This weeks episode of Reply All [P] talks about how Amazon counterfeits, how it's easy to do, no recourse and be bundled along with the authentic products for sale. It was very interesting.

[P] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124

Now the problem is starting to get mass attention outside of tech. I understand that this is a hard problem but it's been years now and there's no solution in sight. The practice of mixing the same products from different vendors just needs to end.

Key normal person quote from the podcast:

"It just feels like this magic store that you guys thought it was, is definitely isn't what it is today. It seems like a place that puts you in touch with some dude selling tongs in Hong Kong, and maybe you'll get a great pair or maybe you'll get ripped off. [Amazon] is just like any other website now"

This mixed with their now crippled customer service has almost turned the Amazon experience into ebay.

It's really not a hard problem to solve.

Amazon simply benifits from it so they have zero reason to stop.

Should Amazon add the concept of "Verified" resellers?

A big part of the problem is co-mingled inventory. When you buy X from seller Y, you do not necessarily get the X that Y physically shipped to Amazon. You get an X with same SKU from Amazon's collection.

Right, hence why "Verified" would be nice. An SKU should allowed to be merged if both are Verified or both are unverified.

They already have this through "gating". But not every brand takes part in it.

just wanted to mention that. Indeed a very insightful episode, that explained a lot of comments I've seen lately.

Conterfeit items are a problem. But even with legit items, I always check elsewhere: quite often, Amazon is not the cheapest.

For items fulfilled by other vendors, I google that vendor's name, see if they have a site. Usually, even with shipping it's cheaper on the vendor's site than on Amazon (I guess that's the fee levied to sell on Amazon, and the rounding involved to do "free shipping").

Amazon excels at convenience, reviews and return policy. Often they are great on pricing. But they are no longer my one-stop shop.

Me too. Ironically the one thing I still buy on Amazon is books. I do try to support local bookstores but we don't have many other than B&N and it's not just a small markup, books can cost twice as much there. It's really hard to justify $60 vs. $30 for the same thing.

I've heard that books also have a high counterfeiting rate on Amazon. Over lunch with Paul Horowitz a couple of years ago he mentioned that he's had to fight to get counterfeits of "The Art of Electronics" taken down.

I read on here a while back about FBA inventory getting comingled, but I'm unclear on whether Amazon's own inventory gets comingled as well. Anecdotally I haven't received a counterfeit of anything shipped and sold by Amazon.

I'm not sure about the US situation but you can't be sure even with books: The scientific publisher Springer switched to a print on demand model. This is generally fine but Amazon apparently prints those books themselves after ordering (it says so on the last page) and both printing and binding are of abysmal quality, much worse than what you get elsewhere for the same price.

There's a lot of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I ordered a Pulltaps corkscrew and the chrome-plated metal part [1] was instead made of crudely bent sheet metal that didn't look remotely authentic. After that I mainly use Amazon for small household consumables. I also heard stories about counterfeit Mitutoyo calipers [2] so I didn't even consider trying Amazon for those.

[1] http://cellarsofwine.com/img/pulltex-pulltaps-double-hinged-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnDype-j3hk

> After that I mainly use Amazon for small household consumables.

I got fake Dove soap from Amazon.

Holy cow, I'd love to know what is in fake soap that is cheaper than real soap. Someone should do an in depth analysis on that.

No quality control and nobody checking that it's not going to give you chemical burns.

no marketing budget.

The messed up thing is that I ordered a product SOLD AND SHIPPED BY AMAZON.COM and it was counterfeit. That's the day I stopped buying stuff for my kid on Amazon. Now I drive to Target and waste an hour each time but it's better than using some counterfeit product on her.

I just realized for the first time, typing this comment, that I could order online from Target, and I've never tried it. Shows you how dominant of a position in e-commerce Amazon has. I'll have to try it.

You can also get a debit-based target RED card (no credit app required) and get the same 5% discount and other benefits as the credit-based version.

Note: At the time it was required to bring a voided cheque to complete the process.

Target order online and pickup in store is not bad. The pickup experience is a little slow, but one thing I've noticed is the online prices are cheaper than in-store (in california at least).

> The messed up thing is that I ordered a product SOLD AND SHIPPED BY AMAZON.COM and it was counterfeit.

Sold and shipped by Amazon is exactly as dangerous as Fulfilled By Amazon that hasn't opted out of commingling, because it is commingled with FBA.

> Now I drive to Target and waste an hour each time but it's better than using some counterfeit product on her.

Why not online at Target.com or Google Express (which has Target as one of its stores?)

Why not shop at Target.com? I've always gotten very good service there and you can "link" gift cards to your online account so if you get a Target gift card you can't lose it or forget to use it.

I was just looking at jansport backpacks for my kids and all of them had "jansport sent this back as not authentic" reviews

It's really bad with things like SD cards. I've gotten ones that are half their stated capacity, and ones that are supposed to be V90 class (90MB/sec write) that barely make 10MB/sec.

