I have started buying most products directly from manufacturer's websites or in physical stores now. The amount of fake products on Amazon is appalling, I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.