Not to mention Amazon's ability to throw your purchases at your door when the disinterested delivery agent is only measured on packages delivered per hour rather than returns due to damage.
You all should try bhphoto.com -- good prices, no counterfeit gear.
It's not that I'm anti-Amazon - I use my Kindle every day, a long time Audible subscriber and I use Prime Video.
What does this mean?
At some point this crosses the line into anti-trust territory.
There are other vectors for counterfeiting own brand products but you would have to be a supplier. In normal retail 'own brand' products can be sourced from many suppliers. If you are selling ready meals then the exterior pack could be provided by the supermarket with that being consistent. Meanwhile the contents could come from one of many industrial units at one of many suppliers. In this way 'co-mingling' is possible. In the UK we had a little problem a few years ago where 'own brand' ready meals were full of horsemeat. The products themselves were 'legit' but the contents were not.
I would say that Amazon Basics are vulnerable to this type of fakery that goes on further up the food chain. This is fully possible with commodity items such as batteries. As per the UK horsemeat problem there is a serious reputation risk if this happens, terrifying the customers this way is a bigger existential threat to the brand than any 'anti trust' laws.
It would be interesting to see counterfeit numbers for items sold by Amazon itself vs by someone else on Amazon. Anecdotally I've never had an issue with stuff sold by Amazon itself and steer away from our vendors if possible.
If I order something from, say, nordstrom.com, I’m pretty confident that the item will be high quality and exactly the same as if I’d bought it from one of their physical stores.
Or for another example, if I were to order some clothing from mrporter.com, I have similar expectations of quality even though they have no physical stores.
If I buy something from eBay or Craigslist though, I have no expectations that it will be of a certain quality standard.
Frys is a nice choice for buying electronics: they have in-store same-day pickup, and they'll price match Amazon and Newegg. It's pretty convenient if you have one nearby.
This one surprised me a bit, but Best Buy also has equivalent prices to Amazon on a lot of things. A few days back I was looking for some items and found that they had everything available for the same price and I could go pick it up on the same day.
Amazon do seem to be stepping up their delivery speed, though. This morning I ordered something that wasn't available at other retailers and I was given an option for same-day delivery. A few hours later it arrived.
Common products that are normally sold at a high mark-up at retailers, are usually always counterfeit if bought from amazon. Case in point are the expensive electric tooth brush replacement heads by Oral-B.
You will pay $5-$8 per head from a physical retailer. Yet on amazon, there are tons of them being sold for much less. If you do buy one from amazon, the product will not be the same as from a physical store even though the packaging is identical. Its a cheap counterfeit.
Another time, I bought a hand cranked can opener. It was supposed to be a heavy duty "Made in America" can opener. Yet once I got it, the construction was nothing at all like the product images showed (was held together by cheap pop rivets instead of solid rivets) even though all the brand markings (including a big print "made in America") were there. It broke quickly. Looking on ebay I discovered an identical item only instead of it have a printed "made in America", it said "China"...
I bought some on eBay, advertised as genuine but not. The packaging was near perfect. The only thing that gave them away was the different mouth-feel and two misplaced mold release marks.
Genuine Braun dual-action brushheads have two divits on top of the brushhead. The copies have the two divits on the side.
I sent a note to the seller warning him that some counterfeits might have gotten into his supply. Seller refunded me.
If you get counterfeits from Amazon I am sure the 3rd party seller will refund you.
For a major example of this, Apple sued sellers over knockoff (and potentially hazardous) USB chargers being sold as official Apple chargers. “Shipped and sold by Amazon” and as far as customers can tell, it’s the real thing.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/20/13343682/fake-apple-char...
Best Buy’s supply chain doesn’t have this problem.
This is common across all sorts of products. A shoe company (I forget which) stopped selling on Amazon because they couldn’t do anything about being mixed in with all the fakes, and fountain pens bought there (Lamy Safari in particular) have good odds of being Chinese knockoffs of questionable quality.
On the other hand, if you buy something retail, you can A. see it yourself first and B. have a physical store you can return it to.
Quality control.
If you do have an item through a retail store with a physical presence, not only should (common) items be there at any time, they should also be of actual durable quality.