22 ms·

Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

505 points by shortweb3 6y ago

crb002 6y ago
File a complaint with the Iowa AG Consumer Protection https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/about-us/divisions/consumer-protection https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/about-us/divisions/consu... Possible lien on that new massive Bondurant warehouse will get their attention.
vorpalhex 6y ago
So he had $1.5m in merchandise that was totally authentic, sent it all to Amazon and yet couldn't reclaim it? And he has no insurance on literally a million and a half of clothing? How did he go from holding $1.5M of merch for over a year to being homeless and having to couch surf? So, I had this $2M bridge up in Wisconsin, but Elon Musk took it out with a cybertruck one night after a few too many mimosas and...
- Johnny555 6y ago
  Is there any insurance that would pay for merchandise that Amazon destroyed because they determined that it's fake? Why would the insurance company take his side when they could just side with Amazon and save $1.5M? He can produce invoices that show he bought $1.5M of legit merchandise, but how can he prove that what he sent to Amazon was not fake?
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    He can show invoices that are over a year old. Which means that for at least a year, he held _at least_ two cargo containers of high end clothing somewhere before selling them in bulk on Amazon. He has no warehouses, no physical storefront, nothing - that doesn't strike you as strange for someone with 1.5M of merchandise? That is a _ton_ of merchandise both in terms of physical bulk and space, and in cost to have sitting around. Unless he's doing tens of millions of sales a year, that is way too much inventory to have at rest. Insurance could tell you nothing was ever covered and never spend a dime - but insurance is a heavily audited industry and at the very least they would do an investigation. Keep in mind, it's not like Amazon got in a few cargo containers of high end clothing and fed them into a shredder - they kept in a warehouse and sold it and got enough complaints about them not being genuine articles that they de-shelved them from inventory, gave him 30 days to retrieve them and only then after his refusal had them destroyed. For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes. Which think of this in reverse - if Amazon told you that you needed to retrieve your $1.5M of merchandise in 30 days or it would be destroyed, would you just roll the dice on that? Even if you can't afford freight, you'd still go haul as much as you can in whatever you drive and hock it on the corner. The only reason you would let Amazon bulk destroy merchandise (with significant notice and several reminders from them, after signing a contract that pre-dictates out the terms of rejected merchandise), the only reason you would let merchandise sit like that, is if it has no significant value. When the cost of freight exceeds the cost of goods - then yeah, don't freight it and absorb the loss because it's less damage.
    - ikeboy 6y ago
      The invoices for the particular product was a year old. But it could be the majority of that inventory was turning over every 90 days, which would mean he was selling 500k/month. >For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes. The system is automated. A destroy order gets put in, then a warehouse employee goes and fulfils that order without knowing or caring why it was placed. Sellers can place destroy orders as well.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Why would insurance ever side with a person making a claim? It would be more cost effective to always deny claims regardless of legitimacy Answer: Because contracts and if the insurer breaches them courts get involved and penalties get handed out.
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      "Insured claims that they shipped $1.5M of merchandise to Amazon. Amazon claimed merchandise was counterfeit and destroyed merchandise after given the insured multiple attempts to retrieve merchandise which were not acted on. In the absence of any evidence that the now destroyed goods were legitimate, we are denying compensation for this claim." He, of course, can try to sue his insurance company to pay the claim (happens all the time), but it's expensive and he's not guaranteed to win.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Indeed in this situation he's unlikely to win because he is pretty clearly in the wrong and his story is rediculous. My point is just that the insurance company can't just arbitrarily decide to side with amazon because they feel it (for that matter, amazon isn't really a party when it comes to the insurance) they have to look at the evidence and facts of the situation.
        Johnny555 6y ago
        My point is that the last party to have had possession of his merchandise claimed it was counterfeit. The evidence is he shipped the merchandise to Amazon, Amazon said it was counterfeit and if he didn't product evidence to the contrary, they'd either destroy it or he could retrieve it, and he chose not to retrieve it. I really don't see why insurance would pay out under these circumstances.
        didibus 6y ago
        I think OP means, if it's logical and correct for the insurance not to pay, it was probably logical and correct for Amazon to destroy it as well.
numpad0 6y ago
Another Marketplace seller blamed for commingled fakes case?
- Johnny555 6y ago
  If his story is true, it doesn't even sound like Amazon had any evidence that his merchandise was fake. One person didn't like the fit and suggested that it could be fake, another complained about a damaged box and again thought that meant it was fake, and the other two didn't like the way it was packed. For all we know, the complaints were from a competitor that knew exactly what would happen.
  - dsabanin 6y ago
    Amazon could've just bought some and checked it?
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      They had it in their inventory. They could look at what they ship out.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  I don’t see any accusation that comingling is the cause of the problem. The seller didn’t deny that he sent the items with the quality complaints. The problem, according to Amazon, is the seller has dodgy receipts. Or according to the seller, the problem is Amazon is too hard on alleged counterfeiters.
- justusw 6y ago
  I have had the issue myself, receiving the wrong article when buying through FBA. And the only option Amazon gives you is to return the article, instead of allowing you to receive the “correct” version of the article instead.
hevelvarik 6y ago
This is a case for the courts. The article is completely one sided, and there’s no way to know whether or not some or much or most of the merchandise was counterfeit. He does admit to ignoring up to 11 notices that his inventory would be destroyed if left unclaimed. He mentions conflicting dates for the notices but we’ve no way of knowing to make of that. I don’t know what to say other that I read the piece with some interest and for all know it’s a work of fiction, but heh I clicked.
- justusw 6y ago
  Don’t forget that sellers agree to an arbitration clause, so a legal recourse in court is impossible.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alliao 6y ago
    have always wanted to know, how watertight are those clauses? surely legal recourse is some sort of right that'd trump a lot of these type of boiler plate contracts?
    - ikeboy 6y ago
      Courts have consistently held up Amazon's arbitration clause for sellers.
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        US courts treat commercial litigation and consumer/personal differently. Commercial is "letter of the contract" (you should have talked to your lawyer before signing), whereas consumer has to be reasonable to the non-expert public in the long run, and is also subject to tons of social justice goals.
        bleepblorp 6y ago
yeneek 6y ago
Selling on Amazon is really hard. Just one fake product claim from a customer can make your seller account blocked. And because customer is always right, seller has to prove product validity.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Im ok with the onus being on the seller to prove they are selling real goods.
  - haasted 6y ago
    Quite the attack vector for competitors, though.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      If you're not shady its pretty easy to prove your legit. Real offline bussinesses have to keep records too, and the same attack can happen in the real world since selling counterfeit goods is a crime (harder to get away with false report though in the physical world)
      - sct202 6y ago
        Records though can be messy across businesses (retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer). A simple example would be if the purchase order id could be entered in different formats like if one vendor has dashes (like [customer]-[order number]) and then that PO id is entered without dashes at another system. If you do a simple search or table join you aren't going to get a match, and if the person who was asked to provide the records doesn't go the extra step to do the search again you suddenly have a lot of issues.
ethanwillis 6y ago
The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we're now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can't even understand what you're saying.
- grishka 6y ago
  Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.
  - Google234 6y ago
    Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.
    - chabad360 6y ago
      It's not that it's favoritism, it's just a way to trigger a manual review...
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
    - 6y ago
carlsborg 6y ago
How do sellers track down and get GTINs for this volume of apparel?
chaostheory 6y ago
“ The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners.”
- anakaine 6y ago
  But did they match the record of the wholesaler?
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    A lot of higher-end brands receive records back from the wholesalers too, so they can a) have a paper trail to determine if products are counterfeit or not, and b) blur the distinction between "counterfeit" and "not sold through official channels" which helps prevent undercutting of the retail price.
- robryan 6y ago
  May have been grey market goods, which is bound to be problematic on Amazon for branded high end fashion.
shajznnckfke 6y ago
