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Amazon Finally Admitted To Investors That It Has a Counterfeit Problem (qz.com)
Amazon has for the first time acknowledged sales of counterfeits and pirated items as a risk in its annual earnings report to investors and the U.S. SEC. "Some third-party sellers have been using the reach of Amazon's marketplace as an opportunity to sell counterfeit and pirated items," reports Quartz. "The pressure on the company has been growing as brands such as Birkenstock and Mercedes Benz have lambasted it for not being able to control the problem." From the report: Under the section of "risk factors" to the business, Amazon says it "could be liable" for the activities of its sellers, and explains: "Under our seller programs, we may be unable to prevent sellers from collecting payments, fraudulently or otherwise, when buyers never receive the products they ordered or when the products received are materially different from the sellers' descriptions. We also may be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies. Under our A2Z Guarantee, we reimburse buyers for payments up to certain limits in these situations, and as our third-party seller sales grow, the cost of this program will increase and could negatively affect our operating results. In addition, to the extent any of this occurs, it could harm our business or damage our reputation and we could face civil or criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers."
We all know everything that comes out of China is not a fraud. Ask Huxley or Hackingbear.
they're just going to have to bite the bullet on maintaining and selling their own inventory and be less wild west "marketplace".
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Because of widespread counterfeiting on Amazon there are some things I am very reluctant to buy anymore from Amazon, like cables... I would either buy them from NewEgg or directly from the manufacturer (I am really hoping NewEgg does not have a similar issue here).
I would think there would be a very real risk that Amazon sales would decline if people found they could not trust Amazon to deliver the real product they thought they were ordering. Given how widespread and accurate fashion fakes are getting, would anyone order a designer purse from Amazon? Or specific clothing brands?
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They knew about this problem. They USED this problem to force retailers into lucrative (for Amazon) deals, or they implied fraudulent counterfeits would flood their market without protections. Literally, Amazon is the worst major US company.
They should move to China where this kind of thing is not only tolerated but promoted generally as SOP. Bribe/tithe or be fucked by the gatekeeper.
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Simple solution, Amazon: stop comingling the damn inventory from 3rd party sellers. True, you won't be able to prevent
from selling counterfeit items, but you'll be able to trace back who sold it, and when sellers know they can be identified, they won't be as willing to risk it
Not to worry Jeff, the cavalry is coming for your counterfeit merchandise. You WILL receive regular beatings next to your counterfeit merchandise. Shut your pie hole you slimy underbelly of America!
you're telling me this life-size 450 pound funko pop of creimer is a fake
this is an outrage
. . . to prevent counterfeiting . . . or, at least that's what the Blockchain folks keep telling me.
Oh, and some folks are actually doing it:
https://www.bosch-presse.de/pr...
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Amazon does fulfillment for 3rd party sellers and mixes the merchandise in the warehouses. It doesn't matter who you buy things from: You can get counterfeit goods from all sellers with Amazon fulfillment and even from Amazon itself.
Like 2TB flash drives for $20.
You can buy a knock-off Benz on Amazon?
My Chinduino microcontrollers could be fake? NO!
The product catalog and search are complete shit and full of duplicate items and bad info. It used to be good for books, but started going downhill when they let 3rd party sellers take over.
Without openly admitting it, those admissions are also referring to money laundering of some affiliates and how Amazon profits handsomely by taking its cut off the top, no questions asked. Nope, there's nothing at all odd about a seller who prices common health & beauty aids and other common items three orders of magnitude greater than their MSRPs....
none of them have a charge, fucking scammers. amazon won't fix it
Investment analysts discovered that 83% of Amazon shares had been printed in China.
Amazon has bigger problems that counterfeit goods alone. By letting in every fly-by-night manufacturer and seller from China, they've created a situation where certain items simply can't be purchased on Amazon anymore.
Case in point: try buying a good replacement battery for a laptop computer, i.e. one that won't die in a few months. You'll find the same crappy junk batteries being sold under a dozen different names, all at cut-rate prices. The quality sellers have fled Amazon. You have to go to another web site to buy a decent battery (albeit at a higher price, but at least a battery you can trust).
Or try buying an RC toy car for your kids, or a water toy, or any one of hundreds of different electronic items. The only choices you have are bad, bad, and bad.
