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Counterfeits on Amazon cost Warren bird feeder business $1.5M
- Jaygles 7y agoI wonder if this is an oversight by Amazon on failing to scale its anti-counterfeit measures. Maybe they didn't appropriately evaluate how large the issue would become and they're stuck with trying to amend a system that wasn't designed to combat the issue at the scale they are operating at. I'm interested in what sort of solution will eventually be effective at stopping this. Hopefully for Amazon it won't be inspecting every single item that passes through its doors.
- viburnum 7y agoThey know what they’re doing and don’t care because it’s working.
- Jaygles 7y agoI think the viewpoint that Amazon doesn't care is too cynical. They probably do care but are stuck with the issue of looking at effective counter measures that are too expensive to consider. What is more realistic is that they are just stumped at this point.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIf they cared, they would let you filter for items only sold by Amazon.com and not commingle inventory. What they really want is for others to take all the inventory risk and liability and take a 15% cut of all purchases. They used to let you filter for items sold by Amazon.com, but they removed it, so I think that clearly proves their goal of being a platform rather than a retailer one can rely on for quality goods, as presumably the former has nice profit margins whereas the latter is famous for barely having profit margins.
- occamrazor 7y agoI can still filter by vendor, at least on the European websites.
- dman 7y agoDoes not mean anything because of commingling. If you have 500 merchants selling the same item you have no way to control whose inventory you get things from. No filtering by merchant doesnt help, I wish it did. As a result I have mostly stopped buying from Amazon after running into a few obvious fakes.
- BeetleB 7y ago> I can still filter by vendor, at least on the European websites. At least in the US, Amazon comingles new products unless the seller requests them not to. So if you buy something shipped and sold by Amazon.com, you may be getting the one vendor ABC had shipped to Amazon's warehouses. Agree with GP. If they cared, they wouldn't comingle. Comingling saves Amazon money, though, as they don't have to track whose goods are in which warehouses.
- didibus 7y agoIt doesn't. Even when commingling, they individually track each good. The only advantage is that comingling is faster and cheaper deliveries, because they can just and you the item nearest to your house.
- toast0 7y agoMost goods aren't individually tracked. If I send three, and you send four of some ASIN to some distribution center, and it is a comingled SKU, to all indications, all seven items are in one bin, and can't be distinguished afterward. Having one bin instead of two saves space (and therefore cost) in the distribution center. If the goods were stored separately, even if they still did buy from any vendor and ship from the most cost effective inventory, they would be able to track down counterfeit goods much more effectively.
- Waterluvian 7y agoThe amount to which they care is proportional to their apparent ability to fix the problem. You'd be amazed how quickly something can get fixed if their company is burning down over it. In this case I expect their response will be just enough to avoid any truly damaging outcomes while not spending any resources beyond that.
- bb88 7y agoI'm in the camp they just don't care. There was a point in time not too long ago where amazon refused to sell Google Chromecasts, but they would sell knock-offs including those that were marked with a "G" in an apparent trademark violation. Some retailers are selling repackaged medical equipment -- in this case cpap masks -- in ziploc bags. There may or may not be anything wrong with the mask itself, but the real bags are high quality packaging and factory sealed -- not a ziploc bag with a sticker on it.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI have seen it many times that companies can fix things rapidly if they really want to. I think they don't care enough, as far as their revenues are going, things are fine, and there is is no easy way to fix this without making less money.
- creato 7y agoThe problem is the long tail of sellers operating on the marketplace. With a long tail of sellers, you get a long tail of fraud and bullshit too. When you search on Amazon for random basic goods, you'll get thousands of results from insane numbers of gibberish sounding sellers. But there might be only a few dozen unique results. It's going to be basically impossible to combat fraud when this is allowed. I'd even consider the "legitimate" case of this (an OEM selling the same product to hundreds/thousands of sellers to resell) to be borderline fraud as well. It's basically reputation/review laundering.
- erik_seaberg 7y agoThis. As a buyer I only ever want Amazon sending me stock they got directly from the OEM, because they're so often better at fulfillment and defect returns.
