I average well into 5 figures a year on Amazon stuff. Have been for years. Have never had an authenticity issue.
I buy sold by Amazon and 3rd party. Name brand and white label. Electronics and home goods.
I’m just not getting it?
Amazon has responded to lawsuits with the hands off "hey it's not us, it's the seller and we're not going to vet our sellers stuff." So apparently it's the customer's job. I don't have the time or knowledge to know how to test toys I buy for my daughter for lead so I just don't buy from Amazon unless it's a hard to find book or something I'm pretty sure won't be dangerous.
I used to buy all my home gym stuff from Amazon stuff and since have switched to directly buying from brands like Rogue Fitness, or Titan and the difference in the quality of even basic stuff like weights, is just worth skipping Amazon. The dumbbells I've bought from Amazon all have some form of rust on them now.
It's that way for clothing and everything else I've tried. Amazon is a game of hit or miss trash. In the midst of the pandemic I actually could not find a Surface charger for my laptop anywhere but Amazon and had to buy it from them and I was so worried it was counterfeit. It wasn't. I was lucky.
If I’ve gotten counterfeits they were certainly of the quality i was expecting from the brand name and I really don’t care, that’s the free marketplace baby, capitalism at full health.
* companies do not face rampant infringement of their brand name (which they own, it is part of their means of production), and
* customers aren't swindled with intentional bait-and-switch practices (which would mean that they are not free to make choices in the market), so
no, counterfeiting has no place in healthy capitalism even if counterfeits often pass for the real thing.
Except that the other end of that spectrum is kids toys with lead in them. Or, hell, adult toys with lead in them.
Point is you don’t really get to say “the harmless counterfeits are fine, just stop the harmful ones” when you don’t know which ones are harmful. The only way to avoid that ambiguity is to stop counterfeits as a whole. A total lack of regulation isn’t capitalism at full health, it’s poison, often quite literally!
But for a specific example of high regulations and decent outcomes look at the food industry, whether that be restaurants or the food supply chain or farms. All of it is highly regulated for good reason.
Taxi medallions is a good example: NYC streets were flooded with taxis and it was slowing down traffic. And there weren’t enough passengers for drivers to make a living. So limiting the numbers did make sense. But the way it was implemented was far from perfect.
In any case if you think commodities industries are working healthily I really have to disagree. Most products are unnecessarily expensive crap. We have little consumer choice in most markets critical to people’s health and livelihood and no way to incentivize improvements.
A free market, by definition, has full transparency; if you can unwittingly get a counterfeit, it's not a free market.
A brand is just a label, immaterial to the quality of the received commodity. The term I would use for folks who buy an expensive item, sight unseen, and expecting proportional quality, from a third party market is “sucker”. Regulating counterfeit sales will just keep prices high and competitive pressure low, fucking us all over.
Why not simply regulate the quality of the item and force brands to compete on things that matter? Say, require phones to have offer a version with a headphone jack so you aren’t forced to shell out endless money for dongles and bluetooth sets every X years.
You really want regulators to design technology? That’s about like the EU forcing USB2 charging ports on phones when USB-C was a better standard.
This was full retail price, proper SKU, MFG picture. when I went back to review the order it seems a third party seller was substituted at check out which I could have missed. I went through extreme and deliberate lengths to purchase exactly what I wanted from the manufacture and pay retail prices and still got fooled. I was actively going through mental checklists during the purchasing stage on amazon to avoid counterfeit and didn't succeed. Majorly annoyed.
I have even worked the packing line at amazon. Over Christmas in 2000 I worked the line to pay some school bills, so I can even visualize some of the failure modes. yup.. still not enough.
- Brand name lock
- Serial Adapter (knockoff chipset)
- Apple Watch charger (these are endemic)
- Dell brand charger
You likely don't realize it but you probably have counterfeit items in your home right now, that were either very carefully copied or part of a "third shift". You also likely have refurbished items sold as new, and if you've ever gotten brand name things in plain packaging, cross-market items (such as intel CPUs that are sold at much lower prices in other regions, and then sold for a profit to the US).
On an individual level, sure. If the real product fails 1/1000 of the time, and the counterfeit fails 1/100 of the time, you've got 99%+ happy customers of both. The damage is only really evident in the aggregate.
The ones that were listed as being actually from Apple and sold by Amazon were no cheaper than buying at the local Best Buy or Target or I think Walmart (I know they sell Apple watches and bands, but I'm not actually sure if they have Apple brand chargers).
Every single less expensive third party one had either almost exclusively terrible reviews, or an overwhelming majority of the positive reviews were for completely unrelated products (and the reviews that were not obviously for other products usually omitted actually saying what they were for so you could not tell if they were actually for the charger or for some previous item that once had the same listing).
Like so many things at Amazon, this has gotten completely out of control. There are so many variants of it, too: There’s what I would call “style overloading” where the control that usually lets you choose between the red or blue toaster has been overloaded to choose between the toaster, the egg beater, and the waffle maker, and all the positive reviews for the waffle maker now give the toaster 4.5 stars in the search results. Then there’s what I will call “SKU retreading,” where a discontinued product has its product page repurposed for a new one, transferring all the old reviews and resulting search presence to the new one.