To make it worse, the fly-by-night sellers have learned how to corrupt the Amazon review system. You'll see some item with hundreds of favorable reviews, then realize that only the last dozen of them actually apply to the item for sale. The other reviews will be talking about a completely different item. Somehow the sellers have figured out how to transfer a set of reviews to a different product.
On top of that, Amazon defends the bogus sellers. I recently got a Facebook message from a Chinese seller offering to reimburse me if I bought a super soaker toy and gave the toy a favorable review. I promptly located the item and seller on Amazon and left a scathing review, which Amazon promptly rejected. Fake paid reviews are clearly perfectly acceptable to Amazon, but reporting them is not.
Trust is Amazon's greatest asset. If people stop trusting what they buy from them, Amazon is opening the doors wide open to the competition.
But it doesn't block the Taboola clickbait crap. Give me ads and block Taboola. Ads are way more interesting.
also good luck buying a PS3 gamepad online.
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the problem is amazon is doing a piss poor job in some fields and totally ignored others.
Loads of copyright infringing games stuff on amazon. they don't care.
but try to sell your own brands shirts on amazon and it's a goddamn nightmare due to having to prove that you own the brand etc - and even then they just flat out deny 50% from selling. but you got a 555-in-1 cartridge with marios face on it? okay, just sell it, no problems.
that is, if amazon just had 1 worker to _manually_ go through the website once a day for obviously pirate multisystems, carts, reporoduction cd's(pirate copies) etc, it would take care 99% of the problem. but they can't be fucking arsed to do that.
ebay can't be arsed to do that either.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Taboola is absolute cancer. There's nothing worse than browsing a coding blog at work (perfectly ok behaviour , it's part of the job) and taboola whacks some borderline pornographic or medical gross-out as smack in the middle of your screen ready to get you in trouble. I've had to block certain sites (I keep a nillroute list on my pc mostly to stop me being tempted by Facebook while on the clock) just because the risks of malicious advertising. It'd be a shame if /. had to go that way after 20+ years
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I have had my fill of counterfeit products on Amazon. Recently, I purchased a reputable brand ski helmet from a NJ retailer and received a piece of junk. It was badly assembled and improperly glued together. I promptly returned the product with a scathing review.
I have since combed local shops looking for a similar product and realize that the helmet I received was a counterfeit. Wow, Amazon sells counterfeit poorly assembled brain buckets. Rest assured some poor soul is going to perish using a similar product. Criminal.
This wasn't the first piece of counterfeit from Amazon, but it was the last. I have abandoned Amazon marketplace and until the counterfeit problem is resolved, I won't be back.
Lazy AC
but try to sell your own brands shirts on amazon and it's a goddamn nightmare due to having to prove that you own the brand etc
The logic of amazon being that if you happen to be trying to sell, say knock offs of Nike or some other brand, they'll have the legal of the big brand team on their asses.
Amazon decides to be cautious. But having actual human employee who can quickly at a glance notice that your "happy bear" brand is a just a small pop and mom shop brand and is never going to cost a legal turmoil... would require paying competent actual human employee. Which is going to cost money.
Better use a poor automated system, that will be goot at avoiding Amazon losing money at the hands of big brand's legal team, but will make the experience miserable for all small shops - because why would Amazon care ? if the small shops want to stay relevant they will *have* to use Amazon and they will *have* to endure the poor system. No need for Amazon to put an effort.
but you got a 555-in-1 cartridge with marios face on it? okay, just sell it, no problems.
...and here the situation is reversed. If you've paying a tiny bit attention to the current gaming market, absolutely nobody uses cartridges anymore.
The cartridge *by itself* (the physical object) isn't an obvious immediate knock off that will immediately attract the ire of some legal team.
It's a legacy type of object to be used with a device that isn't in production anymore. You could hardly claim licensing violation regarding production of cartridge (and even back during the lifetime of the systems, SEGA didn't manage to sue Accolade because of unlicensed cartridge production).
The thing which is problematic is the software flashed onto the cartridge.
But the problem is that a significant amount of the software is done by companies that are now belly up.
It's going to be an administrative nightmare trying to track down the current IP owner of every last one of the 555 supposed games and see if said owner are interested into suing.