- Lammy 7y agoThese days when I end up on one of those Amazon search results filled with obviously-identical no-name goods it’s my cue to head over to Aliexpress instead. The product I’m getting is the same garbage, but at least I recalibrate my expectations and even save a few bucks by cutting out one layer of middleman.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoLots of Ali Express experience here, some of the Chinese stuff can be great, it's just hard to know which is which amongst tge sea of good knows what
- imtringued 7y agoI have never understood this argument. I have seen lots of American/Japanese high quality brands that manufacture in China and they often cost an insignificantly higher amount than the chinese equivalent The difference is that I don't have to wait months for the product to arrive and the trusted brand is massively reducing the risk of poor quality because they actually have to follow the QC standards of the developing wolrd. Meanwhile on Aliexpress the truly cheap stuff is often just garbage. No savings there.
- duxup 7y agoI don't think they care. There was a story about a guy who self publishes his own book and on Amazon there are cheap fakes with identical title, cover and etc... Amazon just doesn't do anything.
- anonymousab 7y agoWell, once in a blue moon they'll take action and ban you and your original products for 'copying' the counterfeits.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoProbably after the original competitor hired someone, probably an examz employee, to backchannel the takedown for a princely sum.
- erik_seaberg 7y agoI seem to recall an author complaining about some random on Amazon "selling" a book that the author hadn't finished writing yet.
- sharpneli 7y agoDoesn’t that make Amazon liable for commercial copyright infringement? Cynical person might say that the copyright law is only applicable when people torrent or upload stuff to youtube.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoPersonal, expensive, and hard to evade, liability is the solution. Make Amazon liable for the products they sell and in turn Amazon will move mountains to make their sellers more liable.
- jackyinger 7y agoHey, this title could be easily misconstrued given the prominent US politician. Assuming this is an innocent accident and only pointing it out because I’d misinterpreted it to be a conflict of interest expose.
- chrisseaton 7y agoWarren is a pretty common name. Not everything is about politics.
- underdown 7y agoWarren is a small city in the Northeast part of Rhode island. This is a local news site.
- taxidump 7y agoThe title is pretty descriptive, you're only seeing this because your mind wants to. It's a sign. Fixed spelling
- Stratoscope 7y agoThe title comes directly from the article, which begins with: WARREN, R.I. (WPRI) — Aspects has been in business for decades, manufacturing bird feeders that come with a lifetime guarantee. So in 2016, when a customer called about a defective hummingbird feeder, the Warren-based company took the complaint seriously.
- wingi 7y ago> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. The access is limited since May 2017?
- TylerE 7y agoCan't imagine Euro visitors are...at all...cared about by a US local news outlet.
- retrobox 7y agoMaybe not in general but the issues with Amazon isn’t limited to .com. We get all the same problems with .co.uk, so I’d be interested in reading what happened
- laurentdc 7y agoArchive to the rescue: https://archive.is/TR6HX https://archive.is/TR6HX
- pergadad 7y agoIt's because they don't want to give anyone an option to opt out of data collection - easier to lock out all EU than actually stop/reduce/give choice for data collection.
- TylerE 7y agoIt really isn't. I used to work in IT for a newspaper. They _really_ are hyper-local. They don't went to spend a cent on even out-of-state visitors, much less out-of-continent. Resources are tight, and the ROI is non-existent.
- oneplane 7y agoBut if a law came in to effect that requires them to not abuse customer data in their local area as well, there suddenly would be a 'ROI' on that? Seems to me they chose to simply not care about what data they collect on who from the start and it will bite them in the ass eventually.
- ikeboy 7y agoNot sure about that number - they give no details on how it's calculated and anyways it's presented as being sales, not profits. Edit: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-counterfeit-problem-reached-a-bird-feeder-manufacturer-in-rhode-island/ https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-counterfe... has more details and is where OP ironically appears to be ripping off from. Says 1.5 million is 4% of sales, so they did around 37 million in sales.
