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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

I think with the state of things, Amazon should be completely banned from selling anything that might be construed a supplement. They have such lax controls that your protein powder or vitamin pills might contain pretty much anything. Even reputable brands bought from their brand storefront might be counterfeit [1]. You’d be shocked at the number of things that are counterfeit. A friend of mine recently bought a niche optical device, and it turned out it was a fake, despite being allegedly sold by the manufacturer. Amazon needs to stop co-mingling inventory, and it also needs to stop selling things that have no safety testing whatsoever, especially in the food and supplement space.

https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch...

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The solution is to stop allowing third party sellers. The idea that any random person can get an Amazon seller account and scam their way into being approved for certain categories and just send in anything as long as it has a label is insane (it’s incredibly easy to forge the invoices they request). There’s zero control at Amazon, they frequently put returned products back into new inventory as well which makes buying trading cards and Lego a massive gamble. Computer parts get swapped and resold all the time too. I can’t imagine trusting them with anything that goes in your body.

Edit: if anyone hasn’t seen just how lax they are, search YouTube for FBA. Literally random people driving around to drug stores picking up nearly expired clearance items to send in for FBA.

There are a lot of undesirable side effects with that solution.

You shouldn't have to be tech savvy enough to host a shopping experience that's competitive with Amazon in order to sell things online. You ought to be able to focus solely on your product and if it's a good one you ought to be able to compete with Amazon Basics on a level playing field--even if it's a field served by Amazon metal.

I think we need more separation between the part of Amazon that handles clicking "buy" and printing shipping labels, and the part that comes up with things for sale. So much separation, in fact, that the former considers the latter to be no more trustworthy than any other company or individual.

Seller reputation should be important, and the medium for determining if a seller is trustworthy should be free from conflicts of interest.

If the user facing part was adequately adversarial about the cardboard facing part it would result in a UI which had no reason to encourage the user to trust the contents of the cardboard, and instead simply presented facts that enable the user to apply their own scrutiny.

Can Amazon even run FBA without comingling? This is the root of the problem; tracing an individual item back to the seller is apparently not possible, so seller reputation doesn't really exist. So either it's not a big enough problem for Amazon to kill comingling, or it's not profitable to do so at Amazon's scale.

I'm pretty sure that if we manage to coordinate an existential threat to Amazon, Amazon will respond by finding a way to do it profitably. The problem is that we're not threatening enough because we're uncoordinated.

I used to think my wife was silly for spending more at beauty stores for her skincare products, but after realizing how insane Amazon's quality controls are, I think someone needs to actually shut them down. I wonder if there are any grounds for lawsuits. The number of counterfeit products they sell, even under "Sold by Amazon.com" is WILD. Zero supply chain discipline.

I think the issue is multifold: a lot of the fake products are not dangerous, but they are either useless, or otherwise inferior. There’s essentially no recourse for this as a consumer, and you probably won’t even notice that you don’t have an original product.

In some cases the fakes are downright dangerous. This is much more the case in supplements, cosmetics, food, and occasionally electrical appliances.

People will only sue them when they get actually dangerous products. Even then it’s a difficult process.

Beauty products are in the ballpark but are also a different ball game. Unless you're licensed or very educated on what chemicals and chemical combinations do to your skin picking beauty products can be tough. My partner is an esthetician and most of what she spends her time doing is helping people pick products that won't adversely impact their skin or just do nothing. Beauty is chalk full of fake products and worse influencers who push them onto unsuspecting/unknowing people. It's given rise to an industry of estheticians who don't make money on purchases but who collect a fee to just help you sift through the bullshit.

Can you elaborate about counterfeit products being sold under "sold by amazon.com"? That's surprising to me, I treat that as a sign of something being non-counterfeit.

Amazon commingles[1] inventory. So if there are N vendors selling an item, including Amazon.com, all N inventories just get mixed together at the warehouses. So if some M of those N are counterfeit, there's no way to know.

"As an example, if I sell Duracell C batteries on Amazon through their “Shipping Fulfilled by Amazon” — which I must do to receive Prime shipping designation — I need to send my batteries to an Amazon warehouse. After receiving my delivery, they will count the number of batteries, then slide the whole stock into a generic shelf labeled “Duracell C Batteries.” Any purchaser receives a Duracell C battery from that box, and thus the actual seller is unknown."

1: https://thetriplehelix.medium.com/your-amazon-products-could...

This makes it rather attractive for sellers to add in some cheap fakes - thanks for the explanation.

I’ve ordered an Apple-brand Lightning cable from Amazon (sold by Amazon), for example, and received a counterfeit.

They replaced it, of course, but had it been a gift, or I’d been in a hurry, would anyone have noticed? If Amazon can’t keep counterfeits out of their own inventory, what chance do most buyers have?

