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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."
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.
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
Selling a hook is not the problem. Using someone else's brand name to do it...is.
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.
A lot of time the cost of the product is in R&D and creating a market by making people aware that it exists. If your competitor just makes an exact clone their only cost is tooling and manufacturing which will be considerably less than yours.
You're basically saying it would be fine for a chinese company to clone an iphone and use Apples software.
The Apple analogy is a poor one. That's pretty much what Chinese and Korean companies have been doing: replicating the hardware design and styling the software to look like what Apple produces. Have you SEEN the Apple Watch clones? The difference is Apple is the big dog, and has the clout to take them to the mat in court.
This kind of talk is why trade wars (and wars in general) start in the first place. Everyone gets focused on who would "win", when in fact even the "winner" gets hurt. Trade, done properly, can benefit both parties. Trade wars, consequently, hurt both parties.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Nice except the $500 American version paid for patents, marketing, American jobs, American taxes, social security, etc. The Chinese one had none of those inbuilt costs. That's why tariffs are supposed to exist to ensure that globalism doesn't become a one way street for money and goods to flow out of a country but never back in. Without proper trade regulations and tariffs it's just a system to bleed a country dry. Fortunately it seems like we're finally coming to our senses." --AC
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.