- meritt 7y ago> Not sure about that number Based on what? Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" [1]?. The fact that it's revenue and not sales doesn't somehow make the headline false. It's still a loss of revenue. The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers. > where OP ironically appears to be ripping off from It's a local news station. Watch the video. They interviewed the manufacturer. They likely read the original story and decided to bring additional attention to a local business. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- ikeboy 7y ago>Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" Because it's presented without any explanation or context, and it's difficult to see how it could be reasonably estimated. The headline is literally false. Losing revenue, even if that estimate is accurate, is not correctly described as losing money. It's kind of how cops inaccurately report "street value" of confiscated drugs - see e.g. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/drug_bust.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/drug_bust.php >The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers. And this point is wrong, of course. If anything, they go too far - I've seen many victims of their overzealous enforcement and am one myself. There's been many lawsuits by companies that have been blocked from selling despite selling only authentic products. That's hardly consistent with them doing little to nothing.
- melzarei 7y agoLink for EU https://outline.com/zCuTHm https://outline.com/zCuTHm
- tobr 7y ago”Our European visitors are important to us.” I’m trying to imagine how they decided to go with this headline for the screen that tells European visitors to get lost.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIt sounds better than "we don't like your kind here, piss off". Compare this parodic press release: http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2017/12/07/improvements/ http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2017/12/07/improvements/ > In our quest to improve our service for you, the user, we're making it worse. If you're doing something good, you announce that you're doing something good. If you're doing something bad, you announce you're doing something good.
- aritmo 7y agoThe message is that they are not good enough in handling privacy to serve EU customers.
- hgoel 7y agoOr more accurately that they don't make enough from the EU to justify dealing with the GDPR mess.
- StavrosK 7y agoIt's only a mess if you can't be bothered to respect people's privacy.
- perl4ever 7y agoIt appears that "respecting peoples' privacy" currently equates to having an overlay with a button to accept cookies, and a message stating that using the website means accepting <whatever>. So I haven't figured out what the button means, but to preserve maximum uncertainty, I try not to click it.
- Zenst 7y agoFakes/copies have always been an issue for companies, but with the move towards digital platforms, we find we have this odd situation in which we have a legit company umbrellaring fake/copy sellers and able to profit from such sales and yet appear totally immune from any repercussions. But more so, all these transactions are documented, not cash in hand style transactions. So, will we see some company who sells a branded product taking Amazon seems not like a case of if, but when and what angle. Meanwhile, such issues in the digital era get dealt with by politicians grumberling fashionably and such digital domains offing some token informal(non legally binding law) compromise that enables politicians to be seen to be doing there job but the digital companies doing it for them in a way that suits them far better than is appreciated. But thanks to the digital age, all those sales of fake/copy products will be logged and are just a growing liability that Amazon is not completely immune from.
- dba7dba 7y agowe find we have this odd situation in which we have a legit company umbrellaring fake/copy sellers and able to profit from such sales and yet appear totally immune from any repercussions. I've known of many small apparel maker/distributor/seller based out of Los Angeles. Over the years, I heard/read/saw so many Police/Marshall personnel raid these businesses to confiscate fake merchandise as if raiding an illegal drug dealer and treat the owner/workers as if they were drug dealers. Ok, well it doesn't happen every week/month but still a regular occurrence. They were breaking the law and so yes police was sent in. But these law enforcement resource was basically acting on the behest of large businesses like Nike/Gucci/etc. And now, we have Amazon (even bigger than all other businesses) basically enabling fake merchandise sellers to sell fake merchandise (hurting other legitimate businesses) while Amazon gets a cut. But there is no business more powerful than Amazon to force law enforcement to act and raid warehouses and HQ of Amazon. Isn't capitalism wonderful?
- alister 7y agoAlong with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Walmart might have 30 kinds of wall clocks with wood vs plastic frame, with or without Roman numerals, but the actual clock mechanism on the back is the same cheap black box. Home Depot has dozens of kitchen exhaust hoods with well-known brand names, but it looks to me like the internals (fan/filter/exhaust parts) are all made by the same company. A pharmacy gives the illusion of hundreds of different cold medicines, painkillers, and antacids, but it's the same few drugs packaged in hundreds of different ways. I don't know the solution to this. I wish there were some way to signal when stuff is 90% to 99% identical to cut down on pointless duplicate products and/or to make comparisons easier.
