Amazon Still Has a Counterfeit Problem
prospect.org
prospect.org
That sounds like a legal liability for them, as in "exhibit D demonstrates the defendant knowingly kept a fraudulent listing available for purchase" /ianal
[1] Only "Amazon Resale" third party resellers are shown https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-8-Piece-Non-Stick-Kitche...
Their AmazonBasics monitor arms are manufactured by Ergotron (aka one of the most reputable and best monitor arm brands out there). I have both AmazonBasics and Ergotron arms (purchased from their official website), and it is clear as day that they are nearly the exact same product.
I purchased the AmazonBasics arms back in 2016, and they still serve me great to this day, surviving 2 moves between west-east coast and many more local moves.
You can call this anecdata, but both AmazonBasics monitor arms and Ergotron ones have excellent reputation.
In other words being generic and being garbage aren't a perfect circle in a Venn diagram.
In the cheapest chinese knockoffs... I wouldn't bet my health on that, and anyone who does is foolish.
Amazon is an authorized retailer of Stanley 1913 products.
They determined that the item was counterfeit because you did not purchase it from Amazon.com you purchased it via Amazon.com from a third-party.
My Amazon account was created in 1998 and since 2008-ish I have barely entered any physical stores due to me being in an extremely rapid delivery area where I once got a microwave delivered three hours after ordering it.
Since then, the number of times I have purchased something on Amazon that has been fulfilled by a third party without my knowledge can be counted on zero fingers. The seller is prominently displayed directly below the "Add to cart/Buy now" buttons on both the website and mobile app and is listed again during the checkout process.
Please help me understand because I hear about this happening often and have a genuine, non-snarky belief that Amazon might be showing me a different version of their storefront because I also hardly ever see any of the cheap Chinese trash everyone complains about.
Obviously, if I search for "novelty rainbow colored wig" I'll get all of the hootoovooodoo brands but for normal things? Nope.
And I have never been curved to a third-party unless I specifically hit "compare all options" and scroll through the list down past all of the other amazon (returns/refurbs/scratch-and-dent) listings and EXPLICITLY choose a reseller.
Since they commingle products at the warehouse level and handle *actual* fulfillment at the SKU level and not the vendor level - how do you know this?
At the warehouse there's a bin of widgets that are all supposedly the same. Regardless of who the vendor is purported to be when you buy it, if it's coming from that warehouse it's coming from that bin of widgets.
Because Amazon does not commingle first and third-party inventory and I do not buy, since it is so easy to avoid, from third parties (or drop shippers) unless it is an extremely niche item like a 0.1" to 0.025" 10-pin header adapter.
Unless, of course, they are lying. Do you have evidence they are lying?
If they were commingling every single report would be a lie.
Also, they explicitly state that:
>Generally, we recognize gross revenue from items we sell from our inventory as product sales and recognize our net share of revenue of items sold by third-party sellers as service sales.
If they were commingling, those figures would be a lie.
The reason that would be lie is that Amazon has defended itself from product liability lawsuits for harms caused by defective products sold by third parties by repeatedly claiming in court that they do not take title to the goods in their possession that are supplied by third parties.
When you take title to something it is yours.
If it is yours, you need to include its value in an inventory valuation.
If inventory that you have title to and inventory you do not have title to is commingled there is no way to track which of the two have been sold, who holds title to what remains in inventory, and what that is worth.
Their inventory valuation would be a lie, their product sales figures would be a lie, and their service sales figures would be a lie. The amount of insurance they carry would be wrong, and that would open them up to legal vulnerabilities if anyone can demonstrate that the toaster they bought from a third-party seller which exploded was actually a toaster Amazon had title to and was shipped to them due to being commingled.
The only thing an investor has to do to sue the shit out of amazon is establish that their numbers are wrong, and are wrong on purpose, and they have been harmed by their numbers being wrong.
> If inventory that you have title to and inventory you do not have title to is commingled there is no way to track which of the two have been sold, who holds title to what remains and inventory, and what that is worth.
How is this not a problem for the 3rd parties with commingled inventory? Amazon clearly has a way to know which of the many 3rd party sellers they commingled sold the product in order to pay them, and know how many products are in stock across their commingled inventory.
