Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier/wholesaler/manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.
The problem with being an "everything store" is that everything also includes an overwhelming majority of crap, looking at you crappy "genuine sony" camera batteries that held about 10 minutes of charge, fulfilled by amazon.
Amazon can't be trusted with high-ticket items, including but not limited to camera equipment. Go to B&H or Adorama, or Newegg or Micro Center for high-ticket computer parts (cf. the recent spate of GPU scams), or the like. And - preferably to any of those options - support your local small retailer, if any.
Most of the more boutique places I shop at use Shopify anyways so it's still pretty convenient.
https://promotions.newegg.com/marketplace/PDF/SBNTermsAndCon...
No reason to shop there anymore. Micro Center and B&H have been great.
To be clear, I suspect error and not malfeasance on Amazon's part. But I don't really care which it is, either.
With Amazon you may get zonked and have no way of knowing until after the fact. And seeing the other comments about Newegg, that's disappointing too. Luckily I live near more than a few Microcenters - but finding reliable, trustworthy electronics retailers is becoming harder and harder.
Micro Center is the last of the old breed of computer stores, where you could expect to go and find a strong product selection and generally knowledgeable people - I can't remember the last time I've gone anywhere else and found the sales staff able to usefully consult and advise on complex questions; by contrast, I've learned through experience that I can go into my local Micro Center with nothing but a problem description and come out with a solution that will work.
I want that to go on being the case for a long time; after all, I'm not getting any younger nor are days getting any longer, and having kids around who are, by all I can tell, well paid and fairly treated precisely to develop and apply knowledge I don't have the time or honestly the desire to obtain for myself - that's something I'm not just willing, but happy, to support.
This is not typically the case if you get a grey market lens on Amazon. It's also something you'll be told on the listing.
I can point to Amazon's policy saying that warranty must apply if you want (it's by condition guidelines.)
1. It's explicit 2. There is a discount
The worst possible outcome is paying legitimate prices and receiving a gray market item.
Now kindly stop playing your music so loud and get off my lawn.
Most retailers seldom care, as they have agreements and well established paths to dump the cost of returns onto the manufacturer.
It definitely doesn’t care if you don’t even notice. But they do the returns if you ask. The former is what needs to change.
I don't think most people here have any idea 3P/FBA selling works. It takes a lot of work to get listed and move into new categories, and you can be removed very quickly for the slightest of reasons. This goes to show the scale of the problem in policing logistics at this scale (not to say that Amazon shouldn't be responsible for it).
I am not new to 3P/FBA myself. I ran a store in my college days 2010-2012, and know number of Alibaba, and Amazon employees who were directly involved into managing vendors.
Among Chinese vendors, there is a very ambivalent attitude towards Amazon. People know that Amazon is at a times can be n-times more profitable than an analogous listing on Aliexpress, or any other smaller platform, but at the same time an extremely zealous enforcement is a giant turnoff to proper vendors.
Nobody who is ready to play "by the rules" goes to sell on Amazon among Chinese vendors because you can spend tens of thousands of bucks invested in the store for it be deletes without any questions asked.
Add to that that better vendors will not be bothering with creating shell companies, or using fake IDs to get Amazon verification. This way, Amazon has driven off the few proper vendors from China they had, and now they have to deal with fly-by-night, quick money types as they are the only ones who are ready to tolerate this treatment.
I half think that its almost racketeering by amazon.
Lets suppose you go thru the work of finding low volume CD's...mainly from one-off bands that no longer exist or only had a single release. Then you establish an ASIN for each CD, eventually some fraudster appears and list under your ASIN (thanks to co-mingling of inventory). Once a 'fraud or counterfeit' charge is brought against that other seller, amazon 99/100 invalidates the entire ASIN.
So your inventory, although legit is now held captive by amazon in their warehouse. So they send you a nice little email that states: You can either pay us $4 to send you back your CD or you can "allow us to dispose of it for you".
