8 ms·

I think it's very simple, amazon and all such stores should be held liable for the fraud and lost business as if they themselves created the counterfeit goods.

by vxNsr 7y ago

I think it's very simple, amazon and all such stores should be held liable for the fraud and lost business as if they themselves created the counterfeit goods. macys wouldn't be given a free pass if it sold counterfeit nikes in their B&M store. so why does amazon get one, they take a 15% cut just like macys does.

save_ferris 7y ago
Amazon is a lot more powerful and influential than Macy's is. I think this is at least partially caused by the increasingly important political relationship between major employers like Amazon and governments. Amazon likely tells governments that being held accountable for things like this would dramatically hurt their business, and therefore cost jobs. No politician wants to be blamed for lost jobs.
- petre 7y ago
  There are different kinds of politicians and there's public opinion. https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/2/15/18225646/amazon-nyc-hq2-collapse-secrecy-incentives-automation https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/2/15/18225646/amazon...
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    Iirc, this was orchestrated by the progressive wing of the NY Democratic Party and was a fairly controversial decision. The progressives still represent a fairly small contingent of the left, and don’t really have the influence to materially alter policy decisions, especially at the federal level. Much of the US still isn’t very interested in progressive politics, especially given the migration of moderate conservatives to the Democratic Party. 2020 is going to be a make-or-break election for progressives IMO.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  "jobs" .. when amazon warehouses will be all robots, they won't have this leverage. What a good news.
  - bencollier49 7y ago
    By which point they'll run the money supply as well. Surely the introduction of Libra may make a proper Amazon-coin more palatable? They must have teams and teams watching this with eagle eyes..
krick 7y ago
This seem to make a lot of sense, so I assume there must be some serious reason for the fact it isn't happening already. Is this hard to implement legally? Is there just not enough incentive to do so?
- awakeasleep 7y ago
  It could be because of lax and disinterested law enforcement. Amazon pays for a lot of lobbyists.
  - ConcernedCoder 7y ago
    Could be they get a discount on doughnuts through amazon...
    - jonsen 7y ago
      or a guarantee they are not fakes. “Look Sean! Two holes in this one. Call in the swats.”
- conductr 7y ago
  I think because consumers don’t usually notice/care and you can’t just walk into an Amazon store and inspect their inventory like a B&M retailer.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  The cost of suing Amazon (which is how a customer would hold them liable) greatly outweighs the cost of almost any counterfeit good they might happen to ship. The government is not likely to step with criminal enforcement unless they are presented with proof that Amazon purposefully ordered the fakes, or knowingly sold fakes. Generally speaking, retailers are considered victims, not perpetrators, of counterfeiting. That's because when a retailer sells a counterfeit, the retailer has to process the returns and deal with angry customers, and then they're left with worthless inventory. Again, the exception is if the retailer knowingly traffics in fakes and tries to defraud their customers. Proving that takes some pretty specific evidence though.
JudgeWapner 7y ago
Does Amazon not take a return if you report the item as counterfeit? I thought they had a very liberal return policy.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  There are lots of problems with that approach, unfortunately: Returning means you need to repack and re-ship the item. Sometimes they cover the shipping cost but not always Sometimes the counterfeit item only becomes evident after the return window has expired, like buying a wireless adapter for game controllers that breaks in 2 months. (It turns out one of the earliest rampant counterfeit issues on Amazon was people selling knockoff USB adapters for XBox controllers, oddly enough). At that point you can't return, all you can do is leave a nasty review for the product you bought From Amazon. Some counterfeits are basically indistinguishable from the real product unless you're an expert. If you buy some vitamins or Tylenol off amazon, do you really have the resources and expertise to identify whether they're fakes or tainted or a batch that failed to pass quality control? So now you have to convince Amazon to take this thing back. In the end at this point Amazon knows very well how much counterfeiting is happening on their platform and they aren't taking enough effort to stop it. It can't all lie on the individual customer to spot and combat counterfeits, they aren't able to do it.
  - dvdbloc 7y ago
    Anecdotal but I learned that some DJI drone props I bought were counterfeit about 7 months after buying them and after many drone crashes. I explained the issue to Amazon and after a couple of questions, they gave me a full refund. It was only 15$ and probably not even worth my time but it never hurts to ask.
- avip 7y ago
  It's a question of liability, not liberal return policy. what good is a return policy, Mr. Anderson, if you cannot see...
- kabacha 7y ago
  People aren't really keen on taking few hours of their day to repackage and ship back something that is 20-50$. I often buy things from amazon-like storefronts here in asia and sometimes they refund no questions asked but sometimes they require you to ship it back and 90% of the time it's not worth it. All of these "free returns" policies sound much better than they actually are. One of more recent anecdotes: I bought a new keyboard for my Thinkpad which said "genuine" and serial numbers in decription match ones with Lenovo's. The keyboard turned out to be fine but had no backlight. My point is that packing it up and sending it back to neihbouring country is just not worth it. I clicked refund and left a negative review and that's pretty much as far as I'm willing to go for 60$ that I've spent.
