Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?
thewirecutter.com
thewirecutter.com
Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.
Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.
I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place.
I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option.
When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled garden." But for hardware, I know that if I get something at the Apple Store, or from apple.com, I generally don't have to worry.
It's because of this that I wish Apple† would go back into some of the product lines it has abandoned. Wifi routers. Servers. Printers and scanners. Even AA batteries and blank DVD's (I still have some of both). I'm at the point where I'll pay extra for confidence in the product.
† Or some other tech company that cares about its brand.
"To enable SSH on an AirPort base station you just need to set the dbug property to 0x3000, like this:
python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --setprop dbug 0x3000
python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --reboot
Then connect to the device with the username root and whatever password you use to manage the device."
Emphasis on generally. Apple still sells many (most?) of its iMacs with spinning rust drives. Just picking up something from Apple Store and paying tons for it does not guarantee it meets minimum quality standards one might expect.
Related: I try to buy Amazon Basics for a lot of items.
So far so good on the latest one but it's annoying to deal with so many replacements
It's interesting that you say this, since Amazon itself is a brand--but not the kind of brand you're looking for. You are looking for reliable quality, and Amazon's brand is quick and cheap.
This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.
This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...
That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues.
If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive.
It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.
I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.
I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.
I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.
It's sickening.
However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.
There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.
This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.
Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.
China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...
As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.
But then if they commit fraud the US associate gets arrested, and it's hard to find volunteers to do that.
Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.
> The scammers and amazon profit.
Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that.
The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.
Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.
And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.
But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.
Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.
So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"
Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.
But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.
I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.
(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)
It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away.
Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does.
I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.
The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.
Anything that can be faked will be faked in bulk.
They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.
As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.
The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.
I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.
One of the reasons ML worries me is because it can sprinkle just enough of something that vaguely resembles quality into the pot to take the quantity (spam) scaling to a whole new level.
Totally agree. I think a lot of people feel this way, which is why it's so lucrative for Amazon and sellers to cheat on reviews.
thanks for the reference as it's often seen in many places of society and culture
It is doubly apt considering what is going on in the political realm currently as well. Not a lot of understanding or willingness to fix things within the constraints of a system, just promises to tear it all down and replace it with utopian versions.
I've had to start doing this with violin strings. The sort of strings I like are pretty damn expensive (~$120 list price), so originally, any chance I could get to save say 10% I would take. But I heard way too much about fakes being shipped from Amazon 3rd party sellers, so I've started just buying everything from Shar (which, it turns out, provides steep discounts fairly regularly; you just have to wait for them).
When you list a product on Amazon, you have to pay 10-20 of those Amazon Employees to review the product at arms length.
Say each reviewer is given 2 hours for each product, before you can list a product on Amazon you have to pay $2 x 20 x hourly rate.
These should be the only reviews.
Or you can sell your product with no reviews.
But also, you don't want people to be too close to a range of products so they can be somewhat objective. For example is swimming shampoo a real thing? or is it just normal shampoo that costs more?
Here is Australia there is a range of over the counter pain killers, all the same brand, all with the same active ingredients, but marketed at different kinds of pain, and at different price points.
Simply limit "review rights" to users who have made a certain amount of purchases, are already subscribed for a certain amount of time, etc.
And the people who answer one of the questions with "I don't know", too. Why did they bother typing anything at all?
My theory is that some people can't imagine that people aren't talking specifically to them. You see them in chat rooms answering every question as if it was posed them to directly, even when it was obviously directed at someone else.
Maybe reviews should be limited only to certified buyers or only those should be added to stars /rank.
If you want to test longevity Amazon could track warranty repair / replacement claims.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
It's essentially an ad, not a review.
My impression is: you pay, you get 5 stars. They buy a product themselves and didn't like it, you get 1 star.
Maybe it's just not an issue for most people because they don't know that reviews could be bought, so any and all reviews are great for making the sale from Amazon's perspective. If the minority that chooses to shop elsewhere grows too large, they can always make a dramatic gesture, punish a dozen people with fake reviews and donate to a children's hospital.
About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need to be a Dyson to get recognized.
The main issue here is really Amazon messing with the supply chain and injecting fakes where they could be guaranteeing genuine products instead. In a sense, looking at a wirecutter like site and buying directly from the maker is the best of both worlds.
[0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
You can't use the word "platform" at Amazon, nor the word "marketplace", it's in violation of the mandatory legal training for FTEs.
No, no, no! They do care, and a lot!
Amazon has been busy catching up to, and undercutting Alibaba on China-US direction for the last 5 years.
Amazon has managers whose full time job is to poach vendors from Alibaba.
I'm getting spammed by their salespeople non-stop
The snag is that they aren't headquartered in mainland China.
And this will effectively be Amazon's undoing. Given how much central power and authority they control over global retail, this is a good thing. Competition is good for the consumer.
