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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.
As the summary notes, there's no way Amazon can police the system adequately with the way it currently functions. At best, it can hope to dissuade some counterfeiters through threat of litigation.
However, to my mind, the real problem is Amazon's lack of transparency when it comes to evaluating and purchasing products from 3rd-party sellers. Amazon will just default to a lower priced listing from some random company, and unless you're paying attention, you could end up purchasing from someone else. There should be a much stronger "flag" that goes up before you can do this -- otherwise, Amazon risks getting sued for liability when people think they're purchasing stuff "from Amazon" but they get defective crap from somewhere else.
But one further issue -- what about linking product reviews (particularly for "verified purchases") to SELLER? If I'm going to be purchasing a product X from company Y rather than Amazon, I should be able to -- in some easy fashion -- just get reviews of X from Y.
I'm sure we've all seen reviews on Amazon that say, "I purchased batteries from [this company], and they're fake!" It should be transparent to find such reviews. So even if the product X has 1000 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars, if the 20 reviews from company Y say, "Beware -- this thing is a piece of junk, not as advertised!" a customer has a chance of making a more informed decision.
(Obviously, lots of reviews on Amazon are fake anyway, and there's all sorts of problems there too. But this would at least be something a customer could try before just blindly purchasing a product from some random 3rd-party company.)
I really wish they would stop the practice of combining a bunch of sellers for a given product. It makes the reviews even less worthwhile because you don't know if a couple of bad sellers pushing fakes are tied to the bad reviews, nor do you know who the legitimate sellers associated with the good reviews.