It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.
Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.
Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.
Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore:
- a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself
- they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor
- sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
- big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow the boycott to have enough wait
- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again. It's been like that for decades. PR works extremely well now, people genuinely live the feeling they've been lead to by those amazing consent manufacturer.
- a brand is dead ? Don't worry, it will be renamed into another one. Or subcontract for another one. You will buy its product again, you will just don't know you do.
PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again.
In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.
The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.
I appreciate your logic. However, MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS, are but a few examples. Only now drowned out.
From the wiki page, there are three levels that include 6 stages (two each):
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)
(Paying for a benefit)
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)
Microsoft continue to produce proprietary software, i.e. software which infringes on its users' freedoms to use, examine, modify & share software; that is wrong.
Indeed, this is an opinion based on observations I made, not a scientific claim.
And as you noted, I designed it specifically so that my comment would not be inundated with answers from the accounts of PR firms paid to say MS is great.
You can now state that those could be real accounts, and that MS is really a great company and that it's just being defended by people that like it for real and I have no proof of what I advance.
I think brand matters more than ever. It’s anecdotal, but let me give you a few examples of how my purchasing habits have become, and I assume that I used to buy things pretty much like everyone else.
Pants, one of my co-workers recommended a brand of pants from a Danish store called shaping new tomorrow, they have two real stores and their own internet business. They are the only pants I buy now, because they fit my needs. I used to buy pants at various places, but these guys really hit the nail on what I need, and as such their brand is immensely important to my pants buying.
Blood Bowl, I play it and I buy 3rd party miniatures. In the blood bowl community there is a lot of talk on who build the best 3rd party miniatures. I prefer willys miniatures and Greebo Games myself, and typically only buy their stuff. Again these are small mom and pop companies with their own little web shops that have become successful through their brands being associated with high quality.
T-shirts, I used to be a shirt guy. But a couple of years ago I started wearing t-shirts with prints. These are perhaps the best example because you can buy from so many places. And I did, I’ve bought t-shirts from about twenty different shops, but these days I mainly buy from qwertee because their fit suits my body best. Again their brand and the product I associate with it is important.
I used to buy things of amazon, and stores like it here in Denmark. But because it’s almost impossible, or at least takes a lot of time to associate sellers and quality on those platforms I almost never use them now. This was all anecdotal, but if I’m not alone in this, then brand matters quite a bit these days.
I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.
Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.
While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.
We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.
A acquaintance of mine recently told me he was going to start his own rock climbing clothes brand.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It works both ways. If I know that a company is basically selling Chinese t-shirts with their logo and their markup price, might as well just buy directly from China and skip the middleman.
> It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
“Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant. This sounds like the kind of thing discussed in No Logo, which was published in 1999.
> “Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant.
Yes, absolutely, since the invention of brands, at least some brands were the product rather than a signifier of quality.
However, in the last 10-20 years, largely due to globalization, high quality goods have become widely available. Before, that Nike hat may well have been much higher quality than the generic, but now they are indistinguishable. As overall product quality has improved, the only thing left to sell is the brand itself.
That's not my experience at all. A few years ago I would have been looking for the unknown chinese brands that could provide me with a gear that was "good enough". Now I will not even consider buying anything that is not from the top 5 brands for each thing. I have been burned too many time by products that were _almost_ as good, but not quite, and broke quickly. My branded gear is usually lasting forever (lenovo laptop, bose headset, roomba cleaner, instapot) as long as I buy on the medium/high-end end of the spectrum.
The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.
If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.
I'm not saying brands are not an indicator. Indeed, if I'm going to buy a USB-C cable, I'm going to use it as a filter.
I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.
Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.
Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.
Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.
And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.
I've found a lot of value in niche brands. For instance the Finnish outdoor/military/surplus store Varusteleka have some quite good own-brand products.
Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.
Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.
Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.
> Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore
> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.
A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?
One of the best choices I've made is to simply avoid any product which features conspicuous logos that are obviously meant to be seen.
There is no value for me in having a big Superdry or whatever logo blazoned across my chest. Instead I choose clothing with no logos, aside from what's on the tags inside. I make a small exception for polo shirts, because it just seems like it's integral part of the design to have a small logo on the left chest. I do try to choose high-quality shirts with small unobtrusive logos.
> - sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
Case example: I have two pairs of a specific model of cycling gloves, both are subtly different in materials and have different labeling styles, as well as different "made in" statements (one European, one Asian). Had I bought them from Amazon I might wonder which one is fake and it wouldn't be clear at all. But I got both pairs directly from company HQ stocks, the closest thing to a definition of "authentic" we have in today's inscrutable networks of subcontracting.
> - a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself
But the brand is responsible for the quality as perceived by the customer. They retain any good brand image by properly managing supply/subcontractor chain with quality control.
For the end user expiernce, it is not important who manufactures what but what assurances about the quality are made.
These are two different arguments, though. Yes, everything you listed is true, and it's largely what led to brand cynicism in the first place. However, this new Amazon problem (at least within the ecosystem of Amazon) is markedly worse. There are 1000 brands, and most of them are terrible, and the reviews are worthless, and you can't even see or hold the product in your hand. In this situation, a trusted brand has more internal consistency (despite all the issues you correctly noted) than the very inconsistent fly-by-night brands you can find on Amazon.
Of course, my argument falls apart if we can't spot counterfeits on Amazon.
>- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft.....
Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.
On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.
Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy
I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place.
I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option.
When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled garden." But for hardware, I know that if I get something at the Apple Store, or from apple.com, I generally don't have to worry.
It's because of this that I wish Apple† would go back into some of the product lines it has abandoned. Wifi routers. Servers. Printers and scanners. Even AA batteries and blank DVD's (I still have some of both). I'm at the point where I'll pay extra for confidence in the product.
† Or some other tech company that cares about its brand.
It’s confidence-inspiring that Apple hasn’t stopped software updates for AirPort routers (I have a 5th gen). There’s even an unofficial Python script that enables SSH, giving you root access to the NetBSD system underneath. So even when Apple finally does abandon it, it might still be possible to customize the Unix underpinnings.
Apple's machines are great. Apple's accessories not so much (see reviews on Apple's site). The 3rd party products Apple carries in their stores and on their site can be downright trash. I once made the false assumption that being sold by Apple was a kind of stamp of approval but I've since realized it's just which ever sales person managed to negotiate to get in the store. As a very concrete example, Apple used to carry Morphie battery cases which at the time were not actually Apple certified (lightning connector certification) as compatible with iPhone and yet other 3rd parties cases were but were not in the store. Also Belkin (not a fan)
I don't have the same experience with Apple. My MacBook had to get replaced multiple times due to a bad graphics card. My subsequent one had to get replaced multiple times because of the butterfly keyboards breaking.
So far so good on the latest one but it's annoying to deal with so many replacements
Right, it's really "generally works, and if it doesn't, and not too much time has elapsed since purchase or it's a widespread issue, you'll get the issue fixed relatively quickly, as many times as needed, until the issue is fixed or they give up and replace the device".
Emphasis on generally. Apple still sells many (most?) of its iMacs with spinning rust drives. Just picking up something from Apple Store and paying tons for it does not guarantee it meets minimum quality standards one might expect.
Classic hard-drives with platters that physically spin rather than a solid state SSD hard-drive. Nothing necessarily wrong with the older HDD technology, though most people have come to expect the better performance characteristics that come with newer SSD technology.
I bought an Amazon Basics USB hub. First I was generally happy, but after some time it would regularly just stop working for several hours. It's not that I was drawing too much power, typically just a security key or USB flash drive (and the hub had an external adapter).
That's "Amazon's Choice", which is a label you pay for that gets plopped on random bullshit. Amazon Basics is a brand that Amazon itself has had people design and manufacture for them. Not the same thing at all.