conductr 7y ago
This is true for “fulfilled by Amazon” but when that’s not the case, Amazon is acting much more like PayPal than a retailer
- deelowe 7y ago
  I think this needs to be tested in court. Newegg and Walmart do this as well. It feels like this goes against the intent of customer protection laws. For most people, they think they are buying this stuff from walmart. Walmart, Amazon, etc should be accountable for this in some way.
  - temp-dude-87844 7y ago
    Recently the US Supreme Court ruled in Apple v. Pepper that app buyers of the iOS App Store do have standing to sue Apple in the antitrust suit, because they're buying the apps from Apple directly, and not from the apps' developers. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the suit, this ruling may have implications for other online storefronts. Here, the Court saw online storefronts as the sellers of goods sold, regardless of whatever business arrangements may be in place between the suppliers and the storefront. Under this interpretation, it's likely that fewer antitrust suits could get thrown out on questions of standing against storefronts. With these prospects, it's likely that more suits will be brought. My prediction is that to mitigate this, storefronts will try to introduce more visual separation between first-party store and the third-party sellers' stores, even if the items are still found from a unified search and catalogue. The purchasing of the third-party item will take place at the third-party storefront, but the payment will be processed by the captive aggregator and fulfilled and supported by them as well.
whack 7y ago
It is very hard to eliminate false-positives without introducing a raft of false-negatives as well. If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Especially those who don't fall under the umbrella of Amazon's good graces. Is that really what you want? More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?
- onion2k 7y ago
  If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Amazon could handle that problem by helping the small merchants more though. Bezos does claim to be "obsessed with the customer" after all, and those businesses are his customers. Allowing people who buy things on Amazon to get fake products is failing everyone in the whole supply chain apart from the business that supplies the fakes and Amazon itself. If I were Bezos I'd be quite unhappy about that.
- dpacmittal 7y ago
  >Is that really what you want? Yes, if that's what it takes.
- wukerplank 7y ago
  > Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior Not a good analogy, ISPs are dumb pipes. Amazon boosts and profits from bad actors. None of them would have a chance to get the reach Amazon provides them. Of course Amazon should be held accountable. I don't buy the "open platform" angle when it comes to FB, Google, etc.
atotic 7y ago
The simplest consumer-friendly solution would be:= to make consumers whole: if I receive a counterfeit item, Amazon should send me a genuine replacement immediately free of charge, and pay me $5 for my time if they want the counterfeit item back. I think it would pay off for Amazon in the long run. Right now, I avoid Amazon for any significant purchases, because I do not trust them.
- brankoB 7y ago
  What if you don't realize it's a counterfeit?
  - blunte 7y ago
    This is trickier, and it also happens to "real stores" as well. If someone in the middle of the supply chain does a switch from real goods to counterfeit, it can go unnoticed by everyone downstream. However, when someone DOES notice, the situation must be remedied. Amazon should be liable to some degree for everything they sell. Consumers should have recourse. Maybe they already do? Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product?
    - therein 7y ago
      > Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product? Yes, very easily but that's not enough because Amazon still profits so massively from everyone else that it doesn't even raise a bell in their accounting.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    That's a good one, the ones in this article are pretty bad / obvious counterfeits, but for things like idk, clothing it can be harder to spot them. But that's where customs should come in; counterfeiting products is illegal, selling fake brand clothing is illegal, and if Amazon sells them they can (and should) be held accountable. It's that branch of law enforcement's job to protect both consumers and brands from counterfeits, you pay taxes for that reason.
hrktb 7y ago
> macys wouldn't be given a free pass if it sold counterfeit nikes in their B&M store The equivalent would be holding a shopping mall liable for the fraud and lost business one of their tenant caused by sourcing counterfeit goods. I don't see any brick and mortar shopping mall getting more than a tap on the wrist under this premise.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  No, shopping mall is not the right analogy. Amazon is much closer to a consignment store in this regard -- doubly so for the "fulfilled by Amazon" stuff. You've walked into Amazon's store; the stuff on the shelves happens to be owned by someone else, but Amazon is displaying it, handling the transaction, providing customer service, and so on. And while a (large enough) consignment store can't police everything, I think for egregious enough problems they can't have their cake and eat it too. This is the same crap that Uber tries: if you want the power to control the (work|sale) experience to such a degree, then you have to take responsibility when it goes wrong.
- novaleaf 7y ago
  I think it's more akin to multiple suppliers not multiple tenants. 1) There's a single unified storefront 2) Supplier of a product is transparent to the customer shopping experience 3) The checkout, payment, and shipping experience is singular and unified The unified and efficient experience is amazon's strength, and I still make 90% of my purchases there. But yes, they should police and be held accountable for bad suppliers. It is amazon's store they are being sold at.