- warent 7y agoThe solution starts with manually verifying products. I'm not convinced that it's impossible for Amazon or other stores to have a quality verification system where they have people hired specifically for this purpose. Maybe even a third party could specifically do this. You don't have to do it for every single item, just do it once whenever someone wants to list a product on the platform. Whenever reviews start complain about bogus products, investigate, and if they changed the product from the last time you verified it, remove them from the platform for a period of time.
- destitude 7y agoAmazon has caused this to itself in order to maximize its own short-term profits. In the past 1-3 years their goal has been to reduce their own inventory by shifting it to 3rd party sellers and let them deal with the overhead of inventory. This is why counterfeits and crappy products have been proliferating on Amazon and why I have started to avoid purchasing from Amazon all-together. I wonder if they realize how much damage this is costing them in reputation or if they don't care because it still results in more profit for themselves.
- amelius 7y agoIn a few years, Alibaba will have a better reputation than Amazon.
- azinman2 7y agoBased on what? No name brands, just loads and loads of direct from factory crapware and knock offs in all shapes and sizes.
- meesles 7y agoUnless you only buy hand-crafted goods (do hand-crafted laptops exist?), most of what we consume is direct from factory crapware anyway. I'd rather get it straight from the factory...
- marcosdumay 7y agoWell, for a start, you can choose your supplier (yes, just like Ebay).
- heavyset_go 7y agoWhen it comes to electronics and plastic wares, most of the stuff on Amazon is just white label products from Alibaba suppliers. Most of the time the same stock photos are used in both the Amazon and AliExpress listings.
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- m0zg 7y agoThe most surprising part of this story to me is that someone manages to make millions of dollars on bird feeders.
- themagician 7y agoRevenue, not profit. You can make millions on just about anything. It’s not hard. Making a healthy margin is something else entirely. 3P sellers don’t really care. If they make $5,000 on $1.5m in revenue it’s fine. They don’t do any real work. They are just middle men. They just try to do as much as possible. The item doesn’t matter, the customer doesn’t matter. If their is a listing and they can sell against it and make a few cents per sale that’s good enough. Amazon has created a horrible race to the bottom model and they don’t care either because they benefit as well.
- RandomTisk 7y agoI got my folks a bird feeder a few years ago when they bought a new house. I grew up a few miles from there, remembering only sparrows, blackbirds, robins, etc and on rare occasions a yellow bird, or a brown bird, or red-wing blackbird. But with a bird feeder, it was amazing to see the number of unique birds that show up now every few minutes, birds of all colors that I didn't even know lived in the area.
- perl4ever 7y agoI was in a home improvement store and noticed that a sparrow had found its way to the aisle with the bird seed.
- LegitShady 7y agowhy does a home improvement store have bird seed/
- chihuahua 7y agoBecause these stores usually have a garden section, and bird feeders and bird seed are usually stocked in a garden section of a store. Presumably, the people who solve the optimization problem "given the amount of space available and the buying habits of our customers, how do we optimize our sales volume" have concluded that bird seed is one of the thousands of items they should stock.
- yoz-y 7y agoI am curious about the advice at the end: > Torres said she encourages customers to verify the seller is legitimate before placing any orders. How? Is there some way to verify that a seller on amazon is legitimate among the slew of fake reviews and stock mingling in warehouses?
- joegahona 7y agoI was just asking this to myself today when browsing safety-razor blades on Amazon. (I was not able to buy them directly from the manufacturer’s website.) When I tried to start filtering by who sells it, I just got a bunch of names that meant nothing. I eventually bought them on Walmart’s site because, I guess I trust it more? Some of the comments on Amazon had the dreaded “this has changed recently,” and the last thing I want to do is scrape my face with counterfeit razor blades.
- syshum 7y ago>and stock mingling in warehouses? That is the problem if you are getting Prime Shipping Fulfilled by amazon on a bird feeder, it does not matter which seller you buy from, Amazon will ship you the one that have that is the cheapest to get to you in 2 days or less
- jcoffland 7y agoCustomers saying "this has changed recently" means little. For example, I found such reviews for a pet flea product. When I investigated further I found similar reviews both very recent and going back 4, 6 and up to 8 years. Perhaps there are random bad batches but I suspect that part of the problem is the perception that a product is different. People often fail to recognize other factors such as changes in their own usage patterns, or in this case, changes in their local flea population.
