> An Amazon spokeswoman denied that counterfeiting of books was a problem, saying, “This report cites a handful of complaints, but even a handful is too many and we will keep working until it’s zero.” The company said it strictly prohibited counterfeit products and last year denied accounts to more than one million suspected “bad actors.”
If it were just a handful of cases, you wouldn't have a million "bad actors" getting caught. You'd have a handful. A million people a year aren't trying this because it's unprofitable.
Sure, and I'm saying that doesn't pass the smell test.
A million accounts a year being banned means folks are seeing all that trouble (it's not anywhere near as easy a process as just signing up for a consumer Amazon account) as worthwhile.
It’s actually far worse than the pirate bay IMHO as they appear legit and pocket a part of transactions—ie profiting over screwing over otherwise moral agents who attempt an honest transaction.
Lots of interesting thought experiments and research could go into separating the differences between, and collating the similarities of, the two.
The original Pirate Bay founders were pursued internationally to be held accountable for their intellectual property facilitation. Will Jeff Bezos join Kim Dotcom in New Zealand to hide from US prosecution for facilitating the sale of counterfeit books? Will there be any follow-up or holding to account? Hahahaha, NO!
How does this sit within the context of the US-China trade war?
(Physical) Counterfeit products versus (electronic) intellectual property breaches, with seemingly more importance placed upon the less tangible, electronic, law-breaking.
You've found the entry to a labyrinthine rabbit hole.
> I really don't see how Amazon is any different to Pirate Bay here.
I do. On Amazon you pay real money to get the real thing, potentially for something important like medical texts or safety equipment. You expect to be able to trust them, and that trust is broken. Customers get defrauded.
On Pirate Bay, you pay nothing to get something you know is illegal and might be malware. Users are not getting defrauded; they are the ones doing something illegal, and the "sellers" are not directly profiting from it. So what Amazon is doing is significantly worse and more dangerous than The Pirate Bay.
We've been told that the antidote to deep fakes is supply chain security. It's troubling to hear that supply chain security is already broken and by fairly unsophisticated attackers from the sounds of it.
I would not use deep fakes to refer to counterfeit goods. Deep fakes refers only to artificially generated videos of a real person (usually face, but it could include voice).
Deepfake (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake"[1]) is a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.[2] The phrase "deepfake" was coined in 2017.
Because of these capabilities, deepfakes have been used to create fake celebrity pornographic videos or revenge porn.[3] Deepfakes can also be used to create fake news and malicious hoaxes.[4][5]
I didn't read the parent post as using it that way - I believe they're saying that any claim that "supply chain security" (of videos) will combat deep fakes* isn't necessarily a credible model of security considering that the "real" supply chain (of physical goods) isn't apparently particularly secure.
I don't think I actually agree, however. Things like hashing and cryptography make me inclined to believe a digital 'chain of custody' is easier to prove and validate than a physical one.
( *I'd never heard this before, but it's an interesting claim )
the digital nature of information removes the need of exclusive ownership. we must find a way to make a marketplace function without exclusive ownership.
An author asks for money upfront. This amount is going to fund the creation of the work. Then a copy goes to the preparers to do as they wish (including making copies to distribute). I foresee crowd funded prepayments to be the norm in the future, and also sponsorships (like patreon) style payments would be the alternative model.
> the digital nature of information removes the need of exclusive ownership
There are a variety of justifications for copyright in various legal systems around the world, and I can't think of any of them where information being digital as opposed to analog would make a difference.
All digital really changes, as far as I can see, is that it makes it possible to make perfect copies and it makes the cost of copying essentially zero. None of the copyright justifications I'm aware of are based on copying being hard or expensive.
digital copying has never existed before, it's a new ability due to computer and information technology.
up to the internet any digital (or analog) copies needed to be transfered along with a physical (thus exclusive) object.
of course none of the copyright justifications are based on the cost of copying becuase it had never been so easy to do. I can't imagine the legal justification of anything being based on technological possibilites from future times.
in any case I think about it "from the other direction" (so to say). I start from the fact that digital copying is so increadiby cheap/easy that we should take advantange of this technological ability instead of trying to diminish it because of "the market's business interests"
But one of the major copyright justifications is in fact based on the cost of copying. Specifically, that if copying is cheap and quick, then copiers will be able to get their copies into circulation before the creator can recoup their costs of creation. Creators have higher expenses than mere copiers, and competition among copiers should drive the cost of a copy down to near the marginal cost of copying.
Technological changes that lower the cost of copying and make it faster to copy make the case stronger, not weaker, for copyright under that justification.
> in any case I think about it "from the other direction" (so to say). I start from the fact that digital copying is so increadiby cheap/easy that we should take advantange of this technological ability instead of trying to diminish it because of "the market's business interests"
Copyright under the cost of copying type of justification is based on artificially giving things like music recording the same attributes as physical goods, so that the free market can determine what new works should be produced. This trade-off with this is that this does mean that the price of a recording to the consumer is higher than it should be (which is close to the marginal cost of making a copy).
There's no reason we have to try to make the free market handle deciding what gets produced. By giving that up, we can make the cost to consumers near zero like you want, but we then do have to come up with a different way to decide what gets produced and how that is paid for.
It's interesting to note that the screenshot of the review of Murder On the Orient express is complaining about CreateSpace [1] an Amazon subsidiary that does print-on-demand stuff.
Shit, Amazon’s already doing this with other stuff. They have a giant counterfeiting problem across the board, and internal systems that only make it worse by fulfilling an order from one vendor with stock from a different one if that happens to be closer to the customer.
I first started hearing about it around the 2017 eclipse, when people ordering glasses designed to let you safely stare into the sun got fakes that wouldn’t do the job properly, but it seemed to already be pretty widespread by now.
The integrity of B&H over my years of ordering from them is literally unparalleled in my experience. Only if I can’t find an item from them will I check elsewhere at this point. If Amazon wants inspiration as to how to do things right...
Often when I try to find something just a little bit out of the ordinary, Amazon tends to be the only option.
And when there is another option, even something like best buy, their experience can be pretty bad (my best buy account is in some sort of limbo where I have been able to create it but can't access it .. so I have to do all my purchases in guest mode).
Sometimes you can find a merchant on Amazon, search for its name (they are not allowed to link), then buy from the merchant's own store.
For any readers from Germany, booklooker.de is great for books. You can buy used and new books with an extremely efficient, no-nonsense user interface. Fulfilled by large and small bookstores and even private sellers. You see the actual vendor before you buy.
> The counterfeit climbing gear with fake safety logos in particular bothers me...
Another one is counterfeit tourniquets. It seems like you basically can't order them off Amazon with any confidence that you're getting the genuine article.
All of these examples sound like they should be rather serious crimes. Are people going to prison over this? There's quite a big difference between fake brand clothes or copies of novels, and fake safety/medical gear and badly copied medical books.
You can get fined for selling counterfeit goods, and apparently if you sell through Amazon you can get fined for it even though the goods were put in Amazon's warehouse by some other merchant.
The problem here is Amazon making it ridiculously easy for people outside of our legislatures reach to commit crimes. So, the logical option is to punish Amazon (and similar companies) for distribution of counterfeits.
Is it legal what Amazon is doing (or rather, not doing)? Well, make it illegal.
IANAL, but I am not sure if they're legally selling counterfeits, or if they're even (legally speaking) involved with any crime at all. Maybe (to the law) they're victims as well? Common sense tells me: Yeah, what Amazon is doing should be considered criminal activity. But common sense and laws sometimes tend to disagree.
Anyhow, I think generally we agree: Amazon should be punished for this. If the legal framework does not allow for this, it needs to be adjusted accordingly.
IIRC they use the defense of just offering a marketplace where other vendors sell stuff. That did not work for places like Silk Road, and given that Amazon handles the delivery I doubt it holds up - at least not in all legislations Amazon is active in.
They sell illegal goods. Yes, I'd say they're doing something illegal. Now the illegal goods happen to be supplied by other people without Amazon's knowledge, but Amazon is still the one selling them, and they have a duty to know what they're selling. And once they know that some of their suppliers are selling them illegal goods, they have a responsibility to do everything they can to stop that and prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, they choose to describe it as not a big problem.
It took seven years and well over £10 million in police costs to get him, and that's from the territory of one of our strongest allies with an extradition treaty.
We don't even have an extradition treaty with China.
From one and only reason - because Ecuador helped him. The minute he left the embassy, he was taken, and that would've happened 7 years ago if it wasn't for Ecuador. The average Joe is not going to have help from foreign governments and their diplomats.
Sorry, but on. The people responsible sit in Seattle, Washington. I didn't ordered anything from a random guy in China, Japan, Malaysia or God knows where else. I have ordered a thing from a respectable looking, USA business.
Well, but in some cases you did. Many, many items on Amazon are not sold by Amazon. Quite a lot of Amazon's business these days is just acting as a marketplace for independent sellers. This is how they keep an arm's length ("plausible deniability") from the problem. I agree, however, that it doesn't absolve them of responsibility.
But the issue here seems to be that even if you order directly from Amazon or a reputable seller, you could still end up with a product coming from a less reputable seller if it has the same barcode.
This is the same bullshit companies like Airbnb and Uber try to pull.
No, the people sit in the Amazon offices. If you sell stolen goods you're lucky if you aren't charged with fencing but you can bet you won't be reimbursed if those goods get claimed. If you sell fake products, you should be held accountable just the same.
Sure, pass the buck up the chain but this should never allow the consumer to be knowingly harmed by an intermediary knowingly enabling the sale of counterfeit items with no accountability.´
Amazon is knowingly allowing fraud to happen. It's a risk they're willing to take and they can get away with it because there's no legal accountability. They could try to curb it but that would impact the bottom line. The only way to fix this is regulation (i.e. laws) and more consistent application of it.