by vxNsr 7y ago

save_ferris 7y ago

Amazon is a lot more powerful and influential than Macy's is. I think this is at least partially caused by the increasingly important political relationship between major employers like Amazon and governments. Amazon likely tells governments that being held accountable for things like this would dramatically hurt their business, and therefore cost jobs. No politician wants to be blamed for lost jobs.

petre 7y ago
There are different kinds of politicians and there's public opinion. https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/2/15/18225646/amazon-nyc-hq2-collapse-secrecy-incentives-automation https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/2/15/18225646/amazon...
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Iirc, this was orchestrated by the progressive wing of the NY Democratic Party and was a fairly controversial decision. The progressives still represent a fairly small contingent of the left, and don’t really have the influence to materially alter policy decisions, especially at the federal level. Much of the US still isn’t very interested in progressive politics, especially given the migration of moderate conservatives to the Democratic Party. 2020 is going to be a make-or-break election for progressives IMO.
agumonkey 7y ago
"jobs" .. when amazon warehouses will be all robots, they won't have this leverage. What a good news.
- bencollier49 7y ago
  By which point they'll run the money supply as well. Surely the introduction of Libra may make a proper Amazon-coin more palatable? They must have teams and teams watching this with eagle eyes..

krick 7y ago

This seem to make a lot of sense, so I assume there must be some serious reason for the fact it isn't happening already. Is this hard to implement legally? Is there just not enough incentive to do so?

awakeasleep 7y ago
It could be because of lax and disinterested law enforcement. Amazon pays for a lot of lobbyists.
- ConcernedCoder 7y ago
  Could be they get a discount on doughnuts through amazon...
  - jonsen 7y ago
    or a guarantee they are not fakes. “Look Sean! Two holes in this one. Call in the swats.”
conductr 7y ago
I think because consumers don’t usually notice/care and you can’t just walk into an Amazon store and inspect their inventory like a B&M retailer.
snowwrestler 7y ago
The cost of suing Amazon (which is how a customer would hold them liable) greatly outweighs the cost of almost any counterfeit good they might happen to ship. The government is not likely to step with criminal enforcement unless they are presented with proof that Amazon purposefully ordered the fakes, or knowingly sold fakes. Generally speaking, retailers are considered victims, not perpetrators, of counterfeiting. That's because when a retailer sells a counterfeit, the retailer has to process the returns and deal with angry customers, and then they're left with worthless inventory. Again, the exception is if the retailer knowingly traffics in fakes and tries to defraud their customers. Proving that takes some pretty specific evidence though.

JudgeWapner 7y ago

Does Amazon not take a return if you report the item as counterfeit? I thought they had a very liberal return policy.

kevingadd 7y ago
There are lots of problems with that approach, unfortunately: Returning means you need to repack and re-ship the item. Sometimes they cover the shipping cost but not always Sometimes the counterfeit item only becomes evident after the return window has expired, like buying a wireless adapter for game controllers that breaks in 2 months. (It turns out one of the earliest rampant counterfeit issues on Amazon was people selling knockoff USB adapters for XBox controllers, oddly enough). At that point you can't return, all you can do is leave a nasty review for the product you bought From Amazon. Some counterfeits are basically indistinguishable from the real product unless you're an expert. If you buy some vitamins or Tylenol off amazon, do you really have the resources and expertise to identify whether they're fakes or tainted or a batch that failed to pass quality control? So now you have to convince Amazon to take this thing back. In the end at this point Amazon knows very well how much counterfeiting is happening on their platform and they aren't taking enough effort to stop it. It can't all lie on the individual customer to spot and combat counterfeits, they aren't able to do it.
- dvdbloc 7y ago
  Anecdotal but I learned that some DJI drone props I bought were counterfeit about 7 months after buying them and after many drone crashes. I explained the issue to Amazon and after a couple of questions, they gave me a full refund. It was only 15$ and probably not even worth my time but it never hurts to ask.
avip 7y ago
It's a question of liability, not liberal return policy. what good is a return policy, Mr. Anderson, if you cannot see...
kabacha 7y ago
People aren't really keen on taking few hours of their day to repackage and ship back something that is 20-50$. I often buy things from amazon-like storefronts here in asia and sometimes they refund no questions asked but sometimes they require you to ship it back and 90% of the time it's not worth it. All of these "free returns" policies sound much better than they actually are. One of more recent anecdotes: I bought a new keyboard for my Thinkpad which said "genuine" and serial numbers in decription match ones with Lenovo's. The keyboard turned out to be fine but had no backlight. My point is that packing it up and sending it back to neihbouring country is just not worth it. I clicked refund and left a negative review and that's pretty much as far as I'm willing to go for 60$ that I've spent.