There are a lot of complaints about allegedly fake merchandise on Amazon and people asking for a crackdown. This is what the other side of that story looks like. The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario. Being a proper retailer and sourcing goods from reputable sources, performing quality control, and then reselling them to the public without the commingling nonsense also avoids this scenario.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    What does comingling have to do with it? Apparently Amazon was able to destroy this seller’s merchandise specifically, so it doesn’t sound like there was a problem identifying it among commingled inventory. I’m getting the impression from the comments here that a lot of people just have an axe to grind about commingling even if there’s no clear connection to the issue at hand (people do seem to bring it up on all sorts of unrelated stories about Amazon).
    - adinisom 6y ago
      Comingling means the buyer can't vet the seller so it's entirely on Amazon to ensure the goods aren't counterfeit. As you say, Amazon was able to identify the merchant specifically but wasn't able to determine whether the goods are genuine. If the goods weren't comingled, this would be less Amazon's problem and the goods wouldn't be in Amazon's warehouse so at least the seller would still have his inventory if Amazon blocks his products.
      - shajznnckfke 6y ago
        You can use Amazon for fulfillment without participating in commingled inventory. In that case, Amazon would still have possession of your inventory, and if you didn’t cooperate when they tried to return it to you, it might end up getting destroyed. If Amazon didn’t offer fulfillment as a service, and just bought product from suppliers to sell, this same issue can arise - the supplier can deliver items which seem possibly fraudulent. Then Amazon will fight with the supplier about returning those items and depending on what kind of contracts are in place, could end up destroying them (this seems to be essentially what happened here).
yalogin 6y ago
Even if they are fake, destroying it is extreme. They should just levy fines or charges on the storage and hold on to it. Atleast not until the seller’s case is open with them. I don’t get how they could be so bad at this.
- Google234 6y ago
  Fakes should 100% be destroyed
  - FullyFunctional 6y ago
    The issue is due process which is missing
- josho 6y ago
  If they are fakes then it’s fraud and the courts should get involved. But why would Amazon give the courts that power when they can just do whatever they want.
Judson 6y ago
Seems odd the reporter doesn’t verify the authenticity/quality of the submitted invoices. Surely he could produce copies for the reporter?
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  Not wanting to do so is probably the reason the article is not really about whether the products were genuine or not, but rather about Amazon's behaviour.
aschatten 6y ago
Regarding forced arbitration: isn‘t the party that forces arbitration by law required to pay for it and if they refuse, then it can be brought in court?
- ikeboy 6y ago
  No, it depends on the rules of the particular arbitration group, which can be modified in the contract. For the AAA, the one bringing it pays an initial fee and the parties split the ongoing cost, but a final award can include costs going to one side if the arbitrator decides that.
ikeboy 6y ago
Some quotes from the recent antitrust report from Congress. These were presumably verified and run by Amazon with opportunity to respond. >In another example, a third-party bookseller told Subcommittee staff that Amazon delisted 99% of his business’s inventory in September 2019.1674 The bookseller requested that Amazon return its products, which were stored in Amazon’s warehouses.1675 As of July 2020, Amazon had only returned a small fraction of the bookseller’s inventory and continued to charge him storage fees.1676 Amazon blocked the bookseller both from selling its products on its marketplace and retrieving its inventory, precluding the seller from trying to recover some of his losses by making sales through another, albeit lesser, channel. >During the Subcommittee’s sixth hearing, Mr. Bezos testified that Amazon “invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in systems” that police counterfeits.1823 However, Amazon’s approach appears to be ineffective, resulting in suspensions of many innocent, third-party sellers, with devastating effects on some sellers’ businesses.1824 >One third-party seller told the Subcommittee that Amazon blocked some of her listings, citing a number of her products as “inauthentic.” 1827 The seller provided evidence to Amazon that, not only were her vendor’s products authentic, but Amazon actively sold the same products, sourced from the same vendor, through its first-party sales.1828 Despite elevating the issue to Amazon executives in July 2020, this issue has still not been resolved as of September 2020. I've had very similar experiences, as I've discussed [0] here numerous times. I currently have an antitrust lawsuit against TP-Link [1] for making false counterfeit complaints against my Amazon account. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Aikeboy%20tp-link&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutions-inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutio...
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > Amazon invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in XYZ On the scale of Amazon, and over multiple years that's like saying "we make a modest investment in XYZ but no more than that".
erik_seaberg 6y ago
I keep wondering why Amazon deals with guys like this instead of going to Calvin Klein’s wholesaler. He wouldn’t have better prices for legit merchandise, right?
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  I think the idea is that it allows for Amazon to remove some strength from the official wholesaler side. If the wholesaler isn't the only source of goods they have less bargaining power. But at the end of the day the wholesaler has to sell to someone. Here are my thoughts on how this relationship could work to Amazon's advantage. Think of this scenario: **Wholesaler**: Give us $10 per unit to list our products on Amazon. **Amazon**: No, we'll pay $15 per unit from a 3rd parties you sell to, but we won't tell you who. **Wholesaler**: Whatever, we'll still make sales at the end of the day. -- Some time passes -- **Amazon**: Hey 3rd parties, if you store all of our stuff in the warehouse we'll be an awesome partner and increase your profits a bit! **3rd parties**: This is an awesome deal! *3rd Parties* who are unaware of the fight between the wholesaler and Amazon sees their business going great buys lots of stock from the wholesaler, sends it all to Amazon, has a lot of their sales going through Amazon, etc. -- Some more time passes -- **Amazon**: Hey Wholesaler, we have these 3rd parties and 90% of their revenue is through our platform. You are going to list your product on our platform at $5 per unit or we're going to either A: Delist the products and kick the sellers off our platform and/or B: We're going to use our business intelligence to launch AmazonBasics™ versions of your product(s) and throw your customers to the wolves while your demand crumbles into to dust. Today YOU are here. This is how they use their monopoly power to get an unfair benefit over the existing manufacturers/wholesalers. And they can use 3rd parties, small businesses, as a way to get leverage. These 3rd parties will go and get business loans, they'll build up their inventories, they provide an abstraction that's hard for the wholesalers to fully peer through to, etc. These 3rd parties are just a pawn in Amazon's games with wholesalers. For every dollar Amazon burns giving these 3rd parties more money than the wholesaler they're really just leveraging indirectly the credit of these 3rd parties and throwing them to the wolves if they don't get their way. Simply a pawn in a game for Amazon to consolidate more power.
egonschiele 6y ago
In a much smaller example, I've been running Instagram ads for the last week. I've been trying to stop this ad for the last 5 days, but there's a bug in Instagram's UI that won't let me. I also can't get hold of an Instagram support person, or FB support. So I've kept spending money I don't want to spend. FB and Instagram are core parts of society now as one of the major places to advertise. Lack of support of this kind seems like a really bad sign of a future where all you talk to are robots. Also, average cost per conversion thru Instagram is $16 - $33. That is just a straight up toll that is paid to Facebook by every product that wants to advertise on their platform. I'm not saying it should be free, but surely they can afford better customer service.
discordance 6y ago
Amazon in Australia is not very good (yet). It's nothing like America or Japan, which have huge inventories and same or next day delivery. This is a really really bad look for Amazon, which is in the process of expanding in Australia. Retailers are already nervous about their expansion plans here and this does further bad for their brand.
- anakaine 6y ago
  I hope they fail here in Aus. Something something tall poppy syndrome. Local retail first.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    Retail prices are very high in Australia. I specifically remember only finding mountaineering carabineers, at $35 AUD at the time (23 EUR at the time) when they’re 8 euros in France. Same goes shoes, tshirts or kettles. Maybe the absence of large-chain competitors plays a role in cost of life being quite high. Then again, as a country, Australia would be free in deciding that it should only be affordable to people who have the means to support their life, to maintain a high quality standard and retails.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      Check out French sports retailer Decathlon, which landed in Australia a few years ago and is already making waves. Karabiners start from $12: https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-quickdraws-belay-devices https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-qui...
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      There is absolutely no way I'd buy such critical equipment as a carabiner from Amazon, with all the problems they have with counterfeit goods.
- athrun 6y ago
  While the delivery times are not great yet because a lot of items come from abroad, their inventory is now pretty extensive. In these COVID times, I've been buying quite a bit of bicycle gear & parts and in many cases I could find stuff on Amazon at lower prices than AU specialist online shops. It certainly was not the case just a couple months ago. I reckon Prime Membership in AU is now very worth it as you get free international shipping for orders over $49, in addition to free expedited domestic shipping and Prime video access.
lxe 6y ago
