Apple asked Amazon to block rival ads
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The knock seems to be that they only did this for Apple products, not counterfeits of say Samsung phones because they were not pressured in similar ways by Samsung.
1. Amazon refuses to hold themselves accountable for the products they sell—they advertise one thing but sell you another, clearly indicating they have no idea what they're actually selling.
2. Apple relies on legal protections to artificially inflate the pricing of their products. AirPods aren't much better than bluetooth headphones sold for a tenth the price, and they are straight-up inferior to the products of competitors with a third their price. If the superiority of their own products were so obvious the branding wouldn't be an issue at all. And don't even get me started on how they force consumers to buy their hardware to get access to their software, which should be forced to be sold on the open market along side their competitors.
Now of course we need to fix the first issue to fix the second one, but the second issue has far more destructive consequences.
1. pair instantly without problems to my apple devices
2. intelligently know when to switch between my phone to my laptop
3. intelligently know when to switch from car bluetooth to headphones
4. is compatible with "Find My"
5. has magsafe charging
6. has same sound quality and sound cancellation with above features
these are all very important to me and my experience with literally any other non-apple device has been awful
It is extraordinarily difficult to do correctly, and once your brain has adapted to the Apple acoustic transformations, they’ve achieved near-indistinguishability.
I have non-Apple Bluetooth earbuds and they pair simply fine to my Apple devices (and others). Apple oversell the shit of their iCloud "auto switching" (that often do not work) but what you actually want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many headphones in the price range of Airpods have.
Find my and MagSafe charging are very odd, Apple marketing induced request, and Apple definitely doesn't have a lead in sound quality at the price they sell their stuff. If anything, their sound quality is extremely disappointing considering the price. Funny thing is that for the price of a set of Airpods, you can get 2-3 equivalent competitors' products. So much of the stuff you say matters is largely irrelevant.
Before calling me a hater: I'm an Apple customer since the PPC days and bought both first iPod and first iPhone. But I am currently leaving the Apple ecosystem precisely because their pricing is not grounded in any technological reality, and mostly about fashion/social statuts.
Person 2: Those "features" are arbitrary stuff Apple told you to care about through their marketing.
How wildly condescending lol. “You don’t actually like those things. You just do as you’re told, puppet.”
AirPods have no way to stream lossless music, so you didn't mention that feature (yet they sell it with Apple music). It does exist in competing implementation of wireless earbuds. I guess when Apple do finally implement the feature you will care about that.
You went on and listed an arbitrary set of features and use that as a rationalization of your choice. Just like a hiring agent crafting a job proposal that could possibly only be met by one specific individual.
It's your right, you can make whatever choice you want and be happy with them. However, you can't argue they are inherently better than some other choice that would offer a different set of features, especially not without putting everything into the pricing context.
Apple Airpods are ok. For the price they are sold at they are very mediocre and the "features" they market as something customers should care about really do not pass the sniff test. Its ok if that's what you prefer, but you can't claim there are no other options that can provide a similar if not better experience. Of course, requiring a perfect 1 to 1 equivalency will get you nowhere...
That's rectifiable.
For the right price, it is rectifiable.
> In a statement today, Apple explained:
> > Apple also told Insider that the 2018 agreement with Amazon “sought to address significant counterfeit and safety issues” on Amazon’s marketplace.
Getting my money back has been a massive pain. Usually Amazon literally returns the money when the delivery person picks up the item from my doorstep.
But with this Amazon required a scheduled pickup with UPS, did not acknowledge receiving the item even though UPS showed it as received and a few weeks later they are still asking me to wait for 1 month before contacting them for any information.
Well, I filed a chargeback with my credit card and automagically the errors in their system got resolved, and the item shows as received (on the correct date 2+ weeks ago), and they are promising a refund in a week (as opposed to 2.5 more weeks).
Looks like they’re not just giving Apple preferential treatment but going out of their way to protect Apple.
It’s likely there’s a significant queue of potential counterfeits that Amazon needs to go through. If you bought/returned this during a period of otherwise-high volume (e.g., right after a release), there’s a particularly high chance that the volume of “real” returns temporarily swamped their normal capacity. Or maybe their capacity just lags behind what it ought to be.
Either way, they’re protecting themselves and this almost certainly has nothing to do with Apple specifically.
