Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M
wpri.com
wpri.com
Bullshit. The front line employees that receive inbound product don't enforce any policy and actually Amazon encourages to deal with disputes only after a product is sold, shipped and a customer complains. That's the Bezos way. Fact. Let's discuss grocery products in glass containers real quick if anyone wants to argue...
I admit, we'd sell counterfeit products if I didn't have morals. We push all the AMZ limits we can. I could write a book on this subject.
Just 1 of many examples we run into as a fulfillment service.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Last week I had a package show up with six 5lb weight plates, a book and toothpaste in the same big box.
Even if the toothpaste hadn't been crushed to the point of failing and getting everywhere, the book was completely mangled by 30 pounds of weight plates sliding around in an oversized box for God only knows how long.
I ordered some sea salt scrub earlier this year and same kinda thing, they just tossed it in an oversized box with a bunch of other stuff... by the time it got to me the lid had cracked and come off and oil/salt was all over everything.
It doesn't surprise me they do similar with food.
I suspect that they knew the inventory was tainted but figured the cost of dealing with noisy customers like me is less than the amount of money they make selling a cheaply made ripoff of a $15 product.
There must have been an Amazon marketplace seller using same listing but shipping fakes. Or Amazon got duped.
If Amazon got "duped" by this they could have gotten duped just as easily by a guy selling a box of old newspapers. I don't understand how it's not fraud to label it as "Sold by Amazon" when they don't have the slightest idea what they're shipping to me.
If it's true that they do not track products by suppliers, this could be a scalable fraud. Send in absolute garbage and take it back/buy it to enrich your metarial.
Only explanation I can think of is returns, issues in the return reception could add FBA returns to AMZN stock. Which should trigger some kind of investigation. I don't like the fact that this stuff keeps happening as it points yo bad processes and, IMHO, some WMS issues as well.
I complain to Amazon that it's counterfeit, and need a refund despite it being 10 months later. I ship it back, get a refund less than purchase price. They charged me a restocking fee. They're now going to sell it used.
They know it's fake - they knowingly sell fake things.
I just use walmart.com now. I spent ~80k on Amazon over the last decade, and they will never get another penny from me, even if they fix this. My two brothers stopped using amazon too. And my wife. Walmart has most things Amazon does, as a first seller. Their 3rd party sellers are the same as amazon - just less of them. Because walmart actually investigates and kicks people off for selling fakes. Amazon literally knowingly sells fakes themselves. Prices are same or less. If I want aliexpress, I'll buy there. But I don't.
Luckily, we got a refund.
> The classic "control fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud strategy is to incentivise your subordinates to maximise revenues while "neglecting" to check that they aren't engaging in fraud to do it. Then you can protest your innocence when the fraud comes to light.
If Amazon gave two craps about some of this stuff it would be cut WAY back.
For a few years at least every Apple branded product on amazon I bought was 100% fake - lazy fakes too. I ended up having to buy from Apple directly to get something legit. You are telling me brands haven't complained about this? I find that totally hard to believe.
The crap amazon sells is going to bring them down.
I've got used stuff sold as new (complete with debries from previous owner).
If they cared they would.
Have sellers post $1,000 bond to sell, scaled up based on sales volume.
Enforce clear fraud issues with account bans and forfeit the deposit (ie, the whole changed 5 star listing selling a totally different product).
Segregate inventory by seller, and enforce consequences on seller for product quality issues.
Have a QC team sample 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 items and 1 item per seller each year. If it claims USB 3- test to spec, claims waterproof test to spec, claims safe for kids - test for lead. Whoever does this will win in long run. Who wants lead in the product they give to their kids.
This reputation issue could bleed into AWS. Why trust a company that CANNOT get control over its marketplace. The fakes are horrible.