Wow. First time reading this as well, and there is such wisdom in it.
It is doubly apt considering what is going on in the political realm currently as well. Not a lot of understanding or willingness to fix things within the constraints of a system, just promises to tear it all down and replace it with utopian versions.
One of the important lessons of the internet is that unless there's very deliberate suppression, noise will drown out signal if there's the slightest incentive to spam.
Well put. It's definitely a signal vs noise type issue, all other aspects of the problem are secondary.
They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.
As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.
The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.
I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.
It's in the nature of the technology. If you can figure out how to do it once, doing it 1000x or 1000000x isn't going to cost you that much more. Quantity is easy, quality is hard. So we've created a selection force for "business" models that benefit from the nearly free ability to scale in quantity while ignoring quality. Ie, all sorts of spamming.
One of the reasons ML worries me is because it can sprinkle just enough of something that vaguely resembles quality into the pot to take the quantity (spam) scaling to a whole new level.
This issue isn't reviews vs. brands. The biggest problem with Amazon is that the reviews and brands are disconnected from the actual supplier. Who knows what you'll get?
> I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud
I've had to start doing this with violin strings. The sort of strings I like are pretty damn expensive (~$120 list price), so originally, any chance I could get to save say 10% I would take. But I heard way too much about fakes being shipped from Amazon 3rd party sellers, so I've started just buying everything from Shar (which, it turns out, provides steep discounts fairly regularly; you just have to wait for them).
i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are a human, that there is no way to win this war.
There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.
They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day.
However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.
There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.
This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.
> However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders.
Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.
Sure. The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere. There are plenty of super functional countries that disobey court orders.
China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...
As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.
> The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere.
But then if they commit fraud the US associate gets arrested, and it's hard to find volunteers to do that.
If Amazon has found themselves too large to operate as a marketplace that customers can trust then perhaps they made a poor decision in prioritizing short-term growth over everything else.
> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.
Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.
> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.
So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"
Good points, I agree that it seems unlikely that Amazon has lost sight of the long term thinking that is largely responsible for making them Amazon.
And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.
But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.
Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.
Of course you can do that at Amazon's scale. Also $1 items can be verified economically, considering you're going to sell more than one of it. It will make life harder for very small sellers with low value items. But I doubt that those make up a big share of sold items.
If you cannot get everyone to review for all purchases, then the next best thing is to do random sampling by randomly choose buyers and purchases to get reviewed, and possibly pay them so that selected reviews are collected. I have fond memory of winning the moderation lottery at Slashdot [1]. The current system of free for all will only amplify the voice of the abusers.
eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store.
Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.
But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.
I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.
(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)
I personally trust all of amazon fresh enough to feed me? but yeah, it's probably good advice to not put things that come from the rest of amazon in your mouth.
It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away.
Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does.
I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
I definitely agree that this could potentially cause long-term damage. Amazon could be one bad counterfeit away from destroying its brand. Brand trust ultimately matters for consumers making a default choice of what to buy or where to shop.
To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.
If we really want to look at it from a money point of view... I would say Amazon has more money to make in keeping people from leaving their marketplace. It seems like that’s the point it’s either at or getting close to.
If Amazon had direct liability for selling counterfeit products, for example, if the Ove Glove company (first in the original article) could sue Amazon and recover all the revenue that went to the counterfeiters plus a penalty - I believe in this case Amazon would find a solution to ensure supplier verification.
The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.
I bought a $25 product recently on Amazon. In the box there was a “coupon” that I’d get $20 back if I left a 5-star review for the product on Amazon. Instead I left a 1-star review saying that they were trying to game the system, and my review got REMOVED! I give up.
I've had people refund entire purchases and let me keep the item after I complain about a real defect, all just to avoid a low review. The most surreal instance was when I just asked a completely innocuous question and was offered a refund--clearly misunderstand my curiosity as a complaint.
I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.
If you sell a $1 product for $10 you can refund 8 of them and still double your money. Yes, for cheap Chinese made stuff the reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves
Don’t give up. Leave a 5-star review, get an out-of-band refund (if they do that). Then change your review to 1 and demand an in-band refund. Tell your friends.
> Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one?
That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues.
If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive.
It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.
Verified purchases on Amazon aren't trustworthy, either.
I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.
I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :)
I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.
The stuff they get from doing this is basically junk, a complete waste of resources. But the allure of "free stuff!" is just to great, even if they just end up throwing it in the trash.
I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.
This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
> Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.
This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review.
One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation.
However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.
I got requests to do reviews for some of the products I received out of nowhere on amazon and other places. They told me they would send me the money if I can order more myself and leave a review. So I guess, no that won't help as much as you think it would.
This is true, sometime I wonder about global economies exposing folks to the widespread corruption we hear about in so many other places in the world but haven't dealt with much first hand. I have to wonder if folks in corrupt environments just see these shady behaviors as the norm and so long as they're not axe murderers they're considered more or less decent people. Low standards and ethics eat systems based on honesty for breakfast.
From my experience in Germany, it's 50/50. There are fake human reviews (Vine Club being a large part of it...), but there are also clearly auto-translated reviews (though they might be posted by humans). It's mostly on low-price items that are FBA'd or shipped directly from China.
yeah, real humans blast past captcha and enter real heart warming text about how great the product is but don't mention they are being paid to write this review and pretend the product is good. Let's tackle the real issue and like connect wires from the human to the computer and like lie detector style measure their blood pressure, heart rate, sweat, or...
This would work for maybe 5% of products. This is no way to review the durability of a product, or review how it performs for specific tasks, e.g. swimming shampoo, internal computer component, sleeping mask, etc.
I think even a lay person would be able to make some good observations about any product. Then across hundreds of employees you could start to build specialized teams.
But also, you don't want people to be too close to a range of products so they can be somewhat objective. For example is swimming shampoo a real thing? or is it just normal shampoo that costs more?
Here is Australia there is a range of over the counter pain killers, all the same brand, all with the same active ingredients, but marketed at different kinds of pain, and at different price points.
They do, but it's not a job nor is it compensated except by delivery of the products. It's called the Amazon Vine program. There is also something called the Early Reviewer Program which is different. Sellers opt in to the ERP for new products. People who participate in the reviews sometimes get a tiny incentive from Amazon.
... and for some reason, Vine pretty much means "all the stars, all the time", so that's not "testing", that's just buying a 5 star review from a "verified" account.
I don't think most people who aren't Vine reviewers are happy with how it works ('cause they get free stuff). I have seen Vine reviewers leave bad reviews, and I know because I've been yelled at over it.
Yeah, it's not 100%, but it's far north of 95%. When I see Vine reviews, they are pretty much always 5 stars, even on products that have very mixed reviews from verified purchases. When I view the Vine-member profiles from those reviews, it's 20-30 five star reviews for every 1 star review. I can't remember ever having seen them give 2, 3 or 4 stars.
My impression is: you pay, you get 5 stars. They buy a product themselves and didn't like it, you get 1 star.
That's rather how a lot of Amazon reviewers are. Vine-rs are also now the only group of reviewers that can officially review products for free. Naturally when you are getting something for free, it's hard to really take value into account. A lot of 2-star $100 products might be "5-star" if you pay $0. That's something Amazon recognizes in its own policies towards normie non-Vine reviewers.
Absolutely, but it makes Vine-reviews useless to me. I'd take the product for $0 and be happy, but they aren't offering it to me for $0, so some review that's essentially "it was free, it's fantastic for something that was free" isn't relevant.
Maybe it's just not an issue for most people because they don't know that reviews could be bought, so any and all reviews are great for making the sale from Amazon's perspective. If the minority that chooses to shop elsewhere grows too large, they can always make a dramatic gesture, punish a dozen people with fake reviews and donate to a children's hospital.