The only recourse is to pay them the charged back amount...
Experienced this first hand with actual fraud that was reported to Amazon moments after it occurred, yet still received a lifetime ban until my fraud dispute was settled.
Doing this for a while has increased my concern about Amazon, as a surprising number of things are only available from them.
When you pushed them, they bumped yours to the front of the line.
If the scammers keep the real item, they effectively get a real product at counterfeit prices. If they sell it, they make the difference between real and counterfeit in profit less shipping.
(If so, I'm guessing they made the cheapest genuine Apple Watch look on the outside like a more expensive one.)
Even booting it to software, it might be enough for a completely-untrained person to assume it was real. Actually pairing it with a test phone might be the easiest/fastest to be certain.
A chargeback is a nuclear solution, where you make it clear that you're going to have a third party dictate terms to the merchant. Most merchants respond to that sort of behaviour by dictating to you that they will no longer do business with you.
A merchant enters into the world of credit card payments knowing full well chargebacks are a thing. And most people won't go there, unless the merchant won't act appropriately.
For example, Amazon. A black hole of information. It's very hard to even find a 'contact' button that doesn't lead to a chatbot with relentlessly circular menus.
They funnel you into multiple choice hell, and the wrong choice gives a lame answer, with no way to chat a person. You have to restart the whole menu process to try a different tact.
Amazon actively, aggressively tries to ignore you. They do not provide customer service except under duress.
Note that they keep doubling down on this! Year after year, it is harder and harder to get resolution for outside the box issues they cause.
I know so many people that have no idea how to ever contact amazon, if something bad has happened. That have tried, and get lost in menu hell.
And even if you manage to get past this, and finally start chatting with an actual person, they have a very hard time helping you if the problem is outside the box.
You'll have your chat session "transferred" to someone else, and have to explain all over again. Yup, they can read the log but often don't. I've had a chat session with 4 or 5 transfers, and then had it die.
Leaving me to start all over again.
Amazon is the worst for customer support. The worst. They deserve chargebacks.
And the post you're replying to was right to do so. If the merchant cannot give clear, concise answers, and explain what is happening in your specific case, it's on them. And amazon chat personnel will just cite company policy.
We all need to say that we don't care, Mr Merchant, if you're trying to scale. If you're doing so as "cost saving measures". Screw you, Merchant, provide customer support!
And it's getting to the point that we should legislate this, specifically for large corps.
I'd guess that the box had been physically received by Amazon but it hadn't been opened/validated/checked by the relevant department to ensure that it was the watch they had sent you and not a knock off/brick.
Honestly, this should be done for every major brand.
Amazon is not the only company to do this. Not sure how reducing ads is problematic. Amazon doesn't have to show ads it doesn't want to.
At that point they're choosing to profit off counterfeits. Which we know they do, but here they're effectively admitting it.
> Apple's latest products directly sold by Amazon have a much cleaner page layout on Amazon with no ads or recommendations until the very bottom of the page
This is not an agreement to "remove junk ads". AMZ is not showing ads for a large part of the page when an Apple product is the focus...probably in relevant searches? but certainly on a product display page. Again, this is the case for Apple products on other vendor sites, as well.
Presumably, Apple paid Amazon to reduce the number of ads.
What's so wrong about that?
All companies allow large enterprise customers (who drive high revenue), to have custom / tailored offerings based on their requests.
Samsung has an Amazon store, and other companies bid for ad spots shown right on the official store page which link to illegal knockoffs of Samsung products. Samsung complains, and Amazon says "sorry we can't help it, that's just how things work".
Then Apple comes along, and Amazon magically cleans up their store page (demonstrating that they have the ability to do so), but leaves the rest of them as-is.
So now the take away is – if you don't sign an exclusive agreement with Amazon they will give counterfeiters full access to your products and customers, and that can be easily challenged in court (which is exactly what the FTC is doing right now).
I agree though bidding on a trademark where you can advertise as a competitor when someone explicitly searches for a brand should be considered copyright infringement.
It’s definitely a horrible user experience - Apple, Google, and Amazon all do it
Just searched for "Netflix". First result is some app called "Chewy" (with [ad]) next to it. Search for "GitHub". First result is some app called "ServerCat". Search for "Grand Theft Auto". First result is some app call "One State RP". Search for "23andMe". First result is for "BodyFast: ..."
