Are you really certain about that? The fakes are so good sometimes I don't notice for a year or two. There are so many ways of faking different products, and the fakers are getting really really really good at making the product seem real.
Have you done a few hours of searching and testing for everything you've bought? This is what it takes, IMO, to feel some level of confidence in an Amazon (US) product being 'real'. The levels of suspicion never really go away either - since I've been duped by probably a dozen products at least, that have turned out to be fake, I'm highly suspicious of any Amazon purchase.
It's been a couple years since I bought anything from there. Too much stress worrying about authenticity to make it worth it.
As far as research goes, if it's expensive, I put some research in if it's a product or brand I've never used before, but I never specifically look to see if it's a fake product on Amazon.
For reference, I spend about £5k a year at Amazon UK. Nearly all my experiences have been positive apart from the occasional damage in transit.
What I have found though is that the quality of search results, the experience of using the site, has seriously deteriorated in the last two or three years. It's like AliExpress or eBay now.
I used to read other countries' Amazon users (e.g. .com) complain about this and think what are you talking about it's great, but yeah, now... I still get as good stuff from Amazon because that's what I buy, I just have to wade through a lot of crap to get it.
If you don’t consider that a sign of a fake product, I don’t think you’re being objective. Fake products put significant effort into looking like real products, many times you need to take them apart to find the differences.
To be fair though it's not as clear as I was expecting, but I'm no expert so not really set up to do any proper testing, the room its in is probably acoustically awful anyway, etc. It's certainly not awful even if it isn't what it says it is, it's several steps up from the dirt cheap 'Tonor' branded and unashemedly 'Chinesium' thing I used before it.
The great thing about Amazon though is that after this thread I contacted support (way out of return period) and they've shipped a replacement. I'll see if it's the same; if it is, of course that doesn't prove anything, but I'll be very interested if it does seem (more - still wouldn't know for sure of course) real to see what the differences are in packaging/construction/printing etc.
Both of these two are identical inside too, same board revision even. (And not every penny pinched like you would if you were faking - gloss black solder mask, as well as on a second PCB whose only job is keeping wires tidy and displaying a silk screened revision number.)
[edit: Further to edit above, it's actually 'C-Media Electronics, Inc. Blue Snowball', and the main chip is this one: https://www.cmedia.com.tw/applications/microphone/CM6327A so presumably both microphones use it and the same assembly house (whether the same design or not) and the EEPROMs' manufacturer/product strings are either getting mixed up or all Blue, whether by mistake or assembler realised they could get paid double to flash once.]
That... yeah, good point. I don't know why that didn't occur to me before. (I was previously thinking they probably just genuninely use some same chips, or even both brands farm it out to the same shop, and both genuine microphones are the exactly same, just differently packaged.)
For computer equipment, I shop NewEgg because their search rules. I wish there was a NewEgg for other stuff. I'm more than happy to pay more and wait a few days extra to have a search that doesn't suck.
The site is increasingly swamped with low-quality goods sourced from AliBaba or AliExpress. This is easily verified by searching for a item and seeing the same product sold under a different "brand name" (with the same generic product photos). These "drop-shipping" businesses dominate many product categories.
Even with books, Amazon's print-on-demand service means that search results are swamped with "low-content or no content" titles (essentially notebooks, diaries, planners etc). These "no content" titles often slap an unrelated title on the cover for what is simply a empty notebook (e.g. "JavaScript notebook"). The keyword in the title is there to gain a higher position in Amazon's broken search.
The things described above are easily discovered online. YouTube has hundreds of "drop-shipping" videos and videos of publishing "no content" books. These videos are full of advice on how to manipulate Amazon listings using various techniques.
Quite simply, Amazon is now an untamed mess of an online store. But with enough customers (and growing) it is unlikely anything will change.
Only when a case goes to court, it will be determined if the certification was rightful or not.
You're making the point I'm making. While I don't (to the best of my knowledge) purchase counterfeit items, I don't pretend that certification is anything other than certification. Hopefully certification comes with standards, and aren't self-reporting... but that's not always the case.
https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...