The market can't fix it because there's no market incentive to fix it.
Yes, Amazon has had ample opportunity to self-regulate, and they are passing on it because--contrary to outdated theories--it's been more profitable to ignore the problem.
I'm probably too much of an adult to be quoting Fight Club but this reminds me of that infamous monologue about car companies comparing the cost of a recall vs the cost of lawsuits from faulty cars that kill their customers.
I'm not sure what you're calling outdated but it's been like this at least since whenever that book was written. The only thing that has changed is that consumer rights have been eroded in the US over decades, reducing the financial risk of inaction.
People may do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Corporations only do what is either directly profitable or inevitable. Expecting a corporation to do something because it is "right" is absurd. Corporations -- contrary to US legal opinion -- aren't people.
Let me check I understand this correctly: You could be a seller of genuine articles, but could be fined if Amazon substitutes a fake supplied by someone else?
It reminds me of the case where someone got in trouble with customs because Amazon substituted a counterfeit for the genuine article he ordered and paid for.
Yep. Amazon offers a service where items with the same SKU from multiple vendors are intermingled at their warehouses. This is no problem as long as they are really the same item.
But clearly when they mix up real items with fake ones, it's Amazon and the fake vendor that are at fault and need to be held responsible, not the real vendor or the customer.
All the investigator sees is that someone went to a website with your name on it, bought product X, and received a counterfeit of product X instead. It doesn't matter how that happened; all that matters is that your business enables counterfeit goods to find a market. Of course if you run a business that sells via Amazon you have to specifically opt out of this inventory mixing, even though it increases your costs. Either that or you shouldn't do business via Amazon at all, or you should gang together with other businesses and force Amazon to change it's operations. But no matter what you do it's likely to increase your costs.
It's not clear to me whether this problem is present in the EU, where consumer law generally works a lot better. A poster below mentions fake CE logos?
A little while ago I was trying to get into Airsoft (paintball with plastic bullets as opposed to color) to have a reason to spend more time with my brother. The little bullets have quite decent momentum and can penetrate normal low-grade safety glasses, and so I was browsing around for glasses with a certain rating. Found the exact pair I wanted for a good price on amazon, but I just couldn't run the risk of getting fakes from China. Needless to say, I haven't played any Airsoft yet..
If nobody goes to retail stores to _ask_ for a specific type of security glasses, how will they ever know to stock it? We, the consumers making Amazon's monopoly.
While security glasses are something that you will hardly find in a typical mall retail shop, it is something, that shops with tactical gear do stock. They also haveh a clerk, who can give you an advice for your specific needs.
I can't remember the specifics, but with the certain model I wanted, at a reasonable price, and with shipping to Sweden I'd like to remember that Amazon was the best option. Regardless, although my last sentence might've been a bit dramatic, the point of the anecdote was to share how Amazon lost me as a customer because of their counterfeit problem.
The first search result for "airsoft safety glasses" is [1], which shows me Danish prices and a delivery cost to Denmark.
Amazon might be easy, but knowing their products may be counterfeit, the company pays next to no tax, and has underpaid staff on awful contracts, I've not bought anything from them for years.
I must qualify what I said by saying that I've found this much harder the more specific I need to be. I could find 0 results for short M3 screws when I searched domestic sellers a few weeks ago. No hardware- or electronic stores carried them. One had them listed with a 3 month delivery and at about $3 each. After that hour+ you Amazon it, without putting hours into finding it in other countries who's languages you don't speak.
Airsoft glasses is something I can find in any mall here.
We're pretty well of the beaten path of Amazon here, but I had a similar need (#1 slotted flat-head brass wood screws) that McMaster-Carr didn't sell a little while ago and found them on microfasteners.com. It looks like they stock metric machine screws as well.
They have secured a place in the minds of people as being the only place you can get anything - or, get anything conveniently, I guess. I hope there's still physical stores out there that do e.g. airsoft goods. The real "problem" is of course that consumers are then faced with real consumer prices, where they have to pay $15 for a good pair of safety glasses instead of $1.50.
They've gotten good enough at SEO that it's honestly hard to Google for alternative or niche vendors.
Unless you're plugged into the community for the activity enough to know the reputations of big online vendors, you've got the same problem of low quality, counterfeits, poor fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
I've started to ask people in the climbing community if they bought anything besides the guide or their pants on Amazon. I'm not climbing with any gear from that store.
I've bought a few other things on Amazon that were counterfeit, which is why I cancelled my prime subscription and now look at other stores first. Never ordered climbing gear, but fake jackets are bad enough.
Some manufacturers do list directly on Amazon. If it's a huge discount I've done this but double check the seller. In general, I'll just use backcountry.com or REI though since I don't have to worry about a fake.
I ended up buying a pair of replacement snowboarding liner gloves from BackCountry after several Amazon reviews mentioned "sudden decreased quality from the last time I ordered". I doubted Burton quality had suddenly dropped off a cliff, so I suspected the listing was now pointing toward a counterfeit product.
I ordered from BackCountry and loved the gloves just as much as I always had. I don't know if the Amazon listing had truly been hijacked by a counterfeit, but I'm glad I didn't risk it and I tend to try to go to other sites first now.
I don't climb, but oh yeah, that's a no brainer all right.
Unless they can fix this then buying direct from the manufacturer has to be the only safe way. Otherwise you have to trust a retailer who even if trustworthy, has to trust a wholesaler.
That sounds extremely terrifying. Got a source, please?
A quick search resulted only in less safety critical gear like maps, clothing etc.. Not saying that this isn't dangerous, too, but are their fake carabiners, ropes and helmets?
Which talks about fake safety logos and
https://www.outsideonline.com/2073311/dangerous-climbing-har... which is about eBay rather than Amazon. My personal experience is that Amazon suggests obviously sketchy, NON-UIAA / CE gear rather than established brands. I've bought a lot of caving, climbing, and mountaineering equipment on Amazon and haven't had a problem yet buying Petzl, Elderid, BD etc.
I needed ballistic glasses for the range that have some shatter resistance. I misplaced a spare set, and needed them sooner than later for a friend. I start looking on Amazon. One of the top results at the time for Z87+[0] was a pack of 3 or 5 glasses for about $8 USD, and it hit me that there is a good chance these small companies are slapping ANSI and MIL-PRF tags onto their products. (Edit: I did the search again today. That listing does not show when searching "Z87+")
In all my years, I've never needed the shatter resistance offered by ballistic glasses. Think about how unfortunate it would be to find out on the range that your safety gear is a pair of $2 plastic lenses.
It's getting to the point where I'm wondering if "fulfilled by Amazon" is a negative when I'm adding to my cart.. Been shipped a lot of opened, damaged, and returned items from Amazon... Maybe my 700+ purchase is better served through a 50k+ reviewed seller instead; still get the same Amazon shopping and checkout experience without the Amazon fulfillment BS.
Reviews should also be taken with a big grain of salt, you know there's farms of people and bots just giving out good reviews for bad products constantly.
And reviews only tell half the story. If a $700 product gets four stars but its $100 alternative does as well despite being nowhere near as good, what good are reviews? I mean people putting down reviews don't have both products to compare with one another.
Yep, and plenty of people don't realize seller reviews != product reviews. You shouldn't complain about shipping times in a product review or talk about how much you disliked the plot of a book is in a seller review, but it happens all the time. Many people don't even realize you can rate a seller for shipping time, description accuracy, and responsiveness, so a legit seller might have a lot of happy customers but not much to show for it while a counterfeit seller has a boatload of paid reviews.
I've found myself using Aliexpress more and more over Amazon due to this reason. I mean if it's something cheap you want - just get it straight from China. There are of course things that can't wait for the 2 weeks it takes for packages to get across the other pond.
Yeah Amazon will likely be beaten by a Chinese company at some point.
There is no domination in capitalism. A new competitor always shows up. Consumers are not loyal to Amazon- they will shop anywhere. If you don't believe me look at the airline industry.
There is plenty of domination in capitalism, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, political influence. Once you get to a certain size you become too big to fail and the government is then in your pocket.
The current trade war with China is probably being fought in the interests of big business rather than the consumer
Allow me to say: in a well regulated capitalism. We all know Standard Oil.
Don't blame Amazon if you can't be bothered to use another store. But I am Dutch, I would walk 10 kilometres just to save 50 cents as a matter of principle.
Capitalism is inherently self-destructive because it tends towards a monopoly and unregulated monopolies make competition impossible (especially if they're "vertically integrated", i.e. monopolies at every level of the value chain). Regulation solves this by restraining capitalism and actively working against it. But companies like Amazon and other US megacorps have been lobbying against regulation for decades and in the US they have been extremely effective.
"Don't blame Amazon" is a position from privilege. I make enough money to be able to waste hours clicking through various websites to find the best deal. Whether or not I shop local is largely a question of laziness. But assuming this holds true for everyone is absurd.
There simply is no direct competitor to Amazon. Sure, there are specialised shops and some of them may have put in the effort to gain their target audience's trust and brand recognition, but everyone already has an Amazon account and if you are already paying every month for Prime shipping (now included in your VOD package!) why not just shop Amazon -- you'll likely order something from them anyway, so just throw it in and maybe you pay enough to hit the threshold for that "plus" product that's been collecting dust in your shopping card.
What makes you think I'm "angry with Amazon"? Amazon isn't a person. How I feel about Amazon doesn't matter. It's like being angry at the wind for blowing over a tree.
