That is the trick. If short-term Amazon accumulates enough money it can later on purchase businesses with a better reputation and repeat the trick again.
I have seen this done by General Electric. It purchases a medium size company with good reputation and loyal customers. GE reduces costs (quality, employee salaries, etc.) and milks the cow for a decade. When many customers have left because higher prices and lower quality then GE sells the company and repeats the trick with a new one.
For mega-corporations there is no incentive for quality beyond what regulations force them to assure by law. Making Amazon liable for defective 3rd party is the only way that Amazon will care about fraud and counterfeits.
The people need to cede power from the Capitalists sufficiently to do that in USA; apply some democracy to the situation.
We need to build longevity into our planetary systems of production.
How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.
This is as good a time for blockchain as any. Register genuine products on a blockchain and have them scanned once they hit the Amazon warehouse to ensure they are authentic.
The basic problem is solveable without blockchain by simply registering products by their serial number on the brand's website, which a lot of brands actually already do for higher priced products.
Sure, some people will input fake serial numbers to get a free product, but they probably weighed the cost of counterfeit strings affecting brand image (if I don’t know mine are counterfeit, I’ll assume it’s D’Addario’s fault if they’re bad) with the cost of sending a free set of $5 strings.
You buy them wholesale from the manufacturer?
This has been a solved problem for any legitimate business. The only other place I've seen such lack of quality control were at flea markets, which doesn't say anything good about Amazon.
The problem is that manufacturers need to opt into it and there is no way as a consumer to tell on a product listing whether or not the product is part of the registry.
Amazon doesn't even do this, though.
Recently I was helping someone look for memory on Amazon. We couldn't tell the difference between two different listings for crucial ram, both with the same model, speed, size, etc. Figuring out who the seller was can be difficult; the place that used to say the store name simply had a link to Amazon's products manufactured by Crucial. We eventually noticed that in the comparison at the bottom it says who's selling the product you're looking at; searching the page for this store name found no other instances of it.
Short term, it would be a good idea to fine Amazon $1,000,000 a day until the problem is fixed.
There's no way Bezos doesn't know how to fix this, he's a smart guy.
It's inexplicable that search/discovery and commingling of substandard/counterfeit merchandise are not both considered five-alarm fires at Amazon HQ.
Prohibit Amazon doing business until they fix the problem.
You can bet the problem will be fixed overnight.
My wider point is this: Bezos knows this is happen, and the only way he gets away with it is because the USA doesn't have enough consumer protection and no desire to.
This has gone beyond fraud, it's abuse of customers.
The system should also be holding anyone in the decision tree accountable for fraud: something like "if test purchases show fraud in >1:20 cases then CEO fine := last month's income from all sources".
Short-term, at least one idea to fix this is to implement more stringent checks/QA with their FBA policies. Do more stringent verification of imported items going into Amazon FBA warehouses. Or at least add a mark to branded items received from other third-party sources. Simply adding "Shipped by: X, Sold by: X" text on the product page doesn't really help.
There's probably other/better ideas out there. This has been a recurring problem that has kinda gotten swept under the rug so far, but at some point is going to need to be reckoned with.
If Amazon wants to be the best customer experience, then it has to position itself in such a way that it does not devolve into one big flea market + Aliexpress + dropshipping junk bin.