Amazon used to be that brand for me, I trusted that I'd get a real product vetted by real reviewers and by Amazon. Adios
A real store with some special online exceptions, but those exceptions are never going to be Amazon or Ebay.
There are some shady real stores selling shit too of course, so I have to be choosy, but I'm feeling pretty safe at a national supermarket chain, or Kmart.
So if I were the big retailers and cosmetic manufacturers (etc.). I'd be banding together to help fund more docos like that on netflix and elsewhere.
That'll scare people over to physical retail without mucking the image of any specific brands.
Another advantage of physical is the great advice you get and being able to act straight away (tale the thing home.). For example for a DIY project you often realise you don't have something mid job, just go and get it, get some advice on how to install it, and finish the job off on the same day.
Also came across Facebook ads that asks you to buy random crap and leave positive review in exchange for a full refund, and they call this "free samplimg".
And the way you can tell Amazon doesn't care is because they have no way to report this to them.
I've tried. They just don't care if someone offers you something off platform in exchange for a good review.
Maybe that's why Amazon beat eBay. When I worked at eBay 17 years ago we had systems in place to combat this exact type of fraud (off platform exchange for a good review).
But you’re right about brands. When it comes to certain products like phone chargers, the manipulation is so rampant I stick with the same supplier.
The other day I came across something interesting: two comments, for two different but related products (dynamos). One comment was in German, the other in Italian, but they both had the same non-sequitur in them.
Apparently scammers reuse comments across products (not surprising) and languages (more surprising).
Well one of the things big brands - especially in the consumer products industry like the one I work in - do quite religiously is product testing during research and a lot of q/a during manufacturing to eliminate as far as possible risk of safety issues.
We sometimes take competitive products through the same tests and while what some of the small producers sometimes produce wouldn't be illegal, we'd never run with those standards. Bigger competitors tend to be largely fine.
- a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself
- they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor
- sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
- big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow the boycott to have enough wait
- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again. It's been like that for decades. PR works extremely well now, people genuinely live the feeling they've been lead to by those amazing consent manufacturer.
- a brand is dead ? Don't worry, it will be renamed into another one. Or subcontract for another one. You will buy its product again, you will just don't know you do.
Pants, one of my co-workers recommended a brand of pants from a Danish store called shaping new tomorrow, they have two real stores and their own internet business. They are the only pants I buy now, because they fit my needs. I used to buy pants at various places, but these guys really hit the nail on what I need, and as such their brand is immensely important to my pants buying.
Blood Bowl, I play it and I buy 3rd party miniatures. In the blood bowl community there is a lot of talk on who build the best 3rd party miniatures. I prefer willys miniatures and Greebo Games myself, and typically only buy their stuff. Again these are small mom and pop companies with their own little web shops that have become successful through their brands being associated with high quality.
T-shirts, I used to be a shirt guy. But a couple of years ago I started wearing t-shirts with prints. These are perhaps the best example because you can buy from so many places. And I did, I’ve bought t-shirts from about twenty different shops, but these days I mainly buy from qwertee because their fit suits my body best. Again their brand and the product I associate with it is important.
I used to buy things of amazon, and stores like it here in Denmark. But because it’s almost impossible, or at least takes a lot of time to associate sellers and quality on those platforms I almost never use them now. This was all anecdotal, but if I’m not alone in this, then brand matters quite a bit these days.
I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.
Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.
While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.
We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
Yes, absolutely, since the invention of brands, at least some brands were the product rather than a signifier of quality.
However, in the last 10-20 years, largely due to globalization, high quality goods have become widely available. Before, that Nike hat may well have been much higher quality than the generic, but now they are indistinguishable. As overall product quality has improved, the only thing left to sell is the brand itself.
In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.
The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.
And as you noted, I designed it specifically so that my comment would not be inundated with answers from the accounts of PR firms paid to say MS is great.
You can now state that those could be real accounts, and that MS is really a great company and that it's just being defended by people that like it for real and I have no proof of what I advance.
And I have no way to contradict you.
These things might be unpreferable to you, but none of them are "wrong".
Let's see how long it takes until that is illegal in your country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
From the wiki page, there are three levels that include 6 stages (two each):
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)
(Paying for a benefit)
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.
If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.
I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.
Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.
Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.
Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.
And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.
The fact that you're bringing up a 15 year old incident proves that doing bad things can sting, perhaps scar permanently.
It's foolish to think there's a company that will always "do right". They are run by humans.
Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.
Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.
Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.
But the brand is responsible for the quality as perceived by the customer. They retain any good brand image by properly managing supply/subcontractor chain with quality control.
For the end user expiernce, it is not important who manufactures what but what assurances about the quality are made.
> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.
A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?