Imagine going on a trip nearly 1000 miles away and finding out after the fact that you got a crappy fake SD card from Amazon that made 90% of your photos unrecoverable.

Happened to me. Once.

Can't everyone just pay attention to the seller if they're worried about fake goods? Just make sure you're buying an SD card fulfilled by Amazon sold by Samsung if you're worried, not from 3rd party seller.

If it's fulfilled by Amazon, it may be commingled with inventory from other sellers, depending on the seller's settings that purchasers can't see.

But when you're buying an item it always shows who the seller is, just don't purchase the item if it doesn't show the actual brand of company vs. some random seller name. I've never purchased a scam item from Amazon and I've had an account since 1999.

I'm not sure if you understand what commingled inventory means.

When inventory is commingled, Amazon puts all of the sellers' products (for a given product ID aka ASIN) into one urn. When a user makes a purchase of that item from any of those sellers, Amazon retrieves an item from the urn and ships it to the purchaser.

As a purchaser of items sold by multiple sellers with fulfillment by Amazon, it's not possible to know if each seller has their own urn, or if it's a single urn for multiple sellers. The distribution of the urn by source is also unknown.

I won't purchase easily counterfeited objects from Amazon, unless there is only one seller listed, and if that seller is either Amazon or an account that seems like the manufacturer. A random Samsung sd card[1], though; who knows . Something like this Anker usb car charger [2] looks reasonable (I'm not specifically endorsing Anker, usb chargers are just a product in a crowded, junky space, and Anker is a brand that's trying to present itself as selling good products.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B06XX29S9Q/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00VH84L5E/

The problem is that Fulfilled by Amazon items have co-mingled inventory, so items bought from amzn_bob_1985 may actually be coming from stickers_on_alibaba_crap99's comingled inventory. If you do receive fake goods, there's no guarantee that it's actually the fault of the specific seller you purchased from.

Amazon mixes their own inventory with the third-party sellers. Even if says "Sold and shipped by Amazon" on the checkout page they will ship whatever item they find most convenient. It could be sourced by them or added to their warehouse without any verification by a random seller. There is no indication during the checkout whose item you get (likely they don't even know it themselves at that stage).

How is it that somebody here will always manage to blame the victim, no matter how obviously absurd that is?

Amazon was originally the seller for everything they offered. In an important sense, they still are: we still shop on their site, still give them money, and still mostly receive the goods from them.

Amazon could have chosen differently, but didn't, because they were looking to dominate e-commerce. they set it up like this, and could undo it in a moment if they wanted. If you're looking to blame somebody, blame the person with the most power over the situation, not the person with the least.

How are they supposed to prevent counterfit goods, besides banning all third party sales, or inspecting millions of items? There isn't a reasonable fix except issuing refunds when it happens and banning accounts, or not having 3rd party sales at all, which isn't reasonable.

Exactly this. If Amazon can't police their marketplace then bad luck, you thought you had become more competitive by solving real world problems with tech, but actually you had just found novel ways to ignore the law. "I can't comply with the law because that would break my novel business idea", is exactly the thing that I keep hearing from tech companies, and it is the same level of nonsense as complaining that trading-standards (or whatever you guys have in the US) shut down for market stall for selling knock-off goods.

If the goods are on your site, then you are responsible for them being there. Sure it costs a lot, like it costs a lot to run an auction house. Boo hoo

So they hire tens of thousands of inspectors? Specialists at spotting fake SD cards? Specialists at spotting fake perfume? Specialsts at spotting fake Nike's? Do they disassemble each product as it comes in and inspect it? How much do they break it down?

None of this is realistic. We're commenting on an article that says Amazon has half of the e-commerce biz right now. The small but vocal contingent on HN might seem to make it that counterfeit goods are rampant everywhere but it's not the case.

It is perfectly realistic that that stay out of businesses they can't competently run.

For most of history people selling things had an understanding of what they were selling. If Amazon can't meet that standard for some products, or for third-party sellers as whole, they can just stop.

Alternatively, they could set up a separate site. Something like "Caveat Emptor" or "Bezos's Dubious Flea Market". Something that doesn't trade on the Amazon brand and create confusion between responsible vendors and fly-by-night operations.

That you can't or won't think of a way to do something without harming megacorp short-term profits doesn't make it "unrealistic" to address a recently create problem. I leave it to you to figure out what it does mean.

They should make a strong UI distinction between "we got this from the manufacturer or one of their authorized resellers" and "this is some random guy in China selling on our version of eBay".

>So they hire...

It is not my problem to solve, it is Amazon's. If they can't solve it then they need to go back to selling their own stock. If this makes them less money than facilitating a crime, then so be it.

What do you need it for?

