13 ms·

I purchased Quickbooks Pro 2017 (PC) on Amazon last week, said it was "sold by Intuit" so wasn't even supposed to be an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon). Figured if it

by Lasher 10y ago

I purchased Quickbooks Pro 2017 (PC) on Amazon last week, said it was "sold by Intuit" so wasn't even supposed to be an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon). Figured if it costs no more I might as well get the physical disk. What showed up was a DVD case with a very clearly photocopied cover for a Mac version with a Verbatim CDR inside and a hacked version of the software. Amazon processed the refund just fine but didn't seem particularly interested or concerned that they had just sold me pirated software. Not a big deal for Quickbooks, I can just buy the download version. I also want to buy a new Ipod Touch and, for the first time ever, don't feel like I can buy it on Amazon. Long term Amazon customer since 1999, Prime since the first year, this counterfeit issue is a real problem that's going to cost them seriously if they don't get a handle on it.

dmix 10y ago
Can't the review system help deal with this problem? I always check reviews of the product and vendor to make sure it's legit. Only a few could get burned before the vendor is flagged as a counterfeiter which would stop further purchases. That should reduce the amount of money you could make scamming people and make it a less viable criminal business. Amazon also seems diligent in refunding people as well. So the solution might be that Amazon should invest more in shutting these accounts down faster but I'm curious if reviews are an immediate stop gap solution here until they get around to regulating each bad seller.
- Lasher 10y ago
  You get to review the product but when the sourcing is all thrown together all you're really doing is dragging down the rating for the overall product (Quickbooks 2017 in this case) and not the source of the specific item you were shipped. My issue had nothing to do with the product itself although I suppose if enough 1 star reviews start to build up then Intuit and other larger publishers that might actually have some leverage with Amazon will start to take notice.
  - justinpombrio 10y ago
    > My issue had nothing to do with the product itself You sound hesitant, but I don't think you should be. Your issue has to do with the product you received after clicking "buy" on an amazon product page. That page may say Quickbooks 2017 from Intuit, but there's no necessary relationship between what the page says and what you're buying, and when they're different you should rate what you were sold.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Agreed that this is a good practice to inform other buyers that there are counterfeit sellers on the product, but do be aware that it impacts the overall rating of the product, meaning that when you're shopping for something, a 3-star product may actually be the thing you're looking for, since the real rating is drug down by counterfeiters (Amazon eventually kicks the counterfeiters off the listing (usually after a few returns), but afaik, the rating damage for the ASIN lingers).
    - Lasher 10y ago
      I totally get your point, my concern is someone deciding that Quickbooks Pro (or whatever product) is not a good product because I was shipped something that doesn't even resemble the product. No love lost for Intuit here for other reasons but still doesn't seem right. With no way to differentiate between product and product supplier then you're right, the review page really the only outlet I have.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I find the lack of granularity that Amazon allows to define what you are reviewing in general a problem. Good luck trying to give the Kindle or paperback version of a book a bad rating while recommending the book as a piece of writing.
  - billpollock 10y ago
    That's correct. One issue we've faced is that people will give the counterfeits one-star although most people reviewing the book give it four or five stars. That just ends up hurting us unfortunately. It took Amazon over three months to remove those one star reviews from one of our counterfeited books.
- simcop2387 10y ago
  The problem is that the counterfeit products are being mixed into the legit ones too. It's nearly impossible to determine ahead of times if you're going to get a real one or a fake.
- phil21 10y ago
