>Do you still experience counterfeit stuff if you do that? Hopefully not, or I'll have to revise my strategy.

Yes, you do. There was a post just a few days ago on Hacker News about "sold and shipped by Amazon" sending out cheap counterfeits of his book.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch....

I suspect the counterfeit problem is much larger than the public can even see, most counterfeit complaints are handled by Amazon or not noticed by the consumer so they aren't made public.

My understanding is that in some cases, Amazon will blend together FBO items in their warehouse, mixing the stock that Amazon sells with the stock that other vendors send it to be sold. They're assuming that for a new book, the items are fungible, so it doesn't matter. This breaks when scammers print lower-quality counterfeit copies that appear identical at first glance. You order "Sold by Amazon.com", but when they grab one off of the shelf, you get the copy that "123Books" added there.

Amazon may want this outcome where shoddy goods and services are hawked by their independent sellers, or is at the very least not strongly incentivized to truly fix the situation. This may be a clever strategy by Amazon to take over distribution channels that are currently dominated by the independent sellers, and achieve what is currently considered nigh-impossible: put the Internet-based disintermediation of retailing back into the genie bottle.

As the independent sellers proliferate shoddy goods and customer service, they drive increasingly more customers to "Authentic Amazon" goods and services. The "Authentic Amazon" experience doesn't have to be flawless or even exceptionally good on an absolute basis, they only need to be substantively good-enough than the aggregate of independent sellers to ascend to the top of the customer experience pyramid. That is an extremely low bar of performance I've no doubt they will accomplish, with or without a conscious strategy in place.

Thus is the stage set for independent sellers to turn into an undifferentiated mass of independent contractors vying for "shelf space" on an "Authentic Amazon" selling channel. With enough critical mass of customers dissatisfied with independent sellers, a single toggle switch or a "channel selector" screens out all of them, and suddenly they are Uber'ized: beholden to inflexible performance metrics that raise the bar on quality, with Amazon taking a very substantial cut of the action.

In the pell-mell rush to the disintermediated e-tailing golden nirvana, people forgot one of the factors retailing arose in the first place: with discerning, effective, "good" retailers, customers outsource the curating process' cognitive load (and time) to some-trusted-one else. That filtering function has eroded significantly in more modern times, but a tattered version still exists under the guise of "curation" these days. Review systems were supposed to supplant this function, but currently they are botted to irrelevance.

There are some expensive ways to reform review systems, but like I mentioned in the beginning, enhancing the independent selling channels' trustworthiness (with effective review systems or any other factors) is not in Amazon's most profitable long-term interests. I expect Amazon to get the sellers hooked into Amazon, then farm them so Amazon doesn't do as much of the legwork of curating for quality as they do today.

I've been seeing some items that are ONLY sold by 3rd party sellers. For example, go search on Amazon for Nintendo Switch. I get it, there isn't much stock out there.. but on Amazon there is no way to say, "Pre-order for whenever you get more in stock."

Instead you're forced to buy from 3rd party sellers. Now go and look at some of those sellers. There are tons and tons of sellers who have either 0% positive feedback, or they just started and have no feedback.

I'm worried that more items are going over to this Ebay-like model of shady sellers.

Amazon has gotten so bad about this stuff that I consider those "shady sellers" on Ebay to be a better bet than the ones on Amazon.

At least on Ebay, I can tell right away if a seller is shipping from China. I can't see that on Amazon until I go to the checkout, and see that it'll take several weeks to arrive.

I goto aliexpress I paid $9.70 for a 1m micro usb cable. oh, wait that was 10 of them. versus $2.86 for one on ebay or 4.99 on amazon. versus $10 at the store.

not affiliate with them, but if your going to by cheap shit from china why not go direct and get it the cheapest.

Plus, when you go to look at reviews on Aliexpress you know they're from people who bought from the seller you're buying from, not some unrelated supplier whose genuine listing a scammer has subsequently latched onto.

Ebay is pretty good, just use the Spamhaus tools to check out all negative and neutral reviews and look for weird stuff.

Ebay has a lot of experienced sellers with hundreds/thousands of transactions and only a few neutral/negative reviews a year.