> Hoping to have his account reinstated and continue selling on the site, Govani put off the decision. He received a total of 11 emails from Amazon each giving him different dates at which time his inventory would be destroyed if he hadn't removed it. > "After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided." I understand the core point here -- Amazon does have the upper hand when making deals with 3rd party sellers. But this is on the seller: he stored his inventory at Amazon, who decided they want to break their deal -- then he failed to move his inventory after what seems like a very lengthy communication, so they ended up doing what they said they would.
- ikeboy 6y ago
  You left out the part where he tried to recall the inventory and it didn't work.
  - robryan 6y ago
    Sounds like he left it to the last minute though hoping that the account would be reinstated. Given the fees to remove he wouldn’t have wanted to until it seemed certain that he wasn’t getting the account back. There are companies like shipbob now which are essentially as good as FBA from a 3PL perspective. Just miss out on Amazon pushing FBA stock over cheaper competing offers.
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Given that the judiciary report also has an example of someone being unable to remove their inventory, I think you’re giving credit where none is due.
- loopz 6y ago
  The first mistake was dealing with amazon.
doodlebugging 6y ago
I think the most interesting thing here is that Amazon can effectively claim a seller's property is fake based on reviews that everyone knows are regularly gamed. Then they can refuse access to the inventory and make the claim, without having to provide any evidence, that the questionable inventory has in fact been destroyed and not just passed on to another seller behind the scenes. Accountability is entirely absent here. On the seller side and on Amazon's side. The fact that Amazon had physical control of the questionable merchandise and had no obligation to retain a small sample that would be useful for the owner to defend himself on the challenge of it's authenticity or for Amazon to demonstrate that it was counterfeit is troubling. I don't have a problem with counterfeit merchandise being identified as fake. I think it is extreme to destroy it all. The existence of eBay, Harbor Freight, Walmart, and Amazon are proof that people will pay for inferior products that look like the originals but are not as durable or beautiful. Once a counterfeit is identified it should be relabeled for sale at a discount since it is a fake. Just like art.
- mjevans 6y ago
  The cominging is also an issue. How does anyone know which supplier actually supplied X among Amazon's swath of caches? As a consumer, how do I know that when I buy from one FBA retailer on Amazon, the stock wasn't actually sourced by another that's also in that program? The lack of transparency, the lack of the consumer (and presumably also retailers) being able to trace these products back to their source of manufacture is the issue. Keep the records that need to be kept, let tracking figure out if there are customers returning bad items, or fraudulent suppliers, or just a run of bad product that had a given lot code.
  - doodlebugging 6y ago
    Exactly. There has to be a way to put trust back into the system. Trust only works if each participant is accountable to the others. Asset tracking is supposed to be a solved problem but obviously it is a bad idea to hand your operations over to a third party whose agenda is likely different than your own.
analogdreams 6y ago
I fully believe this, and feel terrible for this seller, having had a similar experience. For nearly a decade I ran a successful side hustle on Amazon from something that was just making beer money to making more than my day job (grew to $6.5 million/yr in sales at it's peak) and ran into the same thing earlier this summer. Competitors attacking listings with false claims to try and shut your account, or listing down was a regular occurance(search for false 'used sold as new' -- the old version of this), and a headache that could be addressed although it often would take at least a weeks worth of effort and fights with the automated systems. This last series of attacks -- also counterfeit claims in my case -- no such luck -- the process has changed, the invoices from the same suppliers and letters of authorization from the manufacturer not accepted. As it stands I am waiting on them to destroy roughly $120,000k in inventory that they refuse to release. Maybe more because their inventory tracking is garbage and it's not uncommon for items to be lost for months in their warehouse only to magically reappear... The tracking and inconsistent handling of returns is such a mess I can't exactly tell as anyone using FBA at volume just has to accept there will be variance between their known inventory and what Amazon says you have... Fortunately, the market I targeted was heavily impacted by COVID so outside of a modest push associated with the back to school season I dodged a bullet as I essentially shut down on the 'buy side' when that all flared up and focused on getting back to cash. I'm also lucky that I started scaling things back and looking to build out other channels about this time last year when they and WalMart started just automatically price matching one another, including prices from their respective 3rd party sellers, driving prices into the ground -- even below wholesale in some cases. Amusingly, they have noticed I stopped sending new inventory in and some of their listings are now going unfilled and call at least once a week trying to get me back. (Amazon benefits tremendously from not tying up their cash on inventory and using 3rd party sellers to keep their stock.) When I tell them I'm willing to come back once they help me resolve this issues w/ a real person or even go and physically inspect the inventory they have impounded they go silent. I thank them for helping to accelerate my long term financial goals, but to be honest, having been free of them for a few months now, the weight of not living in constant fear of jumping through their hoops has drastically improved my quality of life.
- senojretep356 6y ago
  No idea if they're any good but the junglescout marketplace has Seller Suspension services. Might be worth seeing if they can help with your inventory? Another one I've heard of is Thompson & Holt - again not a recommendation but they may be able to help.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Yeah, you know, when people keep saying "You aren't as far from being homeless as you imagine you are" this is what they mean. Just because your life has not come unraveled overnight doesn't mean it can't for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof. We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like. Please don't see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  We're on the wrong side of the curve of history for something like that to happen in the US--or anywhere else where it isn't already in place. Social Darwinism has been the fashion for 40 years now, and it's not going anywhere.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Nothing takes the past away like the future. Nothing makes the darkness go like the light. We can choose. We aren't actually compelled to just keep collectively being assholes because that's what we have currently.
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      > We can choose. This is true, but not in the sense of the leading candidates in the US presidential elections - both of whom oppose universal health care (despite its wide public support).
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Your conceptualization of how the world works and mine are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book. So while what you say is no doubt true, it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm not expecting universal health care by June of next year or something. You start by just getting people to say "Yeah, you know, that makes sense. I would support that." And when enough people can agree with that idea, eventually you get candidates who say "I have this terrific idea (parrots back to the world what the world is already saying is a good idea)." If there were a general consensus that this is something all Americans like, you can bet money we would have a presidential candidate who not only supports the idea but already has a well-thought-out blueprint developed for how to implement it. In fact, you would likely have two candidates competing for your vote based on the idea that "My universal health care plan is better than theirs! Vote for me, Joe Schmoe, the guy with the better universal health care plan!"
goi 6y ago
I generally use Walmart and Target for shopping online, but recently I decided to go with Amazon for something (pet supplies) that Walmart, Target, and Chewy didn't carry. I created my account, and before I could put the order through, the account was locked for "suspicious activity," which resulted in a black hole of me repeatedly sending them the information they asked for (a recent credit card statement) and them responding with the same form letter email about being unable to verify ownership of the card. I even called, spoke to a human who said they would do something, but no, same form letter response. Why do people use Amazon over walmart.com or target.com?
- pengaru 6y ago
  Because your experience is unusual. It's more inline with new accounts on twitter, not amazon, in my limited experience.
cameldrv 6y ago
I read the article with a more skeptical eye. It could be that he didn't request the items back in time because they were fake and not worth the price of the return shipping. Amazon's response was interesting: "The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners." So he's got (by his own admission old), and by Amazon's telling, illegible, or the brand disclaims them. It made me think of that scene in Fargo where the car dealer is faxing forms with illegible VINs repeatedly to General Motors to keep his scam going.
- derbOac 6y ago
  I don't put stock in claims of illegibility by Amazon. I had a similar (but by comparison nearly inconsequential) experience with Amazon where they accused me of running a fraudulent account (for reasons that are still bewildering to me). The whole experience was too kafkaesque to summarize here while on my phone, but at some point they demanded scans of something be faxed. I sent it twice and both were rejected as illegible. First, if amazon gave a damn about legibility they wouldn't be insisting on faxes. Second, if I sent those faxes to a million people, I'm confident less than one percent of them would have said they were illegible. "Illegible" is an excuse used by Amazon because it's in their control to decide, and is ambiguous enough and plausibily denialable enough in a legal sense that it protects them. To me "illegibility" is just what Amazon gives as a reason when they don't want to give a reason. It's bureaucratic stonewalling.