Also limit review to be written X time after the product arrives. So many useless reviews that just said they received it and they are going to try it later...
And the people who answer one of the questions with "I don't know", too. Why did they bother typing anything at all?
My theory is that some people can't imagine that people aren't talking specifically to them. You see them in chat rooms answering every question as if it was posed them to directly, even when it was obviously directed at someone else.
In the case of amazon questions, this is a lot to do with how amazon handles them. If a new question is asked, amazon will sometimes send emails to people who have bought the product with the question. It's quite easy to see how someone could think this is directly addressed at them.
Why do you feel the process would be too expensive for most products? That is, let's say the review process might cost the merchant $5,000 on a one-time or biannual basis or whatever--does that seem like an unreasonable charge to take reasonable care that the products offered on the marketplace are authentic, of good quality, etc.?
I'll bite: Honest reviewer says that product works fine...for the first week or month. Wait for a year before allowing them to sell? Not doable especially on millions of new products.
Maybe reviews should be limited only to certified buyers or only those should be added to stars /rank.
Who is waiting a year? Just sell right away. The professional reviewer only has a few hours per product anyhow. That's enough the tell if the product is fake or deceptive. (Or if obviously fake, the quality of the fake :))
If you want to test longevity Amazon could track warranty repair / replacement claims.
> Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.
And this will effectively be Amazon's undoing. Given how much central power and authority they control over global retail, this is a good thing. Competition is good for the consumer.
Personally I would phrase it more cynically - the brand is fundamentally a lie even in a magical no counterfeiting world. It had a purpose once as an "index" once but it hasn't been that way for a while.
Essentially all a Brand says is that they got money for it. It how it was made or that they won't decide to cut corners for their next quarterly earnings no matter how many years it was good.
In practice given how often the "counterfeits" are made in the same factory by the same workers with materials from the same supplier the money going there is no guarantee of either product quality or righteousness.
Trying to use brand for delegating quality control is doomed to failure in the real world.
I suspect the better approach towards product identification would be going by verifiable specifications like manufacturers and doing both shopping and any enforcement based upon that. It would be hard as hell to transition society towards that as a norm though with marketer saturation, time investment, and every manufacturer having a financial incentive to try to decommoditize themselves to improve yields and protect themselves from competition.
Also funny, my result of this is that I now order basically everything directly via aliexpress. If all i get is chinese crap anyway, I can at least get it cheaper.
Then I noticed that aliexpress actually made some pretty good page design choices. Since you can see how long a seller is registered and how many they have sold (both directly on the product information site), it is pretty easy to find a at lest decent trader there
> I now order basically everything directly via aliexpress
I would argue that in some ways, AliExpress is better than Amazon. Vendors seem really responsive, even for tiny purchases, and they are eager to avoid negative reviews.
I’ve been happy with the “ReviewMeta” chrome extension, which evaluates the product reviews on any amazon site, and displays a score indicating how likely it is the ratings have been manipulated. It shows examples of flagged reviews which can be pretty funny.
Chrome lets you limit extension permissions by domain, so I don’t worry about it snooping on the rest of my browsing.
But you’re right about brands. When it comes to certain products like phone chargers, the manipulation is so rampant I stick with the same supplier.
> Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases.
The other day I came across something interesting: two comments, for two different but related products (dynamos). One comment was in German, the other in Italian, but they both had the same non-sequitur in them.
Apparently scammers reuse comments across products (not surprising) and languages (more surprising).
I think we are going in the expected direction, but we’re not at the end yet.
About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need to be a Dyson to get recognized.
The main issue here is really Amazon messing with the supply chain and injecting fakes where they could be guaranteeing genuine products instead. In a sense, looking at a wirecutter like site and buying directly from the maker is the best of both worlds.
After reading about the Wirecutter's attempts to extract a commission from a maker of standing desks[0] and observing their general high churn in product picks, it seems hard to argue that WC isn't buyable.
Chinese manufacturers themselves seem to follow this model. When they sell cheap junk, you see those one-shot noname brands. But once some market niche is flooded at the bottom, and the only way to get more of that market is to expand into higher-quality offerings, you start seeing established brands that care about their reputation, to the point where they sometimes outdo Western brands. One example that I know through my hobby is Holosun - not only they compete directly, and quite successfully, against Western market leaders on features and quality, but, in US at least, they have live support based in the country - not the usual call center somewhere in India.
More and more I find Amazon to be closer and closer to a Chinese Bazar of cheap quality items (kind of an AliExpress or dx but with a different perceived quality).
I believe they will gain a lot of customers among people who just want cheap stuff (or don't care if it is original as long as the brand is clearly visible and is cheaper) but definitely they will lose customers that use Amazon for convenience (more or less the same price, better refund policies, availability of products...)
It's a pity. Hopefully others will fill that space.
In Spain, El Corte Inglés with its new on-line platform is getting closer and closer.
> It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.
Totally agree. I think a lot of people feel this way, which is why it's so lucrative for Amazon and sellers to cheat on reviews.
Maybe this is what will save bricks and mortar? Guess where I buy any product I am going to ingest, put on my skin or plug into a wall?
A real store with some special online exceptions, but those exceptions are never going to be Amazon or Ebay.
There are some shady real stores selling shit too of course, so I have to be choosy, but I'm feeling pretty safe at a national supermarket chain, or Kmart.
I really believe these shady operations are ripe for satire and jabs in advertising. Much in the spirit of this one, just with teeth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5c_Br-mO7Po
And also there are docos on netflix about the fake products problem, and they do scare you away from using certain large online marketplaces.
So if I were the big retailers and cosmetic manufacturers (etc.). I'd be banding together to help fund more docos like that on netflix and elsewhere.
That'll scare people over to physical retail without mucking the image of any specific brands.
Another advantage of physical is the great advice you get and being able to act straight away (tale the thing home.). For example for a DIY project you often realise you don't have something mid job, just go and get it, get some advice on how to install it, and finish the job off on the same day.
I’d recommend using https://reviewmeta.com. It filters out suspicious reviewers and makes it much easier to avoid products with bought reviews on Amazon. Wouldn’t make purchases there without it.
I wish Amazon would just let you select which countries you wanted to include/exclude (both for made in and sold by). It wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least allow me to filter out fly by night Chinese manufacturers.
> because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews
Well one of the things big brands - especially in the consumer products industry like the one I work in - do quite religiously is product testing during research and a lot of q/a during manufacturing to eliminate as far as possible risk of safety issues.
We sometimes take competitive products through the same tests and while what some of the small producers sometimes produce wouldn't be illegal, we'd never run with those standards. Bigger competitors tend to be largely fine.
I had the same issue with not being able to tell what is from a 3rd party or Amazon.
I assume that sold and shipped Amazon has a greater chance of being real. For example, my wife was looking to buy some masks (I know, give into the fear) but I refused to buy from 3rd parties since I have a low level of trust.
So I built an app to help me and friends quickly tell if from a 3rd party or Amazon. Welcome to try and let me know how it can be better. https://www.trueseller.co
I’ve bought a few things that offered an Amazon gift card after a 5-star review. In some cases, the product was genuinely good and while I’d not have bothered to write a review, the gift card is enough to get me to write the review. I’m not going to write a good review for a crap product, but I bet plenty of people do.
I saw a documentation a while ago on yt where a German family bought a smartphone over Amazon, which was from China (not sure anymore if they knew at that moment). It exploded then some time later while charging.. they said that Amazon also did not much care and it took a while until it was removed.
I can also say that the company where I work at, had already multiple times problems with Amazon. True they are maybe a bit of a different kind but I think that dollars is the most important thing for them. Even if you have to fk with customers or third party sellers in one or the other way. That's also why I only buy at Amazon if it's really necessary and it's from a big company, like Nintendo or so.
