More specifically, the responsibility for chasing down the manufacturer for a refund is shifted onto the retailer, not the consumer.
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.
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.)
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.
1. It's explicit 2. There is a discount
The worst possible outcome is paying legitimate prices and receiving a gray market item.
https://promotions.newegg.com/marketplace/PDF/SBNTermsAndCon...
No reason to shop there anymore. Micro Center and B&H have been great.
Most of the more boutique places I shop at use Shopify anyways so it's still pretty convenient.
Most retailers seldom care, as they have agreements and well established paths to dump the cost of returns onto the manufacturer.
Now kindly stop playing your music so loud and get off my lawn.
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.
This seems to be a common pattern. Fly by night sellers whose pages disappear within a few days.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
They control the scale of the problem, and can raise the barrier to entry for new 3rd party vendors at any time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”