9 ms·

Amazon is extremely shady and it doesn't just hurt companies like PopSockets. Amazon has a counterfeits problem and it's bad for customers. It is totally obvi

Amazon is extremely shady and it doesn't just hurt companies like PopSockets. Amazon has a counterfeits problem and it's bad for customers. It is totally obvious now that Amazon embraces cheap Chinese knockoffs, and I'm sick of having to send them back.

alistairSH 7y ago
So, stop buying them? As long as people continue to value absolute cheapest crap over quality, even if it means frequent returns, Amazon will continue to do what it does.
- echelon 7y ago
  That doesn't stop other people from buying them. Your dis-involvement will not stop the abuse, which is why the government must step in and stop them.
  - the_gastropod 7y ago
    Yes yes. But these things aren't mutually exclusive. Every extra dime of profit you willingly give Amazon is another they have to lobby and fight against government regulation. We can fight these battles on two fronts: stop voluntarily giving Amazon your money, and demand action from your elected representatives.
    - echelon 7y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree. I just take opposition to those who say Amazon is doing nothing wrong and that I should just stop buying from them and that somehow makes everything better.
      - alistairSH 7y ago
        Where did I ever say that? I simply said stop doing business with them. If you want to follow up with your Congressman, great.
- arprocter 7y ago
  The issue is that the listing is for a genuine product, but then you get sent a fake (even when 'fulfilled by Amazon') Happened to me once with a watch strap, but the price wasn't high enough for me to go through the hassle of returning it
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    And I guarantee that that strap had a >4.5 star rating. The whole site is nothing but >4.5 star ratings now, hmmmm.
    - genericone 7y ago
      4.5 stars with +1000 reviews for a brand that has only existed for a year.
      - arkitaip 7y ago
        Another fraud pattern allowed by Amazon. They simply should allow sellers to modify major aspects of a product listing once it's been published.
      - tartoran 7y ago
        And if you look at the reviews they reference a different product or are too generic to be taken seriously. Amazon has allowed this to happen on a big scale. I personally avoid Amazon now.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > Happened to me once with a watch strap, but the price wasn't high enough for me to go through the hassle of returning it In my experience, Amazon will just refund cheap items without even asking for you to return anything. I have no idea how many things I've returned to Amazon over the years, but it's a lot - easily many dozens of products. I'd guess about 20% of the time, because the item is cheap, they just let me keep it and give me back my money.
    - 7y ago
- jamisteven 7y ago
  exactly.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I never agreed to buy a Chinese fake version of product X because it is Y% cheaper. Quite the contrary, I would pay more if I get the original, every single time I place an order. Amazon stopped being an option for anything serious or easily faked. I simply go to the physical stores or order it from online stores that do not have counterfeit problems. I could not give 2 shits about 10 cent price differences, which is usually the difference.
- csdreamer7 7y ago
  A lot of people can't tell the difference between fakes and the real thing. Sometimes it is obvious, heavy cotton shirts that feel thin to the touch. Other times it is not. Some overseas manufacturers will put corn starch in a shirt to make it feel thicker then it is. Wash it several times and the shirt feels thin. Allowing counterfeits destroys the incentive for people to make quality products. Why build a brand when someone will sell a fake for half the price and people will complain about it on your website? Allowing a giant marketplace to willfully infringe products harms the market as a whole.
- vehementi 7y ago
  Oh boy it's the hourly "don't punish the fraudsters, just try to teach a billion people to work around this particular fraud too, and blame them when they don't" post
Marsymars 7y ago
I was recently searching for 1TB flash drives. Currently, when I search for "1tb flash drive" on amazon.com, after ads and an Amazon's Choice banner, the top result is a listing for a $20 product: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Computer/dp/B07NY9WR28/ https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...
- mrtksn 7y ago
  This was my prime reason to cancel my Amazon Prime. For 20$ of revenue, people are willing to destroy other people's work and memories. In my case, it was a fake Kingston SD Card and luckily used it only for a Rasberry pi. It cost me only a day of figuring out what I am doing wrong but easily it could have cost me my photos from a trip to a remote place. Of course, Amazon would deal with that as if it was 20$(or whatever) issue and everything is supposed to be O.K. when you get a refund.
  - RomanBob 7y ago
    You should test your SD cards as you receive them. Many applications that can do that. Even legit SD cards from well known manufacturers are not without defects.
- artursapek 7y ago
