Amazon Takes Counterfeit Sellers To Court For First Time (cnbc.com)

For the first time, Amazon is taking counterfeit sellers to court. The move comes after several sellers expressed strong concerns about their businesses getting ripped off by Amazon, which is not doing anything to curb distribution of fake, poor quality products on its ecommerce platform. Notably, even Apple had said recently that a lot of its accessories listed on Amazon are fake products. From a CNBC report: On Monday, Amazon filed suit against a group of sellers for infringing on athletic training equipment developed by TRX. In a second case, Amazon sued sellers who are offering fake versions of a patented moving product called Forearm Forklift. [...] There's no way Amazon can litigate away the problem. The company generates over $75 billion a year in commerce, and about half the volume now comes from third-party sellers. However, with Amazon showing its willingness to take abusers to court, the company can at least hope to deter counterfeit sellers with the threat of potential legal action.

Comments

Better yet

[TheRealMindChild]

Rather than litigation, start labeling sellers as counterfeiters right there on their amazon listing. Add a sort/filter feature to eliminate aggregating them or shuffle the listings to the bottom

Amazon is becoming Alibaba

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, I pretty clearly see that Amazon is headed down the dark road where Alibaba's always been. Amazon *used to* be a platform you could trust, at least most of the time. But now? With all these direct-from-China sellers on it? These people are sharks and they know every trick in the book.

A lot of them really don't know how to make money other than shenanigans. The idea that they should offer an honest product and run a good business, get a reputation, etc.? Foreign ideas. The counterfeiter idea is that the only way to win is to rip people off, and when they get burned and don't buy from you again, well don't worry there are billions more people out here and you don't need repeat business. A lot of these scammers operate on razor thin or zero margins, and they go bankrupt all the time. I really don't think it was a good idea for Amazon to open up to them.

What Amazon should do is go to Alibaba and hire away some of their anti-fraud department. Start playing whack-a-mole. It's just not going to get better any time soon. The winners are going to be the counterfeiters, and the losers are going to be Amazon honest sellers. It's a real tragedy.