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Amazon's Jeff Bezos Called Out On Counterfeit Products Problem (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Here's the scenario. A small company designs and creates a product and puts it up on Amazon. Things go well. People really like it. They post hundreds of positive reviews. Sales build -- and keep building. Everything is going great. And then, boom, things go south in a hurry. Another company has created a counterfeit version of the product and is selling it under the same name only it's selling it for less, stealing all the sales. That's exactly what happened to Portland-based Elevation Lab, its founder Casey Hopkins said, accusing Amazon of being "complicit with counterfeiting" in a blog post.
The Anchor, Elevation's popular under-desk headphone mount, has been getting flooded with counterfeits, Hopkins said, noting the situation certainly isn't unique to his company. "The current counterfeit seller, Suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd (yeah they sound legit), has been on there for the past 5 days and taken all the sales," Hopkins wrote. Adding further insult to injury, he said Elevation has paid Amazon a "boatload of money" to advertise the product that it has "built, invested in, and shipped." Amazon has now purged the Suiningdonghanjiaju listing, which is noted in our cart as "no longer available from the selected seller." It instead defaults to Elevation's own stock. Hopkins told CNET that counterfeiters have been purged at least five times in recent weeks only to return a week later under a different seller name "to hijack the listing." He said it takes Amazon 5 days to remove the seller. "If you have a registered brand in the Brand Registry and don't sell the product wholesale, there could be one box to check for that," Hopkins wrote. "And anyone else would have to get approval or high vetting to sell the product, especially if they are sending large quantities to FBA [Fulfillment by Amazon]. I imagine there are some algorithmic solutions that could catch most of it too. And it wouldn't hurt to increase the size of the Brand Registry team so they can do their work faster." Hopkins took a final poke at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saying: "If you're reading this, come on, this is Day 2 activity."
The Anchor, Elevation's popular under-desk headphone mount, has been getting flooded with counterfeits, Hopkins said, noting the situation certainly isn't unique to his company. "The current counterfeit seller, Suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd (yeah they sound legit), has been on there for the past 5 days and taken all the sales," Hopkins wrote. Adding further insult to injury, he said Elevation has paid Amazon a "boatload of money" to advertise the product that it has "built, invested in, and shipped." Amazon has now purged the Suiningdonghanjiaju listing, which is noted in our cart as "no longer available from the selected seller." It instead defaults to Elevation's own stock. Hopkins told CNET that counterfeiters have been purged at least five times in recent weeks only to return a week later under a different seller name "to hijack the listing." He said it takes Amazon 5 days to remove the seller. "If you have a registered brand in the Brand Registry and don't sell the product wholesale, there could be one box to check for that," Hopkins wrote. "And anyone else would have to get approval or high vetting to sell the product, especially if they are sending large quantities to FBA [Fulfillment by Amazon]. I imagine there are some algorithmic solutions that could catch most of it too. And it wouldn't hurt to increase the size of the Brand Registry team so they can do their work faster." Hopkins took a final poke at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saying: "If you're reading this, come on, this is Day 2 activity."
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This may be the last first post, m'ladies ((tips fedora))
Is my DAMN balls, for u to suck
This has plagued Amazon for the longest time, and what makes it worse is when the counterfeits get sent to Amazon's warehouse for shipping. People trust items that go under "Prime" and don't realize they may be marketplace items. I've gotten several fake batteries and other items, and while Amazon has refunded me, I know not everyone is so discerning.
You Americans need to pull your heads out of your asses and fix your fucking society so you don't NEED to buy cheap Chinese shit.
Then tariff and trade war the fucking Chinese locusts back to the 19th Century.
Fuck em.
Agents don't fear the reaper.
Yours,
Buck Dharma & Gregg
Maybe if your product wasn't a 12 cent piece of plastic that you sell for $12 you wouldn't have such a hard time with counterfeits. What does your product do that the counterfeit product does not? It's a stupid plastic hook with a piece of double-sided tape on it. If I see one for $3 and one for $12 then I doubt I am going to give your company my money just so you can afford to show me even more stupid ads to inflate the price of your plastic crap.
Enigma
when is it a competing product? Ok so maybe they're using a similar name and logo and some people get confused, but is that truly counterfeiting? Sleazy yes, but illegal?
A few years ago I bought a camera tripod from a small specialist British company... It gets lots of regular (ab)use and is doing brilliantly. About a year after I bought it, I happened to see what looked like a mirror copy, only smaller, being sold on Amazon's web site.