  The problem is that it can say "Sold by Amazon" and still be co-mingled stock some third party seller tossed the same SKU on. So there is no way to even know who the actual seller is. Amazon could end this particular fraud literally overnight by no longer co-mingling, but I suspect that would be wildly expensive for them to do. Your method is fine for actual accounts selling scammy things - the problem is when those accounts send in product to Amazon and Amazon decides to mix it in with the legit stuff.
  - jghn 10y ago
    Right. My bet has been that they've done the math and handling returns works out to be cheaper for them than stopping the comingling issue. Another aspect is that it's not always obvious that you wound up with a counterfeit. I've had products where the longevity was not what I expected and when I look more closely it was in fact a fake. However by that point it isn't worth returning.
    - greenyoda 10y ago
      "they've done the math and handling returns works out to be cheaper for them than stopping the comingling issue..." It may be cheaper in terms of short-term profits (which is what they can measure), but in the long run, it could be doing irreparable damage to the Amazon brand (which is much harder to measure). I've been an Amazon customer since they first started out as an on-line bookstore, but at this point, I'm hesitant about every item I buy (even though I haven't personally been the victim of a counterfeiting scam). At this point, I'm ready to start exploring their competitors.
      - jghn 10y ago
        To your point I backed off of a purchase on Amazon today specifically because I was afraid of counterfeit. I wanted to purchase a bag in a particular color which no longer seemed to be available on the company's site nor their Amazon store. Another vendor had the bag I wanted in that color for half the price. Perhaps it's legit. Perhaps I could have gotten what I wanted and saved $50. We'll never know.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  It's done. Reviews for both products and sellers already exist. Commingling inventory entirely muddles things. It's not always possible to tell you received a counterfeit, especially if you were not expecting it as a possibility.
- jinushaun 10y ago
  No, because the reviews are comingled. The review is tied to the SKU, not the specific seller. You can check for yourself. If you find two listings for the same product, you'll find that they share the same reviews. Learned this the hard hard way when attempting to buy an e-book on Amazon. I was confused with the reviews until I figured out that half the people bought the wrong version.
Hnrobert42 10y ago
I was a bit confused by the article, but it sounded like unless the seller opts out and pays extra fees, it is always FBA.
- jrs235 10y ago
  Correct to not comingle your stuff with others costs extra. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932231
  - dsr_ 10y ago
    And that's where I think Amazon open themselves up to fraud charges. They should never comingle goods under any circumstances, and they certainly shouldn't be deriving revenue from doing so. Amazon seems to be acting as a counterfeit goods launderer.
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      They like commingling because it allows them to ship goods faster. Your product ships from the closest wearhouse.
robotjosh 10y ago
I bought a phone battery on amazon. Looked legit, was the top result for my phone. It was counterfeit and wouldn't work. I don't even know how to get a battery because the phone stores didn't have it anymore. Can't trust amazon.
- greenyoda 10y ago
  I've bought cell phone batteries from batteries.com. I haven't gotten anything from them in years, so my experience isn't current, but they had the batteries I needed and they worked OK.
- ArtDev 10y ago
  Same thing happened to me. The funny thing is that the Samsung website sends you an Amazon seller. I noticed this the second time I needed a battery. The batteries look identical. The only difference was that the counterfeit battery only lasted a couple months.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    While I agree that buying phone batteries is a lottery on Amazon, in this case you might have got a genuine battery which had simply been in storage for a long time (which applies to batteries for any phone that's out of production). Li-Ion batteries won't necessarily work after being stored unless they were charged to a specific level and stored in a very specific way. And you have to go back and check the charge and maybe recharge them regularly. More in this article: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batteries http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batt... Needless to say none of this would have happened if it was sitting on a shelf in some warehouse for 3 years.