And probably less than 15% of overall retail marketshare?
Conversely what's Amazon's share of physical detail? (Preferably excluding whole foods since that's an arguably different business to selling cheap electronics and other junk)
It's as if the two companies operate in... different spheres!
Repeating the previous opinion with slightly different wording seems a bit odd.
Even though the topics are frequently discussed together, anticompetitive behavior is something different than being a monopoly and one does not require the other.
In the case of Amazon, it's even worse, because despite a 'mere' 36% market share, there is a lot of evidence that they have market-moving pricing power.
They generally exercise it by restricting the prices sellers can charge in other stores. This happens to almost all sellers on Amazon.
The law suit is not about the ads, per se. It's about price-fixing, which you can probably agree should not be allowed.
We've been through a long period of stagnation from big tech companies, often blamed on cultural problems in a maturing industry. What if the real story is a level of cartelisation far beyond anything revealed so far?
Collusion is illegal and typically done in secret because its illegal, like when Apple, Google, Pixar and some others (I forgot who else, Google it) were suppressing wages–that was collusion. Signing contracts and making deals with other Fortune 500 companies operating in the same sector, even for things that neither company would typically offer to anyone else, is not.
The Amazon storefront simply seems to be an extension of that concept from brick and mortar to online stores. I'm not sure what's supposed to be unlawful or unethical about this.
[Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but not in a retail oriented role, nor as a spokesperson]
The manufacturer also pays for the product to be displayed, with different rates for different positioning.
The limit is physical space on the storefront, and that's a problem that Amazon doesn't have.
Best Buy is not in the same league.
Also, Apple appears to be the only company in the world that can get this deal from Amazon. Apple's competitors can't get it. So this seems to be an artificial restriction on competition.
Sure, Apple is sometimes a beta customer of new features in Brand Registry. But in general is not the only company that gets this treatment from Amazon and Apple’s competitors can sign up and use almost all the same services through Brand Registry.
Source: Its been a few years but I built many of these counterfeit detecting systems from greenfield.
The biggest problem really has been brands not wanting to engage with Amazon or Brands not being anywhere close to organized enough to help. In many cases simple questions like “Please give us a CSV of all your products. We will not add them to Amazon’s catalog” was met with “we don’t have such a CSV or database”, “ok we pulled together many products into a CSV by searching years of emails and Dropbox files but if you want the products from our European and Asian divisions please message them separately”.
I can tell you, Apple does not have these same organizational issues. They know every product they have ever made, they are happy to share, and they are happy to leverage experimental features.
This is not true. From the article:
"I'm surprised — that's strange," a former senior Amazon advertising manager told Insider, referring to Apple's clean product and search result pages. "I wouldn't have the discretion to offer something like that."
At least half a dozen salespeople on Amazon's advertising team told Insider that they were not able to extend this Apple-style special treatment to their clients. Large advertisers on Amazon constantly ask for this type of exclusivity, but the company usually denies those requests because it wants a diverse set of search results and ads, one of the people said. To create Apple's clean product and search pages, multiple teams at the most senior levels at Amazon would have had to get involved, this person added.
"We balk at companies that want to buy all the ad slots," this person said. "I have never seen, nor do I have the control to give, that type of right."
However, it is offered to Brands that own legally protected Intellectual Property. Through Brand registry Brands can have their search pages protected when the customer searches for legally protected keywords (eg AirPods).
Context: I was the lead engineer that worked with the Ads teams and designed the architecture to integrate Brand Registry and Ads systems.
Even when I worked there (ie while the feature was still in Beta), Apple was not the only Brand to get this treatment. There were many other Brands in the beta for this feature.
> In contrast, product pages for Apple competitors like Samsung are riddled with ads from competitors, recommendations, and other sponsored banners. Insider says that other companies, including Samsung, have complained about the preferential treatment given to Apple.
You shouldn't be allowed to place ads against another company's product listings or trademarked brands.
You shouldn't be able to pay Google to advertise and gain search placement ahead of another company's trademarked brands, either.
As as consumer, this is precisely where I want competitors ads. Competition is a good thing, for me.
Should companies be able to do this?
Is Amazon a marketplace, or the marketplace? Rewind 15 years ago, and I compared local retail, Amazon, NewEgg, Buy.com, etc. I researched each product, and then researched which site would give me a good price plus shipping. Of course Amazon won this battle and edged out many competitors.