There's also now the law in Germany (or soon) which prohibits the destroying of brand new stuff just because it did not sell. That happened mainly (I'd say) because of Amazon where it went public that 2 trucks left a single warehouse on average per day, filled with only that kind of products
This was one of the early theories about how Facebook would monetize -- that your real-life friends would value their relationship with you too highly to recommend anything but truly great products to you. That hit the reality that people would squander most of their friends for their stupid MLM scheme.
You're right user reviews on Amazon are manipulated. Bought a bluetooth earphone on Amazon DE, was contacted by vendor to exchange a five star for a half refund.
Also came across Facebook ads that asks you to buy random crap and leave positive review in exchange for a full refund, and they call this "free samplimg".
> was contacted by vendor to exchange a five star for a half refund
And the way you can tell Amazon doesn't care is because they have no way to report this to them.
I've tried. They just don't care if someone offers you something off platform in exchange for a good review.
Maybe that's why Amazon beat eBay. When I worked at eBay 17 years ago we had systems in place to combat this exact type of fraud (off platform exchange for a good review).
> Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy
It's interesting that you say this, since Amazon itself is a brand--but not the kind of brand you're looking for. You are looking for reliable quality, and Amazon's brand is quick and cheap.
I have friends who are no longer buying from Amazon. Especially friends with kids. You can’t trust anything safe for your kids when crap like this is allowed. Amazon is in a race to flood the market with availability at the cost of consumer confidence.
Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind. Amazon only cares something bad happens on the news and they’re involved.
My neighbor bought a set of woodworking clamps from Amazon. When the ~25lb. box arrived, the driver threw them up onto his porch (his house is quite raised from the street), and he has video of it damaging his siding as it took three attempts for the driver to get them over the railing onto his porch. When he contacted Amazon, they said to contact some insurance company they had. When my neighbor called the insurance company, they never returned the call.
He proceeded to begin researching the insurance company, which was owned by Amazon, but wasn't listed as a valid insurance company in Massachusetts. He contacted Amazon again, and said, "would you like me to call the insurance commissioner and attorney general that you're operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts." Someone was out to fix his siding in 3 days, and they painted the porch as well (due to some paint matching problem).
Despite how much I love being able to order stuff, and not have to go out, Amazon is pretty scum-tacular.
I too learned that the best way to get your problem solved with Amazon is to resort to threats. It took ages to get my account closed -- I was sent by 5 different chat agents to the same "click here and send an email to confirm" page -- until I threatened to complain to the California Attorney General under CCPA. Then suddenly the agent had all the power in the world to close my account.
Did your neighbor call the insurance commissioner and attorney general to tell them that they were operating a non-registered insurance company in Massachusetts?
Amazon sold us a defective and/or counterfeit refrigerator water filter that leaked and damaged our hardwood floors. Homeowners insurance gave us an estimate of $5300 in damage. I sent a demand letter to Amazon legal dept. detailing the claim and threatening a lawsuit. They wrote us a check in about two months from mailing said letter.
I had an experience like this with them recently too--In order to save $15, I bought a part for my Whirlpool washer on Amazon. It was the in-flow controller which the water hoses hook in to. I ordered it from "Sold and Fulfilled by Amazon" which used to be my mark of a decent product (or at least I know I'll be able to get a refund if it has issues directly from Amazon). It arrived in unbranded cardboard, but the plastic wrapper did have "Maytag" stamping. Unfortunately my washer refused to recognize it despite it being extremely basic in design (a couple servos and a tiny switching board connected to some plastic tubes for water inlets). I requested a refund from Amazon which happened with in hours and went down to a local appliance repair place and paid the extra $15 for another.
The one from the local shop was not wrapped in plastic, but it was in Maytag branded cardboard with part-number and SKU. Took it home and compared it to the Amazon part which I hadn't yet boxed up and the Amazon part was visibly of lower quality plastic (edges were poor, you could see where welds had been done at the corners) and the circuit board with the switching components was completely different despite having the same molex-type connector. BOTH units had the same part-number molded in to the plastic in the same spot, yet the actual Maytag version I got locally worked instantly the first time.
Does that Amazon owned insurance company have any clients other than Amazon? If it only serves Amazon, it might not count as an insurance company for purposes of regulation.
I went from being an enthusiastic fan of Amazon Prime and a $50k spend one year [+] to closing my Amazon account and then warning other people away from it in the space of about five years.
I can't recall any other business from which I've moved so quickly and so far from one end of the spectrum of enthusiasm to the other.
[+] Most of it was for business -- parts and equipment for customers, it was often cheaper that way than my wholesale supplier.
Google has been about the same for me. I went from total Google fanboy to migrating a lot of my life away from them and advising others to do the same.
(I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.
Downsides: their label system is, to someone who really likes gmail, not as good. Calendar syncing on Android with their preferred sync app breaks every couple of months until you hit resync. Fastmail is in Australia, and I'm not sure the impact of Australia's police assistance laws.
Same: They support u2f.
Their product has improved a lot in the 5 years I've been using it, and is very worth the money. I think it's critically important that there exist high quality alternatives to google services, so that's a nice secondary reason to pay them.
In the case of Fastmail I don't know what you mean with "their preferred sync app" but I've used CalDAV-Sync in the past and now DAVx5 (because it's easier to use (used to be DAVdroid)) and I've never had these problems you mention.
If you have a domain name registered, sometimes your registrar will offer built in email. For example, I have a domain registered with Gandi and they provide a free email service.
Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.
Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google.
I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.
Once I had great Google Fu. I could find really niche topics. Currently, it's completely useless for that. If it's not something that many people want to find, you cant find it.
I went from being an enthusiastic fan of Amazon Prime and a $50k spend one year [+] to closing my Amazon account
I used to spend about as much as you. Now I almost never buy anything from amazon.com.
The only value my Prime membership has to me now is discounts at Whole Foods, and Prime Video. Otherwise, I bet I spend less than $500 a year at amazon.com.
How on earth can you possibly spend so much on random consumer products sold on Amazon? Are people really buying so much junk that it costs more than most peoples yearly salaries?
I have a friend who buys nearly everything aside from perishable food via Amazon because they will put it directly on his porch and he doesn't have to go to a physical store. I laughed when he told me it was cheaper to have 50 lbs of cat litter delivered to his porch via Prime than to drive across town to the Walmart.
Whole Foods is another one I have gone from super fan to hating. Every time I shop there now is compounding failures of poor stock consistency, more online order shoppers than actual customers clogging the isles, and overall drop in quality
> items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in mind.
The amount of electronics sold without an UL/ETL cert on Amazon is staggering. Many companies no longer bother getting one because there's noone to stop them from selling uncertified crap. Also, we have seen unscrupulous dealers slapping a fake ETL cert on their product and even when Intertek contacted Amazon they didn't take it down!
Hell, there's an "international" power strip sold under many different names which provides three NEMA 5-15R from a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A) and to top it off, it is sold with an ungrounded cable. I often see it recommended on travel forums, for real. I can't even decide whether shock or fire is the bigger hazard with this. Someone eventually will burn down an airbnb with it and then will the finger pointing start.
> a single IEC C5/C6 coupler (the IEC standard is up to 2.5A but the UL certifies it up to 13A but still, the NEMA connector is 15A)
The UL missed the point of C5/C6 entirely. Yes, the contacts are totally fine for that kind of current. But the point of having it with C13/C14 next to it is that because C5/C6 is only rated for 2.5 A you can use thinner coper in the cables. Meanwhile all compliant C13 cables have to use a 1.5 mm² cross section to carry the full continuous 10 A load current. If this is correct, then a "fine according to UL" load would actually melt most C5 cables (generally 3x0.75 mm²).
