In general, the typical "retail" product results get mixed into the sketchy sellers way too much on the platform.

I've actually gone back to buying from brick-and-mortar for things where I care about quality, and aliexpress where I'm willing to experiment. Amazon mixes those two categories poorly, providing a bad experience for both use-cases.

And sometimes in the same listing! Like some colors will be the regular retail version and other colors are from a different seller and either a no-name copy or a totally different year or model and price, and then the reviews are all but useless because you don't know which version they're referring to. Or what used to be a high quality product stops being for sale or stops being prime, and a different product gets merged with it and gets to start with 4 stars and hundreds of reviews.

There's definitely value in having access to cheap products, I guess I'm just surprised that Amazon has basically turned into Ebay rather than the other way around.

This is an, err..., "prime" point: Their aggressive and increasingly universal "mushing together" of reviews for specific items/entries into a single set of less-specific reviews.

Even if you've developed a nuanced view and ability to assess Amazon reviews, they've made it yet harder by dissassociating reviews from the specific, exact item in question.

The primary remaining value that Amazon has, for me, is that so far -- anecdotally and as far as I recall reading -- their payment system and record-keeping has not been directly compromised. (There was the password shortening/weakening behavior, exposed and fixed some years ago.) I hesitate to face replacing an exposed credit card -- maybe months down the line, and with fraudulent entries to clear up -- due to competitors' less robust payment systems.

That, and the fact that I now find the Prime video selection better than Netflix (in the U.S.).

But actually shopping on Amazon -- trying to find a best choice when you haven't already decided and know how to differentiate the authentic from a counterfeit or gray source -- has become damned frustrating.

First I stopped buying anything that goes in my body.

Then I stopped buying anything that goes on my body.

Then electronics.

Finally, sometime early this year when I caught myself pondering whether paper cat litter pellets might be dangerous if counterfeit... I just realized it was time to stop.

Until they show they care about this, I'm Amazon-free. It's nice, I'm walking more than I used to and it feels good.

For physical goods, I'm more inclined to go to local retailers, since I can inspect them. Case in point, rat traps, I couldn't find a place on line where I could convince myself they weren't selling cheap knockoffs, so I drove to home depot and bought them there. I can't guarantee I didn't buy counterfeit traps, but at least they were high quality.

I still think it's safe to buy makeup on jet, though they're probably going to start doing 3rd party nonsense soon.

I bought a charger with a fake Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark on it. Internek at the time had a pdf on their site warning the product had not been tested by them. I discovered this by googling the product after arrival. I notified Amazon and they immediately refunded my order... but didn't remove the charger from their site. Instead, they continued to sell it.

The good news is that the solution can come from the community. Aren't we all startup people here? But the bad news is that very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. People rail on about Big Corp screwing over the little guy. But supporting the 'little guy' companies means buying products that are made by smaller non-established companies. Sometimes doing things "right" means paying employees more benefits, having higher product safety standards, sourcing raw materials ethically, etc all of which adds to the cost of doing business. That money has to come from all of us buying those products.

Presumably the people at Amazon can also access Intertek's website. They're a big enough retailer they could probably get someone on the phone too.

I think the answer is to provide proof of authenticity. Perhaps something like a hash that users can use a website to verify if their purchase is indeed authentic, and actively encourage customers to file chargebacks for products that fail the verification. Hit them where it hurts. This is something that needs to be actively fought by both governments and consumers.

https://www.innokin.com/verify-device/ http://svoemesto.de/serialcheck/ https://qr.szkanger.com/check/ https://www.geekvape.com/authentication/

I guess if we did a lot more intensive inventory tracking so whatever validation service knew batch 213489234 was made 10/21/2019 and was being sold by Amazon/CVS/etc. and was all sold out by 3/14/2020. Then grandma could say 'Oh no' I bought this from BobsDiscountPharma.com so it's maybe fake.

Another option that could maybe make it work with a little RFID/powered chip so you could actually do authentication but that's more expensive and creates a lot of ewaste if it gets applied to a lot of products.

Which if you're a counterfeiter, you obviously don't scan the code... but then you use it to make your product, and as soon as one of your buyers uses it...