But most people tend to go to Amazon, and let Amazon make decisions for them. That's kind of our own fault, but it's also worrying. Now I won't argue that Apple is or isn't the best maker of whatever product someone went to Amazon to shop for. But I still would like the products to be presented equally and fairly.
But... I suppose I want companies to be able to give each other money to get different levels of service, too. How do you draw this line?
I'm not a huge fan of advertising in retail, but even in offline retail, manufacturers/distributors are paying for shelf space, either directly in dollars or offset from the product cost / managed through other terms. Having your product accessory or competitor shelved nearby a more well known product is helpful; ads in a retail website are analogous to that.
I'm not really sure what your point is here. What's wrong with comparing products across brands?
If there's a product page on Amazon about Samsung, you're saying Motorola can't advertise below the fold?
Search terms feel like a different thing. TV Guide search for Mercedes, land on a show about BMW? No. Google search for Samsung, Motorola is top result? No.
PS. Use kagi.com and it's not a problem.
Unless I'm mistaken, this discussion is about search ads. The situation was that users searched for Apple products and were shown counterfeit competitors.
Context: It’s been a few years but I built many of these counterfeit detecting systems from greenfield. Including the early architecture integrations with the ads teams.
AMA (I can’t always say everything, but I’ll answer to my best ability in the morning)
Was there any concern on liability as presumably Amazon can detect lots of counterfeits but choose not to?
Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site?
This is an impossible question to answer. The numerator was a known number of counterfeits but the denominator is entirely unknown.
> Was there any concern on liability
Yes many brands, including Apple, would threaten to sue. Some even did but as a developer I wasn’t involved in those details to know much.
> Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site?
Absolutely! There were entire organizations of 100s of people devoted to just this task. Including appeal pathways for sellers to get back access to the site.
Of course they are.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but Coca Cola exists precisely because of those sorts of distribution and product placement deals.
Grocery stores are paid a ton of money to place products in favorable spots on the shelves and end caps. That and the consumer surveillance loyalty cards are a huge fraction of their profits.
(I’d ban both practices if I were supreme dictator. Sadly, I am not.)
As a consumer, it shows that Amazon is aware of counterfeits, and has the ability to limit them, but does nothing unless the seller can raise an appropriate fit. Have I previously purchased counterfeit Samsung X? Sounds like Amazon might have a good intuition, but does nothing to stop it.
I looked more closely and they don't seem to sell iPhones, which is I guess where I get the impression from. Their other items have weird prices that are different from the Apple Store, which also screamed "scam" to me. But I guess not?
The Apple storefront. Lots of macbooks and watches to buy.
Oddly enough, the iPhone only shows up in searches as used/renewed items, not brand new. Is that an Amazon thing or an Apple thing?
I wonder how many of these thumb drives are legit. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L1...
Someone that "knowingly sells counterfeit goods" is humanly aware that a specific item they are selling is counterfeit, and decide to sell it anyway, which is not the case here.
These listings are taken down whack-a-mole style as Amazon is made humanly aware of their existence.
Strange how easy it is to brush off accountability and still make a profit off of illegalities.
> Prior to the deal, Apple sent “hundreds of thousands of take-down notices” to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates
For example, there are books I purchased off of Amazon, directly from Amazon as new books, that I am not allowed to sell as used on their site. This wasn't always the case.
Fraudulent listings aren't specifically an Amazon problem, there's junk like the above example on basically every marketplace site. Search "2tb flash drive" on any of them. It's a fundamental problem with non-curated marketplaces.
The law requires explicit knowledge, so Amazon can get away with it.
I don’t agree with it, but lawmakers should be making these changes.
So, all those dodgy USB drives that are branded are infringing.
In the UK these are "counterfeit" and illegal to sell (not just tortuous, criminal).
I'm surprised if the USA code doesn't make these actions criminal and leaves them only as civil matters given how much the state choose to consider copyright as a criminal action?
> I mean, if I had repeated instances of someone else performing illegal activities in my basement, I can't continually, or even once, claim that I had no idea.
Amazon does not claim that they are unaware of counterfeit products on their platform. They do explicitly say they are aware of fraudulent products on their platform, and they have blogs on their website that talk about this.