Amazon is a profit-driven corporation. Amazon drives down prices to gain market share and starve competitors. Then it repeats that process with different markets so customers come to rely on them for most of their online shopping (ideally also reinforced via products like Alexa, Kindle or Fire). Then they ramp up prices or lower costs (i.e. quality controls) as customers are too heavily invested to switch to a competitor for any given niche and their service range is too broad for any competitor to meaningfully offer an alternative. That's how you succeed as a corporation under capitalism at this point.
I'm not angry with Amazon because Amazon is winning at the game of capitalism. I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't be forced to play the game because the way its rules work mean it will invariably end -- and that's something we generally don't want for our society as a whole.
It doesn't even matter whether we right now are experiencing "late game" (i.e. late stage capitalism) or not: the rules are already causing harm and literally killing people, so that's enough of a reason to want to stop.
That said, you can't just decide to stop playing if you're deeply entangled in the system. If everyone around you pretends private ownership is a thing and you don't happen to already "own" everything you need to sustain yourself without interacting with them, "not playing" means giving up access to things you need to survive.
Jeff Bezos could probably buy a private island, gather a group of likeminded people and form a commune and not have to worry about the basic necessities of life for the rest of his days. But a wage employee living from paycheck to paycheck doesn't have that luxury. Being able to exit the game without losing everything is only possible if you're already winning.
TL;DR: Regulation is good because it changes the rules of the game of capitalism, not because it enforces them.
I still like Amazon more for physical goods due to having to pay no customs (and more importantly, not suffer through the Kafkaesque process of handling customs in my country) on orders from within the EU Amazon sites.
If I can't wait 2 weeks, I go on Ebay :) It's usually a few dollars more, or sometimes even the same price (probably a US retailer buying bulk from Alibaba instead of Aliexpress). Make sure you check the "Ships from North America" box, though.
The "top reviews" are all positive, but all for different products (this is supposed to be a pack of Lightning cables) - phone cases, LG G6 accessories, a rifle stand - and it's the 4th product when searching for "lightning cable".
It looks like they can just completely change the content of an existing listing, including customer reviews, without any oversight.
I made a huge mistake ordering the top rated boxer-briefs from amazon mindlessly - the reviews seemed good! It turns out that they were terrible and when I did a little digging I found out the reviews were completely fake and if I had looked at the "unhelpful" reviews which were all 1 star I could have avoided some problems!
I ordered headphones from Amazon that had good reviews, over 1k. I was looking for a cheap pair to listen to music at work. What I got were really poorly made Chinese rip-offs of Sony. I went to process the return and all of the review except for a handful of 1 star reviews had been removed. Luckily the return went off with a hitch but it seems clear Amazon is at least trying to do something, even if their efforts are not sufficient.
tl;dr: because they've already won, Amazon has zero reason (financial or moral) to fight counterfeit products. Nothing the consumer says or does can meaningfully impact Amazon's bottom line, and no regulation exists (nor is likely to exist in the future) to force them to "fix their shit".
Unlike banks, Amazon is now simply too big to fail.
(Because unlike banks, Amazon has a million and one services that all more than compensate for each other. Amazon, the website, is barely a fraction of Amazon, the corporation)
That might be the case but individuals are still free to refuse to buy items from amazon. I know that they won’t fail anytime soon because of AWS but I absolutely refuse to buy any items from their store because 7/10 times it’s garbage. They might not fail but luckily there’s still good online alternatives
> I absolutely refuse to buy any items from their store because 7/10 times it’s garbage.
genuinely curious, what kinds of things do you order? I place 1-2 orders every month and I've never received anything that I suspected was counterfeit.
Maybe not counterfeits, but many of the listing are very poorly made. Most of the clothing I've bought through them (even supposed name brands) have fallen apart extremely quickly. Looking through my history:
- a car battery maintainer that doens't really charge the battery
- 2 puzzles that the pieces don't fit together and many of them broke.
- a snowboard edge tuner that ended up breaking after about 5 uses.
- an iphone charging cable that fell apart after about a year even though it claimed to be kevlar braided.
- a spatula that must have been 24 gauge sheet metal stamped into a "spatula" shape.
- some glass screen protectors for my iphone that don't fit.
- an air filter for my car that doensn't fit the car it's listed for.
- a wireless charger that the micro-usb port broke within 2 months.
All of those were from 2018. Now that I look through my history I'll change the 7/10 to 5/10 but in my book that's sill absolutely unacceptable. I'm sure there's more diligence I can do to make sure that I only buy name brand products but Amazon has lost my trust.
Try to find the real manufacturer. If it's a no-name/no-brand seller from China, then you should know what to expect.
Example:
1. Search for "car battery charger"
2. "Amazon's Choice" result is a brand called Ampeak
3. Google "Ampeak trademark"
4. Ahhhh, "AMPEAK is a trademark of SHENZHEN JIADING ECOMMERCE LTD."
Exercise of trying to find any information about "Shenzhen Jiading Ecommerce LTD" left to the reader.
Also:
1. Try to find a website for both the brand and the manufacturer. "Ampeak" does have a website but lacks company information.
2. Note if the listing is dominated by gushing 5-star reviews and 1-star "what the heck did I just buy" reviews, something you can observe in the Ampeak charger listing.
If this is really the only way to successfully shop at Amazon, I wonder why so many people are still doing that. It seems to me that it would be the role of the shop I am shopping at to perform this kind of due diligence and quality assurance.
The role of the shop you are shopping at is to get filthy rich peddling shoddy junk made with effectively slave labor, while degrading both the manufacturer and consumer societies at the same time.
Indeed. Stores are not your friend. And its not like it was better before Amazon. In fact with online shopping I learned how those brick and mortar retailers were scamming me for decades with their middleman rent seeking.
Last week I wanted to get my brother some stuff so he could try out making the electronics for a project idea he has. He’s in high school. I have a nice soldering iron from a reputable seller that has lasted several year and works well.
But I didn’t get him one of those because that would have cost more than the entire assortment of arduino, wire, power suppliers, soldering iron and other components that I got him.
If he really likes it, then I’d buy him a nice one, but here Amazon was great for the use case of I want to knowingly buy cheap stuff and risk it might break.
Many other websites are turning themselves into fairly open accrss market places as well, meaning you have to increasingly go through the same steps on them. A few examples: Newegg, Walmart, Lowes. Now, perhaps those 3 examples are better, but they seem to be determined to head the same way as fast as they can.
If this is the “correct” way to shop Amazon, then the ops point is only stronger. It makes perfect sense to take your business elsewhere when these kind of shenanigans are required.
The trouble is that in many cases it goes a bit further. Steps 1-4 are as you say. But then
5. Keep looking down Amazon's product listings.
6. Notice that _every single thing in the list_ is a weird pseudo-brand whose products are presumably drop-shipped from China.
7. Notice that many of these things, although nominally having different manufacturers, are obviously pretty much the same thing, probably coming out of the same factory.
8. Try to find some suitable products somewhere in the list that actually come from companies you might have heard of and that aren't just reselling the same probably-low-quality Chinese products.
9. Give up and go to a bricks-and-mortar store.
(For me, looking at Amazon UK, for the particular search mentioned above there do seem to be a few real products in among the deluge of fake-brand junk. But often >90% of the products in the list are fake-brand junk. And of course then there's the possibility that the real products are actually fakes too.)
thanks for the response. it's totally reasonable to want a shopping experience where you just search for $item and the item you get is actually a decent quality. unfortunately, it seems that amazon is not this kind of service anymore.
my usual shopping workflow is 1) lookup the wirecutter article for the item I want, then 2) go to amazon and get the top or budget wirecutter pick (depending on price and how much I care). I've never been disappointed by the item I got, but I definitely understand if you don't want to work this hard for a spatula. I guess I have some sort of amazon stockholm syndrome if I never noticed the problem with my workflow. for me, it's just a warehouse full of random items with free two day shipping. the index to the items is external to the service.
you mean from a well known brand like nike, adidas, etc.? why not get it from their own website or app directly? sometimes it's even cheaper and the perks you get far out-weights what amazon has to offer.
You basically never get free shipping on a pair of socks from a brand like Nike though, right? Usually you have to spend ~$50. These were ‘Darn Tough’, a more niche hiking/active brand. Amazon had the best price. I only found out they were counterfeit by doing some research when they got a hole way too soon, but just after the return window. I mended the hole and they’re serviceable for now. In the future, I’ll only buy these from either REI or direct from the manufacturer. Lesson learned. But yeah not your typical sock-buying situation, I’m way too big of a hipster for that ;)
Darn Toughs are nice enough when I left a pair behind by mistake at my hostel after a Grand Canyon trip I prevailed upon the hostel to mail them back to me for $2 for their time + postage. Thanks for the heads up about Amazon.
That's a weird question. I mean, it may totally make sense to do what you are saying, but people tend to get used to shopping in one place, not even to mention that every sane wholesaler does everything in his power to make people used to that (relevant ads, promos, personalized discounts or bonus points, unobtrusive UI...) That's kinda the whole point of being a reseller.
You get a 5% rebate if you’re using an Amazon credit card. Their return policies are predictable and fairly generous. If you’re lucky enough to be in the right place, shipping is reliably 2 days or even same-day, which, if you’re using the card, is “free” as part of prime. I have more trust in Amazon’s ability to safeguard PII and payment information than I do for other companies. Except for the first one, these reasons are some of the main reasons Amazon blew up online retail in the first place.
> I have more trust in Amazon’s ability to safeguard PII and payment information than I do for other companies.
Even though I'd preferentially avoid Amazon much of the time, this is true. I wish Apple Pay for web purchase would become ubiquitous (and my credit card issuer would add support) to sidestep this issue.
