5 ms·

Woupd be nice if they had a "Verified" symbol on the seller's name if it actually comes from that brand, kind of like with Twitter accounts.

• eloff 8y ago
  The problem is worse than that. They mix the inventory from all sellers, including themselves, for the same product. So all it takes is one counterfeit seller to poison the whole well.
  • toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I’m surprised there hasn’t been a coordinated effort against Amazon by an attacker using this strategy (poisoning the well at scale). That’d fix their comingling problem straight away.
    • callalex 8y ago
      That sounds like a quick way to end up in prison for a long time.
      • toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Amazon flagrantly sells counterfeits due to comingling. Repercussions? Zero. As long as you're outside of US jurisdiction, the chances of you being prosecuted are close enough to zero to round down.
    • perl4ever 8y ago
      Posting vast numbers of stories about counterfeits on the internet seems like an easier way to "poison the well", I would assume.
  • bunderbunder 8y ago
    Well, not the whole well. You can avoid "fulfilled by Amazon" products. But that puts a damper on the whole "Prime" thing, so at that point you might as well just shop somewhere else entirely.
    • giulianob 8y ago
      Isn't "fulfilled by Amazon" more trustworthy since they are shipping the product to you rather than a 3rd party? Or does Amazon fulfill counterfeits too?
      • Klathmon 8y ago
        The way it works (as far as I have heard) is that when it's "fulfilled by Amazon", the vendors will ship Amazon their products. Amazon won't really do much in the way of vetting them, and then just throws them all into the same bin (i believe they go by the SKU and not much else). When you order from any of the vendors that sell that exact item, they just pick one at random and ship it to you. All it takes is one bad actor to ship a bunch of counterfeit stuff to amazon for fulfillment and then it's possible to get counterfeits from ANY seller that Amazon fulfills.
        • lozaning 8y ago
          This is exactly how it works, other than it's based on ASIN, not SKU. The only way it changes if if the person sending their inventory to amazon chooses to have their inventory not commingled for a premium fee. Seller that do not commingle their inventory have no way of advertising that to buyer right now though.
  • rasz 8y ago
    Fixing this is trivial, tell comingling sellers to QRcode all the merchandise, scan when adding inventory, penalize/kick out sellers playing label games (wrong/ missing QR codes), penalize/kick out sellers with counterfeit product/brick filled box returns.
    • inetknght 8y ago
      This doesn't go far enough. Fraud is a major crime with very low accountability.
    • vonmoltke 8y ago
      You have an odd definition of "trivial". Some sort of per-vendor coding could work, but it is not trivial by any means.
  • dboreham 8y ago
    Interesting how a schema design errror has led to this real life problem (failure to have a "source vendor") field in the inventory table.
• mancerayder 8y ago
  It would, but by doing so they'd be by fiat casting suspicions on the non-"Verified" variants, and perhaps on the whole brand as a result! I think the HN crowd is more united around the counterfeit issue than rest of the population.
• gnopgnip 8y ago
  Brands can become gated and then only approved sellers can sell those items on Amazon.
• lozaning 8y ago
  Or at a minimum let buyers know which sellers have opted to not commingle their inventory.