There is no value for me in having a big Superdry or whatever logo blazoned across my chest. Instead I choose clothing with no logos, aside from what's on the tags inside. I make a small exception for polo shirts, because it just seems like it's integral part of the design to have a small logo on the left chest. I do try to choose high-quality shirts with small unobtrusive logos.
This has served me quite well for a while now.
Of course, my argument falls apart if we can't spot counterfeits on Amazon.
Case example: I have two pairs of a specific model of cycling gloves, both are subtly different in materials and have different labeling styles, as well as different "made in" statements (one European, one Asian). Had I bought them from Amazon I might wonder which one is fake and it wouldn't be clear at all. But I got both pairs directly from company HQ stocks, the closest thing to a definition of "authentic" we have in today's inscrutable networks of subcontracting.
Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.
On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.
More and more I find Amazon to be closer and closer to a Chinese Bazar of cheap quality items (kind of an AliExpress or dx but with a different perceived quality).
I believe they will gain a lot of customers among people who just want cheap stuff (or don't care if it is original as long as the brand is clearly visible and is cheaper) but definitely they will lose customers that use Amazon for convenience (more or less the same price, better refund policies, availability of products...)
It's a pity. Hopefully others will fill that space.
In Spain, El Corte Inglés with its new on-line platform is getting closer and closer.
Essentially all a Brand says is that they got money for it. It how it was made or that they won't decide to cut corners for their next quarterly earnings no matter how many years it was good.
In practice given how often the "counterfeits" are made in the same factory by the same workers with materials from the same supplier the money going there is no guarantee of either product quality or righteousness.
Trying to use brand for delegating quality control is doomed to failure in the real world.
I suspect the better approach towards product identification would be going by verifiable specifications like manufacturers and doing both shopping and any enforcement based upon that. It would be hard as hell to transition society towards that as a norm though with marketer saturation, time investment, and every manufacturer having a financial incentive to try to decommoditize themselves to improve yields and protect themselves from competition.
Then I noticed that aliexpress actually made some pretty good page design choices. Since you can see how long a seller is registered and how many they have sold (both directly on the product information site), it is pretty easy to find a at lest decent trader there
I would argue that in some ways, AliExpress is better than Amazon. Vendors seem really responsive, even for tiny purchases, and they are eager to avoid negative reviews.
Amazon cares, but Chinese sellers are paying Amazon customers to write fake reviews for them. There's an article about it here:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon...
This practice basically makes it impossible to tell fake reviews from real ones.
I can also say that the company where I work at, had already multiple times problems with Amazon. True they are maybe a bit of a different kind but I think that dollars is the most important thing for them. Even if you have to fk with customers or third party sellers in one or the other way. That's also why I only buy at Amazon if it's really necessary and it's from a big company, like Nintendo or so.
There's also now the law in Germany (or soon) which prohibits the destroying of brand new stuff just because it did not sell. That happened mainly (I'd say) because of Amazon where it went public that 2 trucks left a single warehouse on average per day, filled with only that kind of products
I assume that sold and shipped Amazon has a greater chance of being real. For example, my wife was looking to buy some masks (I know, give into the fear) but I refused to buy from 3rd parties since I have a low level of trust.
So I built an app to help me and friends quickly tell if from a 3rd party or Amazon. Welcome to try and let me know how it can be better. https://www.trueseller.co
Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind. Amazon only cares something bad happens on the news and they’re involved.
He proceeded to begin researching the insurance company, which was owned by Amazon, but wasn't listed as a valid insurance company in Massachusetts. He contacted Amazon again, and said, "would you like me to call the insurance commissioner and attorney general that you're operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts." Someone was out to fix his siding in 3 days, and they painted the porch as well (due to some paint matching problem).
Despite how much I love being able to order stuff, and not have to go out, Amazon is pretty scum-tacular.
This is not legal advice and YMMV.
The one from the local shop was not wrapped in plastic, but it was in Maytag branded cardboard with part-number and SKU. Took it home and compared it to the Amazon part which I hadn't yet boxed up and the Amazon part was visibly of lower quality plastic (edges were poor, you could see where welds had been done at the corners) and the circuit board with the switching components was completely different despite having the same molex-type connector. BOTH units had the same part-number molded in to the plastic in the same spot, yet the actual Maytag version I got locally worked instantly the first time.
I can't recall any other business from which I've moved so quickly and so far from one end of the spectrum of enthusiasm to the other.
[+] Most of it was for business -- parts and equipment for customers, it was often cheaper that way than my wholesale supplier.
I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.
(I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.
Downsides: their label system is, to someone who really likes gmail, not as good. Calendar syncing on Android with their preferred sync app breaks every couple of months until you hit resync. Fastmail is in Australia, and I'm not sure the impact of Australia's police assistance laws.
Same: They support u2f.
Their product has improved a lot in the 5 years I've been using it, and is very worth the money. I think it's critically important that there exist high quality alternatives to google services, so that's a nice secondary reason to pay them.