I'm suggesting that reputation has a delayed effect on sales, it may not have a significant financial impact until the reputational attack hits a certain threshold; at which point that impact could be very significant. It's easy to imagine the hyberbolic, clickbait articles that might arise: "The Amazon Fake Crisis: What you need to know" or "Amazon fakes: Read this before you buy another thing on Amazon" (or better clickbait headlines than I can write but you get the idea).
They are selling more than double the amount of stuff they were 5 years ago, and are over half of US ecommerece. You might care about getting a fake charger, but 90% of people don't give a crap if it's 30% cheaper than the real thing and magically appears at their house the next day.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/revenu...
I think AWS and retail/AFT are basically two different companies. I don't think what happens in one reflects on or affects the other, at all.
Just saying...
It's to the point that I do not buy any batteries from Amazon and tell others to be wary, fire to save a few bucks is not worth it.
Sometimes it's easy to spot knockoffs, other times the sellers have the name of the OEM as their store it seems - and it's crazy bad.
...until it burns their house down.
It’s a fake when you get a counterfeit item that is sold to you at full price under the listing for the real thing. I think most people that seek out a particular brand and then find out it is a fake are pretty pissed off.
This is interesting. I've looked over various pages, starting at https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/pricing.ht... and I can't find anything where FBA stores need to do anything like this (post bond).
Compare this to Chinese stores tmall.com (operated by Alibaba) and jd.com. Both tmall.com and jd.com are focused on trying to ensure that customers can trust the authenticity of their products and similarly can host 3rd party stores. Their corresponding webpages say:
https://about.tmall.com/tmall/fee_schedule
This one-time fee (frozen on Merchant's Alipay account) is used as collateral in the case of any damages incurred by Tmall.com or any customer, unfrozen upon termination of the Tmall.com Service Agreement.
- Flagship Store, Franchise Store:™100,000RMB; ® 50,000RMB
- Specialty Store: ™ 150,000RMB; ®: 100,000RMB
- Specialty Categories:
Flagship Store of a multi-brand marketplace - 150,000RMB
Specialty stores sell merchandises produced outside of Mainland China and the trademarks of those merchandises are not registered in China(Fruit, import products, etc) - 150,000RMB
"Book/Audiovisual" primary category operators: Flagship store and franchise store - 50,000RMB; Specialty store - 100,000RMB
"Service" and "E-tickets" primary category operators - 10,000RMB
"Online Gaming and QQ", "Mobile Fees", and "Travel" primary category operators - 10,000RMB
"Medicine/Medical Service" primary category merchants - 300,000RMB
"Cars and Car accessories" and below 1st class "New and Used Cars" primary category merchants - 100,000RMB
For information on first-class categories, please consult: //a.taobao.com/detail/2011/11/10/533509/1.php
Correspondingly, for jd.com, I couldn't find a similar official company URL, but I found this one.
https://www.tmogroup.asia/how-to-sell-using-jd-com/
Although companies who are registered inside mainland China are eligible to sell on the JD Marketplace platform, it is important to take into account the costs associated with operating a store. Roughly the costs can be divided into the security deposit, service see, and commission.
First, the security deposit ranges between 10.000 and 100.000 RMB depending on the product category. This deposit is refundable if you decided to leave the JD Marketplace.
Second, the service fee is a monthly payment between 500 and 1.000 RMB depending on the chosen product category.
Lastly, JD will charge a commission based on your sales. This commission ranges between 1% and 8% varying with the shop type and product category.
I am surprised that to date, Amazon has not done something similar to weed out all the bad sellers.
Amazon has a hundred thousand employees? If they have 5 people working on this then it's absolutely true that "[their] employees work hard every day to help ensure all products offered in [their] store are safe and authentic".
Employees working on something has weight when you have a handful of employees total. You can measure the effort expended as a whole number percentage of the overall budget. When you've invested almost nothing as a percentage of your entire labor budget, it's just lying with facts.
I don't know the solution to this. I wish there were some way to signal when stuff is 90% to 99% identical to cut down on pointless duplicate products and/or to make comparisons easier.