Considering the product is supposedly the same, the cost would be the same, and they would only need to do the exact same tracking they do with 3rd party sellers whenever they themselves sell an item from the commingled pile.
By design, it is assured that the number of products you put into the system are the number you will eventually sell, even if it's not the exact same physical product. And that is totally fine if the products are identical and cost the same. That is the whole point of the commingling system; that the products are meant to be completely interchangeable. There's no accounting magic to be done, you're just tracking the number you sold vs the number you put in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243814
https://amazonsellerslawyer.com/blog/amazon-commingled-inven...
I got an Amazon product the other day, likely counterfeit, Amazon listed as seller and has 3rd party sticky barcodes on the packaging. How is that possible without commingling.
They do not. Most products are tracked using an FNSKU that identifies each seller.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Stanlely-Quencher-FlowStateTM-Tumbler... [2] https://imgur.com/a/BBHf3N6
A counterfeit HP ink cartridge says it's HP, but it's not. None of these products claim to be HP. One bears no brand mark at all. One is "Ankink" brand. Same for Epson: we have "MYTONER" and "LEMERO".
Amazon is a flea market trafficking in huge quantities of suspect goods. When I go on there I know to be on guard. But the article is wrong when it says that goods that do not bear an HP, Canon, or Epson brand mark - with some of them bearing clear brand marks for other companies - are "counterfeit" or even "knock-offs".
This doesn't even seem to be a problem to me - if you shop at a flea market, be on guard lest you get junk. If you don't like it, try avoiding the flea market.
The problem here is a near-monopoly enabling a flea market that skirts just this site of legality. Sure, it's a lookalike, not a counterfeit, but with misleading copy to make sure people fall for it.
1. went to Mitutoyo website to get list of authorized sellers
2. surprised Amazon itself is on the list
3. Purchased a number of authentic Mitutoyo calipers and micrometers from Amazon itself
4. Ran down Clough42 list of 17 signs to double check if the tool is fake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG6I2gNGVwM
5. Successfully registered equipment on Mitutoyo website
6. Checked quality on reference standards
Note, Starrett has a website with an estore, so is far easier to verify NIST certificate.
If the work is low tolerance, than accuracy and repeatability won't matter anyway. However, when it comes to metrology or PPE the high-end products set the best possible outcome for your workmanship and safety.
Mind you, I couldn't convince a golden retriever to stop obsessing over the taste of free garbage. =3
(fixed cost + maintenance cost)/(frequency of use) = actual cost
If the frequency of use is high, the retail cost between high-end and mid-ranged brands is negligible. i.e. not worth the hassle to mess around with QA on something unknown.
I always bought the kids Starrett or Mitutoyo stuff with the NIST certs. As wasting 1 hour of their time costs more than the high-end equipment.
It is kind of a tradition, but I'm sure there are more appropriate options for folks in different situations. =3
Another problem with clones for example, is they often copy old tech... defects and all... so in this example one probably won't get the current inductive style absolute position verniers that work more reliably around dirt/liquids.
Just a thought, but note often 3rd party sellers are literally sourcing items from dumpsters. There was a news story about the disgusting food people resell on the platform, and it is not technically counterfeit. =3
HP would claim that the simple statement "compatible with HP xyz printer" makes it counterfeit, an improper use of HP trademarks in the statement. HP wants a world where anyone searching for "Ink for HP printer" will only ever see HP-licensed products.
HP would say that "compatible with HP printers" goes well beyond nominative. Per HP documentation, HP printers are only compatible with HP-licensed ink. So anyone saying "compatible with HP" is incorrectly stating they are licensed by HP.
Try selling a cupholder, or a cup, that is "compatible with Ferrari" and you should expect lawyers. (Ferrari famously hates aftermarket parts.)
Amazon in many cases does.
It is also true that there's a flood of cheap knockoffs that don't claim to be Brand X. That's fine, although I usually go to Aliexpress when that's when I want and wind up paying a lot less.
Bought a belt for the vacuum recently--thought I was buying the real thing. Really, now? Wrong markings, wrong size. Returned it, tried another listing and got what seems to be the real thing. My review was rejected because it supposedly didn't address the qualities of the product. Yet one remains for another product where I said it was excellent except for not being the size described.
