Haven't ever read a single word from Amazon to reassure me (as a buyer) about counterfeits. At least nothing beyond completely cookie cutter PR stuff that my brain just dismisses.
Let's see some stats. Let's see some action plans. Let's get all these sellers' horror stories out of my various feeds. Where's all that?
Not sure if you're aware, but Amazon's doing pretty OK by all publicly available signs. To the extent what's bothering you is even a real issue, it's not bothering anyone else enough to stop them shopping on Amazon. I doubt Amazon feels much pressure to post action plans to satisfy the tiny minority of people who have strong opinions about this issue.
See also other shitty companies that made money.
? I mean it may be true that they will some day go out of business. In fact it's all but certain. But I don't think you could really say it's because of effect that is visible today.
What are people buying and receiving fakes of?
I still buy stuff on amazon because returns are very simple, but I got into habit of immediately returning anything which is not good enough. I feel that most of the stuff one can buy there is garbage.
Books, CD, electronics, baby products, stationary, personal care products including condoms, toys,...
Take a look at this cup. Would you know if Amazon sent you a fake if it's your only Yeti cup? http://www.wideopenspaces.com/fake-yeti-ramblers-on-the-rise...
Many/Most of the time it's going to be difficult to tell unless you have the real version already and do side by side comparison.
To get fancy you could compare against the millions of known frauds and apply that to new products.
The thing that bugs me is that they do nothing. This stupid “it’s all on you to register your brand and yadda yadda” would be cool if they also coupled that with a ton of effort and smarts to stamp out counterfeiters.
I mean they run mechanical Turk, they could just manually review shit.
They should keep a running log of how they think this is important and all the things they try.
There’s no machine learning to do. The only way to find the counterfeit is to inspect each shipment by hand vs a reference sample to determine if it’s legit.
This is basically what the Amazon transparency program is. Is tracks each item from manufacturer all the way through to your door with unique code scanned along the way. You can use the app to see where it came from.
If you’re interviewing sellers, what do you ask them in the interview? “Are you selling counterfeits?” What are your grounds for allowing them to list an item?
If you want to inspect a new listing, what do you want to inspect? Maybe you inspect the first shipment. Fine. People will figure that out and send a small first shipment of real items, then start sending fakes.
My point is that they aren’t doing anything. You point out a couple of edge conditions as a reason not to try. Even reducing fakes by 20% would be great.
If this cost Amazon money they would be trying to stop it.
There are literally multiple teams with lots of software engineers working on these problems.
Currently entry into brand registry is a requirement for these programs. You would be shocked to see the head count and money Amazon is spending in this area, they are investing heavily.
"18650" is a type of lithium battery and capacities above 4000 mah are technically impossible.
Usually the batteries with lower rated capacities are fake, too, but at least this would get rid of the most blatant scams.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...
There are also many examples of fake power banks, but those have varying form factors, so you'd have to calculate the volume or check the weight to make sure it is technically impossible.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3...
When did this become an acceptable statement?
Counterfeits however, are difficult; somebody has to notice, and care that the thing is a counterfeit, and if this is the first time I'm buying one of these anchors, how am I to know how nice the seams are supposed to be? if it works, I'm happy.
To get around image section though, all you need is a real box of the thing. you can just buy a bunch of it and repackage, and sell the original separately.
(just for reference, the cloud guys are relying on us for a lot of their detection, not the other way around)
Why would any company spend money to decrease their revenue? I have yet to see one company that does not test the boundaries of the legally permissible to maximize profits.
As a buyer I want to know I can trust what I'm buying is what I believe I am buying --and sellers don't want their brands tarneshed. Once bitten twice shy.
Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers.
He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this.
I don’t sell, but I can barely buy from amazon because of all the scam copies and fake reviews.