Only difference from what OP suggested is it doesn't seem they manually look at all initial listing. Apart from that it seems they claim having exactly the described system by OP in place.
Amazon could greatly improve its counterfeit issue by giving manufacturers more control over their brand. That, to me, is the root of the issue.
It is miles better than the $5 Ikea clock, but I see no reason to pay more since the $12 one looks good and runs perfectly well.
That most people do not care about the quality of the movement is why Wal-Mart has lots of shells with the same movements.
Because the parts fit better, there is less friction. Less of a load on the motor means the battery lasts much longer in a Seiko.
They also keep time better.
I laughed out loud as I can hear my alarm clock ticking 8ft away thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk quite loudly. You can actually hear it from the living room if the TV is off, perhaps I should look into something made a bit better.
I don't quite understand this rant - it's like complaining there's toomany different paintings to choose to put on the wall.
Technically no. Event generics have different excipients and excipients give them a slightly different profile.
What standardization could enable, in a better world, is customizability - the ability to cheaply compose standard parts and some dressing on top to match a particular demand of an individual customer. Instead, we get common customizations prebaked and deployed on the market in a shotgun fashion. It's extremely wasteful, and a reflection of the fact that matter is too cheap these days.
There is some truth to this sentiment. I think part of it comes from the "race to the bottom" for low prices which fosters disposable consumables (even for durable goods) and leaves you with monopolies / oligopolies after the dust settles.
But Alibaba at least doesn't pretend to be anything else.
And, to be fair, if you know what you want, a cheap Chinese piece of crap may be just fine. A lot of my electronics lab is from Alibaba--the rest is from people like Metcal/Oki, Agilent, etc. that I paid a premium for once I knew that I would use it enough to warrant spending the money.
The problem occurs in that I used to go to Amazon when I didn't quite know exactly what I want and could browse, read some reviews, etc. I no longer do that anymore.
It seems like this would create the classic tragedy of the commons situation we are seing where increased sales are chalked up as a win for some teams, but the whole company pays in negative sentiment.
Likewise, the search results are optimised for sales and not discovery. Most of what you'll see is cheaper brands, lower prices and consequently worse quality.
In many ways I'm thankful for this as it's pushed me to many independant sellers own welsites that I otherwise would have been too lazy to seek out and buy from.
> Torres said she encourages customers to verify the seller is legitimate before placing any orders.
How? Is there some way to verify that a seller on amazon is legitimate among the slew of fake reviews and stock mingling in warehouses?
That is the problem if you are getting Prime Shipping Fulfilled by amazon on a bird feeder, it does not matter which seller you buy from, Amazon will ship you the one that have that is the cheapest to get to you in 2 days or less
It's possible the product did change every 2 years or so.
This is pointless, and Amazon knows it. Inventory co-mingling means that the product I receive might have come from anyone selling that product.
If there's one counterfeiter or unethical seller shipping that SKU to Amazon's FBA service, then I'll end up blaming the seller -- not Amazon, and definitely not the original supplier of that faulty product.
As you note, due to stock mingling that doesn't ensure that you won't get a counterfeit, but it probably does at least give you better options to deal with it if you do.
If you buy from Aspects, and Amazon's mingling means you get a cheap counterfeit, I'd expect you'd be able to get an exchange from Aspects.
If you buy what purports to be an Aspects feeder from "Sneed's Feed and Seed" [1] and you get sent a cheap counterfeit, you might be out of luck.
[1] formerly Chuck's
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws."
-> Well, not that important that you can just stop the tracking for a second for us apparently :S.
Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to GDPR that some non-EU companies have adopted and has now stuck?
As a British firm they specialised in advising non-European firms on whether to and from where to get GDPR advice.
In essence their process was to woo client with quick turnaround, get whatever books they could, determine how much money the client was making in the EU + a super rough estimate of likely growth, and return one of roughly a dozen canned answers.