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      Now here's some piece of legislation that could e.g. be made part of "right to repair" bills: When a product with batteries gets EOL'd and uses non-standard (e.g. AA/AAA, CRxxxx coin cells, 18650 Li-Ion) cells and/or proprietary controller chips, the specifications (mechanical, electrical and EC firmware source) must be made public. To ensure that this gets followed and e.g. devices from insolvent manufacturers don't end up without reasonable possibility of new batteries, any manufacturer / importer of any device into the country must deposit said information at a public library/archive, similar to FCC/CE certification records.
jrs235 10y ago
Very pertinent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13931474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13931474
eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
I don't even buy from any third party sellers, including fulfilled by Amazon, for this reason. Amazons response has been wholly inadequate thus far. Brands are destroyed because people get counterfeit crap and review the entire product/brand. Why can't Amazon show the merchant used for every review and let people aggregate the reviews of each product by the merchant and product? Right now you have to check the overall merchant and hope you can trust it. This would be a good data point to watch too (if reviews for one merchant are significantly different than others for the same product). That should trigger a review of the merchant by Amazon. Instead, Amazon conflates all product reviews as if they all came from the same place. Which is another reason reviews are hit or miss -- people reviewing how the seller got it to them, how fast, or in what condition.
- JangoSteve 10y ago
  > I don't even buy from any third party sellers, including fulfilled by Amazon, for this reason. Except, according from the information in the article, this doesn't matter: > Shipped and sold by Amazon.com means that the product is shipped and sold by Amazon Retail (via Vendor Central or Vendor Express) directly. Basically, the manufacturer sends product to Amazon.com at a set price through a traditional PO process. This inventory is commingled with all other FBA inventory. Even if you buy only items that are shipped and sold by Amazon, if those items are also _available_ from other retailers on Amazon via FBA, then the product you get as the consumer, could have come from one of those retailers, because they're all mixed together at the Amazon warehouse. In other words, you could still be getting counterfeit items when you purchase products that are shipped and sold by Amazon. This is the same reason that, as far as I can tell, with their current logistics, tying reviews to merchant wouldn't work. They'd actually have to keep each merchant's products separate in the warehouse and _they'd_ have to know which merchant's product they sent you (which they don't currently unless the merchant opts out of commingled inventory, which costs the merchant extra). This is all assuming I'm interpreting the info in the article correctly. One thing I don't understand is why Amazon would not keep all of their own "shipped and sold by Amazon" inventory from the manufacturers separate from ones that come from 3rd-party merchants. I.e. why wouldn't Amazon opt all of their own direct-from-manufacturer inventory out of commingling? That's the part I'm wondering if I'm understanding incorrectly. EDIT: To further clarify my last question, it seems unwise to willingly mix products sent to you by a 3rd-party in with your own trusted inventory, such that you don't know what's trusted and what isn't. This seems analogous to allowing a SQL injection or XHR attack by not sanitizing user data on input, and then displaying it in the site, trusted as your own content without any sort of escaping.
bonestamp2 10y ago
Amazon isn't going to take this seriously until a major company gets burned and the FBI gets involved. Then Amazon will experience what every other company does that gets burned for selling counterfeit goods... the FBI will raid their warehouse and hold all the inventory as evidence until they complete their investigation. Like you said, Amazon doesn't seem concerned that they're selling counterfeit goods -- probably because they don't understand that's a serious crime.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  There is probably a calculation that the feds will be reticent to do that to an Amazon warehouse as they're generally major employers in the areas they're built in.