rdiddly 6y ago
Is it just me or does it seem like he could've avoided it by answering their emails? You gotta keep up with your emails.
- stonogo 6y ago
  Those emails are notifications from a no-reply address. The article outlines his other attempts to contact them, including the part where he was told there was "nothing else she could do" when he got a response.
radres 6y ago
Something something one basket.
ThePhysicist 6y ago
After reading the article I'm still a bit doubtful about the claims of the seller. I'm not saying that Amazon is in the right here or that he's lying about the merchandise being genuine, but some aspects of the story seem rather sketchy. He seems to have been in contact with Amazon for several months, and still he says he was unable to ask them to send his merchandise back to him? If he really ordered his merchandise from the brands directly, how was he not able to simply ask them for a confirmation or proper invoice copy and provide that to Amazon? Fake merchandise seems to be rampant on Amazon, and clothes/apparel is a great target because the products are "low-tech" and it's hard for a regular customer to tell a genuine article apart from a fake one, so I can see why Amazon is very picky about these things here. Personally I try to never buy such brand items from third-party sellers on Amazon, as my trust in the items being original is quite low.
- jariel 6y ago
  Nothing sketchy here at all. You seem to think that Amazon has reasonable processes for dealing with people? No, it's Kafka. The complaints from a few people are easy: "I didn't like this, looks suspicious" is a very easy thing for a few customers to do. Then the complaint and it's done. These kinds of things can even happen in the regular court systems. I don't know who's right and who's wrong but his claims are within reason.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
we had a similar experience moving item off smaller platform. it's a constant barrage of counterfeit claims, even if we sold 1 (one) item, we racked up 10 complaints in a month. it's a very profitable model to keep small competitors operations out of the system, so of course it's abused to hell and back.
cm2187 6y ago
Does Amazon still commingle inventories between sellers? How could they keep track of who provided a fake item?
- seanhunter 6y ago
  That doesn't seem very challenging to a logistics company and falls out of things they already have to do to keep track of their inventory. They probably do somethiing like barcode each thing when it comes in, record which barcode came from where. Scan each barcode when it gets dispatched out to a customer. Now you know the ultimate provider of the item that went to a particular customer.
eisbaar 6y ago
I don't understand the story. He was given several warnings that his stuff would be destroyed. Why is it Amazon's fault now?
LatteLazy 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: He was told multiple times to remove the inventory or it would be destroyed, in accordance with the contract he signed. He didn't remove the inventory.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> binding arbitration, which the House panel said gives Amazon the upper hand in disputes What is the basis for this? I have gone to arbitration against a big company, and won. The arbitrators were all judges, and the only difference from my experience with court proceedings was the speed and cost.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
This is what monopoly abuse looks like.
nomorealoha 6y ago
What I don't understand is how someone can keep such poor proof of authenticity when hocking questionable products on Amazon? To pretend that illegible evidence of authenticity is okay is disingenuous. Everyone knows that Amazon is full of fakes. You would think scammers would try to have reasonable proof of authenticity so that when the banhammer comes swinging down, they'd have a saving grace. Plus, the article is clickbait. I don't see how the man is homeless. He's not a rough sleeper. He's staying with family. To call him homeless is absurd, it cheapens the word and erodes our communal empathy.
- slostar 6y ago
  According to wikipedia definition he's 'secondary homeless' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness "moving between temporary shelters, including houses of friends, family and emergency accommodation" Actually reading the article, it doesn't mention him being homeless. So unless the original article was edited recently, I'd say the clickbait aspect comes from the HN thread title.
thrownaway954 6y ago
you know that whole, "never put all your eggs in one basket" saying... that's exactly what this dude did and he got burned. while the situation sucks and amazon is a jerk for allowing this to happen... i don't feel bad for him. any business man knows not to do this, it's rule one in everything you do. it places you in the position where you aren't in charge meaning you don't have the upper hand. hard lesson for this dude to learn, but hopefully it prevents others from making the same mistake.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  The issue has Amazon has taken over most of the ecommerce market. And it doesn't even make sense anymore for many to have their own ecommerce website. They are swallowing everything, except for recognizable brands. That's why brand recognition is so important even if you're small. pol But yes, Amazon "efficiency" and policies mostly favourable to the buyer killed the majority of the competition. They are even killing Ebay.
SteveSmith16384 6y ago
The crux of the problem seems to be "when merchants set up shop on Amazon, they waive their right to a day in court by agreeing to binding arbitration to resolve any disputes". Is this even legal?
xn 6y ago
I don't understand why the journalist didn't contact the manufacturers to confirm that the products were authentic.
deleted 6y ago
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WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
>"In order to ensure that customers can shop with confidence on Amazon, we take 'inauthentic' complaints seriously," >That inventory was everything I had. Amazon ruined my life, and I did nothing wrong This is what a perfect win for IP maximalists looks like - an automated ruination of lives, whenever IP seems to be disrespected.
oliwarner 6y ago
TL;DR: Forced arbitration is the worst. Arbitration has its place, but I rather think there should be a "small claims" pecuniary limit on what can be considered eligible for this sort of clause. Anything over a few grand and you're talking about sums of money that can literally break people. Seems somewhat inhumane to stifle recourse.
offtop5 6y ago
>After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided." This seems more than fair. I'm not sure why he would put all his eggs in the Amazon basket though. This very much reads like he wanted to keep selling on Amazon despite them trying to get him off the platform
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  He says he tried to submit a removal request and couldn't. It's possible he's lying, but Amazon's jankiness is the stuff of legends, so it would be quite horrible to just assume that.
mattferderer 6y ago
This sounds like an awful position to put your business in even if the alternatives weren't better. You're the middleman between manufacturers who view you as small & Amazon who would view you as small. To me it seems like you're just asking to be squeezed out here & taking on a lot of risk. Am I missing something?
alangibson 6y ago
US-based meta-comment: I see lots of talk in this thread about the problem of customers just wanting to shout at customer support. Maybe I've got election brain, but does anyone else think this is a symptom of the frustration people feel under a political system that no longer responds to the legitimate grievances of people on the bottom of the social and economic order.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  I don’t think Amazon customers posting here about their frustration are anywhere near the bottom of the social and economic order.
  - alangibson 6y ago
    I'm not referencing them. I'm referencing the discussions about perpetually irate, toxic customers.
- totalZero 6y ago
  In my experience, the quality of customer support has degraded as the volume of sales in the online marketplace has increased. Recently, I had an Amazon customer service supervisor in India (or at least, everyone in the chain had an Indian name and they didn't seem to understand the difference between USPS and UPS) mouth off to me about an issue that eventually resulted in a refund and apology from someone in the USA. I imagine it is even worse for sellers, because they aren't traditionally viewed as "customers" (thus they are not "always right") and many of them are indeed pushing counterfeit merchandise -- especially when it comes to shoes and apparel. I would not be surprised if Amazon characterizes seller support as a cost center, rather than a profit center. Personally, when it comes to oft-counterfeited items, I view a brick-and-mortar presence as an indicator of greater trustworthiness. For me, the takeaway from the story about Mr. Govani's lost inventory is that (A) Amazon's seller support is poor, (B) Amazon has no idea how to counteract its problem with rampant counterfeiting, (C) Amazon doesn't see much value in treating sellers as customers of its platform, and (D) Mr. Govani moved way too much existing inventory to Amazon rather than transitioning gradually with freshly acquired product.
- 6y ago
csense 6y ago
I hope the seller sues Amazon, and the judge awards attorney's fees and a damages multiplier due to the hardship imposed and the egregiousness of the violation.
LorenPechtel 6y ago
Two things here: 1) Binding arbitration. The arbiters know which side of the bread is buttered, you have to have a pretty extreme case to win in binding arbitration. It should be nuked from orbit. 2) Comingled inventory--there's no mention of whether he used it or not. If it's used and someone else sends Amazon counterfeits that get sent to your customer you get blamed for the counterfeit. The only reason they can be sloppy like this is because of #1.
jiveturkey 6y ago
'now homeless' should be removed from HN title. TFA doesn't state that and it's not in the title either.
highprofittrade 6y ago
Imagine if they treat AWS customers this way this doesn't seem like the most customer obsessed company
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505 points by shortweb3 6y ago