Cancelled my prime this year, haven't looked back. A lot of retailers offer free shipping if you order a certain dollar amount and while they have a smaller selection, I can be pretty sure I'm not receiving anything fake. They also tend to have a lot less noise in search results.
main downside is I'm having to order from multiple places, but it hasn't been too bad.
I was tired one night and looking for a replacement brake set for my car (oem has a known problem with seizing I was experiencing). Followed a link from a reddit advice post to some company's site with the parts. Said it would take weeks but I needed it so oh well. Realized the next day Amazon had the same exact thing for less and 2 day shipping. Emailed support of the other site to cancel and days later they said they'd "try" but some of the order was "already printed" and there was "nothing they could do" (BS). Amazon one got here in 2 days, other one got here in 2 weeks, all of it. Returning would leave me out their "free shipping" cost so I'm just keeping it.
I'm never going outside Amazon ever again unless the product or a suitable alternative doesn't exist on Amazon.
Another thing i'd like to note is I've ordered dozens of "Amazon Basics" products and I've yet to be disappointed. The company overall has been great for me. Painless returns with no gotchas, lower prices, superior shipping, better ease of use, 5% back with the card.
Yeah, amazonbasics stuff has been great for me too. I'm not boycotting Amazon, I just don't think Prime is worth it anymore for me. Amazon is truly better in some cases, but I just don't mind using saver shipping for the most part. Most of the typical household stuff and packaged foods are typically available for free 1 or 2 day shipping at other retailers. Worst case I can drag my butt over to a physical store, but I'm usually pretty good at ordering ahead.
One of things that pushed me away from amazon is their increased usage of "add-on item" labels. If I have to batch order anyway, Prime isn't actually that great of a deal.
Also for prices, I've actually found that for some items the prices are not always lower, but ymmv. Factor in that you're paying an annual fee. IMO, the 2 day shipping is almost not a factor anymore, since other major US retailers are starting to offer it for FREE. So for me it comes down to, is it worth the price so I don't need to batch order ~sometimes~ ? We could also be using Amazon very differently, so it may actually be a much better deal for you.
I'm amazed that a person making "negative ion wellness bracelets" would go to the effort and expense of putting a radioactive material in there to actually generate negative ions! Why not just put a copper-colored thread in there and claim it makes negative ions?
I'm astonished no competitor like Walmart or Wayfair has gone on the offensive yet with TV ads stating flat-out that you can't trust Amazon anymore because their counterfeit problem is out of control. They'd make a killing with defectors.
"One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables."
I posted about this on HN recently[1]. Within the last month, I've been getting an increasing amount of native ads on different platforms for "Free [Product]!". If you engage the ad, you find out that the ad-purchaser wants you to buy the advertised product and leave a positive review for it on Amazon, after which they'll refund you for the cost of the product.
Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1], which is misleading to consumers who rely on honest reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. Also, it is almost comical how difficult it is to reach out to Amazon about this issue as a user.
In the end, I just contacted my state Attorney General's Consumer Protection division and the FTC.
If you have examples you can try sending it to jeff@amazon.com and it will (eventually) get triaged as a sev-b ticket if you're lucky or it is an interesting enough issue
Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them? Another approach might be to reach out to the ad network to complain about these illegal ads. (Fake paid reviews are illegal ads, and soliciting illegal activity is illegal.)
The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews. Amazon should be happy to cooperate.
> Are these legit sites / apps you are reading? How are you finding them?
They are mostly on Facebook. They're native ads[1] because I have various layers of ad blocking implemented, and only native ads get through.
> The solution here is probably to convince authorities to prosecute the individuals are accepting bribes for fake reviews
I'd have to disagree. There needs to be incentives against unscrupulous business practices by sellers who are arguably the bad actors in this situation, and not the unsophisticated consumer caught up in a confusing offer.
Well when Amazon takes steps to reduce fraud people scream to high hell about how unfair it is to the small business trying to sell product. Take the case of Apple and Amazon working a deal where Apple products can only be sold by Apple or whom Apple authorizes.
I know the headache of trying to find a Silpat cooking mat, the number of look alike fakes is astounding and worse they use the name brand when they clearly are not that manufacturer.
So the only recourse is to have a setup similar to the Amazon and Apple deal. Anyone wishing to sell a branded product must provide proof to Amazon which includes the manufacturer backing the claim that they are authorized to sell that product. Not line, by product.
After spending $50 on a "Recommended" and "Prime" counterfeit PS4 controller (proven by a tear down), I no longer buy electronics from Amazon. With a brick and mortar, some sort of incoming quality control still seems to be in place.
I'll bite - how would them caring make any difference in terms of quality of "fake" reviews?
The way I see it the problem is unsolvable. There is no mathematical way to absolutely determine truth of reviews and it is fundamentally an arms race. No measure they could do could keep it true and free of deception.
For sure. This is why we let financial institutions launder money, fund rogue states, and aid in tax evasion with no fear of legal consequence. Because otherwise it’s hard for them to operate.
No measure of KYC could keep it the financial system completely free of illicit activity, after all.
Trust seems like the fundamental problem. I used to trust the people writing Amazon reviews but now I don’t. If I could filter reviews to those written by people I trust, then those reviews would still be valuable.
It’s not a comprehensive solution since I probably don’t trust enough people to cover the range of products I’m interested in, but it could be better than the current mess.
The limited scale might even be beneficial because I wouldn’t have to wade through hundreds of nearly identical products.
The problem is mostly solvable. Review quality went downhill when Amazon decided to let 3rd party sellers run rampant, in order to boost their margins. A decade ago or earlier, when they had a handle on their supply chain, the reviews were pretty reliable. They can always go back to that model, but the smell of a greenback is too intoxicating for this to happen.
Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route. Typical cases of crapification of the late stage, overfinancialized capitalism.
> Notice that Walmart, Newegg and other wannabees are going down the same route.
It's sad to hear Newegg is a part of this now. I haven't bought computer parts in 6 years but Newegg was where I typically got most things from (and sometimes Amazon back then too).
I have started buying most products directly from manufacturer's websites or in physical stores now. The amount of fake products on Amazon is appalling, I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.
Very few products on Amazon are sold by the creator. Virtually everything is sold by a mixture of middlemen and importers and drop shippers.
Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between a product I'm middle-manning that's interpreted by investigators as real, vs a product that's interpreted as fake.
With books, nobody really minds if conceptually a book sat unopened on a bookstore shelf with the general public touching and pawing it occasionally vs a book that sat pristine untouched and cleaner on my home bookshelf, although one is marketed as "new" and one as "used", but in practice it usually doesn't matter. Also see the weirdness with $10 "indian subcontinent only" textbooks that normally sell for $200 to sucker american students, nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet.
On the other hand, do that same game with toothbrushes and in roll the complaints.
This may be a problem inherent to online shopping in the long term. A copy of "Numerical Recipes in C edition 3" is a fungible commodity. Apparently, as per the linked article, that is not the case with fad overpriced gloves and toothbrushes. Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
Regardless of whether the product is overpriced or fashionable, I want the correct product, without the shortcuts taken by a fake: unsafe paints, plastics etc.
I don't mind "Philips-compatible" brush heads being listed, but the description should be clear.
Otherwise we may as well repeal all trademark, copyright and product safety laws.
Several of the examples in OP are admittedly not counterfeit but simply look too similar to a name brand, or are older versions. Neither is illegal per se. (Assuming there's no design patent, and the product page doesn't specify year of manufacture or exact model number, which is common.)
Counterfeiters counterfeit the medium, not the information. It's mostly harmless to consumers in cases where it's the information that matters (books, digital content). It's harmful when the physical medium is the product.
Elsewhere in the discussion, 'erentz says:
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
I think they're right in more than one way. It's not only the platform vs. publisher issue. Fake news are the information goods equivalent of counterfeiting - faking the bits, not the medium.