There have been some other products where this worked in my favor. I knew for a fact that something I bought over and over again (things you have multiple of and are expected to wear out over time). Manufacturer stopped making them, Amazon claims to still be selling them 10 years later, there's not a noticeable drop-off in quality so what the heck, I'll keep buying them.
I ordered an All-Clad frying pan, was at the same price as other online retailers. Only when it arrived I realized it was unfortunately, “Shipped by Amazon, sold by XYZ”.
The pan was in a suspicious brown box, with zero product/marketing images, and inside was the pan in transparent plastic bag. On first look it did feel ok/genuine/unused, but I didn’t have anything from AllClad to compare. I did notice some minor imperfections though, such as the riveted handle not being fully flush with the pan and a minor scratch in another place.
The brown box did have a number imprinted on it though. Upon searching online, I found it was a product code from some legitimate store that sells factory-seconds for around 1/3rd the price. These are original items, except they didn’t pass quality inspection and hence sold for less.
This scammer seller was buying seconds and selling them as new at original price. I looked at the seller info which had the name and the business registration info. I ended up finding that it’s some dude peddling courses on how to successful in FBA, found their IG profile. What he did with me reselling a factory second as new is pure fraud, I wish the worst to scum like that.
What I hate is outright counterfeits. Especially given Amazon's commingling of product sourced by third-party "sellers". (Solely due to counterfeits, I don't buy OTC pharmaceuticals on Amazon, I mostly avoid buying flash and SSD devices on Amazon, and I've recently started buying shoes and clothing direct from the brands' DTC Web sites when possible.)
I hate counterfeits so much, I worked at an anti-counterfeiting early startup.
In our marketing and sales efforts -- analyzing many kinds of product categories, and approaching many companies (unfortunately, much of it during peak Covid panic) -- we actually didn't have much success getting brands willing to pay for an anti-counterfeiting solution.
For reasons unclear to me, we had more success by pitching the same tech&process cost as anti-gray-market-diversion, rather than for the rampant counterfeiting of their brand that we could show. (Maybe sometimes because there were always a bunch of execs charged with global distribution, and this was on their plates.)
More predictably, some brands seemed most interested in using variations on the technology for end consumer engagement. Once stakeholders brought into enterprise sales meetings started latching on, when you initially approached with anti-counterfeiting or anti-gray-market story. I can see that, but please let me end counterfeits in the process.
Could you say which you've had luck with?
For hard drives, I usually wait for OfficeMax sales/coupons, and then stock up.
Sometimes I have to drive to Atlanta (about three hours, round trip) but there are some incredible electronic parts stores in huge cities.
Regardless of what/where I purchase, I always open items inside the store (before leaving, near the customer service desk) because I have literally had "new" items contain hazmat returns (e.g. a "new" septic pump, a la feces).
I am very uncomfortable buying electronics and hygiene products from many places because of this problem. For example, years ago, on what became my final Amazon purchase, I received used underwear (yuck!). Knowing that Amazon tends to sell returned products as new, I had explicitly bought a brand that is sealed, shrink wrapped, and promises to dispose returned items, but that wasn't enough.
Recently, I was reading a newspaper article where they described how a criminal gang bought Google Pixel and high-end Samsung phones from reputable online and department stores. They opened them, installed malware, returned the product, and you can guess what happened next. Lots of stolen bank credentials. People tend to buy stuff, test drive it for a few days and return it as new abusing pro-customer regulations. Many shops are unwilling to take a loss and resell these things as new. Very dishonest, should be better regulated.
Absolutely terrifying.
Now it’s like, well, what else can I do? I guess I’m boycotting Amazon, but is it really boycotting when their store is “here’s a random electronic device, maybe it is what you ordered,” I mean, why would I place an order for that in the first place?
I’m also boycotting gun store that only sells footguns.
so you can sign up for the free trial every time you want some counterfeit tat shipped cheaply
then immediately cancel it
one was obviously a return by someone else, it was in completely different unofficial packaging and was DOA
getting the bot like staff to accept that it wasn't me that had broken it was such fun I ended up deleting my 20 year amazon account
and haven't bought anything since
Had this exact thing happen... with a septic pump [gross!].