> Just because it's hidden behind several layers of software abstraction does not mean that Amazon doesn't have explicit knowledge.
They are generally aware that marketplace sellers list fraudulent products. They are not specifically aware that any particular new listing is fraudulent until after the fact.
> These products even physically sit in their own warehouses.
Sometimes they do, but not all of the time. However, putting the item in a warehouse does nothing to authenticate it.
> However, putting the item in a warehouse does nothing to authenticate it.
Those are both Amazon's problems and not customers' or the law's problems. Here's an idea: if you are constantly ingesting fraudulent products in your warehouses and shopping site, maybe do something about it?
Things are not working if consumers don't know what they're buying and government departments devoted to enforcing correct information in the market are doing nothing about it.
If it were any of those things, it would be liable for safety issues of the products it sells, among other things.
I suspect “other things” includes “knowingly operating a cartel that violates patent and copyright law on a larger scale than any other organization in the western hemisphere; primarily by importing illegal and unsafe counterfeit goods into the US”.
I have no idea why the courts have gone along with this scheme. My guess is that it’s corruption.
What government would kill the goose that lays golden eggs? They pay tax. Buyers pay tax. Huge amount (but not that much as I expected [0]). What else is needed?
0 - https://www.investopedia.com/insights/amazon-effect-us-econo...
Ironically, Amazon skated sales tax to such a degree that Congress had to change the law.
What little taxes they pay state/locally are next to nothing because of sweetheart deals in exchange for locating warehouses and offices in particular areas...deals which mean they likely pay less tax than the costs they incur on the communities in terms of services and infrastructure.
1) Farming the tax cattle (ex: speeding tickets)
2) Tracking down and punishing “foxes in the hen house” who disrupt their tax cattle (ex: a murderer easily destroys $1M in taxes per tax cow killed, gotta stop that)
3) Turf wars vs other gangs who would usurp their role as farmer
First, Amazon's warehouse hold merchandise from other companies. Why should they be punished because Amazon or a different company is selling counterfeit goods.
Second, do the retailers know they are selling counterfeit products? There is a huge difference between intentionally deceiving people and getting hoodwinked by thieves. For example, if Amazon's employees decided to buy counterfeit and promote them, that would be wrong. However, what happens if an Amazon employee is tricked and thinks they are buying legitimate goods but are really buying fake goods. In the later case, Amazon is a victim of fraud and should not be punished.
Finally, punishments should be proportional to the crime. If I cause $5 worth of damage, I should not pay a $10,000 fine. Note I have noticed a lot of online posters push for draconian punishments and that is not just or helpful.
Everyone selling 2tb thumb drives knows they're selling counterfeit products, yes.
They will of course strategically claim ignorance if confronted - a lie only the most naive would believe.
Also, the word "knowingly" requires the person taking action to have the knowledge in their head. Someone else knowing it isn't enough to qualify.
Amazon's listings are not curated. Amazon knows nothing about fraudulent listings until later brought to their attention. These fake flash drives exist for short period of time until they are brought to Amazon's attention, at which point, they are taken down.
What's the point where we are going to say "it's not good enough to point at the 3rd party with the autogenerated name" and "computers at large"?
Customer Obsession and Earns Trust might be two of Amazon's Leadership Principles, but no principles stand in the way of cold hard cash.
My favorite example of this was I was browsing the "top 50" computer science books on Amazon. This was about 10 years ago. In the top 50, they had basic how to books (like how to use Linux or Excel), books on getting coding jobs, etc. They had almost no actual computer science books and yet, the top 50 list software almost certainly created by people with a computer science degrees!! The list even listed the same title more than once in a few cases. It was obvious that the software which built the list was broken and either had not been tested or was deployed in a known broken state. Customer obsession does not mean shipping obviously broken software which does not help the customer.
As for trust, when I canceled Prime, Amazon used dark patterns to make the process as painful as possible. Not much to say other than I do not trust companies which try to trick me into not canceling a subscription I do not want.
I wonder whether they used Samsung's factory tooling for that.
People in my world goggle at me when I say I don’t shop on Amazon, but whenever I do go on there I couldn’t be happier not to be paying for the privilege of combing through all of that garbage. (Amazon Visa rewards card holder since 2007 and had Prime 2010-2019)