Amazons shipping. Its the only reason I still shop at amazon. Their shipping is quick and predictable, if it says it will be at your door tomorrow it is very likely that it will be. You can actually take their delivery dates seriously and plan accordingly. I made the mistake of ordering a mobile AC unit somewhere else (reputable entity, bought my first pc there decades ago) and instead of getting it last Friday or Saturday, as stated when buying, it will come some time this week when I am at work. From looking at when the item got transferred to the shipping company its clear the original delivery date was simply wrong. Further more, the company tasked with delivery doesnt even do Saturdays. I dont think i will be buying anything important from them anytime soon. I had to many bad experiences like that with too many vendors to gamble on anything other then amazon.
I think amazon is very aware of that and is working towards their own shipping service for a reason. They are still a shitty company, but at least i dont have the hassle of running after my shipments.
I used to order seaweed snacks. The type of things I enjoy but is hard to find locally. I can't take the chance anymore, Amazon needs a perfect reputation before I'm willing to eat something from them.
7/10 garbage??? Are you not receiving the items you ordered? Or are you ordering the lowest-priced items and expecting premium product?
We have two couples living in our house and receive 5-15 Amazon packages a week and have never had a single "OMG this is counterfeit/fake/literal garbage" moment. And all of us LOVE to complain about any opportunity that has a sliver of a chance at a discount. Meanwhile, I have read numerous HN accounts of "OMG, Amazon is always sending me counterfeit/fake stuff"
At this point, I'm honestly thinking there are troll(s) on HN bashing Amazon. Also, the returns are EASY, so... What gives? I hate that Amazon is TBTF and Bezos controls more resources than some Nations, but the facts for me are: Amazon delivers what I want very quickly at reasonable prices. They often have items that I literally cannot buy locally. I wish I could always support my local people, but often as not, Amazon does a better job with less friction.
Seriously? 7\10?? You buy 10 widgets and (want to) return 7 of them? I'm just going to say this now: you are either pulling numbers out of your ass (on a technical-loving web site) or you are outright lying.
Not the person you’re replying to, (and not a troll) but I just looked at my orders and I was at almost a 50% return/exchange rate for damaged/counterfeit/not-as-described items in the last year before I completely stopped ordering from Amazon. As someone who buys at least one item a day over the internet, that’s a lot of mistakes. At one point I talked to my local UPS shop doing one of my weekly mass Amazon return drop offs, and he said I wouldn’t believe how much of their business was amazon returns. On the other hand, I order a lot of items that I have a lot of knowledge about, so it’s not hard for me to spot a fake or find the damage almost immediately. However, I could see the average consumer just accepting an item without paying too much attention. Since then I’ve switched to specialty retailers, and Target and Walmart for everything else.
That has literally nothing to do with Amazon, the company. If you don't buy products on Amazon.com you're still paying online companies who pay Amazon for using their web services.
THAT'S what it means for Amazon to be too big to fail: the consumer does NOT have any power anymore. We passed that point. Simply by participating in society, some of your money will end up in Amazon's hands, because they own the infrastructure on which society now runs.
As long as they have 3-4 other solid competitors in each market they work, they haven't exactly won. And honestly, Amazon service is less than stellar at times, and most of the services people use them for amount to brokering the purchase or rental of a product. This sounds like a service model that in under 20 years will be completely unprofitable and replicated across all competition. Certainly they'll edge up somehow, but it's unclear how.
> no regulation exists (nor is likely to exist in the future)
I wouldn't be so sure. It's true that they have a ton of money, but they also have a lot of exposure. Lobbying is most effective for companies that are obscure and their interests are adverse to either very few people or to everybody but only in a virtually unnoticeable way.
Even very wealthy industries that are high profile and piss off everyone tend to eventually get regulated. See e.g. banks.
It's not about them having a ton of money. Money on gets you so far. Amazon owns (part of) the infrastructure that modern connected society relies on. I look forward to it getting broken up once the old guard leaves politics and some better educated younger politicians swap in, but Amazon is offering good deals to too many people, except the people that work the warehouses for their distributed global shopping mall. Even if Amazon got legislated to treat all those folks right, hire 100% more people to cut shit times, and raise salaries by 100% for all warehouse workers, all that would do is slow down growth of a company that literally owns part of the internet we all rely on.
> Unlike banks, Amazon is now simply too big to fail.
A generation ago, you could have said that about Microsoft. Somebody can indeed force them to "fix their shit" -- government. ...and they will. You can already see some ripples on the pond. Watch out, though, because the government can have a heavy hand and often the cure is worse than the disease.
You may not like MS products, but I think their capability to seek rent is much, much lower than the antitrust days. The story looks like the competition did it instead of regulation, but who knows if an undeterred, ruthless Microsoft would have fought back better and dirtier.
Microsoft deserves a reputation for poor quality software, but they are at least 10x higher quality than just about everything else of similar complexity. Only software that can kill (medical and flight) is generally of higher quality.
In my opinion it's not that the government has a 'heavy hand' but that Amazon pumps enough money into the system to suborn any regulation that'll eventually occur. You can bet they already have drafts of laws that'll suit them just fine while making it impossible for smaller players to compete.
It was said to be true about Walmart just 15-20 years ago. When I was in high school in the 1990s, it was universally proclaimed that Walmart was a monster that would kill every retailer that was still standing. Nobody would survive. There was terrified breathless coverage in all media everytime they sneezed. If they went into a new town, people proclaimed all business in the town would instantly die, for nobody could compete with The Great & Terrifying Walmart. If they looked at other business segments (banking! pharmacy! gas stations! earth!), it was proclaimed that they would of course conquer that too. They were going to rule all commerce.
Turned out to mostly be typical human drama, fear & pandering, media headline bait, and bullshit than anything else. The exact same will prove to be true in the case of Amazon, and it's extraordinarily obvious that will be the case.
This is a common mistake: yes, the government stepped in to deal with Microsoft, but MS was nowhere near as diversified as Amazon is, and the government has done nothing truly of note to reign in Amazon.
If you have the time, I'd love to hear more about the ripples on the pond, because the only thing I see governments look at right now is getting Amazon to pay more money for continuing to operate all its ventures, which it can _easily_ do if it were legislated into paying more than it does now.
In theory, they can't be a monopoly. What exactly is stopping anyone else from starting an online bookstore or a mart? In India, there is already Flipkart and Big Basket, just two large e-commerce companies among several others who are giving cut-throat competition to Amazon each day, are there no others in the US?
Amazon moves in and takes over an industry due to both economies of scale and scope (i.e. shared services/costs). If they allow lower quality, niche or competing substitutes can exist.
If they offer inferior products, people will substitute away to a better quality option. This is why Walmart is not the only retailer, and space for mid quality retailers like Target or grocery chains exist.
Amazon is not too big too fail. We can easily do without it. Sure, Amazon disappearing would seriously shake up the market, but other platforms would appear, and local shops might get more business again.
Please do let Amazon fail if they do not go out of their way to fix this as soon as possible.
Slightly OT but I just won a bet with a buddy of mine who works at Wholefoods. Somewhat knowing Amazon for huge variety of products, he assumed Amazon will even add more products to Wholefoods palette. I told him to the contrary - Amazon is a hard core analytics company with simple website [todays standards] and incredibly rich physical delivery network. We bet $100. Yesterday I visited him at work. Year later Amazon hs cut off its 365 brand of awesome organic stuff unique to Wholefoods and is on plan to cut 20% more products according to internal email he received. Whatever didn’t hit “moving average” high enough is getting sliced - no more 25 types of meat, just one vacuum packed not even prepared at Wholefoods. Amazon is on its path to destroy the brand. Soon there won’t be anything there that you canmt buy at Wallmart at 10% discount.
/ rant
That sounds depressing. Seriously. Similar kind of thing happened at a bakery I work at. We used to make so many varieties of baked goods, but they've been cut down to the items that sold well. I mean, that means less food goes to waste in the end, but it is still disheartening and I think is a shame as the glass displays looked so much more pleasing with the plentiful variety it had before.
Sure but there is always a tension between being able to address as much of the potential customer base as possible and profitability. On one end of the spectrum you have grocers like Aldi or Lidl that have slashed prices and margins by reducing SKUs (among other cost saving measures). Whole Foods probably has some room to shed unprofitable inventory so long as it preserves its upscale, ecologically conscious brand.
80% of customers go to Walmart for the cheapest thing they can find to get the job done. I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea for Amazon to become Walmart (except for investors maybe).
The problem with hacking the bell curve like this, is that the bell curve will continually adjust itself within the new parameters. There will always be 'fringes' until the sample space of "things being measured" is too small for the bell curve to apply.
In this case for Amazon, it's reaching a limit of capitalism: only selling the most common and profitable items in order to maximize profit and minimize waste (which itself maximizes profit). This will have the side-effect of making the "things they no longer sell" have greater value due to their scarcity, and in turn greater profitability as a 'boutique' product.
Similar theory to the unrelated topic of coal versus renewable energy, in that as renewables gain popularity the demand for coal will go down, and therefore the price goes down as well, lowering the point at which coal and renewables compete for being the cheaper source of energy (carbon price notwithstanding).
Another example, although far more theoretical, is that of personality profiling. What are the fringes? Once you've removed the "terrorist"-level fringes, does the system re-adjust to a new normal and give a new set of fringes to target?
Forced normalization as an end-result of pure data analytics (AI, ML whatever you want to call it).
I'm assuming these effects are covered by fairly basic economic theory (which I haven't studied, but somehow find more and more interesting as I get older).