That last bit is the real punchline. They will then proceed to sell your CD and keep 100% of the money. They routinely farm their sellers using such tactics.
If you are a legitimate seller, you want to be able to communicate with store representative. You want to be able to trust that the store wouldn’t suddenly pull the rug from under you without human contact. You don’t want your products to be displayed alongside fakes. It may be considered wiser not to engage with a store that lacks all of that.
Meanwhile, for a fly-by-night shady seller risk and uncertainty is par for the course, so they would remain and scout for new ways to game the system.
This was quite a few years ago now, I can only imagine Amazon is spending more money on the problem now vs then.
not to defend Amazon, but maybe the scale of the problem is too big - maybe there is a long tail of fraudsters similar to the long tail of illicit content on youtube.
This problem exists because Amazon wanted it to exist. They chose to do business in a way that avoids traditional checks and balances.
The scale of the problem is entirely on them.
I don’t keep up with the marketplace requirements as maybe I should, but historically the biggest difference was Walmart.com required sellers to be based in the US, and amazon.com allowed sellers from all countries. This hurdle alone can make sellers much easier to chase down and throw the legal book at them.
There is no defense for Amazon. The solution is simple. Put back the ability to filter for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com only, and stop commingling inventory.
Amazon will never do this because they don’t want to be in the retail business with 3% profit margins, they want to be in the platform business with 15%+ profit margins.
Hence I take my business to other retailers willing to sacrifice some of their profit margin to ensure I don’t receive garbage the first time.
I could hazard a few specific ideas in Amazon's case, but really I'm just extrapolating from the fact that I've seen that this is how it generally works at any sufficiently large company.
Like you will get nowhere arguing that billion dollar US controlled giants should get shut down or broken up unless it’s a last resort.
That's the issue Amazon absolutely does not want to happen. Getting locked out of their own marketplace or aggregated sales data would hugely undermine the value proposition in terms of de facto earning and profit taking potential, while at the same time undermining public faith in the overall market.
Amazon can't admit they can do anything about counterfeits because no one in their right mind wants to contribute to a platform that empowers and informs a potential competitor.
This is becoming what I consider velvet glove business combat 101 that no one openly admits to.
They control the scale of the problem, and can raise the barrier to entry for new 3rd party vendors at any time.
They might be spending money, but that doesn't mean the money is actually going towards fixing the problem at hand.
When I go to return an item, I can't even select that the reason for my return is that I suspect or know that the item is counterfeited. I have to lie and choose between several somewhat related options like "Inaccurate website description" or "Wrong item was sent" among other things.
To me, it seems like if Amazon were serious about addressing rampant counterfeiting on their platform, they would collect stats from the customers that suffer from Amazon's lack of quality control.
> 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.
This seems to be a common pattern. Fly by night sellers whose pages disappear within a few days.
But I would imagine if you got in early enough, there weren't any negative reviews. There's definitely something wonky with how they aggregate reviews.
I see now Amazon has their own brand of battery. Presumably they don't have this problem. It's actually a pretty disgusting tactic: competitor brands are untrustworthy because of how Amazon handles inventory rather than the actual quality of the product.
I wonder what Amazon would do if you tried to sell your own Amazon batteries on their website.
Yeah, it takes some foresight and planning sometimes, since they can only be shipped UPS ground, but they are cheap, come in bulk, and Digikey certifies that they are genuine.
Or is the problem that FBA sellers are infecting legitimate "sold by Amazon" inventory?
was the product
- 3P
- Sold by Amazon
- Fulfilled by Amazon
As a customer with agency, I have the ability to not buy things on the Amazon site that aren't sold by amazon. When FBA stock contaminates sold by amazon stock, I lose that agency. That is a problem for my own personal uses of the Amazon site.
That some large portion of Amazon functions like a more industrial Ebay is for others to enjoy - YMMV.