  - bonestamp2 10y ago
    Hopefully you're right (for the employee's sake). But given the Bezos/Trump feud, if I were Bezos I'd be very cautious about giving the feds any valid reason (with lots of precedence) to shut down any warehouses for an investigation.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - tw04 10y ago
    I guess I'm curious how you came to the conclusion they're major employers where their warehouses are. As far as I can tell each warehouse is about 1,000 full-time jobs. If I look at a list of warehouse locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations They're pretty much universally a rounding error for total population and jobs in their respective metro areas.
    - Zigurd 10y ago
      1,000 full time employees is pretty big these days. The highly touted Carrier deal amounted to maybe 700 jobs. Elizabeth Warren made an announcement about the big new Amazon distribution center in Fall River. It's supposedly Amazon's biggest, and I recall it was about 1,000 jobs. So they are doing more with the same headcount.
mdp 10y ago
Try buying any Apple accessories. I wanted to buy the genuine Apple headphones, but it's absolutely impossible to on Amazon. "Sold by Apple" product shows up from a seller in Boston, clearly counterfeit. Report it to Amazon and they suggest mailing it back for a refund. Zero concern that the seller is labeling their goods as genuine Apple and then sending knock-offs. Prior to this I got a set of grey market Gillette blades that were fulfilled by Amazon. Like you, I've been with Amazon for nearly 20 years, but I've recently started being more selective about what I order from them. I'm surprised that they aren't tackling this more.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Report it to Apple, not Amazon.
- tiglionabbit 10y ago
  Apple does not sell any products through Amazon. All Apple products listed on Amazon are through third parties.
  - mdp 10y ago
    This isn't very clear when you see pages like this - https://www.amazon.com/Apple/b/ref=w_bl_hsx_s_wi_web_2528944011?ie=UTF8&node=2528944011&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Apple https://www.amazon.com/Apple/b/ref=w_bl_hsx_s_wi_web_2528944... Also, some Apple products are shipped and sold by Amazon, not third parties - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00W5Q06VU/ref=s9_dcacsd_bhz_bw_c_x_3_w https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00W5Q06VU/ref=s9_dcacsd_b... I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken any action against them for this.
    - notgood 10y ago
      Apple taking action against one of its biggest merchants in the US? you must be joking right?
      - chimeracoder 10y ago
Spooky23 10y ago
You should report these incidents to your state attorney general as a fraud. Eventually they'll raid an Amazon DC. Losing a day of revenue will get their attention.
uptownfunk 10y ago
This entire phenomenon is very very worrying. I've been a buyer on Amazon for a while and bought quite a few things from there, my life is so hectic that I don't get time to do due dilligence on everything I buy so it's even possible that I probably own some counterfeit products and don't even know it. This will come back to them one day, and hopefully soon. Obviously not all disruption is clean, in fact, it rarely is, but this is one area where they cannot afford to be lax and let things like this slide. I for one will be much more vigilant in the future about what I chose to buy on amazon and where specifically I get it.
monksy 10y ago
I've been a long term customer as well. From what I've seen they just really don't give a toss about their customer. They make a lot of money and don't have to do anything via their market. Only solution... stop using Amazon. Go elsewhere for everything.
rsync 10y ago
"I also want to buy a new Ipod Touch and, for the first time ever, don't feel like I can buy it on Amazon." I have, twice, had to return "new" phones that were obviously repackaged/rebuilt ... dust specs under the screen protector ... awkwardly applied hologram stickers on the packaging. I have visited the shenzhen mobile phone markets several times and see what people are doing in those stalls ... I have no intention of ever buying a phone from amazon or ebay.

