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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.
I'm not sure that's really an improvement...??
They likely have home insurance and will be reimbursed. If anyone has a right to sue Amazon it will be the insurance company, to reclaim the money they paid out to the homeowners.
I'd hope they drop out of the 3rd party seller program. I've made it a point to not buy from 3rd party sellers after problems dealing with them in the past.
Insurance companies fight you tooth and nail, often for years. Especially on a big payout like a burnt down house. Every year they delay inflation bites into the payout and you get more desperate to take whatever they'll give.
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Since Amazon opened their platform to third parties, Amazon is almost certainly providing "material assistance" (or whatever the proper legal phrase is) to those sellers. Without Amazon, it is far less likely buyers would've had access to that seller.
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China has a long history of selling dangerous products. From poisonous pet food to exploding electronics. When confronted, the Chinese government's response is "what a shame, we'll do something". The "something" is to rename the company and do it all over again.
Why the fuck does China have most favored nation trade status?
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Amazon lists it on their storefront. Amazon handles the financial transaction. Amazon profits off of each sale. Amazon often ships the thing out to you even if it's a third party. Amazon is supposed to vet the 3rd parties they work with. Amazon is on the hook.
Nope, law almost universally agrees, the person you give the money to in order to get the item is the seller. Note, you don't pay eBay for your wins (not including any 3rd party payment services owned by eBay). eBay connects you with a seller, not doesn't directly take payment and dispatch the item, as Amazon (and you supermarket) does.
Amazon should not allow 3rd party sellers, plain and simple
Not without some vetting, or for limited products (like self-published books).
Learn to love Alaska
Depends on who is on the bill of sale. If I see "Amazon.com" on my credit card statement, Amazon sold it to me. In Craigslist case, CL is not selling anything through their site, they're just listing. E-Bay is a bidding site that also makes it clear who you are actually purchasing from but depending on how they handle the sales, E-Bay COULD be on the hook. Amazon will handle all sales for sellers including warehousing and shipping, Amazon is a store just as much as Wal-Mart is.
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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.
Is eBay also supposed to vet 3rd parties? What about Craigslist?
Those services make no pretense of being the seller. In some cases, Amazon redirects you to another site, or makes it clear that Amazon themselves don't have the product and offer you a list of 3rd party sellers' Amazon storefront. In those cases, you can argue that Amazon has reduced responsibility. Sometimes the page lists a 3rd party as being the seller, but if you don't pay attention to the small print, you would think you were just buying from Amazon. At other times it says that the order is being fulfilled by Amazon, though it's not clear whether they're buying products directly from the manufacturer or there's some 3rd party in the supply chain.
Either way, if I can't have confidence that the products I'm buying on Amazon are genuine, I'm going to buy a lot fewer things on Amazon. I would suspect that I'm not alone.
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
So they should have to invest $20k just to protect themselves from faulty products? I've never seen a home with sprinklers.
Not just faulty consumer products, but cooking fires (most common cause of home fires), faulty heating equipment (tied with cooking fires for fire related fatalities), electrical and lighting faults, intentionally set fires, and smoking related fires. If you're buying a million dollar 4,000 square foot house, why wouldn't you make a safety improvement that's shown to save lives (and can safe the structure itself, but that's a lesser concern). If you care about your family's safety, go above and beyond fire codes. I bet the granite countertops in the kitchen in that house cost more than it would have cost to put in sprinklers.
I've seen many homes with fire sprinklers, my state requires them in new construction and I've known people that retrofitted them (usually with a new home purchase in combination with electrical upgrades since the sprinkler system itself is only about half the cost of the retrofit, the other half is drywall repairs).
This family didn't even have linked smoke detectors throughout the house, which led to a delay in evacuation:
Both children initially confused the sounds of the blaze for someone breaking into the home. They thought they heard arguing, according to their parents, but were confused by the sounds of their pets and the vocal warnings of the downstairs fire alarms.
In my home every smoke detector is linked (through hardwire and/or RF links) and every one alerts at the same time -- everyone in the family knows that if they hear them go off to leave the house *immediately*. 2nd floor bedrooms both have escape ladders. Oh, and the house has a sprinkler system, which was one of the things I looked for when buying. And yes, we do yearly fire drills.
It may seem like over the top paranoia, but my brother lost his house to a fire caused by a furnace fault, he and his family all got out (he and his wife had to go out the 2nd floor window, fortunately the kids rooms were on the first floor and they escaped through a window), but the speed with which it went up made me realize that it's true what they say about fires - every second counts. By the time the fire department got there (about 7 minutes after they were called), the home was fully engulfed and was a total loss. Spending time debating whether or not that sound you hear is really the smoke detector can make a significant difference in getting out safely. Fire is the 3rd leading cause of death in the home (after falls and poisoning).
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.
They are not hoverboards they do not hover what so ever that ride on wheels firmly planted on the ground. Call them motorized skateboards, that more closer to what they actually are.
Jack of all trades,master of none
It depends on if Amazon was acting as the Merchant of Record or the Seller of Record. The MoR is a 3rd party entity who is financially liable for the transaction, allowing the original retailer to sell in multiple regions without having to worry about tax and currency issues. The MoR assumes the financial risk for chargebacks etc., but not liability for the product itself.
The Seller of Record is a 3rd party that actually owns the complete transaction. In effect, the original retailer sells the product to the SoR, who then resells it to the buyer. The SoR therefore takes complete legal ownership and liability of the whole transaction.
Not to mention they are allowing tons and tons of fakes and shoddy merchandise to be sold with pretty much ZERO vetting. I have seen in just my shopping there fake flash cards and sticks, shoddily rebuilt laptop batteries being sold as new product, fake mikes/guitars/amps, products that could easily not just rip someone off but seriously maim or kill. You look and there are dozens of complaints and...Amazon don't do shit apparently.
So I'm sorry fanboys but I like Amazon, have bought thousands of dollars in gear from Amazon (NEVER from their third parties) and the computer I'm typing this on was 100% built from parts I got from them but since they have allowed third parties? They have become a real minefield with tons of shoddy shit that I doubt even eBay would allow. I can easily see how someone who didn't know that you can't trust the fact that you are on a site that clearly says "Amazon" does NOT mean you are actually buying from Amazon could get a seriously dangerous product thinking they were buying the real deal. Hell you can't even go by price because tons of them are trying to pass the fakes off as real and thus charge real prices for them!
So this is 100% Amazon's fault. They opened the floodgates to the scammers, even allow the scammers to use their warehouses and distribution, and get a cut of every fake and shoddy product sold, so I don't see how they can argue they are not responsible when they are the ones that allowed the scammers to flourish and aided them in every step along the way.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.