Whole Foods was collapsing when they were purchased. They were going to have to make changes regardless.
And at any rate, white label organic foods are just generic foods (like you find in bags at the bottom of the cereal aisle) that were grown using different types of fertilizers. It's not like "365" is an actual company. It's a label slapped on any number of generic stuff.
Your second paragraph is overly dismissive. People buy brand-name 'Tylenol' for a high markup over generic acetaminophen, even though they are pharmacologically identical.
Instead, your argument seems to reject the idea that Whole Foods - or any brand - has a brand image, and associated cachet, which people are willing to pay for.
Manufacturer's brands are meaningful. White label brands are not. "Rolex" means a watch made by a specific manufacturer. If instead Rolex just bought arbitrary Chinese watches and put their logo on them, the brand would mean almost nothing.
This is the difference between manufacturer's brands and white label brands.
So your view is that Tylenol is able to charge excess because McNeil Consumer Healthcare / J&J makes the acetaminophen themselves? Even though there is no meaningful difference in the product vs. a generic brand?
Using your brand model, can you explain why Unilever paid $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club, when Dollar Shave Club razors are Dorco products?
Speaking of Chinese watches, people by MVMT watches for the brand, yes?
(Yes, it's not an 'arbitrary Chinese watch' as MVMT does quality assurance. But brands aren't created on "arbitrary Chinese watches" so I assume you were using hyperbole rather than making a meaningless statement.)
You can spend your money how you like, but you should know that white label products are literally generic products with somebody else's label on them. In fact, the same generic product will often be sold under a number of different labels in some cases. In other cases the same label will have products from entirely different manufacturers. White Label brands tell you nothing about the product.
But your statement "white Label brands tell you nothing about the product" is not correct.
I gave two examples (razors, watches) where people buy white label goods and pay more because of an attached brand.
That's because brands don't provide only a product but can also provide a service. That service might be quality management, or it may be cachet, as in "selling a lifestyle".
Hence why I point out there's good market evidence that your original statement is "overly dismissive" of brands.
I don't mean to dismiss brands. Just white label brands. All it means is that somebody somewhere has decided to slap a label on it. It's like buying a product because one person gave it a good review. Not worthless, but pretty close.
Again, I pointed to several examples where people are willing to pay for white label brands.
These are also cases where the label was more than "slapped on".
Therefore, your original use of terms like "just generic foods" and "slapped on" were indeed overly dismissive of white label brands because it ignored those white label brands which did not follow the practices you described.
Darn I clicked the link, I gave NYT money due to my fear.
Although this doesnt change anything. Given how easy it would be for a competitor Fortune 500 to dump resources and marketing into a competing store, they could never 'get away with murder'.
FAANG has more to worry about the tech bubble, than the world with FAANG.
Maybe a good indicator for other IP/copyright centric business models. Where "product", a.k.a. data, is artificially made hard to access. That is going to die as a business model at some point, including for Amazon, and that day can't come soon enough. If you're heart is still in that business, you had better enjoy lobbying, because that's your purpose, and you better not care about improving society, because you're not making the world a better place when you succeed.
I don't think books are a good indicator of what will befall real products. There's no doubt Amazon is causing major pains in that area, but I don't think they'll ever "complete" that domination.
> Where "product", a.k.a. data, is artificially made hard to access. That is going to die as a business model at some point
I actually see a different future. Artificial scarcity becomes easier with improvements to cryptography. I think the future is full of artificially scarce goods, such as music, video, crypto kitties, etc.
Cory Doctorow argues that you can't encrypt people's media and also hand them the decryption keys they need in order to consume it, and not expect those decryption keys to leak.
This is only possible if the user can examine what their computers are doing. These days we have restricted boot ("secure boot") and "trusted platform modules" (which can be used for good though) that allow computers to do decryption without the user being able to see it.
For example my Galaxy S9 phone has a locked bootloader. It only boots software signed by Samsung's private key. Google makes DRM software, Netflix and co. sign on, Samsung puts the DRM in their phones because they're useless without Netflix.
The only way to find out how to decrypt the video is to crack the hardware. And some companies might make shitty hardware, but Apple has shown that it's very possible to make a locked down device that takes millions+ of dollars to hack.
Intel iirc had special paths in their processors for video DRM. Google's Widewine DRM is available in all the major browsers. MS has been pushing restricted boot for a while. All that's left is for them to make it mandatory.
Of course none of this matters because you can just record the screen or the speakers... If you're serving content into Bob's eyes or ears then he can use fake eyes or ears to record it.
There's also the analog loopback, which for audio, has way less signal degradation than the compression consumers readily accept. For video, they already tried to restrict any analog outputs with DRM, but for audio, that would hurt much more.
Presumably the people who siphon media out from a walled garden on a large scale wouldn't do it on mobile, but given your timeframe of 30 years, who knows if we even have general purpose computers then.
I understand that artificial scarcity of "information products" is a rapidly drying moat, but we need to come up with a new way to pay people to make these sort of things. I don't care if some people get shit for free, what I care about is incentivising (sp?) creation. There are a lot of products that would create real value for users/consumers that nevertheless require bucketloads of effort to create. Not only do we want the would-be creators of these things to not be stuck flipping burgers to pay the rent, but market price for competing products can still be a great way to surface which are better than others.
I pay people for it all the time. They ask me for a reasonable amount of money, I give it to them, I get fairly simple access to a file without any further restrictions. But I only get that opportunity from people that understand they're not in the supply chain business. Unfortunately, most people and organizations do not realize that and never provide any means to conduct a fair transaction.
The comment above you has other things to say - notably, you're not even guaranteed to get the item from the vendor you ordered from and might get something of lower quality from another seller.
That is a short-sighted stance. What incentive do I have to write and publish a book (at least a man-year of effort) when someone expending 1% of the effort gets to reap most of the financial reward for it?
Even if the quality of the counterfeit (not sure why you used scare quotes) is fine and you save a few dollars, in the following years you'll find fewer and fewer new books you care to by because few people are writing them.
The article talks about a medical handbook whose dosage recommendations might be affected by OCR errors. You want that to come straight from the source and not a scanned copy.
I'm confused how there isn't a huge opportunity for an online dept store with 100% vetted goods here. Does such a thing exist? If not why not? If so how can one find it? What keywords point to it? They win if they can get that keyword into the minds of the general public.
Walmart. I've been Amazon Prime for years, but whenever I need to buy something with a high risk of being counterfeit (printer ink is the most common one for me), I use Walmart - and it's free shipping from them anyway. Really the only difference is that Amazon usually gets it to my door faster.
I don't know the details, but Walmart is also moving towards more of being an online marketplace: https://marketplace.walmart.com/
Is the inventory commingled, are the sellers better vetted, is it obvious that you are buying from a 3rd party and not Walmart, all that I don't know. Just pointing this out.
Target.com is okay for now, but supposedly they are going to start going that way also. These days, I look to purchase on the official brand’s website first, or whichever seller they link to on the brand’s website.
Are you serious. How about any store that isn't Amazon or doesn't sell second-hand goods. Only Amazon does this. If you go to Nike.com, are you going to be worried about your shoes being counterfeit?
Actually yes. Running a secure storefront is hard, as is supply chain logistics. The easy way out is to have amazon host your storefront - you design the theme and put the products there, but the security, payment and shipping are all Amazon.
I regularly buy from a small website that isn't run by Amazon - some months after every order I get a different credit card in the mail because someone hacked the small website. They really need to give up on running their own secure payment processor and hire someone bigger. (I order from them because for the obscure parts my car needs they have the right one in stock and know which are right)
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Shipping. The US is huge and many parts are sparsely populated. You can free deliver in 12 hours in New York and make a profit. But you can't do that in North Dakota.
Amazon has the infrastructure to deliver anywhere in the US in a reasonable time and their size allows them to offset that guy in the Oregon woods ordering a pair of socks with a Manhattanite hipster ordering a $1500 coffeemaker.
> But Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way
Uh... this seems like an unsubstantiated claim. It's my understanding Amazon has multiple team actively working on manual and automated anti-fraud including for counterfeit.
I think there's more inherent problems to this:
1. Making it easier for sellers to sell, mean it's also easier for fraudsters to do so.
2. Being so popular and central means all fraudsters focus their energy on it.
I think it's very simple, amazon and all such stores should be held liable for the fraud and lost business as if they themselves created the counterfeit goods. macys wouldn't be given a free pass if it sold counterfeit nikes in their B&M store. so why does amazon get one, they take a 15% cut just like macys does.
Amazon is a lot more powerful and influential than Macy's is. I think this is at least partially caused by the increasingly important political relationship between major employers like Amazon and governments.
Amazon likely tells governments that being held accountable for things like this would dramatically hurt their business, and therefore cost jobs. No politician wants to be blamed for lost jobs.
Iirc, this was orchestrated by the progressive wing of the NY Democratic Party and was a fairly controversial decision.
The progressives still represent a fairly small contingent of the left, and don’t really have the influence to materially alter policy decisions, especially at the federal level. Much of the US still isn’t very interested in progressive politics, especially given the migration of moderate conservatives to the Democratic Party.
2020 is going to be a make-or-break election for progressives IMO.
By which point they'll run the money supply as well. Surely the introduction of Libra may make a proper Amazon-coin more palatable? They must have teams and teams watching this with eagle eyes..
This seem to make a lot of sense, so I assume there must be some serious reason for the fact it isn't happening already. Is this hard to implement legally? Is there just not enough incentive to do so?
The cost of suing Amazon (which is how a customer would hold them liable) greatly outweighs the cost of almost any counterfeit good they might happen to ship.