Whole thing was taking them less than half a days work per client per two person team.
The kind of company that takes advice like that isn't likely to review the policy anytime soon.
I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in what was filtered so it's probably just knee-jerk.
It's probably not worth it for them.
It's now to a point I weigh everything coming in, and over half of the items are off weight, some egregiously so (0.2 oz of jalapeno, but billed for 1 pound; .5 pound of chicken but billed for 3; a sliver of broccoli but billed for 2 pounds; the list is endless).
Instead of just not using the service? If it's not bad enough for you to stop then Amazon seems to be making a good business decision.
I've tried the other services (Instacart, local stores) but they are even _worse_.
(Unfortunately.)
The site is always trying to get me to buy groceries and I'm like "no thanks, I like to see what I'm buying". When I buy potatoes weekly I might look at 10 bags before I find one that doesn't look like crap, spinach/kale/greens I look at the best buy dates because they need to last me a week until the next visit, peppers I don't want to see a single wrinkle on because I want them to be good for more than a day or two, if some green onions are already wilting I don't want them, bananas I want a bunch that is all green and a bunch that the bananas still have a decent amount of green so that I have bananas for the entire week. The bread I care about the date and the smell because sometimes bags fail at a seam or get cut and a good date can mean bread that is already starting to mold.
If I still ate meat regularly, it'd be the same sort of thing there. You can tell a lot by looking at a piece of chicken or red meat.
Automation initially provides accuracy, but then it provides the potential to systematically conceal inaccuracy.
Compare this parodic press release: http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2017/12/07/improvements/
> In our quest to improve our service for you, the user, we're making it worse.
If you're doing something good, you announce that you're doing something good. If you're doing something bad, you announce you're doing something good.
All those reviews were from 2019. So my guess is that they’ve started to commingle in Europe too.
I wonder if, to reach price parity, you would have to anti-sell as much as you sell. So people’s overall bills go down because they have less stuff but everything they have they really need.
The un-match-able feature could be personal attention from people in your local economy. That also increases the price so there would have to be excellent marketing to help keep your dollars in that economy: you’d get your beer from a local distributor, and they would also market other local products to you. This is extremely difficult to manage now, so part of the decentralized system would have to be helping make that easier.
Essentially, the killer feature is anti-McDonaldsificstion. McDonalds isn’t actually the best possible food in most people, but it is the best possible food you could sell most people and still channel the profits through one bank account.
Decentralized platforms, by not having that requirement, can offer something better.
If you don’t understand what they are proposing, ask a question. I know exactly what they’re talking about and I agree that decentralized services underpinning markets of local goods will play an increasingly important role in the economy.
I stopped shopping at Newegg quite some time ago because the explicit reason I was coming to them is not to buy from third-party sellers.
Isn't this just a market competition if other company's able to make cheaper product out of original idea and does not violate the law?
I was under impression that any product without an IP (copyright, patent, etc) is subject to "counterfeits" case like this.
p.s. I'm not a lawyer
The counterfeits are probably from China and China doesn't respect foreign IP, and they can probably open hundreds of shell businesses anyway so suing one or Amazon removing one will not help. Amazon has armies of lawyers and will argue they acted whenever they knew something was counterfeit, but as the website is automated they did not know ahead of time.
Counterfeit means it is violating trademark IP, meaning riding on the quality reputation of the brand while not meeting it.
They need to know the counterfeits exist in the first place. Amazon doesn't even give the customer the option to mark their returns as counterfeits. This is why I suggest that if you encounter a counterfeit product on Amazon, you should document it and report it to the company whose product was counterfeited.
Amazon is so bad at handling counterfeits that LVMH decided to never give even one penny to Amazon, so you cannot find their products on Amazon.
And the funny thing is that we cannot use AWS because of this rule!
I bet I can find plenty of counterfeit ones, though
Has there been any ruling on the applicability of trademark law to situations like this?
