Amazon's Chinese Counterfeit Problem Is Getting Worse (cnbc.com)

A report on CNBC, citing sellers, says that counterfeit problem on the platform has gotten worse after it made it easier for Chinese manufacturers to sell goods to U.S. consumers. The report gives an example of a seller Jamie Whaley who started a bedding business on Amazon that reached $700,000 in annual sales within three years. Her patented product called BedBand consists of a set of shock cords, clamps and locks designed to keep fitted bed sheets in place. Whaley found quite an audience, selling up to 200 units a day for $13.99 a set. BedBand climbed into the top 200 selling products in the home and kitchen category. That was 2013. By mid-2015, the business was in a tailspin. Revenue plummeted by half and Whaley was forced to lay off eight employees. Her sheet fastener had been copied by a legion of mostly Chinese knockoffs that undercut BedBand on price and jumped the seller ranks by obtaining scores of reviews that watchdog site Fakespot.com determined were inauthentic and "harmful for real consumers." The report adds:Spend any time surveying Amazon sellers and Whaley's narrative will start sounding like the norm. In Amazon's quest to be the low-cost provider of everything on the planet, the website has morphed into the world's largest flea market -- a chaotic, somewhat lawless, bazaar with unlimited inventory. Always a problem, the counterfeiting issue has exploded this year, sellers say, following Amazon's effort to openly court Chinese manufacturers, weaving them intimately into the company's expansive logistics operation. Merchants are perpetually unsure of who or what may kill their sales on any given day and how much time they'll have to spend hunting down fakers.

Comments

And it'll only get worse

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Counterfeits are a huge problem everywhere and it'll only get worse. The lure of money and the ease of capitalizing on someone else's idea make it a market that will never go away, even for niche products.

For some things, however, there ought to be truly severe penalties, like for the people who counterfeited brake pads for the 747's, which turned out to be made of baked sawdust and black paint. They didn't make it into a real plane as far as I know, but the consequences if they had would be staggering.

If you counterfeit a handbag, no one dies, but certain mechanical items, medications, and other "life-dependent "products should have serious penalties, decades in jail in my opinion. Counterfeit meds are problem all over the world, but especially in SE Asia where 50% or more are fake.

Re:And it'll only get worse

[clovis]

Maybe YOU should RTFA....this is all about counterfeit products.

Nonsense. TFA doesn't refer to a single case of "counterfeiting". p>

It kind of looks like you're just being argumentative. That's fun, I know, but at some point you should give the rest of us a break.
This article is not just about the bed-tightener.
To save other people (and you) the trouble of RTFA, I'll pull out the quotes that address the gist of the matter.

From the article:

In May, CNBC.com reported on a Facebook group, now consisting of over 600 people, whose members have seen their designs for t-shirts, coffee mugs and iPhone cases show up on Amazon at a fraction of the price of the originals. The designers described it as a game of whack-a-mole, where fakes pop up more quickly than they're taken down.

Birkenstock has seen dozens of stores at a time hawking its Arizona Sandal for $79.99, a full $20 below the retail price. The names of the online storefronts change all the time, one day including the monikers Silver Peak Wine Cellar and Ryan Hollifield and the next Keila*Knightley and Bking sewneg.

"Amazon is making money hand over fist from counterfeiters, and they've done about as little as possible for as long as possible to address the issue," said Chris Johnson, an attorney at Johnson & Pham LLP, which focuses on intellectual property and brand enforcement and represents clients including Forever 21, Adobe and OtterBox. "Word is out in the counterfeit community that it's open season on Amazon."

And this, Even Alibaba says they're doing fakes.

Counterfeiting online is nothing new of course, particularly when it comes to commerce. Alibaba, the Chinese e-retail giant, has been dealing with it since launching in 1999.

Some form of the word counterfeit shows up 30 times in Alibaba's latest annual report, and founder Jack Ma said in a speech last month in Hangzhou, China, that the fakes are of "better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names."

From a sub-link:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/25...

"They respond and take down the images, but the very same images go up within a week by another new seller," said Kristi Spencer, whose e-commerce site Golly Girls sells personalized sports-themed T-shirts, backpacks and notebooks. "Counterfeiters are selling low-quality knockoffs of other people's artwork."

There's a simple answer

[Pollux]

Sue Amazon. Well, get a patent on your product first, then sell it on Amazon, -then- sue Amazon for selling items that infringe on your patent. Wouldn't be the first time.

A related anecdote...Back in 2014, I received a solicited free iPad case to try that was a Griffin case knockoff. Looked exactly the same, just missing the logo, and $40 cheaper. I was interested, but curious why it was the exact same case w/o the cost. Long story short, the guy went right to Griffin's suppliers in China and paid them to make the exact same case for his company. His mistake was that he setup an office in the United States, and Griffin sued him into oblivion.

Re:Walmart mentality

[ShanghaiBill]

If patents did not exist, then why would they ever be illegal (outside of safety violations)?

Counterfeiting is not about patents, it is about trademarked brands. Brands are an indicator of quality, and it is, and should be, illegal for one manufacturer to impersonate another.

Note: TFA does not claim that either trademarks or patents are being infringed. Just that competitors are making similar products and selling them for less. But (and this is the important part) they are Chinese, so therefore we should be outraged.