The government is not likely to step with criminal enforcement unless they are presented with proof that Amazon purposefully ordered the fakes, or knowingly sold fakes.
Generally speaking, retailers are considered victims, not perpetrators, of counterfeiting. That's because when a retailer sells a counterfeit, the retailer has to process the returns and deal with angry customers, and then they're left with worthless inventory.
Again, the exception is if the retailer knowingly traffics in fakes and tries to defraud their customers. Proving that takes some pretty specific evidence though.
I don't see why police can't simply use civil asset forfeiture seize an entire warehouse, just like they seize homes from owners who might not know that another resident was selling drugs out of it. Proving that the owner knew of the crime isn't necessary to seize an instrument of crime.
Because Amazon will fight back. I guarantee you that very few people with 50 billion dollars of cash in their bank account have their homes taken via civil asset forfeiture.
If Amazon does not go out of its way to fix this and eradicate the problem completely, it is knowingly trafficking in fakes. Amazon absolutely should be held accountable for providing such a convenient platform for counterfeiters.
There are lots of problems with that approach, unfortunately:
Returning means you need to repack and re-ship the item. Sometimes they cover the shipping cost but not always
Sometimes the counterfeit item only becomes evident after the return window has expired, like buying a wireless adapter for game controllers that breaks in 2 months. (It turns out one of the earliest rampant counterfeit issues on Amazon was people selling knockoff USB adapters for XBox controllers, oddly enough). At that point you can't return, all you can do is leave a nasty review for the product you bought From Amazon.
Some counterfeits are basically indistinguishable from the real product unless you're an expert. If you buy some vitamins or Tylenol off amazon, do you really have the resources and expertise to identify whether they're fakes or tainted or a batch that failed to pass quality control? So now you have to convince Amazon to take this thing back.
In the end at this point Amazon knows very well how much counterfeiting is happening on their platform and they aren't taking enough effort to stop it. It can't all lie on the individual customer to spot and combat counterfeits, they aren't able to do it.
Anecdotal but I learned that some DJI drone props I bought were counterfeit about 7 months after buying them and after many drone crashes. I explained the issue to Amazon and after a couple of questions, they gave me a full refund. It was only 15$ and probably not even worth my time but it never hurts to ask.
People aren't really keen on taking few hours of their day to repackage and ship back something that is 20-50$.
I often buy things from amazon-like storefronts here in asia and sometimes they refund no questions asked but sometimes they require you to ship it back and 90% of the time it's not worth it. All of these "free returns" policies sound much better than they actually are.
One of more recent anecdotes:
I bought a new keyboard for my Thinkpad which said "genuine" and serial numbers in decription match ones with Lenovo's. The keyboard turned out to be fine but had no backlight. My point is that packing it up and sending it back to neihbouring country is just not worth it. I clicked refund and left a negative review and that's pretty much as far as I'm willing to go for 60$ that I've spent.
I think this needs to be tested in court. Newegg and Walmart do this as well. It feels like this goes against the intent of customer protection laws. For most people, they think they are buying this stuff from walmart. Walmart, Amazon, etc should be accountable for this in some way.
Recently the US Supreme Court ruled in Apple v. Pepper that app buyers of the iOS App Store do have standing to sue Apple in the antitrust suit, because they're buying the apps from Apple directly, and not from the apps' developers.
Regardless of the eventual outcome of the suit, this ruling may have implications for other online storefronts. Here, the Court saw online storefronts as the sellers of goods sold, regardless of whatever business arrangements may be in place between the suppliers and the storefront. Under this interpretation, it's likely that fewer antitrust suits could get thrown out on questions of standing against storefronts. With these prospects, it's likely that more suits will be brought.
My prediction is that to mitigate this, storefronts will try to introduce more visual separation between first-party store and the third-party sellers' stores, even if the items are still found from a unified search and catalogue. The purchasing of the third-party item will take place at the third-party storefront, but the payment will be processed by the captive aggregator and fulfilled and supported by them as well.
It is very hard to eliminate false-positives without introducing a raft of false-negatives as well. If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Especially those who don't fall under the umbrella of Amazon's good graces. Is that really what you want?
More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?
> Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior
Not a good analogy, ISPs are dumb pipes. Amazon boosts and profits from bad actors. None of them would have a chance to get the reach Amazon provides them. Of course Amazon should be held accountable. I don't buy the "open platform" angle when it comes to FB, Google, etc.
Especially when they've demonstrated countless times they aren't platforms. I find this when-it's-convenient form of claiming they're platforms particularly galling.
Sure, but we're talking about directional shifts. Do you want Amazon to move in the direction of being a laissez faire platform that is open to everyone? Or do you want it to move in the direction of being a tightly controlled ecosystem where all merchants are at the whims of Amazon's corporate overlords? Your suggestion would move Amazon towards the latter
> where all merchants are at the whims of Amazon's corporate overlords
Very dramatic. If you don't want to be subject to Amazon, run your own shop. It's easier than ever before. I really don't understand how counter-fitters should be under any kind of protection by Amazon. And why Amazon should not be held to a standard that does not make them accomplices to black sheep.
The internet and Amazon do not share an important characteristic: openness.
I don't need the internet's permission to publish and this makes the tradeoff with chaos acceptable.
Basically we trade order over freedom.
I'd go further: neutral platforms should be the norm.
If then someone wants to build a walled garden fine, but there must be a neutral alternative by default.
If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire.
Amazon could handle that problem by helping the small merchants more though. Bezos does claim to be "obsessed with the customer" after all, and those businesses are his customers.
Allowing people who buy things on Amazon to get fake products is failing everyone in the whole supply chain apart from the business that supplies the fakes and Amazon itself. If I were Bezos I'd be quite unhappy about that.
At the very least Amazon should not be allowed (and fined if they do) to replace genuine articles from one merchant by stuff from another, just because the second one promises to deliver the exact same thing.
Apparently you can get “brand protection” in some special cases, but it should be default.
> More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform?
Amazon's not just an "open platform" here. Through deliberate features of their logistics system and customer-facing storefront, the primary branding on anything bought via Amazon is _Amazon's_.
Take for example the FBA program with shared stocking. Amazon relies on a supplier's assertion that their goods are not counterfeit and are identical to others of the same SKU, but it then repeats that representation to the consumer on Amazon's own behalf.
The advantage of Amazon's model is that it provides an integrated storefront, but it is not an "open platform" as a result. eBay is closer to an open platform, and there the difference between individual sellers is a first-order feature, where even sellers of identical goods manage their own listings and product descriptions.
The simplest consumer-friendly solution would be:= to make consumers whole: if I receive a counterfeit item, Amazon should send me a genuine replacement immediately free of charge, and pay me $5 for my time if they want the counterfeit item back.
I think it would pay off for Amazon in the long run. Right now, I avoid Amazon for any significant purchases, because I do not trust them.
This is trickier, and it also happens to "real stores" as well. If someone in the middle of the supply chain does a switch from real goods to counterfeit, it can go unnoticed by everyone downstream.
However, when someone DOES notice, the situation must be remedied. Amazon should be liable to some degree for everything they sell. Consumers should have recourse. Maybe they already do? Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product?
> Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product?
Yes, very easily but that's not enough because Amazon still profits so massively from everyone else that it doesn't even raise a bell in their accounting.
That's a good one, the ones in this article are pretty bad / obvious counterfeits, but for things like idk, clothing it can be harder to spot them.
But that's where customs should come in; counterfeiting products is illegal, selling fake brand clothing is illegal, and if Amazon sells them they can (and should) be held accountable. It's that branch of law enforcement's job to protect both consumers and brands from counterfeits, you pay taxes for that reason.
It's a civil dispute between the parties involved, not a crime (in most cases) and if it's a crime it's probably most easily prosecuted under criminal negligence or something like that. It's basically lying and lying isn't illegal except in specific circumstances.
Counterfeiting is a crime in the US. The act of importing counterfeit goods into the US can get you arrested at the border, as an individual. However, Amazon seems to have been given a free pass.
I work in international freight, so I can only cofidently talk about the import side.
From my understanding/experience, dealing with counterfeit items is mostly the responsibility of the IP owner and mostly handled at borders, for the United States you mostly find this in 19 CFR 133 for intellectual property rights.
For trade name stuff, the trade name must have been in use for at least 6 months.
For trademark it has to be registered in Washington DC at the Patent Office, is good for 20 years, has to be registered with Customs and has a fee to register.
Copyright stuff is similar to trademark.
If Customs has suspicion of trade name/trade mark infringement they will detain the shipment, notify the importer of record and the IOR has 30 days to respond and get owner's approval for release of the shipment. The IP owner will also be notified with the date of import, port, name of manufacturer and the importer of record, the country of origin and then the owner has 30 days to respond before release, if the owner wants to stop the shipment they have to post a bond for the value of the shipment at which point Customs will provide a sample and the owner can decide to release the shipment to the importer of record , allow the importer of record to export it out of the country or to remove the objectionable mark before it can be released.
For counterfeit merchandise, Customs will seize and/or destroy it and they will notify the IP owner the names of the importer of record, manufacturer, country of origin and quantity.
For patents, has to be registered with the Patent Office and is good for 20 years. If there is infringement a import survey can be requested and and exclusion order can be obtained from the International Trade Commission.
For grey market articles (genuine articles but not permitted to be imported into the united states, think licensing agreement/authorized reseller type thing) it will get detained, it will be checked against a database, if the importer of record is on the allowed list it will be released and if not the shipment is seized.
The problem with this is, Customs doesn't manually inspect every single shipment so it is fairly easy to get the vast majority of counterfeit goods in. Once it is inside the country, it's basically entirely on the company that's product has been counterfeited to identify counterfeit merchandise, identify sellers and pursue legal action.