When Amazon began selling everything under the sun, the number of vendors exploded. In retrospect, Amazon should have made a big effort to carefully curate all these vendors and their products before listing them on Amazon.com. But that would have been very expensive and no one was telling Amazon they had do that.
The Amazon approach is to move fast and capture market share, without much regard for product quality or ethical concerns. Unfortunately, the rest of the tech industry seems to be following their lead.
I'm interested in what sort of solution will eventually be effective at stopping this. Hopefully for Amazon it won't be inspecting every single item that passes through its doors.
What is more realistic is that they are just stumped at this point.
They used to let you filter for items sold by Amazon.com, but they removed it, so I think that clearly proves their goal of being a platform rather than a retailer one can rely on for quality goods, as presumably the former has nice profit margins whereas the latter is famous for barely having profit margins.
At least in the US, Amazon comingles new products unless the seller requests them not to. So if you buy something shipped and sold by Amazon.com, you may be getting the one vendor ABC had shipped to Amazon's warehouses.
Agree with GP. If they cared, they wouldn't comingle. Comingling saves Amazon money, though, as they don't have to track whose goods are in which warehouses.
It says:
> For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit.
So at least their documentation clearly says that each seller's items are stored grouped by seller.
It very rarely shows up for me after a general search (from the search bar on the Amazon homepage), though-- for example, if I search for "T-shirt" from the homepage, I can't filter by seller, but, if I drill down to the "Men's Shirts" category in the left-hand bar on that search results page, I can filter those results by seller (and select "Amazon.com" to see things they claim they're selling themselves).
In this case I expect their response will be just enough to avoid any truly damaging outcomes while not spending any resources beyond that.
There was a point in time not too long ago where amazon refused to sell Google Chromecasts, but they would sell knock-offs including those that were marked with a "G" in an apparent trademark violation.
Some retailers are selling repackaged medical equipment -- in this case cpap masks -- in ziploc bags. There may or may not be anything wrong with the mask itself, but the real bags are high quality packaging and factory sealed -- not a ziploc bag with a sticker on it.
I think they don't care enough, as far as their revenues are going, things are fine, and there is is no easy way to fix this without making less money.
When you search on Amazon for random basic goods, you'll get thousands of results from insane numbers of gibberish sounding sellers. But there might be only a few dozen unique results. It's going to be basically impossible to combat fraud when this is allowed.
I'd even consider the "legitimate" case of this (an OEM selling the same product to hundreds/thousands of sellers to resell) to be borderline fraud as well. It's basically reputation/review laundering.
For goods we can't risk counterfeit we go Walmart and Vitacost. Vitacost is really great.
There was a story about a guy who self publishes his own book and on Amazon there are cheap fakes with identical title, cover and etc... Amazon just doesn't do anything.
Cynical person might say that the copyright law is only applicable when people torrent or upload stuff to youtube.
The access is limited since May 2017?
Resources are tight, and the ROI is non-existent.
Seems to me they chose to simply not care about what data they collect on who from the start and it will bite them in the ass eventually.
Edit: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-counterfe... has more details and is where OP ironically appears to be ripping off from. Says 1.5 million is 4% of sales, so they did around 37 million in sales.
Based on what? Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" [1]?. The fact that it's revenue and not sales doesn't somehow make the headline false. It's still a loss of revenue.
The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers.
> where OP ironically appears to be ripping off from
It's a local news station. Watch the video. They interviewed the manufacturer. They likely read the original story and decided to bring additional attention to a local business.
Because it's presented without any explanation or context, and it's difficult to see how it could be reasonably estimated. The headline is literally false. Losing revenue, even if that estimate is accurate, is not correctly described as losing money. It's kind of how cops inaccurately report "street value" of confiscated drugs - see e.g. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/drug_bust.php
>The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers.