There's also more encrypted providers like https://protonmail.com/.
Ironically. :)
Too bad they don't offer calendar services with their email though. It's really a choice I can't fathom.
I used to spend about as much as you. Now I almost never buy anything from amazon.com.
The only value my Prime membership has to me now is discounts at Whole Foods, and Prime Video. Otherwise, I bet I spend less than $500 a year at amazon.com.
main downside is I'm having to order from multiple places, but it hasn't been too bad.
I'm never going outside Amazon ever again unless the product or a suitable alternative doesn't exist on Amazon.
Another thing i'd like to note is I've ordered dozens of "Amazon Basics" products and I've yet to be disappointed. The company overall has been great for me. Painless returns with no gotchas, lower prices, superior shipping, better ease of use, 5% back with the card.
One of things that pushed me away from amazon is their increased usage of "add-on item" labels. If I have to batch order anyway, Prime isn't actually that great of a deal.
Also for prices, I've actually found that for some items the prices are not always lower, but ymmv. Factor in that you're paying an annual fee. IMO, the 2 day shipping is almost not a factor anymore, since other major US retailers are starting to offer it for FREE. So for me it comes down to, is it worth the price so I don't need to batch order ~sometimes~ ? We could also be using Amazon very differently, so it may actually be a much better deal for you.
The amount of electronics sold without an UL/ETL cert on Amazon is staggering. Many companies no longer bother getting one because there's noone to stop them from selling uncertified crap. Also, we have seen unscrupulous dealers slapping a fake ETL cert on their product and even when Intertek contacted Amazon they didn't take it down!
Hell, there's an "international" power strip sold under many different names which provides three NEMA 5-15R from a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A) and to top it off, it is sold with an ungrounded cable. I often see it recommended on travel forums, for real. I can't even decide whether shock or fire is the bigger hazard with this. Someone eventually will burn down an airbnb with it and then will the finger pointing start.
The UL missed the point of C5/C6 entirely. Yes, the contacts are totally fine for that kind of current. But the point of having it with C13/C14 next to it is that because C5/C6 is only rated for 2.5 A you can use thinner coper in the cables. Meanwhile all compliant C13 cables have to use a 1.5 mm² cross section to carry the full continuous 10 A load current. If this is correct, then a "fine according to UL" load would actually melt most C5 cables (generally 3x0.75 mm²).
> In this video we go through all of the testing I did over the last few months to determine what's in these products and if they're dangerous.
I wish for something important like this they would just say the result in the description. Gotta get that ad money I guess.
For sensitive things, I now buy direct, or Target.
https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews
FTA:
"One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables."
“Do you actually like the products?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she wrote. “I never use them.”
Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1], which is misleading to consumers who rely on honest reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. Also, it is almost comical how difficult it is to reach out to Amazon about this issue as a user.
In the end, I just contacted my state Attorney General's Consumer Protection division and the FTC.
If anyone has an address I can use to reach out to an actual person, I'd be more than happy to use it to report these sellers.
The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews. Amazon should be happy to cooperate.
They are mostly on Facebook. They're native ads[1] because I have various layers of ad blocking implemented, and only native ads get through.
> The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews
I'd have to disagree. There needs to be incentives against unscrupulous business practices by sellers who are arguably the bad actors in this situation, and not the unsophisticated consumer caught up in a confusing offer.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/audience-network/native...
The way I see it the problem is unsolvable. There is no mathematical way to absolutely determine truth of reviews and it is fundamentally an arms race. No measure they could do could keep it true and free of deception.
No measure of KYC could keep it the financial system completely free of illicit activity, after all.
Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route. Typical cases of crapification of the late stage, overfinancialized capitalism.
Best Buy Canada now too. It's dramatically worse to use the Best Buy Canada website than the Best Buy USA one.
It's sad to hear Newegg is a part of this now. I haven't bought computer parts in 6 years but Newegg was where I typically got most things from (and sometimes Amazon back then too).
I wish I lived near a Microcenter.
It’s not a comprehensive solution since I probably don’t trust enough people to cover the range of products I’m interested in, but it could be better than the current mess.
The limited scale might even be beneficial because I wouldn’t have to wade through hundreds of nearly identical products.
I know the headache of trying to find a Silpat cooking mat, the number of look alike fakes is astounding and worse they use the name brand when they clearly are not that manufacturer.
So the only recourse is to have a setup similar to the Amazon and Apple deal. Anyone wishing to sell a branded product must provide proof to Amazon which includes the manufacturer backing the claim that they are authorized to sell that product. Not line, by product.
Because they make more money than they lose as a result while driving competitors into bankruptcy. Eventually they'll make a big public spectacle of getting it fixed (once the economics stop being in their favor) and everyone will forgive them.
Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between a product I'm middle-manning that's interpreted by investigators as real, vs a product that's interpreted as fake.
With books, nobody really minds if conceptually a book sat unopened on a bookstore shelf with the general public touching and pawing it occasionally vs a book that sat pristine untouched and cleaner on my home bookshelf, although one is marketed as "new" and one as "used", but in practice it usually doesn't matter. Also see the weirdness with $10 "indian subcontinent only" textbooks that normally sell for $200 to sucker american students, nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet.
On the other hand, do that same game with toothbrushes and in roll the complaints.
This may be a problem inherent to online shopping in the long term. A copy of "Numerical Recipes in C edition 3" is a fungible commodity. Apparently, as per the linked article, that is not the case with fad overpriced gloves and toothbrushes. Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
That description is unfair.
Regardless of whether the product is overpriced or fashionable, I want the correct product, without the shortcuts taken by a fake: unsafe paints, plastics etc.
I don't mind "Philips-compatible" brush heads being listed, but the description should be clear.
Otherwise we may as well repeal all trademark, copyright and product safety laws.
3 says "Although the YXTDZ booster is not trying to pass itself off as a Mifold by name, it’s clearly a knockoff of the Mifold’s unique design."
4 says it was called "Toddler Airplane Travel Safety Harness" and says it wasn't FAA certified. It doesn't say that it used the brand name.
5 and 6 are authentic products but older stock or a slightly different model number, respectively.
Elsewhere in the discussion, 'erentz says:
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
I think they're right in more than one way. It's not only the platform vs. publisher issue. Fake news are the information goods equivalent of counterfeiting - faking the bits, not the medium.
You're confusing online purchasing with "Amazon's approach to online purchasing." They are not the same thing. It's possible to manage the supply chain when selling online just like brick and mortal retails already do. Of course, you don't make as much money in the process.
> nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet
This is conflating dishonest substitution of counterfeit goods with consensual purchase of a lower-quality product. If I'm not explicitly purchasing the 'international' version of a book, I would consider myself harmed and defrauded if its materials and construction are not up to expected [North-American / Western / ?] standards.
The user explicitly consenting to purchasing a knock-off is another thing entirely from having the seller 'fulfill' a purchase for a genuine item with the same knock-off.
What it contained looked like a Chromecast, but was actually a knockoff, which I never could get to associate with my network or get working.
Apparently someone bought this cheap one online, didn't like it, bought the real one at Walmart and put the fake one back in the box and returned it to the store.
But what's more common from Amazon is to receive an obviously refurbished product as new. The products people return are just sent to the next buyer, without check or cleaning.
No. I bought directly from the manufacturer's website, paid them, got email from them, the whole bit ... and it was fulfilled and delivered by Amazon. I got an amazon box, and an amazon invoice, and an amazon product.
You can't win anymore. Online commerce is subverted. What you see, no matter how savvy of a consumer or how much experience you have with online shopping, is not guaranteed to be what you get, anymore.
All snark aside, though, I see a resurgence in small, boutique mom-and-pop shops for goods in the next 5-10 years as Millennials and Gen-Z get sick of being scammed online. The biggest new thing is that unlike gen-x and boomers, Millennials and Gen-Z are savvy enough to have tried to remedy the situation for themselves and understand it's a whack-a-mole game with no winners.
You can not trust any review on Amazon anymore, not even from verified buyers. Resellers of Chinese goods will have people (there are facebook groups) to "buy" these goods and leave a 5-star review for a refund.
Depending on what you get, you may get a fake good, or genuine products that failed QA, or similar products with less QA from the same factory, or old tranches, or goods with short best-before dates, goods with a different composition of ingredients, goods with harmful substances as filler and so forth. If you buy refurbished goods, chances are pretty good you will run into region lock or quality issues with no recourse, as brands will refuse (e.g. Apple) to offer support! Even if this is not the norm, it will sooner or later happen to you.
Therefore:
-> Do not buy any brand product that costs above an amount you feel comfortable to just lose. Assume you will getting a no name product, then you are fine. Otherwise, try to buy at a store or better, directly at the company. Save yourself the headache.
-> Do not buy things that go into your body, except if the seller is the manufacturer.
-> Do not buy goods that run without supervision, may catch on fire or otherwise damage their surrounding. Do not assume stickers of "CE certification" (or whatever applies in your country) are genuine. There is still no effective recourse by law enforcement in these cases.
This does not mean that everything is fake or bad quality, but you do not need to take this risk in cases where real harm may occur. Most brands sell their goods directly from their own website, which also usually gives you better support. Do that!
Edit: I realize this PSA is probably useless on this platform as people here are generally pretty aware about these things. But do spread this information for more naive buyers. You really only need to get poisoned, burnt or lose significant amounts of money once.
