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Family Sues Amazon After Counterfeit Hoverboard Catches Fire, Destroys Home (wtsp.com)
Three weeks after unboxing a hoverboard, it burst into flames. But is Amazon partly to blame?
tripleevenfall quotes The Tennessean:
A Nashville family whose $1 million home was destroyed earlier this year in a fire caused by a hoverboard toy is suing Amazon saying the retail giant knowingly sold a dangerous product...
The lawsuit says the seller of the hoverboard listed online, "W-Deals," is a sham organization that is registered to an apartment in New York City that has not responded to requests from lawyers in the case. It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon . It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found.
... at trial and all of the appeals, I wonder if they will just pull out of Tennessee entirely?
More likely, they will lobby either the Tennessee legislature to change the law or lobby Congress to make sure state laws like this don't apply to them unless they "have a physical presence" in that state, then they will make sure they don't have such a presence in Tennessee so the law won't apply to them in the future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
1) They sneak in 3rd party resellers. Lots of other sites allow 3rd party resellers - Newegg, Sears (almost entirely 3rd party), eBay, etc. For the most part, they make it damn obvious you're buying from a 3rd party, not from the site itself. Most of them even let you exclude 3rd party sellers with a single click. Amazon shows the seller name in easily-missed text in the middle of the product listing - very easy to miss. It's easier if you have Prime, as many 3rd parties don't support Prime. So you'll search for a product, click on one listed with Prime shipping, and when you go to put it in your cart you notice it doesn't have Prime shipping because Amazon has silently substituted a 3rd party seller. And I haven't been able to find an option on Amazon to exclude 3rd parties.
2) Contamination of their supply chain. This is based on hearsay, although my personal experience seems to support it. Have you noticed the "Sold by xxx and shipped by Amazon" tags on some products? The way that works is the 3rd party seller sends their inventory to Amazon. Amazon stores it in their warehouse, and when you buy from that seller, Amazon ships it for them. The problem is Amazon seems to co-mingle 3rd party inventory with their own. So if you order a SD card, Amazon's computers grab the nearest available SD card whether it be from Amazon's inventory or a 3rd party's inventory. Your go through the effort of making sure you're buying the SD card with Amazon as the seller to try to get a genuine one, and you still end up getting a fake sent to Amazon by ConterfeitsRUs. I've basically given up buying commonly counterfeited items like flash drives from Amazon. I pay the extra to get them from a local retailer whose supply chain hasn't been contaminated this way.
You assume vetting is just examining dedicated demo product. These days, making sure they are sueable is more likely useful. Amazon 3rd party sellers lets the same person set up 1000 shell identities and sell the same fraudulent item from whichever sell isn't shut down yet. A physical address (verfiied), a business license (verified), and business insurance (verified) wouldn't be too hard for a seller to come up with, and Amazon to verify, and would eliminate 99.44% of the scammers.
So what stops them from scamming Amazon buyers? Amazon has your home address, and the desire to sue you if you defraud its customers. They can't stop someone willing to use their home address to commit mail fraud from. But they can certainly aid in the prosecution of them, which they can't do now.
Learn to love Alaska
Amazon = eBay, only sometimes even worse.
This is what I say to everyone. I don't even bother trying to explain anymore, for most people it's just better to understand Amazon that way. Specially for people who never bought there and still have this image that everything sold at Amazon comes directly from Amazon and are all guaranteed by the company.
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit. The difference between Amazon and eBay is that Amazon used to be it's own store, and it still sells their own products. eBay always was about providing a venue for people to make business. It's well understood that you are not buying anything directly from eBay.
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors. Selected as in who pays a bigger part of their scam, I imagine.
Here's the funny thing: in the past 4 years or so that I've been shopping on eBay, I've never had a single problem with the products, including external batteries, lots of electronics with LiPo batteries in them, and whatnot. And just in case it happens, I also got a fireproof pouch from eBay to keep stuff in it. xD
Amazon, on the other hand, I had problems with fake SD cards, they now have implemented some weird system of pre-charging import taxes that are often waaay above the actual value. Sometimes they return a small percentage of it (like 3 months after the fact), often times they simply don't. And most of the products still cannot be sent to my country anyways, so there's that.
The only advantage Amazon offers to people living in my country is that their products arrive generally faster than stuff bought from chinese stores on eBay... but that's only because they use companies like Fedex, UPS, DHL and the like that are all basically running a scam here in Brazil. They will rip you off here when it comes to charging tax, extra costs, and storage fees you never asked for. They basically hold your products hostage. On average, I'll pay 1.5x to 2x the tax costs, which usually sums up to 110%+ the product value plus shipping, when a product comes from Amazon. It arrives in a week or so. From eBay, it comes via regular mail, so I pay whatever the government actually charges, which ranges from 60% to 100%. It can take anywhere from a month to 6 months because it depends on the goodwill of governmental agencies, but it gets here, and there's no extra bullshit charges.
And this is why I haven't been buying anything from Amazon. The last thing they had going for them was reliability for countries like mine.
Of course, Amazon couldn't care less about the little money coming from countries like Brazil... it's cheap change for them and they have demonstrated it well enough with their horrible policies regarding overseas shipping. But yeah, the way Amazon incorporated marketplace into their main store and started selling all these products that seem to have an even worse quality control than eBay, it's quite telling.