With no more knowledge of the original company than having purchased one of their products direct, I picked up the phone and gave the company a call. Because it was a small British company at the time, the person who answered the phone turned out to be one of the owners... and we got talking. It turns out that he'd taken a phone call from Amazon one day, with the Amazon person saying something to the effect of,
"We've got a solid demand for your product, people asking us for something exactly like your current model range and enough to provide about £100,000 of orders. We're going to buy your product in bulk and sell it, and here are the terms you're going to agree to..." [ I'm exaggerating to make the point].
The small British company decided that they did not want to sell through Amazon, but, believe it or not, ensuring that this happened ended up taking a court case which - despite the win - cost this company a *vast* amount of time and money. In response, Amazon went out and started to purchase rip-off clones from a Chinese manufacturing supplier... Amazon are still selling the rip-off model on their site... This sort of scenario is going to be applicable in every case, of course.
By now, Amazon will know that some of the products they are selling infringe on original product designs from other companies, but in some cases there may be more to the story than Amazon simply being an innocent victim.
Privacy Badger blocks 12 different tracking cookies. Clean up your own website, Elevation Labs, and I might start to feel sorry for you.
Chinese counterfeit products are known all over the world and people are wary of them. America is so insulated and well protected in the past by good law enforcement from fake products and infringements. So in some sense most American consumers are naive, unfamiliar to such scammers. Amazon is the big enabler and the race to the bottom will be very fast. Soon most Americans will learn not to be so trustful of the vendors.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And end the "Fulfilled by Amazon".
Every problem I have ever had on Amazon was from third party sellers on their marketplace.
I now check the only sold by Amazon checkbox now.
Even the legitimate sellers annoy me. All of them pester me for the 5 star reviews - and the ones that have Amazon do all the work "Fulfilled by Amazon" are really annoying. Why should I have them a good review when Amazon did all the work?
When the 'counterfeit' is just as good at 1/3 the price or less including free shipping, then the problem is not a matter of selling cheap counterfeits but having overpriced the original product.
Its amazing how someone can write an article that long and not even cover Amazon's lawsuit a few months ago.
I recently purchased from one of the Chinese knockoff companies - on purpose. The American product was $35. The Chinese clone was $3, and appeared to be of the same quality of materials and construction. I honestly could not tell which was which when I saw them side by side. Of course I'll be buying the Chinese ones in the future.
This has happened with other things too: I had a chance to buy an American power saw for $500 or the Chinese copy for $60. Got the Chinese one. It feels very well made and has held up now to many years of use. Why should I have wasted my money on the American one?
Compete or don't, but don't bitch just because someone out competes you. Capitalism: that's what you were all preaching back 50 years ago. just because you are being beat at your own game you don't get to suddenly cry foul.
'Calls out' is not a complete phrase. Calls out whom? Calls out what? If you meant he's trying to crack down on knock-offs, meh. He has such a monopoly on everything else I don't know that it matters. I would like to see *him* regulated, personally.
It's a hook to hang your headphone so it doesn't take up desk space.
Actually looks liker a nice product, I think I'll buy one.
Even worse Amazon pools them in with products they sell. So you may think you're buying razor blades from Amazon, but it's the counterfeit ones that Amazon sends you because they have the same packaging and UPC.
Amazon does not care. Sure you can get refunded if you complain, but the problem continues.
Amazon should end marketplace sales unless the seller is confirmed and not some shell Chinese company.
More than Amazon doesn't care, Amazon has no reason to care. I'm sure they get paid the same/similarly whether the product is the real deal or not.
Several years ago, I made the mistake of buying a MicroSD card for my phone from them. (Hey, I got burned, it doesn't happen often.) I got an 8GB card in a 64GB Samsung-branded package that looked like a 14-year-old's first attempt at making a fake ID, and I had to *fight* with Amazon to get the charges reversed. The seller even had the gall to demand that I send it back to them. A quick call to Samsung and the RCMP had Amazon cheerfully refunding to my credit card.
It's as bad as Pacific Mall in Markham.
How could any allegedly intelligent business leader not know how rampant the corruption is within his own company? I wipe my ass with Amazon. I hope they tank. I hope Jeff Bezos gets counterfeit chemotherapy drugs.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This looks like something that I could ALMOST use.
Except that my desk is custom built by me and the keyboard drawer slides back so far as to make this thing useless.....
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It's a hook to hang your headphone so it doesn't take up desk space.
Actually looks liker a nice product, I think I'll buy one.
Yeah, I don't care about the bad parting lines on the Amazon knockoffs...