One important part of our solution here has to be that we force these companies to take a position one way or the other. So in Amazon's case it would need to decide - am I a platform for companies to set up there own online shop and provide fulfillment services to? Or am I myself the online shop?
In the later case they become responsible for product, like any business. In the former, they aren't. But in the former they now need to act as just a platform and not provide all the branding that makes it look like you're buying from Amazon. So they'd be more akin to Shopify or something I suppose. Every fly by night shop that wants to set up needs to set up its own branding and that way brand reliability and recognition still works and items are no longer commingled.
This all adds up to a company nobody seems to like in DC. If there's any company I could see getting a Washington smackdown soon, it's Amazon.
Have you ever actually read the WaPo editorial page?
They serve DC, so I’m not surprised or upset they have a bias — but we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist either.
Obviously owning a liberal newspaper doesn’t win Bezos any points on the right, which became obvious with Trump supposedly pressuring the Pentagon not to use AWS.
Just have the police start tracking down what warehouses counterfeit items came from, and getting search warrants to search them.
Apart from the fact that this would directly reduce the number of counterfeit's... repeatedly shutting down warehouses for searches would kill Amazon's bottom line. Cleaning up after the police would kill Amazon's bottom line. Etc.
It's not exactly justice, but it is damn effective. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride and all that.
I don’t agree with this kind of regulation. It’s simply not the governments role to decide. You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon. I say that as the spouse of a seller who owns a store on EBay that’s continued to be successful. We had a bad experience selling on Amazon and are better off without them. Of course that’s just our experience but I’m not convinced Amazon is a monopoly here.
I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers. Amazon simply selling goods with no liability of fraudulent items is a disgrace, and I don’t think they will change until we ram some regulation down their throat.
what would this look like? they already have a pretty generous return policy. they pay the return shipping and return the funds as soon as the package ships. I'm not thrilled with the status quo of playing fraud roulette every time I order something, but the worst thing that's ever happened to me is having to wait a couple extra days for the genuine item.
Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one.
One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the liability such records might incur.
I recall RIAA back in start of 2000’s said it should be around $100k-$300k per instance.
Sorry, but this argument is just silly.
Here's some food for thought: Birkenstock stopped selling on Amazon[1] due to a delluge of fakes. Now go to Amazon.com and search for Birkenstock. You get a shit ton of results.
So if Birkenstock is not selling them, since they don't sell on Amazon, then who sells them and do those sellers have a right to sell a 3rd party product despite the brand not wishing to sell on the platform at all?
If you can regulate that a pimply faced teenager in Tenessee is ruined for life for downloading 10 songs, then it should surely be possible to regulate a behemoth like Amazon not to allow the sale of crap from dodgy suppliers on its platform.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/birkenstock-quits-amazon-in-...
These companies innovate by showing off a layer of whiz-bang techy goodness so people don't notice that they've simply externalized all the responsibility and internalized all the profits.
They didn’t even shield a wirecutter , one of their largest affiliate referrers.
At least Shopify is a real platform you can build stuff on.
Amazon is just this giant bullying machine. The Dalek of retail.
I have several issues with Amazon the company, but any time I buy something only from any other vendor I'm reminded of what makes Amazon different.
Fast OR cheap shipping. At least in my locality. In the place I most frequently order, free shipping is scheduled for "5-7 business days" to get to me, and frequently gets misdirected and takes an extra day or two (pushing it past another weekend).
When I've ordered to one of Canada's large urban centers it is much faster. But going to an actual store to get something for the same price is also an option, and faster still. And doesn't tend to have difficult to spot counterfeits.
Here, in Hungary, ordering from Amazon is problematic, because it's such a beast. No human in the loop, and they pass on your package to some delivery vendor anyway, which usually doesn't provide much tracking. So we get no* benefit of the machine at all.
* - sure, we get an interface that's at least consistent and usually available in English
Those are all things difficult to get consistently from a random web store.
Agreed. The problem is that generally the descriptions are so useless it's hard to know what's actually what. (For example recently I ordered a case for a Kobo Forma e-reader, and it was impossible to know how it would actually fold, because there were a few pictures, no video, no schematics, nothing. And the description was similarly unhelpful. It worked out okay though.)
> great customer service
I found it impossible to even get in touch with them :o (I wanted to ask where my package is, but they just kept naming the shipping vendor - "Deutsche Post", no tracking ID, no link, no actual contact to the relevant department.)
> saved credentials
Every webshop so far does it, and usually smaller ones provide ability to use PayPal.
> 5% back on purchases
How does that work? It's either priced into the price of everything or others pay for it, no?
Brought it up elsewhere[0], but I think you're right in more than one way. Beyond publisher vs. platform issue, fake news are the digital equivalent to counterfeiting; they're to news - and in general, to information media[1] - what Amazon counterfeits are to physical products.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399726
[1] - Which include all digital media and most physical books.