And this point is wrong, of course. If anything, they go too far - I've seen many victims of their overzealous enforcement and am one myself. There's been many lawsuits by companies that have been blocked from selling despite selling only authentic products. That's hardly consistent with them doing little to nothing.
But the story above is about actual counterfeit goods. Not people reselling wholesale goods for below MAPs to retail customers.
[1] https://pdfhost.io/v/zU6v@9u0_Microsoft_Word_TSI_complaint6d...
I disagree, and I'd imagine the plaintiffs in the following cases would as well:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16620676/v-fjallraven-u... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16601182/ems-imports-ll... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16462329/ly-berditchev-... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16139905/eng-sales-llc-... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16610999/big-birds-llc-... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16440121/oj-commerce-ll... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16438724/oj-commerce-ll... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15028460/dj-direct-inc-... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6846972/starke-v-tp-lin... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/13477612/johnson-v-inco...
Or for that matter, the 12,000+ people who've signed a petition complaining about Amazon's overzealous enforcement at https://www.change.org/p/jeff-bezos-amazon-com-should-only-s.... Read through a few of the comments there.
False positives rates go up when trying to minimize the false negative rate. As such, evidence that the false positive rate is high shows that actual counterfeits are being enforced heavily as well.
Anyway, OP doesn't mention any specific actions they expected Amazon to take that weren't taken. It doesn't say, for example, that they asked Amazon to take down counterfeits and were refused.
It's my view that Amazon themselves should be taking action on behalf of both consumers and sellers to ensure that: 1) products are authentic, and 2) consumers can get the best prices possible even if that's from an "unauthorized reseller"
>It's my view that Amazon themselves should be taking action on behalf of both consumers and sellers to ensure that: 1) products are authentic, and b) consumers can get the best prices possible even if that's from an "unauthorized reseller"
This is reasonable. They could require proof of purchase for all products, or perhaps for all products where more than 10 units are being sold.
I also think there should be a higher bar for foreign sellers, or perhaps a bond that must be posted.
2. "issued only by the OEM" but there are many valid suppliers that are not the brand owner. Even Amazon themselves buy from many vendors that are not the brand owner. Amazon wants those suppliers and third party sellers because they bring down pricing and have a wider selection than they'd get if they only allowed sellers buying direct.
Ex: if i sell a trendy product on amazon, then they ask me for proof of purchase, they then know who to approach to make the amazon basics version, and take the wind out of my sails.
Just to clarify: some goods were repacked in polybags, and labeled as such. This is explicitly permitted by Amazon's ToS for the cell phone category:
"Amazon product detail page requirements: All non-retail packaging requires a separate detail page. All non-retail packaging requires either "[Non-Retail Packaging]" or "[Carrier Packaging]" in the title. For example: Motorola H12 Bluetooth Headset [Non-Retail Packaging] Motorola H12 Bluetooth Headset [Carrier Packaging]"
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200785030?...
This was for other products, not the tp-link products, which were all in retail packaging.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191226100007/https://www.wpri....
Amazon is like Youtube. It's a great place to establish your brand and gain popularity but you better have a private site to fall back on to host your content and store.
The following was taken from the DOJ's "Reporting Intellectual Property Crime: A Guide for Victims of Counterfeiting, Copyright Infringement, and Theft of Trade Secrets":
"Counterfeit Trademarks: The Trademark Counterfeiting Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2320(a), provides penalties of up to ten years imprisonment and a $2 million fine for a defendant who “intentionally traffics or attempts to traffic in goods or services and knowingly uses a counterfeit mark on or in connection with such goods or services.”
The key word there is "traffic".
"Counterfeit Labeling: The counterfeit labeling provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 2318 prohibit trafficking in counterfeit labels designed to be affixed to phono records, copies of computer programs, motion pictures and audiovisual works, as well as trafficking in counterfeit documentation or packaging for computer programs. Violations are punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine."