by Lasher 10y ago

dmix 10y ago

Can't the review system help deal with this problem? I always check reviews of the product and vendor to make sure it's legit. Only a few could get burned before the vendor is flagged as a counterfeiter which would stop further purchases. That should reduce the amount of money you could make scamming people and make it a less viable criminal business. Amazon also seems diligent in refunding people as well. So the solution might be that Amazon should invest more in shutting these accounts down faster but I'm curious if reviews are an immediate stop gap solution here until they get around to regulating each bad seller.

Lasher 10y ago
You get to review the product but when the sourcing is all thrown together all you're really doing is dragging down the rating for the overall product (Quickbooks 2017 in this case) and not the source of the specific item you were shipped. My issue had nothing to do with the product itself although I suppose if enough 1 star reviews start to build up then Intuit and other larger publishers that might actually have some leverage with Amazon will start to take notice.
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  > My issue had nothing to do with the product itself You sound hesitant, but I don't think you should be. Your issue has to do with the product you received after clicking "buy" on an amazon product page. That page may say Quickbooks 2017 from Intuit, but there's no necessary relationship between what the page says and what you're buying, and when they're different you should rate what you were sold.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Agreed that this is a good practice to inform other buyers that there are counterfeit sellers on the product, but do be aware that it impacts the overall rating of the product, meaning that when you're shopping for something, a 3-star product may actually be the thing you're looking for, since the real rating is drug down by counterfeiters (Amazon eventually kicks the counterfeiters off the listing (usually after a few returns), but afaik, the rating damage for the ASIN lingers).
  - Lasher 10y ago
    I totally get your point, my concern is someone deciding that Quickbooks Pro (or whatever product) is not a good product because I was shipped something that doesn't even resemble the product. No love lost for Intuit here for other reasons but still doesn't seem right. With no way to differentiate between product and product supplier then you're right, the review page really the only outlet I have.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I find the lack of granularity that Amazon allows to define what you are reviewing in general a problem. Good luck trying to give the Kindle or paperback version of a book a bad rating while recommending the book as a piece of writing.
- billpollock 10y ago
  That's correct. One issue we've faced is that people will give the counterfeits one-star although most people reviewing the book give it four or five stars. That just ends up hurting us unfortunately. It took Amazon over three months to remove those one star reviews from one of our counterfeited books.
simcop2387 10y ago
The problem is that the counterfeit products are being mixed into the legit ones too. It's nearly impossible to determine ahead of times if you're going to get a real one or a fake.
phil21 10y ago
The problem is that it can say "Sold by Amazon" and still be co-mingled stock some third party seller tossed the same SKU on. So there is no way to even know who the actual seller is. Amazon could end this particular fraud literally overnight by no longer co-mingling, but I suspect that would be wildly expensive for them to do. Your method is fine for actual accounts selling scammy things - the problem is when those accounts send in product to Amazon and Amazon decides to mix it in with the legit stuff.
- jghn 10y ago
  Right. My bet has been that they've done the math and handling returns works out to be cheaper for them than stopping the comingling issue. Another aspect is that it's not always obvious that you wound up with a counterfeit. I've had products where the longevity was not what I expected and when I look more closely it was in fact a fake. However by that point it isn't worth returning.
  - greenyoda 10y ago
    "they've done the math and handling returns works out to be cheaper for them than stopping the comingling issue..." It may be cheaper in terms of short-term profits (which is what they can measure), but in the long run, it could be doing irreparable damage to the Amazon brand (which is much harder to measure). I've been an Amazon customer since they first started out as an on-line bookstore, but at this point, I'm hesitant about every item I buy (even though I haven't personally been the victim of a counterfeiting scam). At this point, I'm ready to start exploring their competitors.
    - jghn 10y ago
      To your point I backed off of a purchase on Amazon today specifically because I was afraid of counterfeit. I wanted to purchase a bag in a particular color which no longer seemed to be available on the company's site nor their Amazon store. Another vendor had the bag I wanted in that color for half the price. Perhaps it's legit. Perhaps I could have gotten what I wanted and saved $50. We'll never know.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
It's done. Reviews for both products and sellers already exist. Commingling inventory entirely muddles things. It's not always possible to tell you received a counterfeit, especially if you were not expecting it as a possibility.
jinushaun 10y ago
No, because the reviews are comingled. The review is tied to the SKU, not the specific seller. You can check for yourself. If you find two listings for the same product, you'll find that they share the same reviews. Learned this the hard hard way when attempting to buy an e-book on Amazon. I was confused with the reviews until I figured out that half the people bought the wrong version.

Hnrobert42 10y ago

I was a bit confused by the article, but it sounded like unless the seller opts out and pays extra fees, it is always FBA.

jrs235 10y ago
Correct to not comingle your stuff with others costs extra. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932231
- dsr_ 10y ago
  And that's where I think Amazon open themselves up to fraud charges. They should never comingle goods under any circumstances, and they certainly shouldn't be deriving revenue from doing so. Amazon seems to be acting as a counterfeit goods launderer.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    They like commingling because it allows them to ship goods faster. Your product ships from the closest wearhouse.

robotjosh 10y ago

I bought a phone battery on amazon. Looked legit, was the top result for my phone. It was counterfeit and wouldn't work. I don't even know how to get a battery because the phone stores didn't have it anymore. Can't trust amazon.