I opend some of them non-destructively to check them out, and deemed them sufficient. They barely get warm at all.
Nonetheless I put them in some closed rack where they only could produce some stink, but no fire.
I'm too lazy to unplug them right now to upload photos to Imgur, or such, because it would disrupt some services.
Anyways, no urban legend. Just the usual bureaucratic disconnect from reality, saying otherwise.
Meanwhile another bureaucratic entity, the german customs really likes to hassle you because of exactly that sh..! :-)
edit: Some of them in continous operation for just over a decade, some others about 5 to 6 years, YMMV. (shrug)
Stuff my nightmares are made of now. Anyway, I always open all power adapters/supplies I buy from there, because my original education is EE, so I never used these. But the idea that some people are using such things is quite scary.
Not to poo poo on aliexpress itself. There are some exceptional quality sellers and products to be found there. You just have to know how to find them.
https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...
I'd also say it absolutely matters depending on the class of product -since they are saving money somewhere; so by logic if the outside looks the same, they skimped on the insides.
Electronics can kill you, makeup can contain toxic chemicals, toys with lead, or parts that break too easy and hurt the user...
Not the least, fake books are just theft from the author, who probably isn't getting the best deal from their publisher in the first place. So only a shitty person would be cool knowing their book was just a really good fake.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that one involves copyright infringement. Theft means a possession was taken. Potential income is not a possession. There are various ways to describe the harm ("damages" comes to mind) but "theft" isn't among them.
And theft is defined as stealing, which has "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully" which applies fully here so...
You can nit pick definitions all day, but you'll find most people would consider this theft, as you're depriving the artist of the rights to their creation. I really feel people who want to argue the other way are a stain on this earth, because you're so happy to defend it...it's just mental gymnastics to a pathetic argument
A person can steal an idea (or market share) and it wouldn't make them a thief.
The fact that a victim of copyright infringement may end up disadvantaged to the exact same extent as if they were a victim of theft does not magically equate the two, even if the two involve stealing.
My comment is in the red.
Lemme give an example of how I see this:
I have some idea to do something in a certain way, and because of that I declare it forbidden to everyone else to do it the same way, except they pay me something to be allowed to do it that way.
Wouldn't you think of something like F! How dare he/she/it/whatever?
Usually, but not always, which is why theft of electricity is a thing.
Paintings, manuscripts, etc. are subject to theft because they are nonfungible. The content itself is subject to copyright because the copies are fungible.
Everything matched, with laser cut serial numbers and everything. The only way they could ensure it was real was by material testing, or known purchase from an authorized dealer.
Years ago there was a decent chance amazon had the real thing, but now I'd avoid anything that can potentially kill you
Or whomever setup their plant setup an extra plant on the side.
Though I increasingly suspect any bad batch gets labelled as a counterfeit to avoid liability.
I just try to search and order from local UK websites or stores. These often offer comparable or even better prices (esp. books), plus good contact with the seller and very often a better quality. Amazon just being either my last resort if I cannot buy a product in a local mom and pop store. With possibility of not even receiving a genuine product I prefer to buy, especially electronics, just directly in normal shops.
Best to avoid buying any items sold both by Amazon and a FBA seller; they're nearly guaranteed to be commingled, running you the risk of getting a third party's FBA counterfeit. But that'll probably get rid of a large chunk of your shopping list.
I've seen proof this happens in the US, I'm yet to find any that this happens in the UK as well.
I've accidentally bought a fake board game. We didn't know until we reached out to the manufacturer because the cardboard cutouts for coins / tokens / markers were all offset randomly. On one sheet white, unprinted cardboard was visible when we punched them out.
When we contacted the manufacturer, they plainly knew it was a fake, said we should return it to Amazon, and we did so. When we bought another from elsewhere, we did a side-by-side comparison before sending the fake back:
1. The box was slightly different in size. Not enough that you'd notice, but the box top on the fake was just a little harder to remove.