----
About one year ago, after terrible customer service from a major UPS vendor, I decided that I was now only ever purchasing backup batteries from CostCo: their "lifetime satisfaction warranty" means I don't have to deal with OEM return processes (IMHO) designed to prevent claims submissions (e.g. return shipping fees; questions designed to invalidate your warranty).
"Sorry, this Western Digital 7200rpm 2TB drive is a WD72002048-AMZN, and we sell the WD72002048-BBY, so we can't price match."
They got busted for having different prices if they detected you were hitting the website from a store (Wifi or terminal)... "I know you thought it was $109 when you looked online, but you must be mistaken, here, let's pull up the website, yup, $159".
There was a brief loophole for a while when Amazon allowed ad-hoc Marketplace items from users - find what you wanted on Best Buy's site, create a listing to sell it on Amazon for $x cheaper, and then show them that as the price match. Then they moved to "must be fulfilled by Amazon to be eligible".
It works well. They are competitive in pricing, and have a good lookup system to make sure you get the correct type of RAM( and SDD). Free shipping USA and Canada. (Been using that for over a decide.)
I personally find that one of Amazon's main affronts is interfering with customer reviews in order to maintain artificially higher ratings. For example, my reviews stopped processing and would never post. This happened after leaving honest critical reviews. Note that +90% of my reviews are neutral or positive. Additionally, they removed my ability to search reviews, replacing it with Rufus, a completely incompetent and worthless search bot. This, I believe, cleverly prevents prospective buyers from accessing useful customer feedback or experience unless the buyer is willing to manually parse all reviews, which ain't happening.
Amazon does a lot to convolute reviews, including jumping to the wrong review after selecting a product to review from the order history.
It's an extremely useful and convenient resource, but thoroughly rotten. The algorithms are flagrantly evil and a very deliberate and specific search for a high-end product, the desired product will often be displayed below several or many more cereal-box quality products worth less than their packaging.
Where they win is shipping, variety and pricing. Hard to beat, but I never order anything serious on Amazon unless the seller is the actual company of the product, and even then...
Rufus is a good example of the deleterious capabilities of AI.
Amazon still has a huge problem with its third party vendors. We got screwed with several ‘new’ Lenovo laptops that went belly up in six months. And I don’t believe Amazon has fully sorted out their SKU problem where third party vendors launder used products with new. If you see something cheap on Amazon, there’s almost always a reason.
It feels like fraud. Wild that it's A-OK for Amazon to profit on this at the expense of the consumer.
So to flip it on its head, why should the manufacturer be allowed to constrain the warranty just because a retailer doesn't toe the line on pricing?
> “if we find them”—neatly describes the problem.
Doesn't pass the smell test. Amazon has more compute than almost anyone and could easily afford to run AI or heuristics to find and shut down these stores the moment they pop up.
Disclaimer: I haven't worked at Amazon for 3 years - my info is likely stale.
FWIW, while "counterfeit", technically Amazon doesn't consider commingling to be Brand related abuse which is what I worked on. Abuse of commingling would be handled by other systems related to Seller fraud.
I would say Not enough for how many engineers they had. It had all of the promise, and was frankly mismanaged.
They kept promoting engineers who wanted it to become an AWS service (agnostic of Amazon) rather than solving the Amazon problems at hand.
For example they built a new product identifier… Amazon did not need yet another database of products. This stuff was constantly slowing them down to less than a crawl.
Last I heard all of that was canceled, and their focus brought back to Amazon Retail only problems. But tech debt and culture issues like that are really hard to unwind.
Thanks for some of the backstory. I always thought they had an interesting idea but the trick would be fast, focused execution to reach critical mass with both suppliers and end users before it fizzled out.
Yes I do. In general, the convenience is too nice.
If you're specifically worried about health issues:
- The Pharmacy features are pretty locked down (but nothing is perfect). I wouldn't buy pills from a rando 3p seller, or even "Sold by Amazon" tho.
- For other health related products (like creams, kitchen stuff, clothes or other things that are on me), I just check that the Brand is the listed seller and no other sellers exist on the product.
- For non-health related products (shower curtains, garden hose, etc) I don't really care if it is "not perfect" in terms of quality, etc.