What on earth is "3P" and how does a consumer know? What is the difference between "sold by Amazon" and "fulfilled by Amazon"? Isn't anything sold by Amazon also fulfilled by Amazon? Do they not fulfill some products they sell? Do they fulfill some things they don't sell? I've never seen an item on Amazon that they didn't take your money for. Everything I've ever bought there Amazon has charged my card for.
As a consumer, the nature of the business relationship between Amazon and its suppliers shouldn't be my concern.
So there is Amazon the retailer. That is what Amazon originally did - buy inventory from vendors then sell them. As Amazon gained scale they launched 3P aka 3rd party selling. This is essentially Ebay at scale. Returns for these products are more or less managed by the seller.
FBA then came where 3rd party sellers can take advantage of Amazon's delivery and warehouse logistics. The stock is held by Amazon and can tap into Prime delivery. IIRC returns are also handled by Amazon so you get no questions asked returns.
I will usually filter products by Prime and will then usually look for the "sold by Amazon" text on a product page (as opposed to "Fulfilled By Amazon")
In the same way I think twice about buying random things on eBay, I also think twice about buying 3P (and FBA to a degree) on Amazon.
Filtering out 3P on Amazon is fairly straightforward. Filtering FBA is more manual and takes reading of the page.
If fake inventory is being comingled that becomes impossible.
Amazon the retailer is (from my experience) reasonably priced, delivers goods in a day (sometimes less) and offers me a return policy that is hard to compete with anywhere else.
I would never buy cables or batteries from a 3P seller. I would think twice with a FBA seller.
Amazon is attempting to be a physical CDN, and that's bad news when what you're looking for is a guarantee that some product will be delivered from some specific seller to you after getting comingled.
Normally, that isn't much of an issue when you've got procurement going sanely.
When it is predated by fake/damaged good sellers predominantly though is where you run into problems.
No average consumer is going to know any of this. It's all Amazon as far as most people are concerned; Amazon goes to great lengths to make you think it's all them - right up until you have an issue.
Only if you notice within the return window. They wouldn't refund our purchase of The Wire box set (when DVDs were still a thing) unless we got it "authenticated" as being a counterfeit by HBO, and even then they were extremely difficult about it.
18 U.S.C. § 2314 (1994)) (indicating that shipping counterfeit merchandise across state lines “may violate laws prohibiting the interstate transportation of stolen property”
I understand where you are coming from, but there are lots of consignment stores and flea markets, at least in the middle parts of the US. The person you pay at the front counter simply records the transaction for the merchant. Amazon is a sort of cross between traditional retail and a consignment store, so it's not obvious (or "common sense") where product liability should lie.
If a consignment store would allow random people from all over the world to sell illegal and dangerous goods with a fake ID while dodging taxes... would anyone find that tolerable?
Why accept the website equivalent?
[1] Starting from Page 17 -- https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2020-d07...
The last phrase you use continues to perpetuate the odd perception that Californians are weird extreme hippie aliens that Middle America should avoid at all costs.
And then, your comment simultaneously envies California’s strong worker and consumer protections.
It’s almost as if Californians aren’t weirdo hippies and they’re just normal people who have demanded and received robust environmental, safety, labor, and privacy protection.
I’d love to live in California right next to those weird Californians and be able to make CCPA requests. I’d also love for non-competes to be illegal.
It’s almost as if other states’ citizens have been failed by their governments in comparison, and/or their citizens are too unaware of these issues to have lobbied for data protection laws.
It has astonished me that a certain political party has just gotten away with labeling an entire state in our country as a bad place, especially one as big and diverse as California.
Maybe that certain political party would have a chance to win California if Joe from Texas didn’t think California was a Mad Max liberal wasteland and considered taking a new job there.
That plus the completely unsustainable water situation that I refuse to be a part of worsening.
Agricultural water in the drier parts of California is an entirely different story.