- joegahona 7y agoIt might mean little for a flea circus or bags to pick up my dog's poop, but for something I'm using on or in my body, it gives me pause.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI'm thinking this will be one of the ways that Amazon can be "disrupted." If Walmart (for example) re-tooled their online platform such that they kept counterfeits out and rapidly identified bad actors, the trust in their platform could grow against the name recognition of Amazon. At that point Amazon would be stuck playing catch up and that makes it hard to innovate. Also, its possible a completely new brand could be born, sort of the 'Angies List' of online retail.
- bjornjaja 7y agoI think they should be disrupted with a decentralized solution where people buy and produce locally. None of this garbage sold en masse
- cardamomo 7y agoI agree that they should be be replaced by something like what you describe, but could they be disrupted that way in reality?
- erikpukinskis 7y agoYes, they just need one feature which Amazon could never have in order to disrupt it. They also need feature/price parity. I wonder if, to reach price parity, you would have to anti-sell as much as you sell. So people’s overall bills go down because they have less stuff but everything they have they really need. The un-match-able feature could be personal attention from people in your local economy. That also increases the price so there would have to be excellent marketing to help keep your dollars in that economy: you’d get your beer from a local distributor, and they would also market other local products to you. This is extremely difficult to manage now, so part of the decentralized system would have to be helping make that easier. Essentially, the killer feature is anti-McDonaldsificstion. McDonalds isn’t actually the best possible food in most people, but it is the best possible food you could sell most people and still channel the profits through one bank account. Decentralized platforms, by not having that requirement, can offer something better.
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- ecommerceguy 7y ago>>In a statement on its website, Amazon also said its employees “work hard every day to help ensure all products offered in our store are safe and authentic.” Bullshit. The front line employees that receive inbound product don't enforce any policy and actually Amazon encourages to deal with disputes only after a product is sold, shipped and a customer complains. That's the Bezos way. Fact. Let's discuss grocery products in glass containers real quick if anyone wants to argue... I admit, we'd sell counterfeit products if I didn't have morals. We push all the AMZ limits we can. I could write a book on this subject.
- dman 7y agoI am surprised Amazon has not run into Food safety issues / lawsuits by now.
- mschuster91 7y agoHard to ship fake perishable goods via Amazon. Food fraud is way more lucrative on bigger scales.
- ecommerceguy 7y agoYou'd be surprised how much 3rd party grocery is sold via FBA... It's a nice income stream done correctly.
- dman 7y agoDoesnt have to be perishable. Things like Biscuits, Cereals, Nuts, Dates, ground items of various kinds etc.
- ecommerceguy 7y agoAs frequently as I've seen BBQ sauce in glass containers, for instance, 1 starred as shattered on delivery, I am too. To be fair, these items should not have been placed within FBA in the first place, according to "policy". Inbound employees are supposed to filter products for policy violations (specifically in this instance liquid in glass containers over 4ozs). Not the employees fault..?, they are overwhelmed. Just 1 of many examples we run into as a fulfillment service. Merry Christmas everyone!
- chmaynard 7y agoThe underlying problem, it seems to me, is that Amazon made a decision early on to do very little curation of the products they sell. During the years when they were mostly selling books from established publishers, this wasn't a big issue. When Amazon began selling everything under the sun, the number of vendors exploded. In retrospect, Amazon should have made a big effort to carefully curate all these vendors and their products before listing them on Amazon.com. But that would have been very expensive and no one was telling Amazon they had do that. The Amazon approach is to move fast and capture market share, without much regard for product quality or ethical concerns. Unfortunately, the rest of the tech industry seems to be following their lead.
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- jameson 7y agoWhy aren't these counterfeits and/or Amazon getting sued by the original companies? Isn't this just a market competition if other company's able to make cheaper product out of original idea and does not violate the law? I was under impression that any product without an IP (copyright, patent, etc) is subject to "counterfeits" case like this. p.s. I'm not a lawyer
- lozenge 7y agoI couldn't read the article due to EU regulations. The counterfeits are probably from China and China doesn't respect foreign IP, and they can probably open hundreds of shell businesses anyway so suing one or Amazon removing one will not help. Amazon has armies of lawyers and will argue they acted whenever they knew something was counterfeit, but as the website is automated they did not know ahead of time. Counterfeit means it is violating trademark IP, meaning riding on the quality reputation of the brand while not meeting it.
