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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.

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I have been the victim of multiple instances of fraudulent product, sold directly by Amazon. One was a salt grinder that had a plastic replacement where it should have been metal and was lacking the lettering but was sold on Amazon from the official page. Somewhere in their system Amazon is accepting product that isn't official and happily selling it under than companies brand. If it was a one off I might agree it was a mistake but that has happened three times this year and while Amazon replaces them it is clearly happening commonly now.

Amazon has lost my trust this year, when my prime runs out I wont be renewing.

Are you sure there aren't multiple variations of the same product?

I made an online purchase for some oral-b toothbrush heads from Target. The item that arrived did not resemble what was on their website. I figure since it's a big retailer, it's probably legit. I checked the official manufacturer's website and the product was also different. Digging a bit deeper into the product images, I finally found one that looked like the version I had.

Quite certain, it was actually a Chinese knock off of a Salters product. Salters never sold a version with a plastic adjustment bar on the bottom for the reason I saw, it breaks almost immediately.

Amazon is really muddying the waters by combining products too. They seem to be merging comments and products that shouldn't be merged and are different SKUs and that is definitely a problem, but its also participating in the fraudulent sale of knock off products and passing them off as the real thing.

Even stuff sold directly by Amazon could be co-mingled with counterfeit inventory from 3rd party sellers.

Has this changed? My understanding is that Amazon only comingles 3rd parties and keeps their stuff completely separate. Of course my only source for that appears to be here / reddit so not sure how true it is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4...

I have seen it three times this year and the last time was November so I would say no its not been fixed and its still happening. If they aren't commingling third party product then they are directly sourcing counterfeit products and that is so much worse and clearly illegal.

I've fallen victim to scammer merchants who use Amazon in their name. Before I would just check "Ships from / Sold by" under the Add to Cart button but it's not obvious if it's Amazon official. For example which one of these "Ships from / Sold by" is legit?

* Amazon

* Amazon Inc

* Amazon LLC

* Amazon Services

* Amazon.com

* Amazon.com LLC

* Amazon.com Inc

* Amazon.com Services LLC

* Amazon Warehouse

Two frequent Ship from/Sold by I got is Amazon and Amazon.com, and these items are non-link instead of 3rd-party which has clickable link to their front store.

In many of the cases where I've done this, I've had a worse experience. With one company, I wanted to return the product because it was defective but was never able to actually contact anyone. With another, it arrived broken and I was never able to get the company to replace it. In either scenario, Amazon makes it easy to correct the problem.

I want to support manufacturers more directly, but their customer service has continued to be lacking.

Hope you contacted your credit card company to reverse the charges and get your money back.

> In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.

You're not the only one. Depending on the item and it's use I would probably pay upwards of a 20% premium just so I know there's a far less chance of the received item being fraudulent.

Pandemic aside, these issues also have made me much more likely in the last 4 to 5 years to purposefully go shopping in-person at stores since they seem to have a higher chance of having a proper supply chain established.

This is probably the right way to do it since AFAICR Amazon also still commingles products sourced by themselves as well as sourced from FBA sellers.

As a Canadian this option is particularly frustrating because shipping to Canada is a nightmare. So Amazon.ca dominates here.

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