(god I am so glad that Louisiana managed to go into this pandemic with a DINO governor, it would have been even worse with someone licking Trump's bootheels setting policy)
That said, California (like Texas) is a large enough state that you can find pretty much any community you feel comfortable with here. You can also find any climate you feel comfortable with (except for Arctic), and you can find a house at any price you may want to pay, but you may not be able to find a union of the choices.
As such, generalizations rarely achieve the goal intended unless that goal is to inflame.
An alternative would be establishing a similar legal notion of strict liability in the jurisdiction where you happen to reside. This requires that you give up none of the features of your current residence, rather it involves becoming more active in its governance which, frankly, is something I wish more people would do.
Yes, this is commonly secondhand goods. But not always. The shop in Winters is all new products, more like a brick-and-mortar Etsy. It's a thing.
Amazon isn't separate blocks of space, and merchants don't really rent their own areas. On a website that'd look like amazon.com/mycrapcompanystore/ or something.
As a customer I just go to amazon and search for what I want. They choose what specific items I should see, in what order, and I am barely aware of who actually sent the item to Amazon. You have to look pretty closely to even tell. In many cases it's just not even possible to choose, with the way Amazon combines their stock.
I could buy the same goods on Amazon but have none of the traceability or protections.
If I'm buying a second hand item like an old video game or something I always use Ebay since I can see what the product actually looks like and can make my own judgement on condition based on the photos. Something you can't really do on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A30QSGOJR8LMXA
Overall I'd agree, though -- Amazon has gone out of their way to take focus away from the individual merchants on their site and give customers the impression that they're buying items "from Amazon".
I'm getting a widget that was pulled out of a co-mingled inventory box at some Amazon warehouse.
Amazon owns the entire shopping experience, end-to-end. They run the website. They design the website. They handle payments. They advertise the items ("Customers who bought Foo also bought Bar"). They handle shipping. They handle refunds. They handle warehousing.
But they don't seem to want to own the responsibility. I'm assuming that's because it's not the profitable part of this equation.
Like 12 years ago I used to build stock/cart systems for said drop shippers.
You can tell the difference when you buy, it's just not blatantly obviously unless the main Amazon listing is out of stock and you click on the "other sellers" link yourself. Go to your orders page and every product will tell you the "sold by" name.
I didn't know about it before, so I tracked it down and it sounds like such a nice place! I used to drive up and down 505 all the time visiting family in Oregon. It's been a while, but a stop in Winters will be in store for my next trip.
"a unique collection of vendors who work in partnership to market as a group and showcase the goods of several small businesses in one creative space."
It's a great place to get a hepatitis tattoo, scam "6,000,000-watt" car stereo amplifier, or dubious candles that all smell like crayons plus whatever they claim to smell like. And these days, covid too.
Downtown Winters is a great stop if you're coming up/down the 505. It's cute. Main street is closed off to vehicles and set up with tables for open air dining and wine tasting. There are two wineries, two breweries, and remarkably good restaurants for a town pop 7,000.
According to this ruling, Safeway, the delivery company, the guy who moved the boxes, and everyone in between you and the manufacturer, are all at fault.
Isn't that plain crazy? Safeway has no control over the juice in the box, except for being able to follow their own guidelines on refrigeration, and check the expire date.
Short of manufacturing their own laptops, how is Amazon to ensure those batteries won't malfunction. How is your corner 7/11 able to ensure that your Gatorade does't have piss in it. How is your gas station able to ensure that those M&Ms you bough don't have nails in them?
If you make stores liable for the products they sell, it removes all the incentive to make good products. Manufacturers can ship anything, who cares, the stores are at fault!
I am note sure what's the right answer. Just thinking out loud.
1. The customer only has to deal with the place they bought from. 2. Every merchant up the chain will have to go through their liability insurance to figure out who pays out.
Consumer protection laws are this way for a reason and when they're respected they work really well.