There’s a big difference though. Social media allows many individual voices, and much like the printing press, allows previously unheard voices to be heard and to have reach. Therefore, the world’s expert can call out a journalist for being wrong immediately, making it seem like “fake news” is more common than it was previously.
Amazon is actually causing distrust around product quality when there wasn’t any before. Consumers may have trusted Colgate’s toothpaste, but if it isn’t actually Colgate’s toothpaste, yet it poisons someone, it becomes Colgate’s problem too. This would be like Facebook or Twitter allowing any account to adopt a WSJ or NyTimes verified badge, one of those accounts publishes fake news, and then the paper itself has a problem too.
That's the brand owner saying that. I'd love to see an Amazon response to that.
No, seriously. Go to your local hardware store. If the quality of your purchase matters, then the surest way to get good quality product is to go to the store and pick it up yourself. If for some reasons you get a fake, you can drive back to the store and they'll be happy to replace it. You don't have to talk to a faceless corporation.
The closest I found was Fry's (Renton, 30min away), and they're doing their darndest to go out of business. A Firewire cable in one of the few items they have on their shelves. It's not name-brand, and if it didn't work, I'd be SOL.
The series is called Broken and the episode on cosmetics is "Makeup Mayhem" https://www.netflix.com/title/81002391
It has completely shaken my faith in Amazon. This is probably my last year as a Prime subscriber.
i had bought two glass (kitchen) storage jars a year ago and decided in november to order one more. the new one was about 10% smaller with slightly different markings, just similar enough that it wasn't noticeable on first glance, but was obvious when placed next to the other two jars.
initially, i assumed it was a warehouse mix-up, so i requested a replacement. the replacement was exactly the same smaller jar and not the original. mind you, the original was already a chinese-made & branded item. the replacement was a cheaper knockoff of what was probably already a ridiculously marked-up import. luckily it was only a minor hassle to return both and get a refund.
i'm not a big amazon shopper and avoid their own electronics like kindles and echos (don't need more plutocratic surveillance in my life), but for anything of (at least moderate) value, i'll sometimes double-check against photos on amazon and manufacturer's sites. fakes have generally not been a significant problem for me.
Ended up just returning it again, but thought it was a fluke. I still used amazon for a while, but this type of thing has become so common that I don't use them anymore at all.
Maybe does their article imply that as long as you purchase through their recommended links you'd be safe(er)?
I'll probably respect them more when they stop hypocritically linking to Amazon.
> Maybe does their article imply that as long as you purchase through their recommended links you'd be safe(er)?
The article implies that, but it's not true.
I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
Correct. Say for the moment that Nike decides to sell their shoes on Amazon through the Amazon warehousing program for really great service and delivery options. Then say that I send a bunch of counterfeit Nike shoes to Amazon using the exact same product details that Nike does. Now Amazon says, "if we put these two batches of Nike shoes together in the same bin, we will save money because fulfilling orders for shoes will be more efficient". But if they are in the same bin, then when you order from Nike you might get my knockoffs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...
It's at least mostly true. They usually link to the official seller, so while it's possible they either get that wrong, or the seller starts shipping the wrong product it at least saves some of the work.
Do you have any evidence at all that this is the case? It's the opposite of what is said in the article - all the examples given are for non-official sellers.
Notably the article say "encountered a few instances in which a _seller_ switched in an authentic product but from a discontinued or lesser-quality line" and "The authentic ‘Ove’ Glove is available for purchase through a page indicating that it is sold and shipped by Amazon.com or sold by Joseph Ent, the Amazon storefront for Joseph Enterprises."
Also none of the sellers in the article that the Wirecutter contacted made this claim which would be surprising if it was the case!
Do you accept this from Forbes? https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/12/13/how-to-p...
How about this from the LA Times? https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-amazon-...
"The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm."
> It's the opposite of what is said in the article
In fact it is _not_ the opposite of what is said in the article! Read it again. Nowhere do they say that you're safe from counterfeits if you buy from the right links. The article steers well clear of even mentioning inventory commingling. The most insidious aspect is that you believe that they've exonerated Amazon, when they just neglected to mention the other half of the problem.
In the last example, they give their credulity away entirely.
"We compared a recently purchased set of Tweezerman tweezers...the seller had swapped in a model that was different from what was listed on the page"
Who was the seller, you ask? The page they link to says "sold by Amazon.com".
Many reviews said they received a used product. I took the risk. I did a return and said "not as described" but didn't get around to return it till 1 day too late. Did a chat and the CS said I can just throw it away, they will refund it.
the original article title is "I Bought These Things From Amazon Prime. Can You Tell Which Ones Are Real?".
The current HN title is "Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?"
The current HN title would be improved by replacing "real" with "authentic". With "real", I started the article assuming that the Ove-Glove was a fictitious product created by a designer or artist. It took some time to realize that "real" means "authentic".