Again, "trafficking". Just need to prove the "knowingly" part, which can't be done without establishing a clear pattern of trafficking in counterfeits.
"Why Should You Report Intellectual Property Crime? Intellectual property is an increasingly important part of the United States' economy, representing its fastest growing sector. For example, in 2002 copyright industries alone contributed approximately 6%, or $626 billion, to America’s gross domestic product, and employed 4% of America’s workforce, according to an economic study commissioned by the International Intellectual Property Alliance. As the nation continues to shift from an industrial economy to an information-based economy, the assets of the country are increasingly based in intellectual property. In recognition of this trend, the Department of Justice is waging the most aggressive campaign against the theft and counterfeiting of intellectual property in its history. The priority of criminal intellectual property investigations and prosecutions nationwide has been increased, and additional resources on both the prosecutive and investigative levels have been brought to bear on the growing problem of intellectual property theft. Effective prosecution of intellectual property crime, however, also requires substantial assistance from its victims.."
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olp/docs/ip_task...
From:
If Trump really does hate Bezos, he could go on TV and give a national address stating that Amazon has repeatedly been facilitating the illegal import of dangerous products from China. In addition, this has persisted despite repeated complaints. Therefore to protect innocent Americans, US Customs has seized all Amazon inventory at all warehouses and will be examining each item to check if it is authentic and passes the relevant safety standards.
Doesn't seem realistic or useful.
She's determined to break up Amazon because they cost her $1.5 million!
You can make millions on just about anything. It’s not hard. Making a healthy margin is something else entirely.
3P sellers don’t really care. If they make $5,000 on $1.5m in revenue it’s fine. They don’t do any real work. They are just middle men. They just try to do as much as possible. The item doesn’t matter, the customer doesn’t matter. If their is a listing and they can sell against it and make a few cents per sale that’s good enough.
Amazon has created a horrible race to the bottom model and they don’t care either because they benefit as well.
But more so, all these transactions are documented, not cash in hand style transactions.
So, will we see some company who sells a branded product taking Amazon seems not like a case of if, but when and what angle. Meanwhile, such issues in the digital era get dealt with by politicians grumberling fashionably and such digital domains offing some token informal(non legally binding law) compromise that enables politicians to be seen to be doing there job but the digital companies doing it for them in a way that suits them far better than is appreciated.
But thanks to the digital age, all those sales of fake/copy products will be logged and are just a growing liability that Amazon is not completely immune from.
I've known of many small apparel maker/distributor/seller based out of Los Angeles. Over the years, I heard/read/saw so many Police/Marshall personnel raid these businesses to confiscate fake merchandise as if raiding an illegal drug dealer and treat the owner/workers as if they were drug dealers. Ok, well it doesn't happen every week/month but still a regular occurrence.
They were breaking the law and so yes police was sent in. But these law enforcement resource was basically acting on the behest of large businesses like Nike/Gucci/etc.
And now, we have Amazon (even bigger than all other businesses) basically enabling fake merchandise sellers to sell fake merchandise (hurting other legitimate businesses) while Amazon gets a cut.
But there is no business more powerful than Amazon to force law enforcement to act and raid warehouses and HQ of Amazon.
Isn't capitalism wonderful?
It is not until there is some major court case or other financial impacting precedent being set, that the current state will only carry on playing out.
Do we see more fake products on the high street than we do online, oh yes. It's small things like that in which fall into the additional costs of a bricks and mortar store over an online shop and also does entail more rules and regulations as well as checks. How many stores route there POS system thru another country/state to lower taxes - none without breaking the law and yet online stores, there is always a way.
Assuming this is an innocent accident and only pointing it out because I’d misinterpreted it to be a conflict of interest expose.
Fixed spelling
WARREN, R.I. (WPRI) — Aspects has been in business for decades, manufacturing bird feeders that come with a lifetime guarantee.
So in 2016, when a customer called about a defective hummingbird feeder, the Warren-based company took the complaint seriously.