By keeping carts on their marketplace, Amazon isn't risking much lawsuits, but avoid the backlash that they could have from end-users trying to sell legit cartridges 2nd hand. (And risk loosing customers to e-bay, as that competitor is also significant in the market of 2nd hand).
So basically it's a balance of risk of being sued vs. potential profit.
For branded shirts, Amazon has decided there's some risk of suits.
For carts, Amazon thinks that the potential profits outweigh the lawsuits risks.
that is, if amazon just had 1 worker to _manually_ go through the website once a day for obviously pirate multisystems, carts, reporoduction cd's(pirate copies) etc, it would take care 99% of the problem.
that covers 99% of the *classes* of problems. But a lone guy would probably be only able to go through 1% of the volume of the above mentioned problems.
Amazon would need a larger crew. Which would cost money. More money that the risk of getting sued.
thus : no.
ebay can't be arsed to do that either.
ebay has a system for reporting of suspect goods.
ebay has also a system that tries to filter automatically potentially counterfeit goods. Which sucks badly and ends up with you still seeing hundreds of obviously counterfeit items that managed to be described and listed in a way that circumvents the simplistic filters, while at the same time suddenly blocking you from buying some completely and unrelated legit item, just because its description uses a word that accidentally looks like something which would trip the filter.
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If it's made at the same factory as the original, it can never be a fake or counterfeit.
...
You would be nuts to buy *anything* that is likely to be counterfeited in Amazon. Even if you buy from a legit seller, there us every chance what you receive will be counterfeit stock from a different seller. At this point, you have to assume that goods you purchase on Amazon are counterfeit (i.e. you need to by elsewhere for anything that actually matters).
SonicCare tooth brush replacement heads are one sub-niche product category which i found to be plagued by Cheap Chinese Plastic Counterfeiters. i spent at good 15 minutes sifting through the hundreds of clone products to find what looked the most like the Authentic product from the OEM. i ordered it and when the package arrived, i discovered the tooth brush heads didn't fit the base device. they were definitely supposed to fit my model of tooth brush, but i could see where China screwed up one small plastic groove in the head that prevent it from fitting onto the metal pin. so i was out $24.99 plus shipping.
as a programmer, i thought i was savvy enough to distinguish between fake products and real products, but the way Amazon is designed makes it impossible to really tell the difference. of course Amazon knows what its doing, and intentionally promotes counterfeit good to shave off a few percentage points of profit.
i know longer buy SonicCare brushes from Amazon. now i buy them in-store at Target, and pay 40% more than Amazon, because paying a little more for peace of mind and quality assurance is worth it to me.
Last year i was buying Legendary White Tails Flannel shirts on Amazon. this is an old and tiny family business brand in Wisconsin. on the Amazon page, it showed they were entirely out of stock of dozens of colors of shirts. bizarrely, another vendor of the shirts appeared, and had all of their shirts in stock. at 1/3 of the price of the original vendor. so i ordered a few, and Amazon says they will ship in 2 months. from China. WTF. so i did some digging, and according to Legendary WhiteTails own website, they have no 3rd party re-sellers and they are the only authorized vendor of their brand.
all i can surmise is that China actively scans Amazon for brands who run out of inventory, then back in China they fire up the clone factories, and pump out counterfeit products faster and cheaper than the original brand can re-stock. which explains why it would take China 2 months to fill my order. i cancelled my order with Amazon and got a refund and then ordered directly from the Legendary White Tails website.
the scale of Amazon's fraud is breath taking and it makes me mad to think how 800lb Gorilla Amazon is demolishing small Mom&Pop Made in America brands by forcing everyone to compete against Chinese counterfeiters. what Amazon is doing to American businesses is like those Youtube videos depicting animal cruelty, where some dude puts a Tarantula in the same cage with a mouse and films the fight to the death.
The general rule should be if you buy stuff from Amazon, don't buy anything that's likely to kill you, injure you, burn your house down or leave you massively out of pocket if it's fake. So generally stuff like clothes, CDs/DVDs, books, AA/AAA powered electric goods, wooden things, (non electric) kitchen stuff etc. are OK - the worst that will happen if you get a fake is you're out a small amount of money. But I find I'm spending less on Amazon each year because of these limitations.