- heavyset_go 7y ago> Why aren't these counterfeits and/or Amazon getting sued by the original companies? They need to know the counterfeits exist in the first place. Amazon doesn't even give the customer the option to mark their returns as counterfeits. This is why I suggest that if you encounter a counterfeit product on Amazon, you should document it and report it to the company whose product was counterfeited.
- jcmeyrignac 7y agoLVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) is one of the clients of the company where I work. LVMH fights hard against counterfeits. Amazon is so bad at handling counterfeits that LVMH decided to never give even one penny to Amazon, so you cannot find their products on Amazon. And the funny thing is that we cannot use AWS because of this rule!
- nikanj 7y ago> Amazon is so bad at handling counterfeits that LVMH decided to never give even one penny to Amazon, so you cannot find their products on Amazon. I bet I can find plenty of counterfeit ones, though
- jdkee 7y agoSimply put, it is not in Amazon’s interest to police counterfeits as it is not in Facebook’s interest to police speech.
- erichurkman 7y agoTheir quality control, or lack thereof, also extends into Prime Now. It is now a game when I get a Prime Now delivery: what did they replace without telling me, what products did they get wrong, and most critically: what did they overbill me for? It's now to a point I weigh everything coming in, and over half of the items are off weight, some egregiously so (0.2 oz of jalapeno, but billed for 1 pound; .5 pound of chicken but billed for 3; a sliver of broccoli but billed for 2 pounds; the list is endless).
- ReverseCold 7y ago> It's now to a point I weigh everything coming in Instead of just not using the service? If it's not bad enough for you to stop then Amazon seems to be making a good business decision.
- erichurkman 7y agoTime investment to weigh and verify incoming items (did they mistakenly buy green cabbage instead of romaine?) is still significantly less, even when factoring in the 5 or 6 taps to refund orders via my phone. I've tried the other services (Instacart, local stores) but they are even _worse_.
- smabie 7y agoWhy are you buying food on Amazon? It’s kind of weird.
- erichurkman 7y agoAmazon has Prime Now, a grocery delivery service mostly via Whole Foods and a few other stores in major metro areas. Grocery delivery isn't anything new in big cities, but their UI and selection is far above anyone else. (Unfortunately.)
- 34679 7y agoMost major grocery stores allow you to order delivery directly through their website now. There's no need to involve a 3rd party and their markup.
- fortran77 7y agoI'm not being hyperbolic when I say that Jeff Bezo's online store should be forced to compensate Warren for all their lost business now and into the future, and to make sure that everyone knows they've been enabling the knock-off business. It's outrageous that Bezos enables this sort of "collateral damage." If he can't stop this sort of thing, he should be shut down.
- peter_retief 7y agoIn my simple understanding of the law isn't Amazon liable to pay damages?
- wayanon 7y agoI would enjoy a Netflix documentary on this whole topic.
- naithemilkman 7y agoI remember reading about Birkenstock having the same issue at a much larger scale.
- Router 7y agowarren buffett's startup ?
- halfjoking 7y agoReading the headline I was thinking.... no wonder Elizabeth Warren REALLY HATES Amazon. She's determined to break up Amazon because they cost her $1.5 million!
- Router 7y agoShe could've had a nice dinner with that money.
- linksnapzz 7y agoWarren...the smallest town in the smallest county in the smallest state. I think Aspects is still in the same little brick building on Child Street across from the drycleaners.
- jlengrand 7y ago"Our European visitors are important to us. This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws." -> Well, not that important that you can just stop the tracking for a second for us apparently :S.
- djaychela 7y agoFunnily enough, I was just thinking exactly that - and wondering just how much tracking that site does that it's not straightforward for them to stop doing it (and/or deal with data they had previously collected). Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to GDPR that some non-EU companies have adopted and has now stuck?
- jlengrand 7y agoBoth options are indeed plausible. I'd also add the "we don't get enough of those visitors that we care even taking the five minutes it would take to stop the tracking for those" or the "wow, stop tracking for a given crowd sounds diificult to achieve".
