They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day.

However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.

There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.

This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.

> However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders.

Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.

Sure. The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere. There are plenty of super functional countries that disobey court orders.

China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...

As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.

> The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere.

But then if they commit fraud the US associate gets arrested, and it's hard to find volunteers to do that.

They create a Delaware C corp, and if the product is found bad, the company just goes bankrupt. Replace with a new one.

not. at. amazon's. scale.

Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

> The scammers and amazon profit.

Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that.

The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.

If Amazon has found themselves too large to operate as a marketplace that customers can trust then perhaps they made a poor decision in prioritizing short-term growth over everything else.

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"

Good points, I agree that it seems unlikely that Amazon has lost sight of the long term thinking that is largely responsible for making them Amazon.

And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.

But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.

Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.

Of course you can do that at Amazon's scale. Also $1 items can be verified economically, considering you're going to sell more than one of it. It will make life harder for very small sellers with low value items. But I doubt that those make up a big share of sold items.

Maybe we should make it illegal for Amazon et al to externalise this cost to society.

It would be if they couldn't pretend to be a platform..