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There are a lot of 3rd party shipping scams on Amazon now. In fact there are a lot of counterfeit items on Amazon now. I think I've posted this before, but if I
by partiallypro 8y ago
There are a lot of 3rd party shipping scams on Amazon now. In fact there are a lot of counterfeit items on Amazon now. I think I've posted this before, but if I am ordering a name brand item, I will not buy it from Amazon anymore. I'll only order things that won't really matter if they aren't the real name brand now.
Even if it is fulfilled by Amazon, even that doesn't guarantee it's not counterfeit. I can order a pallets of counterfeit items from Alibaba and ship them off to Amazon to fulfill (for a fee) so that I can qualify as a Prime shipper.
I used to sell a lot of (legit) things on Amazon (a $250K/yr revenue pace) but Amazon raised their seller fees which choked my already low margin business; and honestly since that I feel like the amount of scams and counterfeits has skyrocketed because now Amazon has trimmed people's margins so much with their high fees.
Now I hear from some others I know that sell on Amazon about how they will buy from Alibaba, negotiate a bulk rate and then sell it on Amazon. Generally they are almost all fake, but the seller doesn't care, or pleads ignorance. Then there's the shipping scams, which I feel are fairly new, but no less worrying if you're a customer. It's also a bit infuriating if you were/are a seller and people are getting away with this when you're trying to be honest.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI don't see the relationship between abundance of counterfeit items and higher fees edging out low margin sellers.
- partiallypro 8y agoYou can raise your margins if you merely sell counterfeit items, because your input cost is less. Amazon raising their seller fees squeezes margins and forces suppliers/sellers to reinflate their margin via external means. If you squeeze out legitimate sellers, the sellers that counterfeit will be more robust and their margins will be what the old baseline was before the seller fee increase (at least.) I don't see how you can't see that obvious relationship.
- caf 8y agoThe simpler response is: selling counterfeit items is inherently a higher-margin business than selling the legitimate version of the same items.