2. the token/marker printing was of poor quality. It was like they'd taken the misprints from a real run and were selling those.
3. The instruction manual was printed on different paper. It felt real enough, but was obviously different from the "real" one.
4. Some extra flyers and adverts were missing from the box vs the real one
On MicroSD-Problems - https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
From the samy guy, 30c3 - The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuX_ElPhWHs
Same video from source - https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291...
Even when Amazon has exactly the product you're searching for, they'll often bury it under a dozen vaguely related junk items (which sometimes don't match your search term at all). Presumably because those vendors have paid for elevated search placement?
I’m not even sure the initial launch looked as good as that Chinese site Wish…
Maybe they should embed the latter as option for the languages it understands.
Basically there's no way to buy anything in secondary market, yes OLX or Quikr etc... exist but they are limited to only people around you (in same city) and do not facilitate payments or logistics or even reviews.
Now someone can make their own website but product discovery is pain and buyers can't trust reviews on website owned by the single seller, neither can trust the refund will be honoured as you need Escrow to deal with the unknown sellers.
India has people who are interested in saving money and buying second hand tools/machines is an option yet it has no eBay or alternative as if startups in India have a blindspot.
For example, I live a town with population of 500K (200km away from Delhi) and while repairing my car, the mechanic told me he will go to Delhi and try getting the spare part from Junkyard owners.
Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?
Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.
Lemme give you another example, sometime back I was interested in a product from Mobil which only comes in 230L barrel packaging, I need only 2liters of this stuff and there were many sellers on eBay selling it in used Coke/Soda bottles, but I couldn't buy it because I am from India.
Similarly, our junkyards are filled with useful servos, PLCs etc..., linear rails, valves but it's hard to find buyers for the junkyard owners because there's no online marketplace for this
India imports millions of tons of waste from foreign countries yet the stuff that's harvested from it has very inefficient market.
This is holding back innovation as you can build lots of cool things from the used machinery/tools which cost wayyy less than the new stuff.
Back in time eBay was operating in Indian market and eBay was successful as the payment service used on eBay was PayPal, buyers had protection in India which they couldn't get with any other local website as online payment infrastructure was in dark ages in India at that time.
After that India rapidly grew in e-commerce and payment platforms rapidly developed (now they are at par with western ones or we can say even better and payment regulations also improved a lot). Now logistics has also improved a lot, so we can receive goods in just 1 or 2 days in any part of the country. We've new expressways, freight corridors, capacity expanding rapidly so now even more businesses is possible in India yet we are leaving the obvious one out. Where are all my Indian executives, investors, guys from IITs are doing? Why they aren't working on this?
Then Flipkart buys eBay India and shuts it down.
And now there exists market vaccum. Everyone is looking at each other, no startup founder doing anything about it. Existence of eBay alternative will add great efficiency to India market, reduce its CO2 footprint as well when used products find buyer instead of destroying and remelting them.
Flipkart has a history of buying and shutting down businesses.
Just to remove this possibility of being used as a weapon in competition's hand, they killed it.
They certainly didn't understand the whole use case of eBay like website but killed it because it was possible to use it for competition in consumer goods space considering it had many things that were being sold on Flipkart too
Okay I am only guessing, the historic reason is listed in another subcomment on my original post.
Their service with mostly wholly owned logistic was considered superior.
I place order before 2pm and my orders arrive at my desk next day before 11am, arrives in my town at 7am.
For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.
Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.
Even if we ignore the high shipping charges for relatively low value products, scammers, fraudulent sellers, the returns if receiver not available etc.
Amazon doesn't package and ship your items if it weighs over 30kg, you've to fulfill orders on your own if it's larger than 30kg.
>Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.
Not true! India has changed. I've shipped over 300kg per shipment no problem. I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg
I am not sure how old was your experience, leave the government services. We ship with delhivery and safe express
Who are you shipping with? And when did you try? Today you can easily get the shipping rates we are getting by signing up for Delhivery's business account the more you ship the cheaper it becomes but man we are no longer living in dark ages of IndiaPost parcel times anymore
There's the crux. Ebay is not about regular e-commerce retailer, but it is about avg next door Joe selling surplus items that they have. That's the scenario you painted.