Meanwhile, if you're buying products where the Brand=ZFDSC or any other character salad - you should expect whatever you get. I still have purchased them (e.g. a sticker that makes my windows look like stained glass - I don't care that its cheap garbage from China - it looks good and unlikely to be bad enough to kill me at that distance), but certainly would not buy those Brands' expecting lasting quality.
I literally do not buy things off amazon that fall into these "binning problem" categories, or anything easily counterfeitable. I'll buy from amazon for things that essentially cannot be counterfeit (GPUs, hard drives, things where counterfeits would be more likely to be a brick of the same weight rather than something that worked but was crappy or dangerous), or where i'm essentially trying to get "counterfeit"-grade stuff (stuff like plastic or metal garden spikes, where i just want the cheapest possible thing that will hold my irrigating tubing in place).
Everything else comes from target or the OEM's website store.
(HN entrepreneurs: I'd love a map-based consumer-products search engine where I could just type an item description into a search bar and see a map of stores in my area with prices and inventory.)
Amazon doesn't want that thought to interrupt the 1-click checkout flow. And it apparently works; enough people seem to have internalized the idea that everything costs at least $15-$20 that they don't question it anymore. Soon your local dollar store is losing the economies of scale it used to have, cutting inventory and raising prices...
I wouldn’t be so sure, a good friend of mine ordered a GPU and it was an older and much cheaper model with the shroud replaced and flashed to call itself the newer model in windows. He would not have found out except he immediately ran a benchmark that returned an extremely low score and then investigated from there.
If it says X model on the label, and OS also reports it as X it becomes tough to make a case for returns.
Additionally, there is fear that you receive the "actual item," but it has been used detrimentally (usually: operated 24/7 too hot) for cryptomining or genAI.
This actually happened to me once (VEGA64) and I was surprised when Amazon authorized a full refund after the GPU failed.
I really though that anyone going to these lengths wouldn't be bothering to do this to scam on amazon and would instead be gainfully employed??? What the hell.
I guess I can't buy anything on amazon anymore. Oh well.
what.
ugh.
one less thing i can buy on amazon, I guess. gosh dangit.
Packaging meant to emulate a brand’s design without using its logo can be a violation of copyright laws. HP actually won a federal court case in March against a Chinese manufacturing company called Ejet, which HP accused of infringing upon its “trade dress,” the technical term for packaging design.
You can google 2tb flash drives and see a ton advertised for <$100. These are all fake. Surprisingly Amazon doesn’t have any!
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/512GB-High-Waterproof-Compatible-Co...
(Amazon refused to accept a return as it was foodstuff and I didn’t have the energy to spend 45 minutes on the phone/chat arguing with them.)
Luckily it was a direct replacement for the same one I purchased > 3 years ago so could compare.
Amazon provided no way to report the counterfeit and when talking to their support just wanted me to return it as fault. No doubt this will go back into the supply chain and someone unbeknownst to counterfeits will receive it.
I've actually found ads on Amazon to be more detrimental to my experience than marketplace shenanigans and ALLCAPS sellers.
Anything you order from Amazon has to be tested for counterfeit. If you can’t verify it’s not counterfeit then assume it is. Even if Amazon is listed as the seller they are clearly swapping in someone else’s fakes. Mine has a secondary retail barcode label on them.
I’m going to send them back with a note in a text file saying they are fake. See if Amazon resells them.
If you're writing to them constantly, that doesn't prove they are counterfeit. They will thermally throttle. Naturally, specs don't talk so much about that part. I have an older one that throttles down to almost nothing, but it is still technically writing correctly. I don't use it much anymore, because it's like 16GB which is nothing now, but I used to "liquid cool" it... by holding it with my fingers while writing. I suppose you could call it blood cooling for some metal cred. It wouldn't recover full speed, my blood cooling rig didn't have enough heat transfer (it's got some pretty serious rate limits on how much heat it can handle), but it would noticeably speed back up.
Now, if you can't write the entire space and read it all back with the data being retained, you've got counterfeit.
And it definitely sometimes has to do with heat, or I couldn't speed my drive up on-the-fly by cooling it.
I don't think I've ever thought to look at the contents of a new drive before just formatting it, portable or otherwise.
Now I wonder if I've ever missed a note someone left for me..
Canon or Epson or HP or someone with enough clout? Yeah, here, our "CCU" will assist so you don't go running to the courts.