  The seller also has a "Digital Scale" that appears to be a re-purposed product listing page for a USB drive (based on reviews) https://www.amazon.com/Metal-256GB-USB-Flash-Drive/dp/B076BDNTBT?ref_=ast_bbp_dp#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Metal-256GB-USB-Flash-Drive/dp/B076BD... Very strange.
  - pridkett 7y ago
    This is common. Amazon lets sellers tweak their product pages. What unscrupulous settlers have realized is that you can slowly change one product into another and keep the reviews. This allows them to have fake products with hundreds of verified purchases.
- 7y ago
xvector 7y ago
Are there any alternatives you use? I try to buy the highest quality version of whatever product I'm looking for and this is completely impossible on Amazon. Every product is a cheap Chinese clone and the next 100 products are the same exact thing with a different color scheme. It's a nightmare.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  For electronics, B&H or BestBuy. For outdoor goods REI or any of the Backcountry online stores. Or direct from the manufacturer. My typical shopping pattern is to search for whatever I want, scan several review sites (realizing many of them are paid to pimp stuff), figure out which brand/model I want, then start googling.
dan-robertson 7y ago
An issue I have with Amazon these days is with books. Many slightly obscure books these days come print-on-demand rather than from an earlier, larger offset-printing run. I don’t know if the original publishers do this service or if the books are counterfeit too (I remember reading complaints here about low quality copies of books which the commenter thought were counterfeit. Though I’m not so convinced of that) Print on demand means that the book is only printed when (or shortly before) your order comes in. This reduces the risk of not being able to sell all the copies in a larger offset run and of storage but at a higher per-unit printing cost. I typically recognise these books by soft edges on letters (even dots of ink around the letters giving a fuzzy underline) and blurry diagrams. This is particularly bad for small labels or footnotes. I also saw some absolutely awful photographs that looked like they came out of an inkjet printer running low on ink (ie not great resolution and big stripes of off colours running across the image). Another sign is a sparse first page (the one listing information about the publishers and print run), or even a blank first page with a little printers name in the back. The kind of offset printing one normally sees in books leaves much crisper edges (I think the ink is more sticky and more shiny too; perhaps sitting ever so slightly above the page rather than feathered into it). Plates also somehow look much better. I don’t know how they are made. I wish there were a way to know whether or not you’re going to get a print-on-demand book because often the quality is very poor and I’d be willing to invest time looking elsewhere for an offset printed copy. But perhaps I get more print on demand books than I know. Indeed I read that Amazon’s own print on demand service produces very high quality results and if thats true it would probably be a good thing for getting consistent quality books from Amazon. Certainly all the poor quality books I’ve ever gotten were print-on-demand (or digital printing which, as far as I can tell, is basically the same thing).
- cgriswald 7y ago
  My last book purchase was print on demand. I knew Amazon did that for some titles but I assumed they’d tell you. If it said somewhere, it wasn’t obvious. The book arrived with the printing offset vertically by about an inch so the bottom margin was huge and the top margin just under the top of the page. It’s not unreadable but it’s a pain to read and I’m looking for the title elsewhere and just not buying books from Amazon again. It’s really not excusable. Either there are no humans in the loop or some actually looked at this and decided to send it anyway. I’ve already got a list of products I won’t buy from them but I never thought books would be on the list.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
The article says they mentioned gray market suppliers. Gray market is not the same as "knock offs" or the black market. Gray market usually just means "sold legally without manufacturer warranty."
JamalW 7y ago
I have purchased hundreds of items from Amazon and have yet to discover one of the items being fake. I think this problem is blown out of proportion by consumers who lack common sense or are proponents of further regulation of Amazon. I suppose the proponents’ argument is we have an obligation to these consumers who can’t differentiate between junk and non-junk because not everyone has two eyes and a brain behind them. Some people are blind etc. which actually is a fair point now that I think about it.. Amazon could require all sellers to send in their product for review to confirm it’s validity. This would add additional costs but the costs could potentially be offset from the positive response from consumers who have had issues discerning product realness.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  I find that it depends a lot on what you buy. I have not noticed any fakes on regular household items. However, I buy a lot of cables and adapters because of what I do and for those items it's a problem.