These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.
I have friends who have their own e-commerce shopify storefronts, and you are absolutely right they have a hassel free shipping experience (more or less), but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.
Did you ever try? A lot of web shops are being run in India by average Joe now, sometimes take a look at Google shopping tab.
Signing up for delivery business account is not smth you need much for, anyone can sign-up and start today.
Okay so you don't want to sign up for Delhivery account, sign up for ShipRocket (it's just an account sign-up like any website). Upload your shipment dimension and they'll arrange pickup and deliver your goods.
>but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.
They'll depending on what they are selling if they are selling consumer goods, they can sign up with Amazon but if they are selling smth more niche, they'll benefit greatly from product discovery that comes with a website like eBay, unless they've a recognizable brand and enough money to spend on advertisement and marketing a guy with an eBay account can get a lot of sales.
Honestly most guys will will not be shipping 50kg item from get go. To ship small 1 or 2 kg item they can approach nearest courier service and if they've a few of these Packets, courier offers pickup from your premise.
For small packets, price variation among different courier providers isn't much to fuss about. Only at higher weight levels, the delhivery/safe express standout from the competition.
So here's the process:
1. Sign up for ShipRocket
2. Pack your goods and wait for it to be picked up and delivered
How can we make it easier than this? Next step is only that a courier company reads your mind and picksup unpacked goods, pack it and deliver it to customers using teleportation. There isn't room for making it easier than this, just saying.
A person who can't be bothered to do is, has any place in business? What he deserves to make money for if he can't given do this.
I am a guy from a small city near Delhi with not much resources and I still manage to ship goods and make good money that I left my job, if I can do it, anyone can.
> Did you ever try?
No, not Delhivery kind of specialised courier. But in USA I was eBay user. I was an ordinary bloke with 9-5 job, and used to sell excess stuff (old gadget which I want to upgrade from), shipping charges were major part of the transaction and my endeavour was to minimize it - ended up using US postal service quite a few times.
Here I am talking about the domestic courier service not shipping to US for international shipping I agree we are still behind.
I also have export import business where I sell Chinese goods into US and India.
Many times in small towns Amazon routes its fullfiled by Amazon shipments to Delhivery.
Hardly any ecomerce service is using India Post now, most small packets are through XpressBees and Delhivery. Rest are through Amazon and Flipkarts own logistics like ATS and Ekart respectively
> Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?
> Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.
Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.
But you can find people who scavenge junkyards and are listed as sellers on eBay who do sell used bench grinder (maybe after restoring them!?), Induction motors, industrial brushless motors etc... In India even that is also not easy to find.
Sometime in the past few years something changed though. Shipping prices went up. Prices on name brand goods started climbing up too, sometimes higher than I pay locally even. Savings basically disappeared so I stopped bothering 90% of the time.
Then the flood came. IG without the international competition, the knockoff and counterfeit and aliexpress sellers saw an opportunity and absolutely flooded the site. Now you can't find a name brand fucking anything unless you explicitly search for it, and more often than not it's out of stock. It will sell you a million suspiciously cheap knockoffs with obviously fake brand names, often the same knockoff under dozens of different names and prices.
It really is basically just a shit overpriced Wish now, and it is baffling to me that Amazon have seemingly just allowed this to happen.
But I had a hard time getting a "reputable" USB-C Cable a few weeks ago, & all of them were basically obviously "too good to be true" clone cables from generic brands that you know won't actually work. Getting good cables/electronics for a lot cheaper was what got me into Amazon in the first place but now I'd rather buy everything from best buy or Walmart and avoid a huge headache. Everything from good brands has been perpetually out of stock or outright unavailable anymore.
Appliances are somehow even worse, like the last few things I've bought there were outright unsafe and almost always had misleading listings/pictures. I mean at least on Aliexpress you pretty much know what you will get, and (good) stores are usually honest about their products.