greenyoda 10y ago
I've bought cell phone batteries from batteries.com. I haven't gotten anything from them in years, so my experience isn't current, but they had the batteries I needed and they worked OK.
ArtDev 10y ago
Same thing happened to me. The funny thing is that the Samsung website sends you an Amazon seller. I noticed this the second time I needed a battery. The batteries look identical. The only difference was that the counterfeit battery only lasted a couple months.
- rwmj 10y ago
  While I agree that buying phone batteries is a lottery on Amazon, in this case you might have got a genuine battery which had simply been in storage for a long time (which applies to batteries for any phone that's out of production). Li-Ion batteries won't necessarily work after being stored unless they were charged to a specific level and stored in a very specific way. And you have to go back and check the charge and maybe recharge them regularly. More in this article: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batteries http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batt... Needless to say none of this would have happened if it was sitting on a shelf in some warehouse for 3 years.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Now here's some piece of legislation that could e.g. be made part of "right to repair" bills: When a product with batteries gets EOL'd and uses non-standard (e.g. AA/AAA, CRxxxx coin cells, 18650 Li-Ion) cells and/or proprietary controller chips, the specifications (mechanical, electrical and EC firmware source) must be made public. To ensure that this gets followed and e.g. devices from insolvent manufacturers don't end up without reasonable possibility of new batteries, any manufacturer / importer of any device into the country must deposit said information at a public library/archive, similar to FCC/CE certification records.

jrs235 10y ago

Very pertinent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13931474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13931474

eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago

I don't even buy from any third party sellers, including fulfilled by Amazon, for this reason. Amazons response has been wholly inadequate thus far. Brands are destroyed because people get counterfeit crap and review the entire product/brand. Why can't Amazon show the merchant used for every review and let people aggregate the reviews of each product by the merchant and product? Right now you have to check the overall merchant and hope you can trust it. This would be a good data point to watch too (if reviews for one merchant are significantly different than others for the same product). That should trigger a review of the merchant by Amazon. Instead, Amazon conflates all product reviews as if they all came from the same place. Which is another reason reviews are hit or miss -- people reviewing how the seller got it to them, how fast, or in what condition.

JangoSteve 10y ago
> I don't even buy from any third party sellers, including fulfilled by Amazon, for this reason. Except, according from the information in the article, this doesn't matter: > Shipped and sold by Amazon.com means that the product is shipped and sold by Amazon Retail (via Vendor Central or Vendor Express) directly. Basically, the manufacturer sends product to Amazon.com at a set price through a traditional PO process. This inventory is commingled with all other FBA inventory. Even if you buy only items that are shipped and sold by Amazon, if those items are also _available_ from other retailers on Amazon via FBA, then the product you get as the consumer, could have come from one of those retailers, because they're all mixed together at the Amazon warehouse. In other words, you could still be getting counterfeit items when you purchase products that are shipped and sold by Amazon. This is the same reason that, as far as I can tell, with their current logistics, tying reviews to merchant wouldn't work. They'd actually have to keep each merchant's products separate in the warehouse and _they'd_ have to know which merchant's product they sent you (which they don't currently unless the merchant opts out of commingled inventory, which costs the merchant extra). This is all assuming I'm interpreting the info in the article correctly. One thing I don't understand is why Amazon would not keep all of their own "shipped and sold by Amazon" inventory from the manufacturers separate from ones that come from 3rd-party merchants. I.e. why wouldn't Amazon opt all of their own direct-from-manufacturer inventory out of commingling? That's the part I'm wondering if I'm understanding incorrectly. EDIT: To further clarify my last question, it seems unwise to willingly mix products sent to you by a 3rd-party in with your own trusted inventory, such that you don't know what's trusted and what isn't. This seems analogous to allowing a SQL injection or XHR attack by not sanitizing user data on input, and then displaying it in the site, trusted as your own content without any sort of escaping.