- Normal_gaussian 7y agoThrough a friend I met a solicitor working at a firm that had a temporary endeavour with an acturial/accounting firm during peak GDPR advice. As a British firm they specialised in advising non-European firms on whether to and from where to get GDPR advice. In essence their process was to woo client with quick turnaround, get whatever books they could, determine how much money the client was making in the EU + a super rough estimate of likely growth, and return one of roughly a dozen canned answers. Whole thing was taking them less than half a days work per client per two person team. The kind of company that takes advice like that isn't likely to review the policy anytime soon.
- GraemeL 7y agouBlock Origin blocked 15 items on the page for me (20%) when I bypassed their geoblock. Not great, not terrible. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in what was filtered so it's probably just knee-jerk.
- ikurei 7y agoWeb Archive link for EU citizens (the site blocks access from EU to avoid having to comply with data protection laws): https://web.archive.org/web/20191226100007/https://www.wpri.com/news/call-12-for-action/counterfeits-on-amazon-cost-warren-bird-feeder-business-1-5m/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191226100007/https://www.wpri....
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI wonder how much Trump really hates Bezos. If Trump really does hate Bezos, he could go on TV and give a national address stating that Amazon has repeatedly been facilitating the illegal import of dangerous products from China. In addition, this has persisted despite repeated complaints. Therefore to protect innocent Americans, US Customs has seized all Amazon inventory at all warehouses and will be examining each item to check if it is authentic and passes the relevant safety standards.
- LegitShady 7y agocan we not make everything about trump and fantasizing about him going on tv/twitter etc to bash a specific company for a specific problem? Doesn't seem realistic or useful.
- Snetry 7y agoSadly the site is blocked in the EU :(
- fnord77 7y agosee lots of reviews lately on amazon for various products where people are complaining about counterfeits. stuff you wouldn't think would be worth counterfeiting
- charwalker 7y agoAnother company that will drop Amazon due to heavy losses and open another area where Amazon can sell its own product or chosen son in its place. Amazon is like Youtube. It's a great place to establish your brand and gain popularity but you better have a private site to fall back on to host your content and store.
- 34679 7y agoStart reporting counterfeits at https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Report-Fake-Goods https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Report-Fake-Goods The following was taken from the DOJ's "Reporting Intellectual Property Crime: A Guide for Victims of Counterfeiting, Copyright Infringement, and Theft of Trade Secrets": "Counterfeit Trademarks: The Trademark Counterfeiting Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2320(a), provides penalties of up to ten years imprisonment and a $2 million fine for a defendant who “intentionally traffics or attempts to traffic in goods or services and knowingly uses a counterfeit mark on or in connection with such goods or services.” The key word there is "traffic". "Counterfeit Labeling: The counterfeit labeling provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 2318 prohibit trafficking in counterfeit labels designed to be affixed to phono records, copies of computer programs, motion pictures and audiovisual works, as well as trafficking in counterfeit documentation or packaging for computer programs. Violations are punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine." Again, "trafficking". Just need to prove the "knowingly" part, which can't be done without establishing a clear pattern of trafficking in counterfeits. "Why Should You Report Intellectual Property Crime? Intellectual property is an increasingly important part of the United States' economy, representing its fastest growing sector. For example, in 2002 copyright industries alone contributed approximately 6%, or $626 billion, to America’s gross domestic product, and employed 4% of America’s workforce, according to an economic study commissioned by the International Intellectual Property Alliance. As the nation continues to shift from an industrial economy to an information-based economy, the assets of the country are increasingly based in intellectual property. In recognition of this trend, the Department of Justice is waging the most aggressive campaign against the theft and counterfeiting of intellectual property in its history. The priority of criminal intellectual property investigations and prosecutions nationwide has been increased, and additional resources on both the prosecutive and investigative levels have been brought to bear on the growing problem of intellectual property theft. Effective prosecution of intellectual property crime, however, also requires substantial assistance from its victims.." https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olp/docs/ip_task_force_report.pdf#page=63 https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olp/docs/ip_task... From: https://www.stopfakes.gov/welcome https://www.stopfakes.gov/welcome