alistairSH 7y ago

So, stop buying them? As long as people continue to value absolute cheapest crap over quality, even if it means frequent returns, Amazon will continue to do what it does.

echelon 7y ago
That doesn't stop other people from buying them. Your dis-involvement will not stop the abuse, which is why the government must step in and stop them.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  Yes yes. But these things aren't mutually exclusive. Every extra dime of profit you willingly give Amazon is another they have to lobby and fight against government regulation. We can fight these battles on two fronts: stop voluntarily giving Amazon your money, and demand action from your elected representatives.
  - echelon 7y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. I just take opposition to those who say Amazon is doing nothing wrong and that I should just stop buying from them and that somehow makes everything better.
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      Where did I ever say that? I simply said stop doing business with them. If you want to follow up with your Congressman, great.
arprocter 7y ago
The issue is that the listing is for a genuine product, but then you get sent a fake (even when 'fulfilled by Amazon') Happened to me once with a watch strap, but the price wasn't high enough for me to go through the hassle of returning it
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  And I guarantee that that strap had a >4.5 star rating. The whole site is nothing but >4.5 star ratings now, hmmmm.
  - genericone 7y ago
    4.5 stars with +1000 reviews for a brand that has only existed for a year.
    - arkitaip 7y ago
      Another fraud pattern allowed by Amazon. They simply should allow sellers to modify major aspects of a product listing once it's been published.
    - tartoran 7y ago
      And if you look at the reviews they reference a different product or are too generic to be taken seriously. Amazon has allowed this to happen on a big scale. I personally avoid Amazon now.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > Happened to me once with a watch strap, but the price wasn't high enough for me to go through the hassle of returning it In my experience, Amazon will just refund cheap items without even asking for you to return anything. I have no idea how many things I've returned to Amazon over the years, but it's a lot - easily many dozens of products. I'd guess about 20% of the time, because the item is cheap, they just let me keep it and give me back my money.
  - 7y ago
jamisteven 7y ago
exactly.
StreamBright 7y ago
I never agreed to buy a Chinese fake version of product X because it is Y% cheaper. Quite the contrary, I would pay more if I get the original, every single time I place an order. Amazon stopped being an option for anything serious or easily faked. I simply go to the physical stores or order it from online stores that do not have counterfeit problems. I could not give 2 shits about 10 cent price differences, which is usually the difference.
csdreamer7 7y ago
A lot of people can't tell the difference between fakes and the real thing. Sometimes it is obvious, heavy cotton shirts that feel thin to the touch. Other times it is not. Some overseas manufacturers will put corn starch in a shirt to make it feel thicker then it is. Wash it several times and the shirt feels thin. Allowing counterfeits destroys the incentive for people to make quality products. Why build a brand when someone will sell a fake for half the price and people will complain about it on your website? Allowing a giant marketplace to willfully infringe products harms the market as a whole.
vehementi 7y ago
Oh boy it's the hourly "don't punish the fraudsters, just try to teach a billion people to work around this particular fraud too, and blame them when they don't" post

Marsymars 7y ago

I was recently searching for 1TB flash drives. Currently, when I search for "1tb flash drive" on amazon.com, after ads and an Amazon's Choice banner, the top result is a listing for a $20 product: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Computer/dp/B07NY9WR28/ https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...

mrtksn 7y ago
This was my prime reason to cancel my Amazon Prime. For 20$ of revenue, people are willing to destroy other people's work and memories. In my case, it was a fake Kingston SD Card and luckily used it only for a Rasberry pi. It cost me only a day of figuring out what I am doing wrong but easily it could have cost me my photos from a trip to a remote place. Of course, Amazon would deal with that as if it was 20$(or whatever) issue and everything is supposed to be O.K. when you get a refund.
- RomanBob 7y ago
  You should test your SD cards as you receive them. Many applications that can do that. Even legit SD cards from well known manufacturers are not without defects.
artursapek 7y ago
The seller also has a "Digital Scale" that appears to be a re-purposed product listing page for a USB drive (based on reviews) https://www.amazon.com/Metal-256GB-USB-Flash-Drive/dp/B076BDNTBT?ref_=ast_bbp_dp#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Metal-256GB-USB-Flash-Drive/dp/B076BD... Very strange.
- pridkett 7y ago
  This is common. Amazon lets sellers tweak their product pages. What unscrupulous settlers have realized is that you can slowly change one product into another and keep the reviews. This allows them to have fake products with hundreds of verified purchases.
7y ago

