Re:Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside ...
by tzs on Monday March 21, 2016 @03:53PM
(#11331302)
It's worse than that. Suppose you have N sellers selling the same item through Amazon using "fulfilled by Amazon". Each of the N sellers ships stock to Amazon.
Amazon just keeps track of the total number of items each of the N sellers sent, not which particular items came from which seller.
When a customer orders, and picks seller #1 as his seller, Amazon just pulls one from the pile and sends it, and records that seller #1 has one less item attributed to them.
This means that if any seller ships counterfeit items to Amazon, those could end up used to fulfill an "fulfilled by Amazon" order from any other seller of that item!
When the customer pissed off customer then comes and gives a bad review, it will go to their seller even though that seller may be 100% genuine.
Worse, Amazon has no idea which seller actually supplied to counterfeit item, so they act is if it was the seller for that particular sale. That seller gets dinged, and if this happens enough times he gets kicked out of fulfilled by Amazon. (And when that happens, Amazon screws him even more. Suppose that seller logically has K items in stock at Amazon. Amazon gives the seller a choice: pay to have K items shipped back at the seller's expense using a shipping method selected by Amazon, or abandon the items. If the seller elects to have the items shipped back, he gets K random items from the pool so that even if that seller only sent genuine items he may get back counterfeits that other sellers supplied. It often won't be worth it, because Amazon picks expensive shipping methods, so often the seller ends up simply losing their inventory).
There have been allegations that unscrupulous sellers have purposefully taken advantage of this. Suppose seller #1 is a big seller, doing a lot of business. You are a small seller, not doing much business because #1 has great ratings and better prices than you. So you do this:
1. Raise your prices high enough that no one will pick you over seller #1.
2. Ship a bunch of counterfeit items to Amazon to poison the pool.
Since seller #1 sells way more items than you, most of those counterfeits you shipped to Amazon will end up going to #1's customers. This hurts #1's reputation, and if you get lucky gets #1 kicked off of Amazon.
Amazon just keeps track of the total number of items each of the N sellers sent, not which particular items came from which seller.
When a customer orders, and picks seller #1 as his seller, Amazon just pulls one from the pile and sends it, and records that seller #1 has one less item attributed to them.
This means that if any seller ships counterfeit items to Amazon, those could end up used to fulfill an "fulfilled by Amazon" order from any other seller of that item!
When the customer pissed off customer then comes and gives a bad review, it will go to their seller even though that seller may be 100% genuine.
Worse, Amazon has no idea which seller actually supplied to counterfeit item, so they act is if it was the seller for that particular sale. That seller gets dinged, and if this happens enough times he gets kicked out of fulfilled by Amazon. (And when that happens, Amazon screws him even more. Suppose that seller logically has K items in stock at Amazon. Amazon gives the seller a choice: pay to have K items shipped back at the seller's expense using a shipping method selected by Amazon, or abandon the items. If the seller elects to have the items shipped back, he gets K random items from the pool so that even if that seller only sent genuine items he may get back counterfeits that other sellers supplied. It often won't be worth it, because Amazon picks expensive shipping methods, so often the seller ends up simply losing their inventory).
There have been allegations that unscrupulous sellers have purposefully taken advantage of this. Suppose seller #1 is a big seller, doing a lot of business. You are a small seller, not doing much business because #1 has great ratings and better prices than you. So you do this:
1. Raise your prices high enough that no one will pick you over seller #1.
2. Ship a bunch of counterfeit items to Amazon to poison the pool.
Since seller #1 sells way more items than you, most of those counterfeits you shipped to Amazon will end up going to #1's customers. This hurts #1's reputation, and if you get lucky gets #1 kicked off of Amazon.