I agree that the ambiguity between 'like-new' and actually new, but mildly shopworn would make it hard to tell a material difference between the two occurrences, however this:
> nobody complains their book was "fake" with a 95% discount to keep them quiet
This is conflating dishonest substitution of counterfeit goods with consensual purchase of a lower-quality product. If I'm not explicitly purchasing the 'international' version of a book, I would consider myself harmed and defrauded if its materials and construction are not up to expected [North-American / Western / ?] standards.
The user explicitly consenting to purchasing a knock-off is another thing entirely from having the seller 'fulfill' a purchase for a genuine item with the same knock-off.
>Possibly that type of product is inherently unsuitable for online purchase.
You're confusing online purchasing with "Amazon's approach to online purchasing." They are not the same thing. It's possible to manage the supply chain when selling online just like brick and mortal retails already do. Of course, you don't make as much money in the process.
I started buying electronics at my local physical Best Buy. I thought 4 years ago I would never step inside a Best Buy again but a string of obvious fakes from Amazon changed my mind.
Their in-store pickup is very convenient. And their prices are pretty good. I'm avoiding buying anything from Amazon since August because of the numerous problems I was having with them. I did have to buy one technical book about database design from them because I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere else. Otherwise it's been really painless not using Amazon for any purchases.
I bought a tv at best buy recently. it was my first time stepping inside the store in ten years. I had very low expectations, but it turned out to be a great experience. the sales associate I spoke to was actually super knowledgeable; it was almost as good as buying pc hardware at microcenter.
Best Buy even price matches Amazon so I've gotten the same item from there at the same price, same day, no shipping wait, no $120/year charge for "free" shipping.
>I wonder why they don't put effort into stopping this.
Because they make more money than they lose as a result while driving competitors into bankruptcy. Eventually they'll make a big public spectacle of getting it fixed (once the economics stop being in their favor) and everyone will forgive them.
Agreed. I assume they have ran the numbers and decided that the small number of customers they lose (like myself) don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
A couple years back I impulse purchased a Google Chromecast at a local Walmart. When I went to open it up at home, the seal looked a bit funky like it had been carefully pealed back and put back in place.
What it contained looked like a Chromecast, but was actually a knockoff, which I never could get to associate with my network or get working.
Apparently someone bought this cheap one online, didn't like it, bought the real one at Walmart and put the fake one back in the box and returned it to the store.
I tried this recently. Bought something from the manufacturer, paid extra for shipping & handling, waited longer, the whole bit. I felt good about myself, because I don't want to be taken advantage of anymore, and hey ... I'm buying directly from the manufacturer, so they get a higher cut. Right?
No. I bought directly from the manufacturer's website, paid them, got email from them, the whole bit ... and it was fulfilled and delivered by Amazon. I got an amazon box, and an amazon invoice, and an amazon product.
You can't win anymore. Online commerce is subverted. What you see, no matter how savvy of a consumer or how much experience you have with online shopping, is not guaranteed to be what you get, anymore.
It's like there was real value in a physical store where you could go, look at the product, and speak to experts about said product. Weird.
All snark aside, though, I see a resurgence in small, boutique mom-and-pop shops for goods in the next 5-10 years as Millennials and Gen-Z get sick of being scammed online. The biggest new thing is that unlike gen-x and boomers, Millennials and Gen-Z are savvy enough to have tried to remedy the situation for themselves and understand it's a whack-a-mole game with no winners.
The actual solution would require them giving up being a "platform" or would require changes that would make logistics and/or management of the platform take much more effort. They'd rather let a "fraud department" keep chopping off hydra heads at a much lower cost.
I have received fake products from Amazon in France and Spain. It's not just the US.
But what's more common from Amazon is to receive an obviously refurbished product as new. The products people return are just sent to the next buyer, without check or cleaning.
You can not trust any review on Amazon anymore, not even from verified buyers. Resellers of Chinese goods will have people (there are facebook groups) to "buy" these goods and leave a 5-star review for a refund.
Depending on what you get, you may get a fake good, or genuine products that failed QA, or similar products with less QA from the same factory, or old tranches, or goods with short best-before dates, goods with a different composition of ingredients, goods with harmful substances as filler and so forth. If you buy refurbished goods, chances are pretty good you will run into region lock or quality issues with no recourse, as brands will refuse (e.g. Apple) to offer support!
Even if this is not the norm, it will sooner or later happen to you.
Therefore:
-> Do not buy any brand product that costs above an amount you feel comfortable to just lose. Assume you will getting a no name product, then you are fine.
Otherwise, try to buy at a store or better, directly at the company. Save yourself the headache.
-> Do not buy things that go into your body, except if the seller is the manufacturer.
-> Do not buy goods that run without supervision, may catch on fire or otherwise damage their surrounding. Do not assume stickers of "CE certification" (or whatever applies in your country) are genuine. There is still no effective recourse by law enforcement in these cases.
This does not mean that everything is fake or bad quality, but you do not need to take this risk in cases where real harm may occur. Most brands sell their goods directly from their own website, which also usually gives you better support.
Do that!
Edit: I realize this PSA is probably useless on this platform as people here are generally pretty aware about these things. But do spread this information for more naive buyers. You really only need to get poisoned, burnt or lose significant amounts of money once.
I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)
One important part of our solution here has to be that we force these companies to take a position one way or the other. So in Amazon's case it would need to decide - am I a platform for companies to set up there own online shop and provide fulfillment services to? Or am I myself the online shop?
In the later case they become responsible for product, like any business. In the former, they aren't. But in the former they now need to act as just a platform and not provide all the branding that makes it look like you're buying from Amazon. So they'd be more akin to Shopify or something I suppose. Every fly by night shop that wants to set up needs to set up its own branding and that way brand reliability and recognition still works and items are no longer commingled.
>I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem. In both cases you have a company that wants to both have it's platform cake and eat it's publisher cake at the same time. (Sorry for the bad spin on that phrase there.)
These companies innovate by showing off a layer of whiz-bang techy goodness so people don't notice that they've simply externalized all the responsibility and internalized all the profits.
Wait, do you really believe that amazons retail business has had little or no significant innovation besides whiz bang tech goodness? I’m guessing you were exaggerating to make a more strong sounding statement, but if you meant it, then I strongly disagree.
What exactly are they adding in value compared to any regular webshop? It's just as incomprehensibly bad as the standard run of the mill default PrestaShop.
At least Shopify is a real platform you can build stuff on.
Amazon is just this giant bullying machine. The Dalek of retail.
Could you elaborate a bit on what other vendors screw up?
Here, in Hungary, ordering from Amazon is problematic, because it's such a beast. No human in the loop, and they pass on your package to some delivery vendor anyway, which usually doesn't provide much tracking. So we get no* benefit of the machine at all.
* - sure, we get an interface that's at least consistent and usually available in English
Fast OR cheap shipping. At least in my locality. In the place I most frequently order, free shipping is scheduled for "5-7 business days" to get to me, and frequently gets misdirected and takes an extra day or two (pushing it past another weekend).
When I've ordered to one of Canada's large urban centers it is much faster. But going to an actual store to get something for the same price is also an option, and faster still. And doesn't tend to have difficult to spot counterfeits.
Huge selection, great customer service, saved credentials, 5% back on purchases, most stuff is one day shipping for me. I also know they fix problems pretty rapidly. I get a ton of entertainment from prime video.
Those are all things difficult to get consistently from a random web store.
Agreed. The problem is that generally the descriptions are so useless it's hard to know what's actually what. (For example recently I ordered a case for a Kobo Forma e-reader, and it was impossible to know how it would actually fold, because there were a few pictures, no video, no schematics, nothing. And the description was similarly unhelpful. It worked out okay though.)