Somewhat appallingly, I’ve seen even popular brands like Aukey engaging in the latter. As you say, it’s sometimes not clear until you actually read the reviews and see they’re referring to features the product doesn’t have, or are posting pictures that look very different from the product photos. I’ve even used the “report incorrect product information” link on these and described the problem, and the listing has unsurprisingly remained unchanged weeks later.
Isn't that basically a rule for apple peripherals? You can't buy them new for cheaper than MSRP?
I definitely do not want a knock off charger. I didn't care so much about the serial adapter, but it was still very annoying.
Remember when the guy tested all the USB cables? Some of them were downright broken, but many worked just fine (except not to specification, so were perhaps damaging or even dangerous, but they worked), so most people would never notice that something was amiss.
I’ve also heard of counterfeit books: they look the same as real books, but are of lower quality print and paper. Would you notice? Would you just think the book wasn’t as good quality as other books, without questiining whether you actually got a counterfeit product? I’m not convinced I’d necessarily notice.
Another anecdote: my wife wanted to buy a refill for the Clorox brand hydrogen peroxide based sanitizer she prefers to use. There weren't any in stock on Amazon, but she found a third-party that was advertising effectively the same thing (right down to the ingredients indicating a 1.86% by volume solution of hydrogen peroxide). What came from Amazon was something closer to an industrial-grade bleach-like cleaning solution.
It's not the first time this has happened, either: we've had shoddy device charging cables, rechargeable batteries, etc. It has happened enough in the last year that we have substantially drawn back our spending on Amazon, and we will not under any circumstances buy any electronics (devices, accessories, etc.) from there. I'm actually quite close to stopping my Prime membership and cutting them out altogether.
The good thing was I noticed it. My worry is when I don’t.
I can usually find something cheaper on a different site (best buy, B&H, Microcenter, Newegg...although Newegg has been really bad for me lately, monoprice, Walmart). And the rare couple of times I don’t, I’m willing to pay the $1-$2 more (I’m much better off in the long run anyways).
Honestly, it’s really really hard to find something that is also available elsewhere, cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else for me. So I’m not willing to take the counterfeit risk, for basically no benefit.
Even so, I haven't had any trouble with products bought directly from them since then (though the introduction of a captcha just to log into the damn site was rather annoying). Their third party marketplace appears to be a total cesspool, however. I bought some "new" hard drives from two separate vendors... both batches arrived beat to shit, with 35-50k hours of runtime and some with significant error counts.
Only after the fact did I bother looking into it, and notice that ALL vendors in the hard drive category have ratings less than 80%, and plenty of reviews accusing them of selling used as new. Newegg obviously doesn't care. Sad, indeed.
I’m still willing to buy from Amazon items that aren’t potential fire hazards.
[1] https://youtu.be/Uo2GFh6FGsg
The "Amazon's Choice" for "high security lock" is actually a Chinese knockoff [2] but you wouldn't know that unless you are familiar with the original.
[2] https://youtu.be/Gflpf0DrCgw
Even people dying doesn't seem to get products removed
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/report-finds-mor...
>A 23-year-old man in Missouri purchased a motorcycle helmet from Amazon that was at the time listed as certified as meeting US Department of Transportation safety standards. Later that year, however, he was killed in a crash while riding. A federal investigation later found that the helmet did not meet DOT standards and was recalled. The WSJ, however, found the product still for sale, with an active listing promising compliance, until the WSJ contacted Amazon to inquire about it.
Nothing happened after i reported it, either.
That's what's so infuriating about Amazon. Amazon should proactively police their store for counterfeits, but they don't. To add insult to injury, they won't even respond in a timely manner to reports of physically and economically impossible counterfeit items that are sold as part of a well known type of fraud [1].
[1] IIRC, I reported some "2TB" microsd cards selling for $10 a few years back, and the listings remained up for weeks. Had the same experience reporting price-gouging on N95 masks and hand sanitizer early in the pandemic, too.
Now I just don't use filters. The utility company filters the water well enough.
If you want to test an SD card, this site details how: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and-detect-fake-or-counterf...
It seems quite possible you may have had a fake and simply not detected it.
Returning items is a PITA to me, so I just tossed them and vowed to never buy blades from Amazon again. I never heard anything from Amazon, but it's interesting that years later they still have a problem with Gillette blades.
I avoid buying electronics from Amazon precisely because distinguishing a counterfeit USB charger from a real one is not easy. And the counterfeit one might result in my house burning down...
Although to be fair there's a Yamada Denki less than a 10 minutes walk away from home, so in terms of convenience it's even better than Amazon...
2) Some of the fakes are very good, you may not know you're getting a fake. But if it's something like a fake Apple charging brick, it won't have anywhere near the safety engineering of the Apple product, so you may not ever notice it but you had a fake. Or you could have a food product that wasn't made to safety standards.
There are some products that are "safe" to buy and you won't have to worry but there's a ton of stuff that will randomly be counterfeit. -- even prime stuff.
It's also common for me to order something several times -- and then suddenly get a counterfeit product.
I honestly recommend people use eBay instead or BestBuy :) or Newegg or anyone else essentially.