xvector 7y ago

Are there any alternatives you use? I try to buy the highest quality version of whatever product I'm looking for and this is completely impossible on Amazon. Every product is a cheap Chinese clone and the next 100 products are the same exact thing with a different color scheme. It's a nightmare.

alistairSH 7y ago
For electronics, B&H or BestBuy. For outdoor goods REI or any of the Backcountry online stores. Or direct from the manufacturer. My typical shopping pattern is to search for whatever I want, scan several review sites (realizing many of them are paid to pimp stuff), figure out which brand/model I want, then start googling.

dan-robertson 7y ago

An issue I have with Amazon these days is with books. Many slightly obscure books these days come print-on-demand rather than from an earlier, larger offset-printing run. I don’t know if the original publishers do this service or if the books are counterfeit too (I remember reading complaints here about low quality copies of books which the commenter thought were counterfeit. Though I’m not so convinced of that) Print on demand means that the book is only printed when (or shortly before) your order comes in. This reduces the risk of not being able to sell all the copies in a larger offset run and of storage but at a higher per-unit printing cost. I typically recognise these books by soft edges on letters (even dots of ink around the letters giving a fuzzy underline) and blurry diagrams. This is particularly bad for small labels or footnotes. I also saw some absolutely awful photographs that looked like they came out of an inkjet printer running low on ink (ie not great resolution and big stripes of off colours running across the image). Another sign is a sparse first page (the one listing information about the publishers and print run), or even a blank first page with a little printers name in the back. The kind of offset printing one normally sees in books leaves much crisper edges (I think the ink is more sticky and more shiny too; perhaps sitting ever so slightly above the page rather than feathered into it). Plates also somehow look much better. I don’t know how they are made. I wish there were a way to know whether or not you’re going to get a print-on-demand book because often the quality is very poor and I’d be willing to invest time looking elsewhere for an offset printed copy. But perhaps I get more print on demand books than I know. Indeed I read that Amazon’s own print on demand service produces very high quality results and if thats true it would probably be a good thing for getting consistent quality books from Amazon. Certainly all the poor quality books I’ve ever gotten were print-on-demand (or digital printing which, as far as I can tell, is basically the same thing).

cgriswald 7y ago
My last book purchase was print on demand. I knew Amazon did that for some titles but I assumed they’d tell you. If it said somewhere, it wasn’t obvious. The book arrived with the printing offset vertically by about an inch so the bottom margin was huge and the top margin just under the top of the page. It’s not unreadable but it’s a pain to read and I’m looking for the title elsewhere and just not buying books from Amazon again. It’s really not excusable. Either there are no humans in the loop or some actually looked at this and decided to send it anyway. I’ve already got a list of products I won’t buy from them but I never thought books would be on the list.

all_blue_chucks 7y ago

The article says they mentioned gray market suppliers. Gray market is not the same as "knock offs" or the black market. Gray market usually just means "sold legally without manufacturer warranty."

JamalW 7y ago

I have purchased hundreds of items from Amazon and have yet to discover one of the items being fake. I think this problem is blown out of proportion by consumers who lack common sense or are proponents of further regulation of Amazon. I suppose the proponents’ argument is we have an obligation to these consumers who can’t differentiate between junk and non-junk because not everyone has two eyes and a brain behind them. Some people are blind etc. which actually is a fair point now that I think about it.. Amazon could require all sellers to send in their product for review to confirm it’s validity. This would add additional costs but the costs could potentially be offset from the positive response from consumers who have had issues discerning product realness.

metalliqaz 7y ago
I find that it depends a lot on what you buy. I have not noticed any fakes on regular household items. However, I buy a lot of cables and adapters because of what I do and for those items it's a problem.