Source: The policies on sellercentral.amazon.com and online forums where sellers complain about why they can't commingle certain products.

Very good to know. I've worried about buying replacement laptop batteries off Amazon. Thanks!

Can someone post a non-paywalled link?

Firefox (also mobile) + bypass paywalls addon

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

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