File a complaint with the Iowa AG Consumer Protection https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/about-us/divisions/consumer-protection https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/about-us/divisions/consu... Possible lien on that new massive Bondurant warehouse will get their attention.

vorpalhex 6y ago

So he had $1.5m in merchandise that was totally authentic, sent it all to Amazon and yet couldn't reclaim it? And he has no insurance on literally a million and a half of clothing? How did he go from holding $1.5M of merch for over a year to being homeless and having to couch surf? So, I had this $2M bridge up in Wisconsin, but Elon Musk took it out with a cybertruck one night after a few too many mimosas and...

Johnny555 6y ago
Is there any insurance that would pay for merchandise that Amazon destroyed because they determined that it's fake? Why would the insurance company take his side when they could just side with Amazon and save $1.5M? He can produce invoices that show he bought $1.5M of legit merchandise, but how can he prove that what he sent to Amazon was not fake?
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  He can show invoices that are over a year old. Which means that for at least a year, he held _at least_ two cargo containers of high end clothing somewhere before selling them in bulk on Amazon. He has no warehouses, no physical storefront, nothing - that doesn't strike you as strange for someone with 1.5M of merchandise? That is a _ton_ of merchandise both in terms of physical bulk and space, and in cost to have sitting around. Unless he's doing tens of millions of sales a year, that is way too much inventory to have at rest. Insurance could tell you nothing was ever covered and never spend a dime - but insurance is a heavily audited industry and at the very least they would do an investigation. Keep in mind, it's not like Amazon got in a few cargo containers of high end clothing and fed them into a shredder - they kept in a warehouse and sold it and got enough complaints about them not being genuine articles that they de-shelved them from inventory, gave him 30 days to retrieve them and only then after his refusal had them destroyed. For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes. Which think of this in reverse - if Amazon told you that you needed to retrieve your $1.5M of merchandise in 30 days or it would be destroyed, would you just roll the dice on that? Even if you can't afford freight, you'd still go haul as much as you can in whatever you drive and hock it on the corner. The only reason you would let Amazon bulk destroy merchandise (with significant notice and several reminders from them, after signing a contract that pre-dictates out the terms of rejected merchandise), the only reason you would let merchandise sit like that, is if it has no significant value. When the cost of freight exceeds the cost of goods - then yeah, don't freight it and absorb the loss because it's less damage.
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    The invoices for the particular product was a year old. But it could be the majority of that inventory was turning over every 90 days, which would mean he was selling 500k/month. >For what it's worth, removing THAT much merchandising from shelving is a serious labor and time sink. You don't do that because you got one or two complaints about crushed boxes or off sizes. The system is automated. A destroy order gets put in, then a warehouse employee goes and fulfils that order without knowing or caring why it was placed. Sellers can place destroy orders as well.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Why would insurance ever side with a person making a claim? It would be more cost effective to always deny claims regardless of legitimacy Answer: Because contracts and if the insurer breaches them courts get involved and penalties get handed out.
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    "Insured claims that they shipped $1.5M of merchandise to Amazon. Amazon claimed merchandise was counterfeit and destroyed merchandise after given the insured multiple attempts to retrieve merchandise which were not acted on. In the absence of any evidence that the now destroyed goods were legitimate, we are denying compensation for this claim." He, of course, can try to sue his insurance company to pay the claim (happens all the time), but it's expensive and he's not guaranteed to win.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Indeed in this situation he's unlikely to win because he is pretty clearly in the wrong and his story is rediculous. My point is just that the insurance company can't just arbitrarily decide to side with amazon because they feel it (for that matter, amazon isn't really a party when it comes to the insurance) they have to look at the evidence and facts of the situation.
      - Johnny555 6y ago
        My point is that the last party to have had possession of his merchandise claimed it was counterfeit. The evidence is he shipped the merchandise to Amazon, Amazon said it was counterfeit and if he didn't product evidence to the contrary, they'd either destroy it or he could retrieve it, and he chose not to retrieve it. I really don't see why insurance would pay out under these circumstances.
        didibus 6y ago
        I think OP means, if it's logical and correct for the insurance not to pay, it was probably logical and correct for Amazon to destroy it as well.

numpad0 6y ago

Another Marketplace seller blamed for commingled fakes case?

Johnny555 6y ago
If his story is true, it doesn't even sound like Amazon had any evidence that his merchandise was fake. One person didn't like the fit and suggested that it could be fake, another complained about a damaged box and again thought that meant it was fake, and the other two didn't like the way it was packed. For all we know, the complaints were from a competitor that knew exactly what would happen.
- dsabanin 6y ago
  Amazon could've just bought some and checked it?
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    They had it in their inventory. They could look at what they ship out.
shajznnckfke 6y ago
I don’t see any accusation that comingling is the cause of the problem. The seller didn’t deny that he sent the items with the quality complaints. The problem, according to Amazon, is the seller has dodgy receipts. Or according to the seller, the problem is Amazon is too hard on alleged counterfeiters.
justusw 6y ago
I have had the issue myself, receiving the wrong article when buying through FBA. And the only option Amazon gives you is to return the article, instead of allowing you to receive the “correct” version of the article instead.

hevelvarik 6y ago

This is a case for the courts. The article is completely one sided, and there’s no way to know whether or not some or much or most of the merchandise was counterfeit. He does admit to ignoring up to 11 notices that his inventory would be destroyed if left unclaimed. He mentions conflicting dates for the notices but we’ve no way of knowing to make of that. I don’t know what to say other that I read the piece with some interest and for all know it’s a work of fiction, but heh I clicked.

justusw 6y ago
Don’t forget that sellers agree to an arbitration clause, so a legal recourse in court is impossible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alliao 6y ago
  have always wanted to know, how watertight are those clauses? surely legal recourse is some sort of right that'd trump a lot of these type of boiler plate contracts?
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    Courts have consistently held up Amazon's arbitration clause for sellers.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      US courts treat commercial litigation and consumer/personal differently. Commercial is "letter of the contract" (you should have talked to your lawyer before signing), whereas consumer has to be reasonable to the non-expert public in the long run, and is also subject to tons of social justice goals.
      - bleepblorp 6y ago

yeneek 6y ago

Selling on Amazon is really hard. Just one fake product claim from a customer can make your seller account blocked. And because customer is always right, seller has to prove product validity.

bawolff 6y ago
Im ok with the onus being on the seller to prove they are selling real goods.
- haasted 6y ago
  Quite the attack vector for competitors, though.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    If you're not shady its pretty easy to prove your legit. Real offline bussinesses have to keep records too, and the same attack can happen in the real world since selling counterfeit goods is a crime (harder to get away with false report though in the physical world)
    - sct202 6y ago
      Records though can be messy across businesses (retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer). A simple example would be if the purchase order id could be entered in different formats like if one vendor has dashes (like [customer]-[order number]) and then that PO id is entered without dashes at another system. If you do a simple search or table join you aren't going to get a match, and if the person who was asked to provide the records doesn't go the extra step to do the search again you suddenly have a lot of issues.

ethanwillis 6y ago

The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we're now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can't even understand what you're saying.

grishka 6y ago
Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.
- Google234 6y ago
  Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.
  - chabad360 6y ago
    It's not that it's favoritism, it's just a way to trigger a manual review...
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
  - 6y ago

carlsborg 6y ago

How do sellers track down and get GTINs for this volume of apparel?

chaostheory 6y ago

“ The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners.”

anakaine 6y ago
But did they match the record of the wholesaler?
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  A lot of higher-end brands receive records back from the wholesalers too, so they can a) have a paper trail to determine if products are counterfeit or not, and b) blur the distinction between "counterfeit" and "not sold through official channels" which helps prevent undercutting of the retail price.
robryan 6y ago
May have been grey market goods, which is bound to be problematic on Amazon for branded high end fashion.

shajznnckfke 6y ago

There are a lot of complaints about allegedly fake merchandise on Amazon and people asking for a crackdown. This is what the other side of that story looks like. The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>The old solution of Amazon mostly ignoring the fakes and just compensating people who complain avoids this scenario. Being a proper retailer and sourcing goods from reputable sources, performing quality control, and then reselling them to the public without the commingling nonsense also avoids this scenario.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  What does comingling have to do with it? Apparently Amazon was able to destroy this seller’s merchandise specifically, so it doesn’t sound like there was a problem identifying it among commingled inventory. I’m getting the impression from the comments here that a lot of people just have an axe to grind about commingling even if there’s no clear connection to the issue at hand (people do seem to bring it up on all sorts of unrelated stories about Amazon).
  - adinisom 6y ago
    Comingling means the buyer can't vet the seller so it's entirely on Amazon to ensure the goods aren't counterfeit. As you say, Amazon was able to identify the merchant specifically but wasn't able to determine whether the goods are genuine. If the goods weren't comingled, this would be less Amazon's problem and the goods wouldn't be in Amazon's warehouse so at least the seller would still have his inventory if Amazon blocks his products.
    - shajznnckfke 6y ago
      You can use Amazon for fulfillment without participating in commingled inventory. In that case, Amazon would still have possession of your inventory, and if you didn’t cooperate when they tried to return it to you, it might end up getting destroyed. If Amazon didn’t offer fulfillment as a service, and just bought product from suppliers to sell, this same issue can arise - the supplier can deliver items which seem possibly fraudulent. Then Amazon will fight with the supplier about returning those items and depending on what kind of contracts are in place, could end up destroying them (this seems to be essentially what happened here).

yalogin 6y ago

Even if they are fake, destroying it is extreme. They should just levy fines or charges on the storage and hold on to it. Atleast not until the seller’s case is open with them. I don’t get how they could be so bad at this.