(I'm not sure if it's still the case but for almost the entirety of 2020 Amazon support was only available through emails that could take 48h to get a reply to, apparently because of coronavirus (?? Isn't chat pretty much perfect for remote work) so good luck even getting a refund especially for less expensive items that aren't worth a few days of back and forth)
Edit: also, big brands like Aukey have stock available next to you, so there's only one middle-man (Amazon), and it handles the logistics, so it's not like it's doing nothing…
Otherwise, they are not that different from most other big retailers.
Usually that's all
If the guy sucks, you go to another one.
You can see a company called Ugreen, which ended up with multiple "official stores" on online marketplaces this way.
Contract enforcement in China is of course non-existent. It's good if you manage to get a prominent handle for your own brand, in worst case somebody else can do it for you!
I know a man who regularly have to smack pretender "official stores" of his brand few times a year.
This also works the other way around, somebody with a vicious lawyer can coerce Alibaba, or JD into handing your (likely well doing) online store to them on a claim that you don't own your own brand name.
Germany has so many other good online shops that it's for most products really easy to cut Amazon out and avoid that problem.
Customer orders X from seller A, A buys X1 from seller B, then A gives X1 to customer. Meanwhile B buys X2 from A.
Sellers can of course opt out of this scheme.
With FBA, you could have gotten counterfeit goods or a return from another customer where they've sent only the box and something that weighs the same (or a broken item). Amazon throws away the receipts (it'd be a nightmare to handle so they just... don't).
Why is Amazon not on the hook for this?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Amazon does keep track on where a given unit came from so that it is traceable to the original source, and at least in Europe invoices are issued for the inventory supplies between the sellers (these are documented at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/help/help-page.ht... - may not be public).
An example from pricing something up earlier this week, identical leveling casters, made in china and sold under different brand names, but with the same specs and product code
Aliexpress: $41, Free postage, Est delivery 17/6
Ebay: $62, Free postage, Est delivery 2/6 - 7/6
Amazon.com.au: $125, $35 Delivery, Est delivery 10/6
It's shifting through loads of absolute trash.
* Many with "product tolerances may be 1cm to 3cm off". This is a device that's about 2inch (58mm). 3cm is half the width. Perhaps they mean millimeter....
* Magnetic and non-magnetic ones mixed together. Seller even communicates they have mixed stock and will not guarantee which one you get. I want the magnetic one.
* Misleading claims on nearly every description to suggest the product has features of much more expensive funnels.
I'm only willing to tolerate it because I don't actually need this item and I can get it for free from Amazon. But...it's getting to the point where I might as well pay more and wait to get it from a reputable seller.
I didn't even know there is an estimation. I just assume it will ship within 7 days. The vast bulk of my orders all arrived in 7 days (sometimes even shorter). But I got caught out with some orders where it shipped all the way from China, and I only learned about that after buying them (by visiting the 'track package' page).
https://d2bvhe78se1grn.cloudfront.net/optimized/2X/a/a0a8385...
About a few months ago, most guitar items in Amazon.de were straight up forgeries at a smaller price, unless the Amazon Seller was a famous German music store. Those items also were on top of search.
I have some internal contacts at Amazon and passed it to someone internally, and it seems to have been solved, but there is still lots of forgery in others areas.
Amazon's first choices are always garbage, have to sort through a lot of it, make sure you're buying from the right seller (and even then you could get a fake) and actually read the reviews (1 star, 2-3 stars and 5 stars, preferably) so you know what you're buying. But overall, it's alright.
I wish Ebay had the same interface as https://reverb.com/ , which is nice, but is for music-instruments only and the prices are a bit too high.
eBay forces me to simultaneously compare different products across different sellers. It's a nightmare to keep track of the differences and pros/cons of each listing.
I really don't know what happened to Amazon's product search, but it's almost entirely useless unless you search something super specific, and even then Google will actually give you better results.
If I don't have a smartphone i'm screwed. https://postimg.cc/LJ6KVgZr