I would think it's really in Amazon's interest to crack down on fakes. Fakes are bad customer experience. My guess is that fakes are hard to detect at Amazon's

I would think it's really in Amazon's interest to crack down on fakes. Fakes are bad customer experience. My guess is that fakes are hard to detect at Amazon's operational scale - that it's "not solved" how to filter or curate out shrewd fakes vendors and ads for fakes on the platform at scale. The Amazon market place is like an AppStore without the benefit of code to scan. Amazon does need to signal that they are going to detect the fake sellers. But I also think that they would benefit by implementing a more restrictive listings policy, where they risk some false positives in favor of reducing the overall prevalance of fakes. This is one of the things that makes the AppStore frustrating for publishers to deal with, but it also in principal benefits the Apple customer. A low restriction policy instead favors vendor relationships vs consumer experience. Maybe Amazon benefits by identifying customers with a propensity to buy goods like fakes. One would think Amazon is losing consumers for certain goods. Amazon operates a marketplace. It makes money from sellers, in terms of selling paying to advertise, and it makes money from transactions, as some fraction of sales. It instruments the marketplace, so it knows which consumers are buying which goods. It makes money from its own brands, which given its instrumentation, can efficiently targetly pockets of demand. Amazon does OK as long as it is the default or preferred marketplace for stuff. As a consumer, I should not be seeing fake stuff at all. This is a search quality problem, like not seeing SEO'd spam in search results. If it's hard to tell good stuff from fake stuff, you would think a BestBuy or a Walmart with assured quality would win out. What it looks like now is that not "enough" consumers are turned off from negative Amazon experiences. Do I pay a lower price though a more convenient experience, and risk a notably worse fake, or do I pay a little more, and go to a differernt vendor? I wonder if there is a relative or absolute cost charactic to fakes - like no deal can be but so good and probably not be a fake. What I would want to see is if Amazon is losing sales on higher cost higher risk items to competitors. I think the ultimate question for undestanding Amazon will always be the money - how are the marketplace profits are driven - and in that what's the mix of vendor ads, transaction fees, and consumer targeting. My speculation is that they are working toward technical solutions for fakes, and that they think they have time and position in market to get there. Fakes are not yet enough of an experiential or reputational problem for Amazon to do differently.