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I've seen plenty of tales on reddit and elsewhere of individuals selling knock off Oakleys/Coach bags etc get letters from the owners/their law firms and some instances of suit.
If you're selling small amounts, one can fly under the radar, if you're insulated somewhat by Amazon/FBA then it can also slow down all but larger companies from coming after you.
If you do get caught, my understanding is they'll usually cease and desist you. If you persist, they can come after you under the Lanham Act for 3x profit or damages (whichever is greater).
And what if you can't be made whole? What if a counterfeit product causes serious injury or death to you or your family members? Amazon should be held liable for it!
They do. I ordered a corkscrew (https://www.amazon.com/Pulltaps-Double-Hinged-Waiters-Corksc...), got a fake one and complained. Amazon gave me a refund, a $5 credit for the hassle and didn't make me return the fake one. But it's incredible that the problem goes so far that people are selling fake corkscrews!
> macys wouldn't be given a free pass if it sold counterfeit nikes in their B&M store
The equivalent would be holding a shopping mall liable for the fraud and lost business one of their tenant caused by sourcing counterfeit goods. I don't see any brick and mortar shopping mall getting more than a tap on the wrist under this premise.
No, shopping mall is not the right analogy. Amazon is much closer to a consignment store in this regard -- doubly so for the "fulfilled by Amazon" stuff. You've walked into Amazon's store; the stuff on the shelves happens to be owned by someone else, but Amazon is displaying it, handling the transaction, providing customer service, and so on. And while a (large enough) consignment store can't police everything, I think for egregious enough problems they can't have their cake and eat it too.
This is the same crap that Uber tries: if you want the power to control the (work|sale) experience to such a degree, then you have to take responsibility when it goes wrong.
I think it's more akin to multiple suppliers not multiple tenants.
1) There's a single unified storefront
2) Supplier of a product is transparent to the customer shopping experience
3) The checkout, payment, and shipping experience is singular and unified
The unified and efficient experience is amazon's strength, and I still make 90% of my purchases there. But yes, they should police and be held accountable for bad suppliers. It is amazon's store they are being sold at.
I for one really enjoy Amazon’s dominion. If your old enough to remember the Bell System before it was broken up, the airlines before they were deregulated, Amtrak before they lost government funding, or the postal service before they had to sell out to all the direct mailers to turn a profit — I’d say every once in a while the economists and political scientists can step back and take a break. Seriously. Fly Emirates, ride Eurorail, switch to T-Mobile, burn your mailbox - I think that is about as close as you can get these days. Since the US stopped subsidizing the dairy industry, the snap crackle pop of my cocoa crispies cost as much as a real breakfast. Two industries I’d love to see Amazon disrupt next are healthcare and car rentals. They are both overrun with vested interests and old fogies that have forgotten what a customer is. Amazon could be the first company to have an significant and quantifiable interest in their customers not dying AND do something about it. What customer would be more loyal then the one whose life you literally saved? I’m also pretty sure the entire IRS could be an Alexa skill and I wouldn’t shed a tear if it were. How is democracy working out for us these days? I kinda think it’s been swirling since about 1963, give or take, maybe Jeff Bezos should be King? Sure some people won’t be happy but no matter what you do some people never will be.
Honest question: With so many alternatives to Amazon (direct brand retail, Walmart, Target, regional competitors) probably offering lesser fake products and still failing, doesn't it mean that the overall consumer base is not as concerned about the fake product issue?
It could be because:
1) Fake product issue is not as widespread (per user, seller or per transaction)
2) Fake product cases are usually resolved in a satisfactory enough way to dissuade the consumer/seller from seeking alternatives
3) The annoyance of getting a fake product is outweighed by other conveniences offered
If any of the above is true, well, there is not a real problem for Amazon to address.
Of course, the assumption is that there are theoretical alternatives to Amazon for getting stuff you need, minus the convenience perhaps, but with higher degree of trust in product quality.
this! 100 times this!
In a totally unregulated market consumers have very little access to information to make a proper decision. some markets should not be free
EDIT: alternative is to limit size of companies so there is proper competition
You just assume that the product is shit and never buy it again. But the user base is large. With the swath of fake reviews on the site you can’t judge by ratings either.
To me, the real victims are the original product sellers.
I commented something similar on an article here about a year ago, and people had some good points[0]:
> Heavy metal poisoning may take years to show effects.
> Shoddily made laptop chargers may be a fire/shock hazard that kill in 100/1,000,000 instead of 1/1,000,000 cases.
> Not every dangerous counterfeit is immediately obvious as such.
> If you're slathering it all over your body but you have no idea where or how it was made, do you suppose that you might suffer from deferred regret at some point in the future?
So, yeah, if the counterfeit is just as good, then fantastic. If it's not, that's a problem. If it's not in a non-obvious way that affects health or safety, that's a big problem.
For items with no safety implication, that is probably true.
But, take the case of USB chargers. If the name-brand bursts into flames at a rate of 1/1000000 and the fake 1/1000, most consumers will never know they received a fake. But, for those that have their house burst into flames, the fake was not worth the savings.
I might just have bad luck, but I've bought many electronics products from Amazon, and more often than not it's unsatisfactory in some major way: obviously opened box with broken/missing items or fake.
If this hit rate is normal across electronics on Amazon I have to imagine it's just plain ignorance on the part of the customer. Because there's no way Amazon could live with a return rate > 50%, which is what I'm at right now.
opened box with broken/missing or fake first hand items? Never happened to me, now if you are talking about second hand items I never bought any so I can't talk about that.
That seems like a fairly short-sighted view. Much of Amazon's strategy seems to be giving up short term profit to establish a monopoly for much larger long-term profit. They aren't perfect, and have certainly made some unprofitable decisions over the years, but I think that their overall strategy is VERY profitable, even if it hasn't yet yielded all the profits it is going to.
Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994. They have yet to produce an impressive profit margin (outside web services which isn't really relevant to this specific thread). How long sighted are we talking here?
The raw numbers are impressive, but they clearly aren't in the game of profit maximisation as we knew it back in the 80s. That is why nobody is really managing to compete with them.
I don't really see how they could maintain a monopoly and a margin at the same time. If they had actual profit margins then other companies would compete with them. The reason they look like a monopoly at the moment is because they have no margins. If they change that, competition will spring up like mushrooms.
Amazon is basically a web services provider by profit. All the other stuff they do is a mysterious distraction. If you want a company making for-profit decisions, look at how Apple runs itself.
This can't be rushed. Their competition is from i.e. Walmart. These competitors are big and a single major event isn't going to take them down. It requires a series of major events for a company of that size to fall out of serious competition. But it does happen: look at Sears. It took almost three decades, starting with a pricing scandal in 1992 to declaring bankruptcy in 2018, with many mis-steps along the way, but they did eventually fall.
> I don't really see how they could maintain a monopoly and a margin at the same time. If they had actual profit margins then other companies would compete with them.
By that logic, monopolies can't be profitable, but they clearly are profitable, so your logic must be faulty.
Once a company reaches a certain scale, it becomes very difficult to start a competing company for a bunch of reasons:
1. First to market advantage: name recognition. Amazon is a household name. A new company isn't. A new company could overcome this with marketing, but marketing costs money, and then they have to pass that cost on to consumers, and Amazon will win on price.
2. First to market advantage: pre-existing infrastructure. Amazon has warehouses everywhere, so they can deliver to most places quickly. In places like NYC or SF they can deliver something from a few miles away, so they can deliver it on the same day. They have already spent this money, so they can provide this speed at a lower cost. A new company could overcome this by building out their own infrastructure, but this costs money which they have to pass on to consumers, and again Amazon wins on price.
3. Efficiencies of scale: Amazon is already huge. If it costs them $10 to write a line of code or lay a brick, that cost is amortized across millions of purchases that occur each day. A new company has to write the same line of code and lay the same brick to provide the same feature or distribution center, but that cost is amortized across only a few hundred purchases a day when they're new.
There are more reasons, but basically, Amazon is well past the point where new companies could pop up and reasonably compete with them based on profit margins alone. They still have competition, but it's from the likes of Walmart--other giant companies that already have some of the same advantages Amazon does. It would be possible for a newcomer to compete, but it would require an extraordinary innovation which is highly unlikely.
> The reason they look like a monopoly at the moment is because they have no margins. If they change that, competition will spring up like mushrooms.
They don't look like a monopoly because they aren't yet. They have major competition with, for example, Walmart.
They aren't going to get a monopoly. They are operating in a market that is famously cut-throat and competitive that any motivated person can succeed in by cutting prices far enough.
> By that logic, monopolies can't be profitable, but they clearly are profitable, so your logic must be faulty.
My logic is fine. They are a middleman in a free market - monopoly is practically impossible. I don't see what is stopping anyone, including myself, jumping in to the same market as Amazon except for the fact there is no margin to be made because Amazon is the cheapest provider.
Monopoly (funny to say) isn't a reflection of number of providers in a market even though that is the outcome. Monopoly captures the idea of how easy it is for new entrants to move in to a market. Building a new company isn't easy, but it isn't especially hard.
> Once a company reaches a certain scale, it becomes very difficult to start a competing ...
These points are all off topic for monopolies. Having economies of scale (which is what you list) gives competitive advantages but it isn't going to let Amazon take the market somewhere it doesn't want to go. If Amazon isn't fulfilling a need, someone else will. If Amazon is fulfilling the need at a low price, they aren't an abusive monopoly they are a success story we are all grateful for. 'Monopolies' that brutally suppress the price of goods for decades on end are a good outcome. More to the point, they aren't monopolies, they are just effective competitors - because as you point out a monopoly should be profitable.