conductr 7y ago

This is true for “fulfilled by Amazon” but when that’s not the case, Amazon is acting much more like PayPal than a retailer

deelowe 7y ago
I think this needs to be tested in court. Newegg and Walmart do this as well. It feels like this goes against the intent of customer protection laws. For most people, they think they are buying this stuff from walmart. Walmart, Amazon, etc should be accountable for this in some way.
- temp-dude-87844 7y ago
  Recently the US Supreme Court ruled in Apple v. Pepper that app buyers of the iOS App Store do have standing to sue Apple in the antitrust suit, because they're buying the apps from Apple directly, and not from the apps' developers. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the suit, this ruling may have implications for other online storefronts. Here, the Court saw online storefronts as the sellers of goods sold, regardless of whatever business arrangements may be in place between the suppliers and the storefront. Under this interpretation, it's likely that fewer antitrust suits could get thrown out on questions of standing against storefronts. With these prospects, it's likely that more suits will be brought. My prediction is that to mitigate this, storefronts will try to introduce more visual separation between first-party store and the third-party sellers' stores, even if the items are still found from a unified search and catalogue. The purchasing of the third-party item will take place at the third-party storefront, but the payment will be processed by the captive aggregator and fulfilled and supported by them as well.

whack 7y ago

It is very hard to eliminate false-positives without introducing a raft of false-negatives as well. If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Especially those who don't fall under the umbrella of Amazon's good graces. Is that really what you want? More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?

onion2k 7y ago
If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Amazon could handle that problem by helping the small merchants more though. Bezos does claim to be "obsessed with the customer" after all, and those businesses are his customers. Allowing people who buy things on Amazon to get fake products is failing everyone in the whole supply chain apart from the business that supplies the fakes and Amazon itself. If I were Bezos I'd be quite unhappy about that.
dpacmittal 7y ago
>Is that really what you want? Yes, if that's what it takes.
wukerplank 7y ago
> Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior Not a good analogy, ISPs are dumb pipes. Amazon boosts and profits from bad actors. None of them would have a chance to get the reach Amazon provides them. Of course Amazon should be held accountable. I don't buy the "open platform" angle when it comes to FB, Google, etc.

atotic 7y ago

The simplest consumer-friendly solution would be:= to make consumers whole: if I receive a counterfeit item, Amazon should send me a genuine replacement immediately free of charge, and pay me $5 for my time if they want the counterfeit item back. I think it would pay off for Amazon in the long run. Right now, I avoid Amazon for any significant purchases, because I do not trust them.

brankoB 7y ago
What if you don't realize it's a counterfeit?
- blunte 7y ago
  This is trickier, and it also happens to "real stores" as well. If someone in the middle of the supply chain does a switch from real goods to counterfeit, it can go unnoticed by everyone downstream. However, when someone DOES notice, the situation must be remedied. Amazon should be liable to some degree for everything they sell. Consumers should have recourse. Maybe they already do? Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product?
  - therein 7y ago
    > Can they return for a refund from Amazon if they dispute the authenticity of the product? Yes, very easily but that's not enough because Amazon still profits so massively from everyone else that it doesn't even raise a bell in their accounting.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  That's a good one, the ones in this article are pretty bad / obvious counterfeits, but for things like idk, clothing it can be harder to spot them. But that's where customs should come in; counterfeiting products is illegal, selling fake brand clothing is illegal, and if Amazon sells them they can (and should) be held accountable. It's that branch of law enforcement's job to protect both consumers and brands from counterfeits, you pay taxes for that reason.

hrktb 7y ago

> macys wouldn't be given a free pass if it sold counterfeit nikes in their B&M store The equivalent would be holding a shopping mall liable for the fraud and lost business one of their tenant caused by sourcing counterfeit goods. I don't see any brick and mortar shopping mall getting more than a tap on the wrist under this premise.

wool_gather 7y ago
No, shopping mall is not the right analogy. Amazon is much closer to a consignment store in this regard -- doubly so for the "fulfilled by Amazon" stuff. You've walked into Amazon's store; the stuff on the shelves happens to be owned by someone else, but Amazon is displaying it, handling the transaction, providing customer service, and so on. And while a (large enough) consignment store can't police everything, I think for egregious enough problems they can't have their cake and eat it too. This is the same crap that Uber tries: if you want the power to control the (work|sale) experience to such a degree, then you have to take responsibility when it goes wrong.
novaleaf 7y ago
I think it's more akin to multiple suppliers not multiple tenants. 1) There's a single unified storefront 2) Supplier of a product is transparent to the customer shopping experience 3) The checkout, payment, and shipping experience is singular and unified The unified and efficient experience is amazon's strength, and I still make 90% of my purchases there. But yes, they should police and be held accountable for bad suppliers. It is amazon's store they are being sold at.