I'm not sure. Perhaps charge a vetting fee until your store established a level of trust. Whilst there are some great 3rd party sellers there's now a huge number of awful ones. Amazon is no longer a site that feels trustworthy.

Physical stores have to meet quality and legal requirements on sale of goods and what have you. The retailer can be sued if something isn't as described, or fit for sale. Things can and do get pulled. Mistakes are of course made.

Selling a bunch of stuff under the Amazon brand but disclaiming everything (take it up with the seller in China) except their own supply has taken it a little far. They became ebay but somehow still carry the trust "even Amazon".

> Physical stores have to meet quality and legal requirements on sale of goods and what have you.

Yes, but that's probably the wrong physical analogy. Has a mall ever been sued because one of its stores sold illegal and/or deceptively advertised goods? I seriously doubt it. Now a mall (or Amazon) might kick a seller out if there are problems. This absolutely happens, but it's not very visible, and only occurs after the fact.

Your analogy helps focus the crux of the problem. How many malls have all their stores branded as the mall?

Amazon have been so successful integrating stores into their site that customers don't realise who they're buying from.

I'll argue that the branding issue is a distraction. Shoppers generally understand that Home Depot, Walmart, etc. don't make or comprehensively vet everything they sell, yet they still stand behind the customer experience via returns and support. I find holding Amazon to a higher standard of product vetting as compared to other mass retailers a difficult position to defend.

Holding them to exactly same standard as all retailers. It seems US and EU law may be vastly different on this front. Here it's the retailer held responsible for problems, so it's in their interests to vet as a normal part of the buying process, and they do.

New Company will find product looked at to decide if it's worth putting in the stores, that they meet electrical safety or whatever laws etc.[1] Only once approved will they be placed in store. They'll probably trial in just a few stores first. At least some retailers have an audit process for the factory too.

[1] https://www.homeretailgroup.com/suppliers/how-to-be-a-suppli... 80,000 lines, they say they assess all products, and mention lab testing and pre-shipment inspections. They're a mass market retailer with a lot of product at the cheaper end of the scale.

Amazon is not really much like a mall; insofar as any brock.and mortar analogy is applicable, it's more like a retail store where some of the items on the shelf are sold on consignment for third parties, while some are regular first-party retail. Which isn't an entirely unheard of thing, though in brick and mortar it's probably more common for antiques, etc., rather than new consumer goods.

I'll completely agree that the analogy is imperfect. Yet it only has to stretch this far: it's just as bad an idea for a mall to literally vet every item sold by its retail occupants as it would be for Amazon.

In fact, no retailer does this. Consider any direct seller of a wide assortment of retail goods, e.g. Home Depot, Walmart, etc. None of these have rigorously "vetted" every item that comes through their doors. They certainly get problematic goods, and deal with that after-the-fact two ways: to purchasers via customer returns and support policies, and to suppliers via feedback into their supplier relationships (give us bad stuff, our $$ go elsewhere; contracts; etc.).

The idea that a retailer should be held a priori accountable for third-party goods it sells smacks of the same kind of thinking that suggests ISPs should be held accountable for third-party content flowing across their networks.

Any merchant selling goods is accountable for the goods it sells (implied warranties) and this accountability may not be avoided, in some jurisdictions, even by express disclaimer.

You require the seller to put money into escrow to cover bad customer experiences. This of course makes it harder to become a seller, which could also be a bad thing (for example, to incorporate in some countries requires putting $50k in the bank, which effectively stops quite a few entrepreneurs).

They could at least be _trying_. The impression I get is literally anyone can post literally anything and amazon will put their brand above it. They must realize that their brand is highly legitimizing to any product for sale, and you'd think they would be more interested in maintaining that brand.

I mean I wouldn't say Amazon is a byword for quality and value, but at the same time I would say most people would put it above, say, ebay and there really doesn't seem to be much of a difference anymore.

There are two, maybe three sides to Amazon.

There is the main Amazon site that everyone is familiar with. You go to Amazon, buy the product from Amazon, pay Amazon, then receive a shipment from Amazon via carrier.

Next is the Amazon seller side. This has two different sides to it. There is the traditional seller model that is akin to eBay's buy-it-now. You go to Amazon, buy from the seller, pay the seller (via Amazon), then receive the shipment from the seller via carrier.

The side to the seller is fulfillment. Sellers have the option to use Amazon as a distributor. It's essentially a hybrid model of the two. You go to Amazon, buy from the seller, pay the seller (via Amazon), then receive the shipment from Amazon (that the seller sent to Amazon) via carrier[1].

My point is that Amazon doesn't exactly put their seal of approval above everything. Just most things.

[1]: https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/how-it-wor...

The point is that buying a thing off Amazon's site that turns out to be something unexpected or a scam devalues Amazon's brand, whether it's vetted by Amazon or not. Amazon make a point of not separating their vetted stuff from their third-party sellers intentionally.

If it gets to the point where it's difficult for me to find products of the quality that I want on Amazon, I'm not going to worry about whether it's Sold By Amazon or not - I'm going to find an alternative.

The seal of approval is implied though. They're carrying it in what is effectively their "store." If you bought something out of a Best Buy and it turned out to be full of malware, you'd go back to Best Buy (justifiably) pissed off, and in my mind Best Buy just throwing up their hands and saying "Well we carry a lot of products, we can't check everything" isn't a very good answer.

Isn't that exactly what best buy said about the superfish-infested laptops they sold?

True that, but we're not talking an installed SSL cert buried in the system, this guy found it by opening the page and clicking view source. Not exactly well hidden.

Yeah, all you have to do is order a camera from a third party seller, open the box, power everything on, visit the admin page, view the source, and then Google the domain name used in what looks like an ad tracker at the bottom of the page.

Its a good question, is the market maker responsible for the transactions that occur in their market. Probably not but it stains their reputation so its important for them (like it is important for Google's App store) to have some process for collecting feedback on, vetting, and mitigating, bad actors in their marketplace.

Lenovo did the same thing on at least three different occasions on their laptops. Advertisers on sites like Forbes regularly serve up malware.

I guess I'm interested in knowing: when is someone going to be prosecuted over malware creation and distribution?

One way is to have vendors sign a contract guaranteeing that their products do not contain malware. If the product does turn out to contain malware, then Amazon has contractual and legal recourse to recover damages and refund customers their money.

Sure, this isn't perfect, and won't help much if the vendor is a shell company, but it does put vendors on notice.

They do. See https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... and https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Illegal or fraudulent listings are expressly forbidden, and the seller agrees to indemnify Amazon for any claim resulting from a breach.

That's good to hear!