bonestamp2 10y ago

Amazon isn't going to take this seriously until a major company gets burned and the FBI gets involved. Then Amazon will experience what every other company does that gets burned for selling counterfeit goods... the FBI will raid their warehouse and hold all the inventory as evidence until they complete their investigation. Like you said, Amazon doesn't seem concerned that they're selling counterfeit goods -- probably because they don't understand that's a serious crime.

emodendroket 10y ago
There is probably a calculation that the feds will be reticent to do that to an Amazon warehouse as they're generally major employers in the areas they're built in.
- bonestamp2 10y ago
  Hopefully you're right (for the employee's sake). But given the Bezos/Trump feud, if I were Bezos I'd be very cautious about giving the feds any valid reason (with lots of precedence) to shut down any warehouses for an investigation.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tw04 10y ago
  I guess I'm curious how you came to the conclusion they're major employers where their warehouses are. As far as I can tell each warehouse is about 1,000 full-time jobs. If I look at a list of warehouse locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations They're pretty much universally a rounding error for total population and jobs in their respective metro areas.
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    1,000 full time employees is pretty big these days. The highly touted Carrier deal amounted to maybe 700 jobs. Elizabeth Warren made an announcement about the big new Amazon distribution center in Fall River. It's supposedly Amazon's biggest, and I recall it was about 1,000 jobs. So they are doing more with the same headcount.

mdp 10y ago

Try buying any Apple accessories. I wanted to buy the genuine Apple headphones, but it's absolutely impossible to on Amazon. "Sold by Apple" product shows up from a seller in Boston, clearly counterfeit. Report it to Amazon and they suggest mailing it back for a refund. Zero concern that the seller is labeling their goods as genuine Apple and then sending knock-offs. Prior to this I got a set of grey market Gillette blades that were fulfilled by Amazon. Like you, I've been with Amazon for nearly 20 years, but I've recently started being more selective about what I order from them. I'm surprised that they aren't tackling this more.

3pt14159 10y ago
Report it to Apple, not Amazon.
tiglionabbit 10y ago
Apple does not sell any products through Amazon. All Apple products listed on Amazon are through third parties.
- mdp 10y ago
  This isn't very clear when you see pages like this - https://www.amazon.com/Apple/b/ref=w_bl_hsx_s_wi_web_2528944011?ie=UTF8&node=2528944011&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Apple https://www.amazon.com/Apple/b/ref=w_bl_hsx_s_wi_web_2528944... Also, some Apple products are shipped and sold by Amazon, not third parties - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00W5Q06VU/ref=s9_dcacsd_bhz_bw_c_x_3_w https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00W5Q06VU/ref=s9_dcacsd_b... I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken any action against them for this.
  - notgood 10y ago
    Apple taking action against one of its biggest merchants in the US? you must be joking right?
    - chimeracoder 10y ago

Spooky23 10y ago

You should report these incidents to your state attorney general as a fraud. Eventually they'll raid an Amazon DC. Losing a day of revenue will get their attention.

uptownfunk 10y ago

This entire phenomenon is very very worrying. I've been a buyer on Amazon for a while and bought quite a few things from there, my life is so hectic that I don't get time to do due dilligence on everything I buy so it's even possible that I probably own some counterfeit products and don't even know it. This will come back to them one day, and hopefully soon. Obviously not all disruption is clean, in fact, it rarely is, but this is one area where they cannot afford to be lax and let things like this slide. I for one will be much more vigilant in the future about what I chose to buy on amazon and where specifically I get it.

monksy 10y ago

I've been a long term customer as well. From what I've seen they just really don't give a toss about their customer. They make a lot of money and don't have to do anything via their market. Only solution... stop using Amazon. Go elsewhere for everything.

rsync 10y ago

"I also want to buy a new Ipod Touch and, for the first time ever, don't feel like I can buy it on Amazon." I have, twice, had to return "new" phones that were obviously repackaged/rebuilt ... dust specs under the screen protector ... awkwardly applied hologram stickers on the packaging. I have visited the shenzhen mobile phone markets several times and see what people are doing in those stalls ... I have no intention of ever buying a phone from amazon or ebay.