If money if not an issue, buy Swissbit S-45 cards from Mouser.

There you go. But if you go to Jansport, I bet you'll have to pay shipping and the cheap option will be 5-10 business days. That's the norm. We've forgotten, mostly thanks to Amazon.

For a brand like Jansport, this is a false dichotomy:

https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=jansport%20backpack&ca...

Wal-Mart has the same problem, although perhaps not to the same extent.

Does Wal-Mart commingle inventory with 3rd party sellers? That’s the root of the problem in Amazon’s case.

I think the implication is that you can just go drive to walmart, or to some other brick and mortar location.

Yeah I would be much more certain that b&m products were "genuine" than I would be for walmart.com products, which I thought was the topic. I kind of wonder how we've gotten to this point, if we're talking about genuine Wal-Mart products...

I'm not saying this out of snobbery... I'm in Wal-Mart about once a week.

I've encountered a trend of B&M and big retailers carrying counterfeit hair & body care products over the last two years.

I just skip the middlemen and use Aliexpress.

There, you'll see 95% of the electronics, tools and small appliances you'd see on Amazon.

The pictures are usually the same, too.

Heh because it's people buying on Alibaba then having it shipped straight to Amazon for FBA. I see and file the Customs paperwork on the shipments daily at work.

Yep. Same thing with Ebay. A good portion of electronics and other small items are straight from Alibaba.

Woupd be nice if they had a "Verified" symbol on the seller's name if it actually comes from that brand, kind of like with Twitter accounts.

The problem is worse than that. They mix the inventory from all sellers, including themselves, for the same product. So all it takes is one counterfeit seller to poison the whole well.

Well, not the whole well. You can avoid "fulfilled by Amazon" products.

But that puts a damper on the whole "Prime" thing, so at that point you might as well just shop somewhere else entirely.

Isn't "fulfilled by Amazon" more trustworthy since they are shipping the product to you rather than a 3rd party? Or does Amazon fulfill counterfeits too?

The way it works (as far as I have heard) is that when it's "fulfilled by Amazon", the vendors will ship Amazon their products.

Amazon won't really do much in the way of vetting them, and then just throws them all into the same bin (i believe they go by the SKU and not much else). When you order from any of the vendors that sell that exact item, they just pick one at random and ship it to you.

All it takes is one bad actor to ship a bunch of counterfeit stuff to amazon for fulfillment and then it's possible to get counterfeits from ANY seller that Amazon fulfills.

This is exactly how it works, other than it's based on ASIN, not SKU.

The only way it changes if if the person sending their inventory to amazon chooses to have their inventory not commingled for a premium fee. Seller that do not commingle their inventory have no way of advertising that to buyer right now though.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a coordinated effort against Amazon by an attacker using this strategy (poisoning the well at scale). That’d fix their comingling problem straight away.

Posting vast numbers of stories about counterfeits on the internet seems like an easier way to "poison the well", I would assume.

That sounds like a quick way to end up in prison for a long time.

Amazon flagrantly sells counterfeits due to comingling. Repercussions? Zero. As long as you're outside of US jurisdiction, the chances of you being prosecuted are close enough to zero to round down.

Fixing this is trivial, tell comingling sellers to QRcode all the merchandise, scan when adding inventory, penalize/kick out sellers playing label games (wrong/ missing QR codes), penalize/kick out sellers with counterfeit product/brick filled box returns.

You have an odd definition of "trivial". Some sort of per-vendor coding could work, but it is not trivial by any means.

This doesn't go far enough. Fraud is a major crime with very low accountability.

Interesting how a schema design errror has led to this real life problem (failure to have a "source vendor") field in the inventory table.

It would, but by doing so they'd be by fiat casting suspicions on the non-"Verified" variants, and perhaps on the whole brand as a result! I think the HN crowd is more united around the counterfeit issue than rest of the population.

Or at a minimum let buyers know which sellers have opted to not commingle their inventory.

Brands can become gated and then only approved sellers can sell those items on Amazon.

While on the subject of high quality electronics stuff, I cannot endorse this brand highly enough:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiha_Tools

https://www.mouser.com/wiha/product-line/

To the extent that for DC power work, as things wear out I am not buying Klein anymore.

The worst thing is that even if you report the products as counterfeit, Amazon won’t take them down or refund the purchases.

Is that really the case? I’ve returned things to amazon for other reasons...

Same. Filters for our well system. Comments that they were not genuine, so ordered from Home Depot.

Just to be clear, you're saying you've encountered counterfeits on Adafruit?

I read it as meaning Adafruit-branded products purchased via Amazon from 3rd parties.

Lithium ion batteries are another example of this. Used batteries 're-wrapped' in counterfeit labeling to look like some particular brand/model are probably more common than genuine products on Amazon.

More often than not, buying batteries through Amazon is literally paying someone to ship their e-waste to you.