> great customer service
I found it impossible to even get in touch with them :o (I wanted to ask where my package is, but they just kept naming the shipping vendor - "Deutsche Post", no tracking ID, no link, no actual contact to the relevant department.)
> saved credentials
Every webshop so far does it, and usually smaller ones provide ability to use PayPal.
> 5% back on purchases
How does that work? It's either priced into the price of everything or others pay for it, no?
It also wouldn't be surprising to learn that they identify customers (buyers) who have louder voices and more social influence, and shield those people from fakes -- or provide rewards to mollify them when they do report problems.
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.
Brought it up elsewhere[0], but I think you're right in more than one way. Beyond publisher vs. platform issue, fake news are the digital equivalent to counterfeiting; they're to news - and in general, to information media[1] - what Amazon counterfeits are to physical products.
Just stopping the insane co-mingling of products from different sellers would go such a long way. The co-mingling is in essence destroying accountability and evidence!
Amazon is simply the worlds largest fence for counterfeit goods, and should be treated as such. If your local pawn shop did what Amazon does, the owners would take a ride in a black-and-white cab.
I think you solve it by making amazon directly liable for fraud on their platform. They’d clean up the problem pretty quickly after losing a few billion dollars in lawsuits.
By having a President that holds rallies on getting these issues passed and sets a agenda for the people to vote for congresspeople who support consumer protection laws like these. This is where the office of the Presidency really has impact, it can direct the attention of millions of people to exert great pressure on its target.
There is already legislation that should give the FTC teeth to fine or shutdown Amazon based on counterfeit goods, especially if the branding is illegitimate.
There's a lot of anti-tech energy on the left lately. And Bezos painted a target on his back by getting into Twitter feuds with Trump. He's also now synonymous with the Washington Post which has never met a Republican they liked.
This all adds up to a company nobody seems to like in DC. If there's any company I could see getting a Washington smackdown soon, it's Amazon.
I’m talking about their reporting, not their editorials — which, no, I don’t regularly read. Although it’s worth noting they’ve not once endorsed a Republican for president, ever.
They serve DC, so I’m not surprised or upset they have a bias — but we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist either.
Obviously owning a liberal newspaper doesn’t win Bezos any points on the right, which became obvious with Trump supposedly pressuring the Pentagon not to use AWS.
I think they should be liable, but I think even just enforcing the existing laws without making them liable would put a stop to it.
Just have the police start tracking down what warehouses counterfeit items came from, and getting search warrants to search them.
Apart from the fact that this would directly reduce the number of counterfeit's... repeatedly shutting down warehouses for searches would kill Amazon's bottom line. Cleaning up after the police would kill Amazon's bottom line. Etc.
It's not exactly justice, but it is damn effective. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride and all that.
I agree from in some capacity in the growth or greed to increase DAU and engagement for social networks is similar to Amazon’s desire to grow SKUs and purchase volume. Amazon mixing SKUs maybe relates to when press piggy backs off of the same initial headline as it creates distrust and makes people question the quality of the product.
There’s a big difference though. Social media allows many individual voices, and much like the printing press, allows previously unheard voices to be heard and to have reach. Therefore, the world’s expert can call out a journalist for being wrong immediately, making it seem like “fake news” is more common than it was previously.
Amazon is actually causing distrust around product quality when there wasn’t any before. Consumers may have trusted Colgate’s toothpaste, but if it isn’t actually Colgate’s toothpaste, yet it poisons someone, it becomes Colgate’s problem too. This would be like Facebook or Twitter allowing any account to adopt a WSJ or NyTimes verified badge, one of those accounts publishes fake news, and then the paper itself has a problem too.
Disclaimer: I don’t own amazon directly but do own funds where Amazon is a significant chunk.
I don’t agree with this kind of regulation. It’s simply not the governments role to decide. You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon. I say that as the spouse of a seller who owns a store on EBay that’s continued to be successful. We had a bad experience selling on Amazon and are better off without them. Of course that’s just our experience but I’m not convinced Amazon is a monopoly here.
I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers. Amazon simply selling goods with no liability of fraudulent items is a disgrace, and I don’t think they will change until we ram some regulation down their throat.
Minus the projection, I think all we can say is they were warning us to take their opinion with a grain of salt because they have an ostensible conflict of interest.
> You as a seller are not forced to sell on Amazon.
Sorry, but this argument is just silly.
Here's some food for thought: Birkenstock stopped selling on Amazon[1] due to a delluge of fakes. Now go to Amazon.com and search for Birkenstock. You get a shit ton of results.
So if Birkenstock is not selling them, since they don't sell on Amazon, then who sells them and do those sellers have a right to sell a 3rd party product despite the brand not wishing to sell on the platform at all?
If you can regulate that a pimply faced teenager in Tenessee is ruined for life for downloading 10 songs, then it should surely be possible to regulate a behemoth like Amazon not to allow the sale of crap from dodgy suppliers on its platform.
> I do think Amazon needs to be held liable for fake products and whatever damage they cause its customers.
what would this look like? they already have a pretty generous return policy. they pay the return shipping and return the funds as soon as the package ships. I'm not thrilled with the status quo of playing fraud roulette every time I order something, but the worst thing that's ever happened to me is having to wait a couple extra days for the genuine item.
> they already have a pretty generous return policy.
Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one.
One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the liability such records might incur.
This can be solved with an "I believe the item I received is a counterfeit" option alongside the "Item is defective or doesn't work" option already present during the return process.
My personal favorite was the manufacturer who purchased an item from us (a third party merchant) who claimed it was counterfeit. This product was originally purchased from the manufacturer and had its original sales receipt. Amazon’s project zero uses a hammer to fix this problem by removing all sellers (even ones that have a right to sell the item). Sometimes in rare cases legal action is taken and they do get the real counterfeiter but from what I saw the real problem (for the accuser) is solved because now only amazon or only the manufacturer can sell against that listing. Hoping this will one day change but I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.
"Getting the fake gloves removed from Amazon can be a long process, Hirsch said, taking weeks or even months of playing whack-a-mole with counterfeit sellers"
That's the brand owner saying that. I'd love to see an Amazon response to that.
Personally the brand owner makes me trust them as far as I can throw them as they have a fundamental interest in hampering secondary markets and undermining right of first sale. Sure there are valid concerns but it becomes "CEOs claim higher CEO compensation main factor linked to better company performance".
There's not a big secondary market in unopened $15 gloves. And I really doubt the used listings are a big deal. So I don't think that's a notable factor here.
They also have a fundamental interest in protecting the reputation of their product, which is definitely at risk from someone burning themselves with counterfeit gloves.
Time to pack the kids in the car and drive to your local hardware store.
No, seriously. Go to your local hardware store. If the quality of your purchase matters, then the surest way to get good quality product is to go to the store and pick it up yourself. If for some reasons you get a fake, you can drive back to the store and they'll be happy to replace it. You don't have to talk to a faceless corporation.
Great idea for some products, infeasible for others. I recently needed a Firewire cable, on a day's notice, and after much searching I concluded there's no longer any store in Seattle which sells computer components in person, especially outside of normal business hours.
The closest I found was Fry's (Renton, 30min away), and they're doing their darndest to go out of business. A Firewire cable in one of the few items they have on their shelves. It's not name-brand, and if it didn't work, I'd be SOL.
I just watched a CBC Marketplace spot on this topic. What scared me the most was the danger of toxic materials in fake products and especially makeup. Some lipsticks from brand name knock offs had had mercury levels hundreds of times higher than the maximum levels recommended by industry standards.
Netflix has a short documentary on this very thing. It was really eye-opening that counterfeit makeup and cosmetics are not only bad for businesses but they can be physically harmful to the body/face, resulting in some people being rushed to the hospital.
