I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial.

I'm sure Amazon is taking it very seriously - when have they ever shown anything but "obsession" about positive customer experiences. But it is hard, and it will take time to do it effectively without completely blocking all 3rd party sellers on the site.

I think Amazon is making a bet that reducing the number of SKUs in their warehouses is of greater value than counterfeiting is a problem - and this is probably true for a ton of their more generic stuff that comes from the same factory in China anyway.

Yes, but:)

Fixing it is far from trivial, BUT there are trivial things that would help. It's the 80/20 rule again; sure, a full solution would take years and be a massive undertaking, but even a minor effort would make a big dent in the problem.

Meanwhile, those counterfeits allow Amazon to fulfill orders more quickly and to list items at lower cost, undermining their competition, and any bad experience a customer has can be blamed on the vendor, not Amazon itself.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I have no particular insight, but to me this seems like an intentional part of Amazon's business model.

At the moment it might be negligible but in the long run they are hurting them self. 5 years ago I and a lot of my friends ordered everything on Amazon because it was fast and we knew that we will get the correct stuff.

Nowadays I (and most of my friends) almost stopped using Amazon because it is such a hassle to find stuff which is actually sold and shipped by Amazon and not some sketchy third party seller with only 5 reviews. And even if you manage to order something directly through Amazon you might still have problems with counterfeit items and other stuff.

And the same is true for my parents and their friends. Until 1-2 years ago Amazon was _the_ place to shop online but nowadays they switched back to more traditional methods.

Due to all this shady stuff Amazon lost me as a customer (who used to spend hundreds and thousands of euros per year).

I trust Target's supply chain about 100x more than Amazon and I'm willing to pay extra for that assurance.

As a fairly heavy Amazon customer for both home & biz, I was getting to the point where Amazon was just the default buying location, but now there are entire categories of stuff that are such a PITA to find a valid offering that Amazon is just about off my list.

Amazon recently keeps showing me a popup about a Biz account for some benefits, and while I probably would have jumped at it 2 years ago, I just haven't bothered now.

Yes, it's mere anecdote, but I'm seeing many complaints of the same. This is the kind of problem that doesn't show up in the numbers early, and by the time it shows up in the numbers to get Mgt's attention, it may be too late, because the reputational damage has been done.

Years to build trust, minutes to break it...

I flat out won't buy from Amazon unless I'm already in the market to get something that I know is cheap and may or may not work- which turns out is not very often. Because of this I very much doubt the reality of the retail apocalypse in the long term.

Personally, I think amazon needs to distance themselves from those third party sellers; if it's hard to tell the difference between amazon and joe rando, the amazon brand is going to become worth significantly less, and they will not be able to charge the premium that I'm sure their investors are expecting.

Or you could say that Amazon is highlighting the comparative lack of quality of branded goods. A Lacoste shirt is so easy to replicate at a fraction of the cost, that Amazon, by its very nature undermines the entire rationale for buying Lacoste.

No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt.

Know what's ridiculous? I trust Poundland more than I trust Amazon to supply genuine goods.

Such a statement has no grounds to stand on. There are non-genuine items which are of the same or better quality than the genuine ones. You cannot just put them all in one bin.

Amazon do, that's the problem.

As you provide no citations either, your assertion seems to have no more grounds. The chances of counterfeit being better quality are so vanishingly rare as to be headline worthy.

I've even used their expertise as evidence that AI and machine learning could do the same if we only knew how to train it. They've written several books on the subject and they are recognized authorities in Asia.

And so does Alibaba, except for it is in China and is outside of US IP enforcement regime. If Amazon were not to do a great pivot towards 3rd party sellers back in 2012-2014 and do the same thing Alibaba does, we could have been talking about Alibaba swallowing Amazon's online retail business by now. Alibaba is a type of company you can do nothing about, yet it can do a lot of things about you, and I can throw a couple examples for you:

Paypal - they used to have a "partner agreement" with Alibaba, but the moment they began to carve into eBay's domain, Paypal's board was foolish enough to antagonise them.

Alipay was the result of all of above, as well as Paypal's almost complete loss of Chinese market, and few others where Alipay made inroads.

Apple - they had pretty much to bribe Alibaba along with Sony to have their products delisted and prohibit trade in refurbished electronics on their platform (which was also eating into Apple's sales big big time).

Also, Alibaba strongarmed Apple into letting them send payments and selling virtual goods without paying "Apple tax." Knowing that, Tencent and few other big Chinese dotcoms followed the suit, which gave them enormous commercial advantage against foreign competitors for in-app payments.

And all of above is on a minute scale of societal impact in comparison how Aliexpress singlehandedly nuked a big big chunk of the brick and store retail industry in the former bloc countries. (Alibaba makes more profit in Russia than in all other foreign markets combined)

Maybe you're talking about a different kind of shirt, but I tried Amazon's brand of collared long-sleeve button-up shirts and found the quality so low that I'd consider them unwearable.

The material was very thin, extremely wrinkle-prone, the collars were wilted and didn't keep their shape at all, and the cut wasn't very good.

I'm not the type to be easily fooled by marketing/branding psychological tricks, quite the opposite. But every off-brand collared shirt I've ever bought in my life has been a cheap unwearable disheveled mess.

I know designer brands are just cranking these things out of Cambodia for $3/unit, but no-name brands still just can't seem to compete at all on quality. They're not even trying as far as I can tell.

That’s exactly the problem. Brands can be held accountable. Unbranded goods can’t. Me personally, I don’t want to live in a world, where all standards are given up just to have the lowest price.

I don't know about Lacoste, but of the brands I do know about, they do a pretty good job on their own of undermining that rationale.

"Amazon is rich with the most important resource in asset management: trust. The firm earned the highest reputation ranking in the U.S. in a 2017 Harris Poll. It was ranked as both the most influential and most trusted company in a 2016 survey by SurveyMonkey. It was the only company to land in the top 5 for both categories."

If the above is true, then counterfeit goods are probably not ultimately a significant problem for them.

It's similar to how there are all types of websites running on AWS. Amazon is not responsible for their content.

Amazon is also a merchant on their own market place. I would expect Amazon and other big name merchants to usually sell you genuine products.

Why would one think that?