My understanding is that all sellers, including Amazon itself have co-mingled inventory. Therefore you can’t actually guarantee that what you’re getting is from Amazon’s stock, as opposed to some other random seller who gave the FBA warehouse a truck full of fake products.

It's an inventory management exploit that Amazon seems in no hurry to fix.

https://www.redpoints.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inventory-m...

obviously if Amazon sold something that damaged someone it would be grounds for suit under tort law, in which case the sky's the limit, and guessing the easy to find details of their behavior over the years any American jury would punish them.

Only a tiny few Americans can afford filing such types of lawsuits, and only a tiny few of those people are interested in pursuing such things.

Personal injury is serious business, and many personal injury attorneys work on contingency. Amazon has "deep pockets," so I doubt this is the reason.

This isn't correct, most personal injury lawyers don't charge you directly. They take a percentage of the settlement or victory. There's way more money to be made with the "no fee" model than charging hourly in these instances.

Time and availability are expensive commodities. Who's paying for that?

I literally just said that they make their money on fees from the outcome of the cases. That is how basically every personal injury case works. If they don't think the case will win, they don't take it. Personal injury/tort lawyers do not charge clients in the same way as other types of law. They especially don't do that because a) they'd make less money and b) they are often times dealing with people that couldn't afford hourly rates up front especially as a case becomes more complicated.

> Amazon needs to stop co-mingling inventory

That alone would solve 99% of the problems, as dedicated inventory would allow to quickly weed out the bad actors.

My understanding is that co-mingling was originally a distribution optimization. I can’t remember if I was there under the initial rollout or they had tried it, stopped it, and rolled it out again during my tenure, but when I started in 2009 it wasn’t a thing, and people were opinionated about why it wasn’t a thing (to protect seller reputation), but it was obvious how it could reduce shipping times (if you have your inventory on the west coast, but a buyer on the east coast, picking from another merchant reduces shipping time and cost and wasted warehouse space partitioning everyone’s inventory).

However, Amazon has abandoned any idea of consistent reliable shipping or even delivery “promises”, so the only thing co-mingling does is reduce shipping costs and warehouse space at the customer’s expense. That’s the antithesis of what Amazon delivery used to be. It’s sad to see all the work we did on Prime and Delivery Experience get washed down the drain. Prime used to be a no brained for anyone who used Amazon regularly, and now I’m not even sure if there is discrete value there anymore, rather than just a mishmash of unrelated, mediocre up upsell opportunities.

>>...the state of things...

If you're not familiar with Skinny Puppy (industrial band)

There is a lyric in a song "...define... the state of things...

https://youtu.be/sDEhCm0pxCo?t=271

"...that paper shredder, patent tender, puts us back in time again...."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHDb9xwHvc

Skinny puppy is from an AI cultural perspective, where they audience is a bunch of ~50 year old dorks (yes, population, we are fucking old - but we built things)

1. the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDEhCm0pxCo

2. Reference: https://youtu.be/sDEhCm0pxCo?t=271

(about to filter this through AI topaz and see if can get a better qual vid - but this song is a Hex on Exxon mobile (in response to valdez spills and oil profit demons)

Calling for Amazon to be banned from selling supplements is extreme, IMO. But they should be accountable for preventing counterfeit items from being sold or marketed as the items they’re counterfeiting. In cases where the authenticity of the item has not been verified, that should be made clear to the buyer. Absence of such an indicator would mean the product is authentic (consumers should IMO be able to rely on products being what they are marketed as by default). That would put them on par with pretty much any other supplement seller, and go a long way toward ensuring people get the items they buy.

Defending the right of a company to profit from selling or mediating sales of products intended for human consumption, without any legal liability for their content or safety, is also pretty extreme.

Nevermind the fact that they pay no taxes, at least not here.

> Calling for Amazon to be banned from selling supplements is extreme

If a physical store near you sold fake everything, including supplements, you’d think it extreme to shut it down?

Wouldn’t it be better for all parties involved to keep it open and implement regulations requiring they be honest about products? The customers could use the marketplace to get the products they actually want, and the business gets to benefit.

Note that idea isn’t mutually incompatible with penalizing the company for all the counterfeit products it sold/marketed.

> implement regulations requiring they be honest about products?

Surely the US has regulation requiring this? So if it’s being ignored, what does the state do?

Step 1: Cease and desist letter

Step 2: Legal action to pursue a change of policy and damages.

Step 3: 2nd legal action if Amazon continues to be out of compliance with the previous ruling.

There's a process here and jumping to the very end is not how it works.

This seems entirely appropriate, but skip step 2, then start sanctions or shutdowns if the situation persists.

There is surely a template for this - quite possibly it’s what you detail?

If they sell people counterfeit food and health supplements they should be banned from selling those items (at least for a period of time) until they can figure out proper inventory controls.

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