And wow! The dark patterns they use when you try to cancel Prime are really quite impressive!
Of course, none of that thinking is accurate, but it appears to be logical on the surface.
"Sellers on Amazon can pool their goods with the same exact goods offered by Amazon itself, a practice known as commingling. This has advantages for sellers — less processing is needed, so it’s cheaper — but it also explains how Amazon can unknowingly ship counterfeits despite getting stock directly from the printer."
"What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues" NY Times, June 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/amazon-dominat...
As other comments mentioned, we are entering a hyperfake decade - and we are only at the beginning. I am virtually certain, we will exit this decade with a profound experience of more and more private universes (which may deteriorate what is left of civil societies even more).
Unless these trends reverse, or there is a massive rise in the number of complaints from customers who've been cheated or injured by fakes, there won't be any significant changes.
Quality of an individual product aside, the issue surrounding counterfeits is that confidence in the market as whole will wane, which isn't good for anybody.
A product that looks like a name brand product, but doesn't claim to be that product is one thing.
A product that claims to be the name brand product, but isn't is a different.
The name brand probably doesn't want either to be easily avaialable, and will call them both fake. A purchaser might want to take a chance on the former, but shouldn't have to have a chance of getting the latter.
As many know, Amazon's practice of commingling inventory in its Fulfilled by Amazon program can just as easily result in a fake being sold by Amazon as from a third-party seller. The author got lucky and didn't get any fakes in the control group (though one might not rule out the possibility of a more sophisticated counterfeit!), but it will continue to be a risk so long as Amazon continues commingling in FBA.
They admit this. Which means buying from them directly is no guarantee.
Should be unlawful imo.
Make it expensive for Amazon to not police the shit that third parties are throwing on the marketplace - and soon you won't see any fakes any more.
You want to know where Bezos got his billions? Partially because Amazon outright shits on all the regulation that traditional brick and mortar places have - like, not selling product that is illegal, counterfeit or offensive.
Ugh.
But on Amazon? There is no such thing as a public space to protest here, there is no cost (not even from lost business) in selling Nazi merchandise, so Amazon happily sells Nazi merchandise that Nazis then fly on their balconies and gardens, thus incurring a cost to society.
Such a company can make a deal with Amazon that if they certify a product, then that product can get a badge on Amazon's product page that it is certified by that company. Like UL, the company would be incentivized not to abuse its badges, because otherwise the badges and the company would be come worthless.
It's destined to be a vicious cycle. The only losers will be consumers and honest producers.
That said, I left a review warning other customers. I hope I helped them.
Amazon sells these exact items with Prime as well.
> Although Amazon has taken many measures to prevent counterfeits and unsafe products from showing up on its site, plenty of fakes still slip through.
I don't believe this one bit. There are blatant fakes being shipped through Prime. They're not flying under the radar or bait and switching. Go on Amazon and search "Yuangu belt" -- you will quickly find Gucci & Hermes fakes being shipped through Prime. Are you telling me their "counterfeit measures" could not detect this before allowing it to be sold with Prime?
The idea is that it's hard to keep a fake high rated reviews for a long time.
However I don't consider this and what Facebook doing to be the same.
Personally, the last 3-4 phones I bought off of Amazon were all different models from what they had been advertised as. It's possible that you might get lucky and receive an authentic phone for less than buying from Google directly, but if you actually want confidence that you will receive the real thing, get it directly from the manufacturer.
I'm continually amazed at the popularity of Amazon. It goes to show how powerful advertising, social distortion, and the sunk cost fallacy ("prime") are. For example, Amazon has never had good prices on anything, and yet that myth persists. Presumably the same people that repeat this can't even be bothered to just check eg walmart.com. (Walmart does find some new way to disappoint me every time I step in there. It's just so utterly huge that it's foolish to ignore.)
Would you mind explaining how you can figure this out? (I've never bought anything on Ebay, so I'm completely ignorant about how it works.)
Legitimate distributors generally have recognizable names and other web presences - Best Buy, Adorama, Beach Camera, Anker Direct, Rosewill, etc. The value here is being able to search prices across all these stores at once.
Surplus distributors usually have conditions Open Box / Seller Refurbished, fixed quantities, many such listings.
Knockoffs/generics either ship direct from China, or have basically identical listings that ship directly from China.
This of course all depends on what you're actually buying, but being able to weigh such details is the whole point. Many generic computer cables/adapters/etc are great, but you'd be foolish to buy lithium ion batteries that way.
Specifically searching for "Ove Glove", I do see an item that is direct from China. So right away I know this is an item that has been heavily copied. Which is a given, with this article. But knowing this means I can either opt for the cheaper generic version (and self-verify it has similar utility), or be extra sure to order it from a legitimate channel.