(LOL - Just kidding. I'll get the real ones, from the manufacturer's site, I wouldn't trust Amazon to sell me cigarette butts.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I know - I'll get a regular coat-hook for $0.99 at Ace Hardware, screw it into the side of the drawers that way it will be out of the path of the keyboard tray, serve the same purpose, not need adhesive, and not violate any I.P.
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IF they were smart, they have registered their trademark. When a counterfeit item pops up, not only use a DMCA on the offending listing, sue Amazon for willful misuse of a registered trademark. Trademarks carry the force of patents - it's a Government granted monopoly on a logo and/or branding element. Use it. A few hits at Amazon and they'll quickly pay attention to anyone trying to use your trademark.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They are charging $12 for an injection molded silicone rubber hook.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But then it won't have the brand name obnoxiously embossed down the front!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"They are charging $12 for an injection molded silicone rubber hook."
Exactly! And if somebody sells something similar for $1.50 they cry us a river and throw a tantrum like the content mafia.
or is that competition? If Amazon infringed on a novel patent I could see it being a genuine rip off. But baring that, well, it's a camera tripod. Maybe even a really nice one, but still a camera tripod.
Now that said, I do think we ought to start thinking (and doing something) about the scenario where Amazon eats the world. Once everyone else is out of business it won't end well for us working stiffs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
China can't feed it's population without our granaries. Also, you're massively underestimating the power of modern logistics. We need Taiwan for CPU manufacturing. That takes decades to build up. Everything else can be up and running in 5 years or less.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well, you should do what a self-respecting nerd would do: make your own.
As for whether the price should be based on the marginal unit production cost, by that argument the price for proprietary software should be zero.
If you sell things, the production cost is just part of the costs you have to accrue. You have development and marketing costs too, and overhead. After all that you have to pay yourself. For low volume items the costs of these things is a big fraction of the retail cost.
Now if somebody just copied the idea, that's actually fair game under our system if it's not patented. But counterfeiting is freeloading on all the marketing costs by the original developer. And even if you don't think that is wrong, there is the fact that you are misrepresenting what you are selling to the consumer. The honest approach would be to reverse engineer the product and tell the consumer that you'd done so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've bought some books from Amazon, and they were fine. But electronics, and certainly food products - nope.
I suspect that I received counterfeit Dockers pants from Amazon -- they lasted just one or two washes before disintegrating -- I made a second attempt at ordering that brand of work clothes from Kohls online and they are holding up well
I could have designed that thing in under 5 minutes in SolidWorks and had it printed up in about an hour and a half.
Companies like this need to fuck off and die.
"If you have a registered brand in the Brand Registry and don't sell the product wholesale, there could be one box to check for that," Hopkins wrote. "And anyone else would have to get approval or high vetting to sell the product
I've seen exactly this happen. Amazon restricts some brands or even whole categories until you provide paperwork showing you've either bought it from a reputable supplier or have written permission from the brand owner.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
i seen it myself, i would find a good product, but not be able to afford it, a few weeks to a couple months later i search amazon for the product and its gone but there are knockoffs that look the same under a new seller with a new account, i even bought clothes and the product delivered to my door was not the same as advertised, amazon is doing the same dirty bait & switch crap ebay has been famous for in the past, somebody needs to do a class action lawsuit on Jeff Bezos and amazon, they need to be in real trouble for this, because if they dont it will contine
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This happened to me at least once that I'm aware of. I bought some cologne and the packaging was quite legitimate but the product was absolutely wrong.
And go after the company violating your trademark.
If you are buying an apple product that is cheaper than you can get it from one of the well known mac Resellers like MacMall, then it's a fake.
I've gotten some lovely fake apple earphones from amazon. Visually identical, and with packaging declaring it made by Apple. But they sounded crappy, fell apart, and the packaging lacked high end finish.
I knew they were fakes immediately and the seller said keep them but don't give us negative feedback. I told Amazon but nothing happened. They and a zillion others like them pop up like whack a moles.
Recently I've seen a new scam in which ludicrously cheap gaming computers are on sale. You add them to your cart. They say in-stock. and then when you check out they vanish and go to out of stock for a few hours. When you write the seller they try to get you to buy it directly outside amazon for an even cheaper price. Nice scam. I've reported them to Amazon but nothing happens. The marketplace ads themselves disappear and new ones show up.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Since amazon often merges all the reviews for a given UPC, the reviews saying a product is fake will also tar a vendor not selling fakes. The feedback for vendors is ineffective since they come and go.
What amazon should do is anytime someone leaves a review they should ask if this review about the vendor, the product or both. Then list the vendor in the Review.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Quite often Amazon has two separate listings for the same textbook, one at a substantial discount but with cheap printing obviously made in India.