Google234 6y ago
Fakes should 100% be destroyed
- FullyFunctional 6y ago
  The issue is due process which is missing
josho 6y ago
If they are fakes then it’s fraud and the courts should get involved. But why would Amazon give the courts that power when they can just do whatever they want.

Judson 6y ago

Seems odd the reporter doesn’t verify the authenticity/quality of the submitted invoices. Surely he could produce copies for the reporter?

_-___________-_ 6y ago
Not wanting to do so is probably the reason the article is not really about whether the products were genuine or not, but rather about Amazon's behaviour.

aschatten 6y ago

Regarding forced arbitration: isn‘t the party that forces arbitration by law required to pay for it and if they refuse, then it can be brought in court?

ikeboy 6y ago
No, it depends on the rules of the particular arbitration group, which can be modified in the contract. For the AAA, the one bringing it pays an initial fee and the parties split the ongoing cost, but a final award can include costs going to one side if the arbitrator decides that.

ikeboy 6y ago

Some quotes from the recent antitrust report from Congress. These were presumably verified and run by Amazon with opportunity to respond. >In another example, a third-party bookseller told Subcommittee staff that Amazon delisted 99% of his business’s inventory in September 2019.1674 The bookseller requested that Amazon return its products, which were stored in Amazon’s warehouses.1675 As of July 2020, Amazon had only returned a small fraction of the bookseller’s inventory and continued to charge him storage fees.1676 Amazon blocked the bookseller both from selling its products on its marketplace and retrieving its inventory, precluding the seller from trying to recover some of his losses by making sales through another, albeit lesser, channel. >During the Subcommittee’s sixth hearing, Mr. Bezos testified that Amazon “invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in systems” that police counterfeits.1823 However, Amazon’s approach appears to be ineffective, resulting in suspensions of many innocent, third-party sellers, with devastating effects on some sellers’ businesses.1824 >One third-party seller told the Subcommittee that Amazon blocked some of her listings, citing a number of her products as “inauthentic.” 1827 The seller provided evidence to Amazon that, not only were her vendor’s products authentic, but Amazon actively sold the same products, sourced from the same vendor, through its first-party sales.1828 Despite elevating the issue to Amazon executives in July 2020, this issue has still not been resolved as of September 2020. I've had very similar experiences, as I've discussed [0] here numerous times. I currently have an antitrust lawsuit against TP-Link [1] for making false counterfeit complaints against my Amazon account. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Aikeboy%20tp-link&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutions-inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutio...

einpoklum 6y ago
> Amazon invest[s] hundreds of millions of dollars in XYZ On the scale of Amazon, and over multiple years that's like saying "we make a modest investment in XYZ but no more than that".

erik_seaberg 6y ago

I keep wondering why Amazon deals with guys like this instead of going to Calvin Klein’s wholesaler. He wouldn’t have better prices for legit merchandise, right?

ethanwillis 6y ago
I think the idea is that it allows for Amazon to remove some strength from the official wholesaler side. If the wholesaler isn't the only source of goods they have less bargaining power. But at the end of the day the wholesaler has to sell to someone. Here are my thoughts on how this relationship could work to Amazon's advantage. Think of this scenario: **Wholesaler**: Give us $10 per unit to list our products on Amazon. **Amazon**: No, we'll pay $15 per unit from a 3rd parties you sell to, but we won't tell you who. **Wholesaler**: Whatever, we'll still make sales at the end of the day. -- Some time passes -- **Amazon**: Hey 3rd parties, if you store all of our stuff in the warehouse we'll be an awesome partner and increase your profits a bit! **3rd parties**: This is an awesome deal! *3rd Parties* who are unaware of the fight between the wholesaler and Amazon sees their business going great buys lots of stock from the wholesaler, sends it all to Amazon, has a lot of their sales going through Amazon, etc. -- Some more time passes -- **Amazon**: Hey Wholesaler, we have these 3rd parties and 90% of their revenue is through our platform. You are going to list your product on our platform at $5 per unit or we're going to either A: Delist the products and kick the sellers off our platform and/or B: We're going to use our business intelligence to launch AmazonBasics™ versions of your product(s) and throw your customers to the wolves while your demand crumbles into to dust. Today YOU are here. This is how they use their monopoly power to get an unfair benefit over the existing manufacturers/wholesalers. And they can use 3rd parties, small businesses, as a way to get leverage. These 3rd parties will go and get business loans, they'll build up their inventories, they provide an abstraction that's hard for the wholesalers to fully peer through to, etc. These 3rd parties are just a pawn in Amazon's games with wholesalers. For every dollar Amazon burns giving these 3rd parties more money than the wholesaler they're really just leveraging indirectly the credit of these 3rd parties and throwing them to the wolves if they don't get their way. Simply a pawn in a game for Amazon to consolidate more power.

egonschiele 6y ago

In a much smaller example, I've been running Instagram ads for the last week. I've been trying to stop this ad for the last 5 days, but there's a bug in Instagram's UI that won't let me. I also can't get hold of an Instagram support person, or FB support. So I've kept spending money I don't want to spend. FB and Instagram are core parts of society now as one of the major places to advertise. Lack of support of this kind seems like a really bad sign of a future where all you talk to are robots. Also, average cost per conversion thru Instagram is $16 - $33. That is just a straight up toll that is paid to Facebook by every product that wants to advertise on their platform. I'm not saying it should be free, but surely they can afford better customer service.

discordance 6y ago

Amazon in Australia is not very good (yet). It's nothing like America or Japan, which have huge inventories and same or next day delivery. This is a really really bad look for Amazon, which is in the process of expanding in Australia. Retailers are already nervous about their expansion plans here and this does further bad for their brand.

anakaine 6y ago
I hope they fail here in Aus. Something something tall poppy syndrome. Local retail first.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Retail prices are very high in Australia. I specifically remember only finding mountaineering carabineers, at $35 AUD at the time (23 EUR at the time) when they’re 8 euros in France. Same goes shoes, tshirts or kettles. Maybe the absence of large-chain competitors plays a role in cost of life being quite high. Then again, as a country, Australia would be free in deciding that it should only be affordable to people who have the means to support their life, to maintain a high quality standard and retails.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Check out French sports retailer Decathlon, which landed in Australia a few years ago and is already making waves. Karabiners start from $12: https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-quickdraws-belay-devices https://decathlon.com.au/collections/climbing-karabiners-qui...
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    There is absolutely no way I'd buy such critical equipment as a carabiner from Amazon, with all the problems they have with counterfeit goods.
athrun 6y ago
While the delivery times are not great yet because a lot of items come from abroad, their inventory is now pretty extensive. In these COVID times, I've been buying quite a bit of bicycle gear & parts and in many cases I could find stuff on Amazon at lower prices than AU specialist online shops. It certainly was not the case just a couple months ago. I reckon Prime Membership in AU is now very worth it as you get free international shipping for orders over $49, in addition to free expedited domestic shipping and Prime video access.

