4 ms·
I bought some cologne from them and figured it was safe because the seller was posted as Amazon. Got it and the original barcode had been excised with a razor a
by coleifer 8y ago
I bought some cologne from them and figured it was safe because the seller was posted as Amazon. Got it and the original barcode had been excised with a razor and replaced with a sticker. Scent and bottle were fake. When I wrote a dispassionate and factual review with pics it was removed with no recourse or explanation. Very sketchy.
- sytse 8y agoThey tend to remove the original barcode if they sell at a discount because otherwise the wholesaler/manufacturer will not sell to them again. This is not illegal. If anything it is an indication the product was real.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> They tend to remove the original barcode if they sell at a discount because otherwise the wholesaler/manufacturer will not sell to them again. Why would the wholesaler care?
- nostromo 8y agoOften these are gray market items. If I sell Product X in America for $50 and in China for $5, I would not want retailers selling the Chinese product in America.
- coleifer 8y agoThis makes no fucking sense. They could have just covered the old barcode with the sticker but someone had taken care to carefully cut it out. As I wrote, the whole reason I got suspicious in the first place is the scent itself was wrong. The bottle, too. I had an old one I'd bought from a department store to compare against.
- robryan 8y agoIt needs to be cut out, the point being that the brand can't identify who they originally sold the product to. The brand may take a hard line of their authorized sellers diverting to the grey market. The authorized sellers want to keep being authorized sellers.
- michaelmrose 8y agoHe said twice that the product was fake why are you insisting that its not?
- jstarfish 8y agoThat may be, but this sounds more like that high-profile wine fraud case from years ago. Get a bunch of empty branded bottles from wherever you can get them, fill them with rubbing alcohol and sell it for full retail price. The UPC would have to be altered for proper fulfillment, but it may not have been the seller that cut it off-- they could have received it that way themselves, or it was used as a tester bottle at one point.
- masonic 8y agoThat is no reason to remove a UPC barcode -- it is common to all instances of that product/size and doesn't reveal anything about its travels through the supply chain.
- Symbiote 8y agoThe contents of the box will differ, even if its only the language of the manual or the plug. I've bought slightly cheaper goods from Romania where just above the barcode it said "Romania and Bulgaria only". I presume the bar code was different than the rest-of-EU one.
- jstarfish 8y agoUPCs are not as universal as they once were. By removing an ounce from a can of soup (Walmart Rollback) or adding an extra hairbrush accessory to a Barbie to make it a Target Exclusive, the UPCs differ and become more specific to its destination in the supply chain. (It also makes it impossible to price match since the Target doll and Walmart soup are no longer technically the same item competitors sell, even though they practically are). International edition textbooks also have different UPCs (but not ISBN) than the standard versions.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dahdum 8y agoIf you mention counterfeit products in the review it’s automatically rejected in my experience. Thrice it’s happened to me.
- AnssiH 8y agoYes, reviews that are not of the genuine product are against Amazon rules and removed (often automatically). Such situations are considered as seller-at-fault (they sold/shipped an incorrect product) and not generally applicable to the product as sold by any other sellers, too. Product reviews have to be generally applicable as they are not seller-specific. You are expected to leave seller feedback (which affects the seller's star rating etc) instead of product review in such cases.
- dahdum 8y ago2 of those sellers were Amazon itself...so not much help there, but you’re right that’s why they reject them. The seller ratings don’t matter when they comingle though. Next time I’m going to write a carefully worded one that doesn’t explicitly state that it was counterfeit.
- michaelmrose 8y agoHow about a site that lists real reviews that amazon can't remove + a script to display reviews from this site alongside the amazon data.