Also doing that requires a decent percentage of people to be actively scanning things, otherwise counterfeiters could just play the odds.

No, it's the same pattern as software CD-Keys and that's been working fine at scale for decades. You draw from a pool of unique, unpredictable codes based on a secret seed, and keep a tally of the number of claims over that code. The only difference here is that instead of the online service 'failing activation' for your software, it simply displays the number of activations to the end user. If 'this code has already been redeemed' comes up for your $2 ali express MOSFETs, you know you're dealing with a knock-off.

>doing that requires a decent percentage of people to be actively scanning things, otherwise counterfeiters could just play the odds

I'll partially concede this point - It's certainly a factor. However, if the down-stream effect is product returns, the middle man sellers are likely to take corrective action against the suppliers. I'm not convinced that this limitation of the proposed system will render it ineffective.

It's similar except you're not tracking one product with a few hundreds of thousands to a million or so at the largest scale to tracking many products with billions of copies sold. Just taking vitamins/nutritional supplements for example, last year that market sold 36.1 billion dollars in the US alone so ROM that's 1-3 billion codes to track. That gets whittled down pretty quickly by people who don't use the service but it's still a lot when you start adding other industries too.

For example, if you ship the unique codes with your products via a small card in the packaging, or a small product-neutral sticker applied to the outside, the end result is the same.

I hear you on the volume problem but I'm not sure it's a significant issue. A key/value store meets the need and will scale to billions while remaining space and compute efficient.

That's why creating counterfeit-proof physical money is still an unsolved problem.

I've been thinking - maybe something like bitcoin can help. When you buy a product, you get 1 coin with it. When you resell, you have to send that coin to your buyer. Since counterfeiters can't make coins, that serves as a proof. Unfortunately it creates an annoying layer that all sellers of goods must follow.

On the other hand, being the first to check the code is NOT perfect proof that your item is legitimate. If the counterfeiter makes 100 of an item, the one of those will still pass verification. Unless you get notified of other attempts later, of course.

P.S. Aliexpress itself is an English language "fork" of Taobao. At some point, amount of active merchants on Aliexpress was that high, that it seemed that it is about to overgrow the original, but Taobao caught back after few years.

You'll still get burned sometimes. But the savings!

Sometimes you gotta roll the dice, but yeah that is very risky with things like integrated circuits, or really anything more complex than discrete components.

I've only seen for one product category (Solar LED string lights). I assume it only happens when a US distributor has too much supply and sells at cost/below. Also, prices on AE have risen about 20% as winter season approaches, so it could be that Amazon sellers still have units from 'summer' prices.

For the same reason, I avoid Chinese-produced goods if at all possible - plus, I swear they're using gasoline as a solvent when they make anything plastic. What a stink.

Won't help. Amazon mixes their stock with "fulfilled by Amazon" stock from third party sellers. So as long as it appears to be the same product it'll end up in the same batch. Funnily enough, due to this even sketchy sellers that provide counterfeit goods using the FBA service might actually sell original products.

Others are so inexpensive that it's not really worth the hassle to return them.

Now I'm reluctant to order any electronics product that doesn't have at least 500 reviews, as the scammers have become good at getting 50-100 fake reviews for counterfeit items.

Amazon needs to step up and fully insure all purchases against counterfeiting. The worst part is that this kind of stuff is ammunition for the Trump supporter view that Amazon is doing harm to the American economy by promoting goods manufactured by cheap labor abroad.

So you're saying the worst part isn't that people are getting ripped off with fire-hazard chargers and lead-paint baby toys, but that a Trump supporter might be able to make a point because of it?

When we import goods from these countries, we too arbitrage environmental damage for short-term profits.

Since the environment is global, a filthy and polluted river or smokestack in China is harmful to all of us in the US, even if we are not directly drinking out of it or breathing it in.

I think all products made from imported parts should contain disclosure about what environmental harm was created in the manufacture of the parts. I'm not loyal to American manufacturing in the least, but it's silly to pretend that there is fair competition when a product manufactured in the US must comply with extensive environmental regs that the Chinese product does not.