lxe 6y ago

> Hoping to have his account reinstated and continue selling on the site, Govani put off the decision. He received a total of 11 emails from Amazon each giving him different dates at which time his inventory would be destroyed if he hadn't removed it. > "After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided." I understand the core point here -- Amazon does have the upper hand when making deals with 3rd party sellers. But this is on the seller: he stored his inventory at Amazon, who decided they want to break their deal -- then he failed to move his inventory after what seems like a very lengthy communication, so they ended up doing what they said they would.

ikeboy 6y ago
You left out the part where he tried to recall the inventory and it didn't work.
- robryan 6y ago
  Sounds like he left it to the last minute though hoping that the account would be reinstated. Given the fees to remove he wouldn’t have wanted to until it seemed certain that he wasn’t getting the account back. There are companies like shipbob now which are essentially as good as FBA from a 3PL perspective. Just miss out on Amazon pushing FBA stock over cheaper competing offers.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Given that the judiciary report also has an example of someone being unable to remove their inventory, I think you’re giving credit where none is due.
loopz 6y ago
The first mistake was dealing with amazon.

doodlebugging 6y ago

I think the most interesting thing here is that Amazon can effectively claim a seller's property is fake based on reviews that everyone knows are regularly gamed. Then they can refuse access to the inventory and make the claim, without having to provide any evidence, that the questionable inventory has in fact been destroyed and not just passed on to another seller behind the scenes. Accountability is entirely absent here. On the seller side and on Amazon's side. The fact that Amazon had physical control of the questionable merchandise and had no obligation to retain a small sample that would be useful for the owner to defend himself on the challenge of it's authenticity or for Amazon to demonstrate that it was counterfeit is troubling. I don't have a problem with counterfeit merchandise being identified as fake. I think it is extreme to destroy it all. The existence of eBay, Harbor Freight, Walmart, and Amazon are proof that people will pay for inferior products that look like the originals but are not as durable or beautiful. Once a counterfeit is identified it should be relabeled for sale at a discount since it is a fake. Just like art.

mjevans 6y ago
The cominging is also an issue. How does anyone know which supplier actually supplied X among Amazon's swath of caches? As a consumer, how do I know that when I buy from one FBA retailer on Amazon, the stock wasn't actually sourced by another that's also in that program? The lack of transparency, the lack of the consumer (and presumably also retailers) being able to trace these products back to their source of manufacture is the issue. Keep the records that need to be kept, let tracking figure out if there are customers returning bad items, or fraudulent suppliers, or just a run of bad product that had a given lot code.
- doodlebugging 6y ago
  Exactly. There has to be a way to put trust back into the system. Trust only works if each participant is accountable to the others. Asset tracking is supposed to be a solved problem but obviously it is a bad idea to hand your operations over to a third party whose agenda is likely different than your own.

analogdreams 6y ago

I fully believe this, and feel terrible for this seller, having had a similar experience. For nearly a decade I ran a successful side hustle on Amazon from something that was just making beer money to making more than my day job (grew to $6.5 million/yr in sales at it's peak) and ran into the same thing earlier this summer. Competitors attacking listings with false claims to try and shut your account, or listing down was a regular occurance(search for false 'used sold as new' -- the old version of this), and a headache that could be addressed although it often would take at least a weeks worth of effort and fights with the automated systems. This last series of attacks -- also counterfeit claims in my case -- no such luck -- the process has changed, the invoices from the same suppliers and letters of authorization from the manufacturer not accepted. As it stands I am waiting on them to destroy roughly $120,000k in inventory that they refuse to release. Maybe more because their inventory tracking is garbage and it's not uncommon for items to be lost for months in their warehouse only to magically reappear... The tracking and inconsistent handling of returns is such a mess I can't exactly tell as anyone using FBA at volume just has to accept there will be variance between their known inventory and what Amazon says you have... Fortunately, the market I targeted was heavily impacted by COVID so outside of a modest push associated with the back to school season I dodged a bullet as I essentially shut down on the 'buy side' when that all flared up and focused on getting back to cash. I'm also lucky that I started scaling things back and looking to build out other channels about this time last year when they and WalMart started just automatically price matching one another, including prices from their respective 3rd party sellers, driving prices into the ground -- even below wholesale in some cases. Amusingly, they have noticed I stopped sending new inventory in and some of their listings are now going unfilled and call at least once a week trying to get me back. (Amazon benefits tremendously from not tying up their cash on inventory and using 3rd party sellers to keep their stock.) When I tell them I'm willing to come back once they help me resolve this issues w/ a real person or even go and physically inspect the inventory they have impounded they go silent. I thank them for helping to accelerate my long term financial goals, but to be honest, having been free of them for a few months now, the weight of not living in constant fear of jumping through their hoops has drastically improved my quality of life.

senojretep356 6y ago
No idea if they're any good but the junglescout marketplace has Seller Suspension services. Might be worth seeing if they can help with your inventory? Another one I've heard of is Thompson & Holt - again not a recommendation but they may be able to help.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Yeah, you know, when people keep saying "You aren't as far from being homeless as you imagine you are" this is what they mean. Just because your life has not come unraveled overnight doesn't mean it can't for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof. We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like. Please don't see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.

bleepblorp 6y ago
We're on the wrong side of the curve of history for something like that to happen in the US--or anywhere else where it isn't already in place. Social Darwinism has been the fashion for 40 years now, and it's not going anywhere.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Nothing takes the past away like the future. Nothing makes the darkness go like the light. We can choose. We aren't actually compelled to just keep collectively being assholes because that's what we have currently.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > We can choose. This is true, but not in the sense of the leading candidates in the US presidential elections - both of whom oppose universal health care (despite its wide public support).
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Your conceptualization of how the world works and mine are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book. So while what you say is no doubt true, it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm not expecting universal health care by June of next year or something. You start by just getting people to say "Yeah, you know, that makes sense. I would support that." And when enough people can agree with that idea, eventually you get candidates who say "I have this terrific idea (parrots back to the world what the world is already saying is a good idea)." If there were a general consensus that this is something all Americans like, you can bet money we would have a presidential candidate who not only supports the idea but already has a well-thought-out blueprint developed for how to implement it. In fact, you would likely have two candidates competing for your vote based on the idea that "My universal health care plan is better than theirs! Vote for me, Joe Schmoe, the guy with the better universal health care plan!"

goi 6y ago

I generally use Walmart and Target for shopping online, but recently I decided to go with Amazon for something (pet supplies) that Walmart, Target, and Chewy didn't carry. I created my account, and before I could put the order through, the account was locked for "suspicious activity," which resulted in a black hole of me repeatedly sending them the information they asked for (a recent credit card statement) and them responding with the same form letter email about being unable to verify ownership of the card. I even called, spoke to a human who said they would do something, but no, same form letter response. Why do people use Amazon over walmart.com or target.com?

pengaru 6y ago
Because your experience is unusual. It's more inline with new accounts on twitter, not amazon, in my limited experience.

cameldrv 6y ago

I read the article with a more skeptical eye. It could be that he didn't request the items back in time because they were fake and not worth the price of the return shipping. Amazon's response was interesting: "The spokeswoman said Amazon repeatedly asked Govani to provide evidence that the products sold were authentic but that the invoices he sent were either illegible or didn't match the records of the brand owners." So he's got (by his own admission old), and by Amazon's telling, illegible, or the brand disclaims them. It made me think of that scene in Fargo where the car dealer is faxing forms with illegible VINs repeatedly to General Motors to keep his scam going.

derbOac 6y ago
I don't put stock in claims of illegibility by Amazon. I had a similar (but by comparison nearly inconsequential) experience with Amazon where they accused me of running a fraudulent account (for reasons that are still bewildering to me). The whole experience was too kafkaesque to summarize here while on my phone, but at some point they demanded scans of something be faxed. I sent it twice and both were rejected as illegible. First, if amazon gave a damn about legibility they wouldn't be insisting on faxes. Second, if I sent those faxes to a million people, I'm confident less than one percent of them would have said they were illegible. "Illegible" is an excuse used by Amazon because it's in their control to decide, and is ambiguous enough and plausibily denialable enough in a legal sense that it protects them. To me "illegibility" is just what Amazon gives as a reason when they don't want to give a reason. It's bureaucratic stonewalling.

rdiddly 6y ago

Is it just me or does it seem like he could've avoided it by answering their emails? You gotta keep up with your emails.

stonogo 6y ago
Those emails are notifications from a no-reply address. The article outlines his other attempts to contact them, including the part where he was told there was "nothing else she could do" when he got a response.

radres 6y ago

Something something one basket.