I've wondered whether this was legit (same as what the airlines do with different tiers of passenger seats) or a counterfeiting scam.
You're a moron. They have some cookies your shitty blocker doesn't like so that equates in your dead brain with 'they should get ripped off by chinese criminals'.
So stupid... so shockingly stupid.
What are you even talking about? No one involved in any of this is opposed to legitimate competition (e.g. someone selling their own product for whatever price they want to set). The problem here is that someone is falsely claiming to be selling someone else’s product when what they’re actually selling is something else entirely.
The cheap knockoff company is selling a counterfeit item that purports to be the real deal by illegally using the brand name’s trademarks, packaging, and nearly exact product design. No one is suggesting they shouldn’t be allowed to sell their own product under their own name for $1.50. But instead of doing that, they’re falsely claiming to sell a name brand thing for less, literally stealing sales from the name brand in the process.
And even if you don’t care about brand names (which I have no problem with), you should care about people getting what they pay for, which isn’t happening when these counterfeits get sold in place of the real goods. That’s fraud, plain and simple. The fact that you’re dismissing illegal activities that are hostile towards both legitimate businesses and consumers as nothing more than someone crying about competition is astoundingly absurd.
Do you want to "invent' something that is little more than a piece of twisted plastic and then retire for the rest of your life? With patents and IPee laws you can!
I did this! With a torque arm for an electric bike. Amazon has a bunch of cheap ones, half the price of ebikes.com which seems to be the origin of the design. But I bought just the knockoff first. $5 for a piece of steel when the ebikes.com-associated one was $20.
The knockoff sheared*, my bike's dropouts tore off. I bought a "real" one after and, fingers crossed, it hasn't yet ripped apart from riding.
So, sometimes look-alike isn't act-alike. At least when the knock-off tore, I was accelerating out of an intersection and still at low speed, so just some bumps.
*it's STEEL and it sheared - it didn't deform. Ugh.
Here are some other Amazon problems that they haven't fixed for years:
1. They often don't look at returned products before putting them back in inventory. Customer #1 buys a new product, returns a old used banged-up scratched product, and get a full refund. The old product then goes back into inventory to be sold to customer #2. This has happened several times with products we sell. Customer #2 has sent us photos of the obviously old/used products that Amazon has shipped them. (We replaced them directly.) Amazon should photograph every returned item and give the seller the decision on whether to resell it.
2. Chinese sellers get much cheaper shipping than US sellers because their postal system is heavily subsidized (and US Post then delivers on this side of the ocean for free). Chinese companies can sell items with free shipping for cheaper than a US company's shipping cost alone.
One other strange thing about Amazon is that there are some sellers with items for hugely inflated prices (2x or more) mixed in with the regular priced sellers. What's going on there? I suspect money Amazon is being used for money laundering.
As for whether the price should be based on the marginal unit production cost
Absolutely not my argument. The cost should be whatever the market will bear. Unfortunately for this company, anyone can make even low-volume injection molded silicone rubber for well under a buck. Hell, you could 3D print this thing for around $5. That means competitors that will undercut their high $12 price. I mean, it's a hook...
But counterfeiting is freeloading
Agreed, and Amazon was in the wrong. They seem to have fixed the listing, but if people are allowed to sell generics under brand-name listings, that is a huge problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Just reply with a one liner of what you want to change at Amazon. Then a one line explanation as to why.
I want them to identify the country the item will be shipped from. I’m tired of ordering things from US companies that ship from China discovering the shipping time is unexpectedly weeks delayed only in checkout.
Bezos doesn't care about you, your business, your health, welfare, or anything except getting your money off you and into his pocket. He doesn't care if you are a thief, a slaver, or a drug-dealer. He doesn't care if the money comes from legal, illegal, or ethically-dubious sources. He doesn't care if you made it by selling people, animals, burning the rainforest, or conning old women out of their life savings. The only thing that matters is that it comes to Amazon.
Bezos is a sociopath, pure and simple.
Don't
Buy
From
Amazon
EVER
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
1: If the seller has a Chinese name, don't do business with them. Never buy from the Chinese.
2: Google the text of reviews. If it shows up elsewhere, call them out, and make a 1* review with all other products, call them out on Q&A, and report to Amazon
3: If the seller has a Chinese name, don't do business with them. Never buy from the Chinese.
Can't even do that, because with Amazon Fulfillment, you don't actually know whose product you received-- just who claimed the order.
I ordered a Disney DVD and received one which was obviously counterfeit - from the package, let alone the DVD itself not playing. I tried addressing this with Amazon and they never replied.
I got your panties in a wad, therefore I succeeded.