Slashdot Mirror
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."
they're just going to have to bite the bullet on maintaining and selling their own inventory and be less wild west "marketplace".
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?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
If you register and attain a decent Karma rating, you get to disable the ads.
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
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.
You can buy a knock-off Benz on Amazon?
My Chinduino microcontrollers could be fake? NO!
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....
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.
also good luck buying a PS3 gamepad online.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If it's made at the same factory as the original, it can never be a fake or counterfeit.
...