ThePhysicist 6y ago

After reading the article I'm still a bit doubtful about the claims of the seller. I'm not saying that Amazon is in the right here or that he's lying about the merchandise being genuine, but some aspects of the story seem rather sketchy. He seems to have been in contact with Amazon for several months, and still he says he was unable to ask them to send his merchandise back to him? If he really ordered his merchandise from the brands directly, how was he not able to simply ask them for a confirmation or proper invoice copy and provide that to Amazon? Fake merchandise seems to be rampant on Amazon, and clothes/apparel is a great target because the products are "low-tech" and it's hard for a regular customer to tell a genuine article apart from a fake one, so I can see why Amazon is very picky about these things here. Personally I try to never buy such brand items from third-party sellers on Amazon, as my trust in the items being original is quite low.

jariel 6y ago
Nothing sketchy here at all. You seem to think that Amazon has reasonable processes for dealing with people? No, it's Kafka. The complaints from a few people are easy: "I didn't like this, looks suspicious" is a very easy thing for a few customers to do. Then the complaint and it's done. These kinds of things can even happen in the regular court systems. I don't know who's right and who's wrong but his claims are within reason.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

we had a similar experience moving item off smaller platform. it's a constant barrage of counterfeit claims, even if we sold 1 (one) item, we racked up 10 complaints in a month. it's a very profitable model to keep small competitors operations out of the system, so of course it's abused to hell and back.

cm2187 6y ago

Does Amazon still commingle inventories between sellers? How could they keep track of who provided a fake item?

seanhunter 6y ago
That doesn't seem very challenging to a logistics company and falls out of things they already have to do to keep track of their inventory. They probably do somethiing like barcode each thing when it comes in, record which barcode came from where. Scan each barcode when it gets dispatched out to a customer. Now you know the ultimate provider of the item that went to a particular customer.

eisbaar 6y ago

I don't understand the story. He was given several warnings that his stuff would be destroyed. Why is it Amazon's fault now?

LatteLazy 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: He was told multiple times to remove the inventory or it would be destroyed, in accordance with the contract he signed. He didn't remove the inventory.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> binding arbitration, which the House panel said gives Amazon the upper hand in disputes What is the basis for this? I have gone to arbitration against a big company, and won. The arbitrators were all judges, and the only difference from my experience with court proceedings was the speed and cost.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

This is what monopoly abuse looks like.

nomorealoha 6y ago

What I don't understand is how someone can keep such poor proof of authenticity when hocking questionable products on Amazon? To pretend that illegible evidence of authenticity is okay is disingenuous. Everyone knows that Amazon is full of fakes. You would think scammers would try to have reasonable proof of authenticity so that when the banhammer comes swinging down, they'd have a saving grace. Plus, the article is clickbait. I don't see how the man is homeless. He's not a rough sleeper. He's staying with family. To call him homeless is absurd, it cheapens the word and erodes our communal empathy.

slostar 6y ago
According to wikipedia definition he's 'secondary homeless' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness "moving between temporary shelters, including houses of friends, family and emergency accommodation" Actually reading the article, it doesn't mention him being homeless. So unless the original article was edited recently, I'd say the clickbait aspect comes from the HN thread title.

thrownaway954 6y ago

you know that whole, "never put all your eggs in one basket" saying... that's exactly what this dude did and he got burned. while the situation sucks and amazon is a jerk for allowing this to happen... i don't feel bad for him. any business man knows not to do this, it's rule one in everything you do. it places you in the position where you aren't in charge meaning you don't have the upper hand. hard lesson for this dude to learn, but hopefully it prevents others from making the same mistake.

throw_m239339 6y ago
The issue has Amazon has taken over most of the ecommerce market. And it doesn't even make sense anymore for many to have their own ecommerce website. They are swallowing everything, except for recognizable brands. That's why brand recognition is so important even if you're small. pol But yes, Amazon "efficiency" and policies mostly favourable to the buyer killed the majority of the competition. They are even killing Ebay.

SteveSmith16384 6y ago

The crux of the problem seems to be "when merchants set up shop on Amazon, they waive their right to a day in court by agreeing to binding arbitration to resolve any disputes". Is this even legal?

xn 6y ago

I don't understand why the journalist didn't contact the manufacturers to confirm that the products were authentic.

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WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

>"In order to ensure that customers can shop with confidence on Amazon, we take 'inauthentic' complaints seriously," >That inventory was everything I had. Amazon ruined my life, and I did nothing wrong This is what a perfect win for IP maximalists looks like - an automated ruination of lives, whenever IP seems to be disrespected.

oliwarner 6y ago

TL;DR: Forced arbitration is the worst. Arbitration has its place, but I rather think there should be a "small claims" pecuniary limit on what can be considered eligible for this sort of clause. Anything over a few grand and you're talking about sums of money that can literally break people. Seems somewhat inhumane to stifle recourse.

offtop5 6y ago

>After being unable to resolve the matter following several appeals as part of our dispute resolution process, we informed this seller six separate times that they needed to remove their inventory from our store by specific dates or it would be destroyed," she said. "The seller failed to request to remove their inventory by the dates provided." This seems more than fair. I'm not sure why he would put all his eggs in the Amazon basket though. This very much reads like he wanted to keep selling on Amazon despite them trying to get him off the platform

jjoonathan 6y ago
He says he tried to submit a removal request and couldn't. It's possible he's lying, but Amazon's jankiness is the stuff of legends, so it would be quite horrible to just assume that.

mattferderer 6y ago

This sounds like an awful position to put your business in even if the alternatives weren't better. You're the middleman between manufacturers who view you as small & Amazon who would view you as small. To me it seems like you're just asking to be squeezed out here & taking on a lot of risk. Am I missing something?

alangibson 6y ago

US-based meta-comment: I see lots of talk in this thread about the problem of customers just wanting to shout at customer support. Maybe I've got election brain, but does anyone else think this is a symptom of the frustration people feel under a political system that no longer responds to the legitimate grievances of people on the bottom of the social and economic order.

rrdharan 6y ago
I don’t think Amazon customers posting here about their frustration are anywhere near the bottom of the social and economic order.
- alangibson 6y ago
  I'm not referencing them. I'm referencing the discussions about perpetually irate, toxic customers.
totalZero 6y ago
In my experience, the quality of customer support has degraded as the volume of sales in the online marketplace has increased. Recently, I had an Amazon customer service supervisor in India (or at least, everyone in the chain had an Indian name and they didn't seem to understand the difference between USPS and UPS) mouth off to me about an issue that eventually resulted in a refund and apology from someone in the USA. I imagine it is even worse for sellers, because they aren't traditionally viewed as "customers" (thus they are not "always right") and many of them are indeed pushing counterfeit merchandise -- especially when it comes to shoes and apparel. I would not be surprised if Amazon characterizes seller support as a cost center, rather than a profit center. Personally, when it comes to oft-counterfeited items, I view a brick-and-mortar presence as an indicator of greater trustworthiness. For me, the takeaway from the story about Mr. Govani's lost inventory is that (A) Amazon's seller support is poor, (B) Amazon has no idea how to counteract its problem with rampant counterfeiting, (C) Amazon doesn't see much value in treating sellers as customers of its platform, and (D) Mr. Govani moved way too much existing inventory to Amazon rather than transitioning gradually with freshly acquired product.
6y ago

csense 6y ago

I hope the seller sues Amazon, and the judge awards attorney's fees and a damages multiplier due to the hardship imposed and the egregiousness of the violation.

LorenPechtel 6y ago

Two things here: 1) Binding arbitration. The arbiters know which side of the bread is buttered, you have to have a pretty extreme case to win in binding arbitration. It should be nuked from orbit. 2) Comingled inventory--there's no mention of whether he used it or not. If it's used and someone else sends Amazon counterfeits that get sent to your customer you get blamed for the counterfeit. The only reason they can be sloppy like this is because of #1.

jiveturkey 6y ago

'now homeless' should be removed from HN title. TFA doesn't state that and it's not in the title either.

highprofittrade 6y ago

Imagine if they treat AWS customers this way this doesn't seem like the most customer obsessed company

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