- The store refrigerators may have lost power. Those products are now waste or potentially hazardous and must be tossed. (Otherwise risky, temperature can be tracked, but in a loss of power scenario is more difficult)
- The delivery truck broke down. Perhaps the temperature in the trailer went above acceptable food safety thresholds.
- The packaging company potentially stored a product outside of the coolers, leading to a food safety hazard.
etc.
Some transportation companies even upload that to their freight dispatchers in real time.
I downvoted you because that's not what this ruling says. If you want to have an honest discussion be honest, don't use hyperbole.
Far from unheard of, sadly.
Even if the manufacturer refunds/replaces the item, I can see it being better for the manufacturer in some instances. If they are relying on store prominence instead of brand recognition, it's very important that stores want to actually carry those items, and low overhead return could factor into that.
If the manufacturer thinks a customer are missing some parts (for whatever reason, even if they broke them yourself) they will ship extra parts to avoid dealing with the store.
Everyone should know you never have to do an RMA if you don't want to and it's only been 30-90 days.
I've never been refused a return on any product from any brick and mortar store store unless it was for something I was explicitly told was final sale or it was my own fault by losing the receipt or destroying the packaging or something.
I even returned a $500 laptop to a Futureshop the day after getting it after dropping it off my lap onto the carpet and the screen completely dying. There was no hassle and I walked out with a brand new laptop.
This is reminding me of my friend who because of the work-from-home orders wanted a standing desk. He buys one, uses it everyday and then returns it a day before the last return day. He’s on his 5th one now. He absolutely has the money (software engineer). To me that’s outright fraud.
People who abuse return policies likely increase the prices for everyone.
It's just the store as the seller was taking on the responsibility for sealing with this as part of selling Toshiba products and the store and Toshiba are clearly alright with this arrangement.
They also can't charge restocking fees or refuse the return if you've destroyed the packaging. Losing the receipt possibly, but they need to be tracking sales as well and I think you would win that.
I bought a Sonata Antec PC case ~15 years ago. Quite expensive, first (and last) time I shelled out so much for a case.
The PSU was weird, it didn't work with my new mobo but did work with an older one. Got the mobo sent back for checking (I had to pay extra fees for “repairs“, bought in the same shop), came back okay.
A week of intense pondering with one of my friend on the floor of my bedroom. Two weeks top of back and forth with the shop.
Then it hit us: the 24watts 4-pin sugar was missing internal cabling. This explained the hit and off working.
Back to the store with the case and the PSU (again). I am told they won't replace it because it's not an hidden defect, it's a “physical damage” and I'd have to send it back myself to the manufacturer and they can't do anything.
I bought a 20€ no-name PSU on the spot and never again bought anything from this shop.
To this day I am still using all the clot I have on people asking for PC advice to convince them not to go there.
https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/
https://www.consumidor.gov.pt/
And across Europe we have, https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/consumers/reso...
Usually those pesky shops get gently very quickly if you are willing to bring them into the fight.
Reliance is one of India's largest companies, they have a consumer electronics brand like Best Buy. The worst return experience I've EVER had was trying to return a DOA pair of Bluetooth headphones to them.
Their literal return policy is that you don't, unless it's defective, then you can exchange. It was only after opening two more pairs of Sony crappy-developing-market-special-models that were also defective that they refunded me and sent me on my way.
I have no doubt that the only reason they did that for me in the end was because I was a tall white foreigner.
Your experience in India would not be not unusual in NA for consumer electronics or computer components. "No returns, all defective products must be handled, at your shipping expense, by manufacturer's warranty" is a very common policy in this sector in North America, as is "final sale, even if defective or counterfeit."
What kind of monkey circus are we living in where this is not common sense. Is Amazon really taking the same position as OfferUp? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bmBxQHbZQQ
Regrettable, when I lived in Bolivia I dreamed of being able to purchase things online. Having that security was priceless to me. Now that I live here it seems Amazon has become a fleamarket website. I buy things through Walmart now, only the things sold by Walmart themselves.