Amazon isn't in a market where it is possible to build a monopoly, and if they do the government can squelch it when they get there. And making sane decisions to build a competitive advantage at scale isn't monopolistic, it is an encouraged feature of most serious companies.
It sounds like there are a million deceived customers and cheated small businesses, but no individual customer or small business can take on Amazon. How about a kickstarter or other crowdfunding plan to raise money from everyone who's suffered due to Amazon's apparent tolerance of counterfeits? I.e., if you received a counterfeit product, or if your product or book was counterfeited and sold on Amazon (like the Antimicrobial Therapy handbook)?
The kickstarter plan would be to either sue Amazon as class, or sue based on the best individual cases in all available jurisdictions, or failing all of that, to lobby the government to bring Amazon under control. Assuming it got enough funding, is there any chance that the lawsuits or lobbying would work?
Well, I think lawyers in class action suits typically work on contingency, so there wouldn't be any up-front cost to suing, and they would just take a big chunk of the settlement or judgement instead as a fee.
However, as is the trend nowadays, Amazon's Conditions of Use[1] include an arbitration clause, so that will probably make it rather difficult to bring a suit anyway.
It can also be passive: they're making money from it, the threat of lawsuits to counterbalance the money they're making seems to be low right now, so they just turn a blind eye to it.
I refuse to believe that a company with these values: https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/principles, a pretty thorough recruitment process, probably 100k engineers (including many, many data engineers) on their payroll, etc. can't do better about identifying fakes.
Meh, I'd call that negligence. They're knowingly allowing harm to come to others, through putting in a token effort (CYA style) rather than instituting meaningful change.
And it's their marketplace, so they get to set the rules, and they have significant resources if they actually wanted to engage.
I agree. There are some really great product search engines available in Germany (geizhals.de and idealo.de) that allow you to search many many articles by custom criteria (depending on their category) and then do a price comparison.
Amazon lacks basic search filters. And it has a lot of other annoyances. For example when I search for shoes in my size, Amazon won't display the price of the shoes in my size until I click on the shoes. Instead of shows the price range for all sizes in the list of shoes. Makes it a huge hassle to browse through a lot of shoes.
Exactly. Anything with options on Amazon is a terrible user experience now. One hack I found is the mobile app will give you the price along with the option. Why the desktop site is now worse than mobile I don't know.
Honestly I don't understand why this is so hard to solve, unless amazon is willfully ignoring it.
If the item is shipped by a third party directly, tracing the counterfeit origin is easy.
It's the comingling at the Amazon fulfillment centers that muddies the water. However, why not just tag each individual item with the supplying vendor as it arrives? You must of course credit them with stock, so just assign a code for that unit or box or pallet connected to that seller. They can still cross-fulfill (though I don't think they should) and record the origin code with each order as it's packed. Don't tell me this is too complicated for Amazon. It's an extra code like a second SKU per item, not conceptually challenging. Of course there are process issues to solve, but this should be a huge internal priority for Amazon. I see it as a weak spot that leaves room for a competitor to do better.
Of course identifying fakes is still a challenge, manufacturers have long had systems for verifying authentic units. If a $20 webcam has a unique serial number I don't see why we couldn't have one for an $80 board game.
The standard policy in China is x3 refund if the product is fake.
The all online sellers have this policy but it makes it a lot easier to tell if something is likely to be fake. Also if you get a fake then you get a triple refund...
They do already offer this, but it's not free, and you have to re-label each item with your barcode, and cover up any UPC codes, if possible.
The base problem is that UPC. Amazon wants to use it to identify everything, as it's already there, and easy to use. However, it's also easy to counterfeit along with the item.
It would also be a significant technical challenge, as it would increase the size of Amazon's item database by at least an order of magnitude, and would increase the amount of unique bins they need to maintain in the warehouse by a lot too.
They clearly need to do something, but understand why they don't want to go down the road of tagging per-vendor if they can avoid it. On more expensive items, they seem to be trying the alternative of allowing vendors that control their supply chains to also exercise control of the amazon supply chain. It's starting to hit for more prominent vendors. I can no longer sell used Canon lenses on Amazon anymore. To do so, I need approval, which consists of "At least 1 purchase invoice for products from a manufacturer or distributor, 1 letter from Canon authorizing you to sell their products". (Note, this is for selling used gear, not new, or like-new. Just normal, used camera lenses that I bought and no longer need.)
They are definitely tracking suppliers, but it is not as easy as you make it seem.
Suppliers may not be using 100% fakes, making them much harder to catch. Customers may also be a significant part of the problem, due to Amazon's return policy. Customers can easily claim a fake, then ship a fake item back, blaming the supplier.
There's no way to know for sure without Amazon themselves testing the products, which would be costly. Most items do not have unique serial numbers, and even if they did, opening boxes to confirm matching serial numbers would likely be cost prohibitive.
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
Unfortunately, I only see a way to solve this for fungible goods where you would still need to get every actor involved in the supply chain to upgrade to the same secure tracking solution. It could be done in theory with crypto and tamper-proof packaging, but overcoming the network effect of today's archaic supply chains would be a huge undertaking.
The article points out how sellers are creating unique, non-fungible goods. So how does a customer even initially know that they're discovering 'the original' and not something that has been re-branded? With a Lamborghini, re-naming the car to another brand isn't a problem since the customer won't find it (and a supply chain integrity solution might work.) But how would you solve the Amazon problem?
I suppose you could have a time-locked escrow account where sale funds had to be locked there for N days. That way there would be time to challenge counterfeit sales and re-distribute the funds to the original authors (and / or make customers whole) when fraud was detected. But I am pretty sure people would hate that. Everyone would have to agree to use it for it to work and it wouldn't stop the potential for brand damage from low-quality counterfeits.
If it were a short enough time-lock though, it might work? High enough that it removes the incentive for fraud, low enough that it doesn't frustrate vendors.
Idk how closely you guys are watching but industry around Amazon affiliates is huge and getting bigger. Amazon is basically outsourcing discovery to third party which means their AI can't keep up. I believe Amazon could be disrupted by niche player who do discovery and quality right.
From a product quality point of view, they have long peaked. From a customer service point of view, I've yet to see something better in the consumer space.
So counterfeits are an invention of Amazon? Amazon's business model is counterfeits, and they have no interest of curbing the practice?
What a bullshit article, in the usual fashion: collecting a bunch of anecdotes, to convince readers "emotionally" that Amazon is the devil.
The reality is probably that at the scale of Amazon, some issues are bound to happen. "Journalists" looking for "evidence" can always find some anecdotes to relay.
Counterfeiting is big business in China and other places. It's presumably a difficult problem. It would exist with or without Amazon. Article does not give any indication that it would be easier for Amazon to fight it.
This is why the FTC should be taking a close, hard look at these guys. The FTC has many tools it can use. They could force Amazon to institute fraud control that actually passes a blush test, or face massive penalties for not complying. Having a monopoly is bad enough. Having an unaccountable, unregulated monopoly is intolerable.
If you have a brick and mortar store and you repeatedly sell counterfeit goods, you'll be repeatedly raided and probably shut down by some authority.
It's strange (ok, not really, and not surprising) that one of the biggest, richest, smartest companies is given a pass on following the same rules that little people have to follow.
Amazon has no legitimate excuse, period. And if Bezos is the high performing micromanager that we've read about, then it's a certainty that he knows that they are flagrantly selling (or facilitating the sale of) counterfeit goods.
Let's put this a different way: If some of the products on Amazon were known to be hollow shells filled with drugs, you can bet that Amazon would suddenly become capable of identifying and preventing the sale of illegal products.
Counterfeiting killed reliable brands. Try to find a good charger or surge protector: on amazon they all are fake and nobody else is selling them - it's impossible to compete with amazon's fakes.
Plot twist: the publisher is selling the counterfeits too. Why sell one good book when you can sell one bad one through Amazon and _then_ one good one directly from your site?
Ok, probably not, but if we're talking about the dystopian end state of a system where the middlemen have gotten out of control then maybe we should look out for things like that.
In _Anathem_ (a sci-fi novel) Stephenson describes a future where for every authentic version of a document on the net there are millions of fake ones--bogons, they call them. The history of how the bogons (and the defence system that successfully ignores them most of the time) is somewhat left to the imagination, but I imagined it like this:
- Content creators set up special channels where they can get paid for access to the content.
- Parasites infiltrate the channels and resell access the content, undercutting the Creators.
- The Creators ban the Parasites from the channels, so they can't make copies of the content.
- The Parasites re-infiltrate without much delay.
- The Creators stop banning the Parasites, and instead--after identifying them--serve them slightly degraded content, so rather than having to compete with themselves, the Creators now compete with a slightly shittier version of themselves. They hope the Parasites don't notice the content degradation.
- The Parasites notice the degradation and get new identities, and continue reselling the original content.
- There arms race between these parties produces better and better fakes, to the point where there's so much fake news (or whatever content) that the only way to verify its authenticity is to re-do the journalism yourself to see what you find.
In my version, the Creators win by establishing an economy of trust (part PGP, part cryptocurrency) where being a parasite is less profitable than either making good content or helping distribute good content (in a way that benefits the creator and gives the consumer reason to believe that they're not being lied to).
I'm not sure if I think this will actually happen, but if it does then we'll have to go through the pre-web-of-trust darkness (where the light of truth is occluded by bogons) before things are reliably authentic again.
If it were just a handful of cases, you wouldn't have a million "bad actors" getting caught. You'd have a handful. A million people a year aren't trying this because it's unprofitable.
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