This happened to me the first time this Christmas. Bought a $25 electric doodad that was "sold by Amazon" for a family member and it was obviously a fake. It came in a very generic white box with the company logo stamped on it, inside was a product that looked completely different and was non-functional. Not only that, but the product was difficult to return (I had to contact support) which makes me suspect Amazon knew it was a fishy product.
It has completely shaken my faith in Amazon. This is probably my last year as a Prime subscriber.
I bought a monitor once on amazon a couple of years ago. It seemed legit -- packaging looked authentic. Monitor looked authentic. But the power cable was really weird and clunky. It had no branding on it, and everything was written in Chinese. It barely fit into the monitor, and the monitor would only turn on if the cable was in exactly the right position. This was an LG monitor, and not a cheap one, so I contacted amazon and they accepted the return and sent a replacement. Well, the replacement was even worse. Same thing where the power cable seemed incredibly cheap, but the monitor itself seemed fine, but I couldn't even get it to turn on unless I was actively holding the power cable into the monitor.
Ended up just returning it again, but thought it was a fluke. I still used amazon for a while, but this type of thing has become so common that I don't use them anymore at all.
at the risk of upping the amazon paranoia (which i think is valid but blown out of proportion), i also had a little fake product issue recently with amazon.
i had bought two glass (kitchen) storage jars a year ago and decided in november to order one more. the new one was about 10% smaller with slightly different markings, just similar enough that it wasn't noticeable on first glance, but was obvious when placed next to the other two jars.
initially, i assumed it was a warehouse mix-up, so i requested a replacement. the replacement was exactly the same smaller jar and not the original. mind you, the original was already a chinese-made & branded item. the replacement was a cheaper knockoff of what was probably already a ridiculously marked-up import. luckily it was only a minor hassle to return both and get a refund.
i'm not a big amazon shopper and avoid their own electronics like kindles and echos (don't need more plutocratic surveillance in my life), but for anything of (at least moderate) value, i'll sometimes double-check against photos on amazon and manufacturer's sites. fakes have generally not been a significant problem for me.
Then every time you try to make a purchase as a former prime user you will hit failed captcha after failed captcha, and a mandatory "would you like to try prime" window with a 'no thanks' click through in size 8 font. Sometimes I have to use a different browser if I fail the captcha too many times and amazon crudely attempts to lock me out.
Can you actually cancel? When I did, they had an obnoxious dark pattern where there was no visible option to disable auto-renewal, but going through the cancellation flow just disabled auto-renewal.
Well, the very reason they exist is for you to click on their links. Thats their business model. So really, for them to write such an article is really to bite the hand that feeds them, which shows some gumption. But they would never cut off all their income by removing the links.
I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
> I’m not sure how it works with counterfeits on Amazon, will the same product id or same link sometimes be the real thing and sometimes not?
Correct. Say for the moment that Nike decides to sell their shoes on Amazon through the Amazon warehousing program for really great service and delivery options. Then say that I send a bunch of counterfeit Nike shoes to Amazon using the exact same product details that Nike does. Now Amazon says, "if we put these two batches of Nike shoes together in the same bin, we will save money because fulfilling orders for shoes will be more efficient". But if they are in the same bin, then when you order from Nike you might get my knockoffs.
It's at least mostly true. They usually link to the official seller, so while it's possible they either get that wrong, or the seller starts shipping the wrong product it at least saves some of the work.
These official sellers are using Amazon order fulfillment. Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.
Amazon is mixing counterfeits into their inventory. Linking to the official seller doesn't matter if Amazon treats the product as a fungible commodity behind the scenes like it does.
Do you have any evidence at all that this is the case? It's the opposite of what is said in the article - all the examples given are for non-official sellers.
Notably the article say "encountered a few instances in which a _seller_ switched in an authentic product but from a discontinued or lesser-quality line" and "The authentic ‘Ove’ Glove is available for purchase through a page indicating that it is sold and shipped by Amazon.com or sold by Joseph Ent, the Amazon storefront for Joseph Enterprises."
Also none of the sellers in the article that the Wirecutter contacted made this claim which would be surprising if it was the case!
"The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm."
> It's the opposite of what is said in the article
In fact it is _not_ the opposite of what is said in the article! Read it again. Nowhere do they say that you're safe from counterfeits if you buy from the right links. The article steers well clear of even mentioning inventory commingling. The most insidious aspect is that you believe that they've exonerated Amazon, when they just neglected to mention the other half of the problem.
In the last example, they give their credulity away entirely.
"We compared a recently purchased set of Tweezerman tweezers...the seller had swapped in a model that was different from what was listed on the page"
Who was the seller, you ask? The page they link to says "sold by Amazon.com".
I'm saddened that you don't see any middle ground between linking to a site with a very long history of actively facilitating counterfeits through product commingling and not getting paid at all.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Only that a great deprivation has weighed heavily on us to the point that you need to ask what possible alternatives exist rather than knowing several already. I don't condemn you personally for it.
Their comingle is also an issue. My last experience is I bought a new razor, sold by Amazon.com. The box rattled which was a big red flag. Then saw a hair inside.
Many reviews said they received a used product. I took the risk. I did a return and said "not as described" but didn't get around to return it till 1 day too late. Did a chat and the CS said I can just throw it away, they will refund it.
the original article title is "I Bought These Things From Amazon Prime. Can You Tell Which Ones Are Real?".
The current HN title is "Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?"
The current HN title would be improved by replacing "real" with "authentic". With "real", I started the article assuming that the Ove-Glove was a fictitious product created by a designer or artist. It took some time to realize that "real" means "authentic".
There's a follow on question that I'd like to raise, which is: "Are you rich enough to care"? In the race to the bottom on prices, it becomes a mark of wealth when you have the time and money to verify your own purchases, or to shop at more reputable retailers. I'm in that category, but could easily see myself being too cash strapped / too busy to do anything about a fake product being shipped to me from Amazon. I'd probably shrug.
I mean, kinda. But you can buy most of the stuff that you’d otherwise get on Amazon from Costco, Target, or Walmart online, and not have to worry about it being a crappy knock off made with leaded paint. So, I think most people are rich enough to care that much.
A few weeks ago, I bought some shampoo and conditioner from Amazon. I wanted a bulk size and the bottle looked like it was form the official manufacturer. When I got the bottles, opened and used them, I could tell they were fake. The consistency of the product was terrible and the smell was overly harsh. I returned both of them and just ordered the products from the company website. Funnily enough, the company website didn't even have the sizes that were listed on Amazon. Over time, I've become more wary of buying household products Amazon's website.
You're lucky you didn't accidentally put that stuff on your hair or face. Back before cosmetics and beauty supplies were regulated in the US, there would be occasional news stories of shampoos removing hair or causing rashes. A high school teacher showed us as an example a newspaper article from that period about mascara making several women permanently blind.
Walmart's online store is now my go-to for most household products. Free 2-day shipping without a subscription and the ability to actually vet their supply chain means it's basically always better.
I feel like I can't trust anything I buy on Amazon now. For the last month I've been buying from UK registered businesses which pay tax and which I can trust to send me goods which aren't counterfeit and potentially dangerous.
And wow! The dark patterns they use when you try to cancel Prime are really quite impressive!
The good news is, it's not even necessarily true that you pay more when buying elsewhere anymore. Amazon is coasting on that reputation but they're no longer subsidizing customers like they used to.
I've always taken it as a proxy for quality. My thinking was that Prime means it must ship from Amazon (I realize now marketplace sellers can qualify for the Prime flag if their shipment is free and fast for Prime members). And then it follows that shipped by Amazon means they stock it, and are responsible for returns. Therefore, not wanting the expense of excessive returns, they would probably have a system to ensure quality merchandise.
Of course, none of that thinking is accurate, but it appears to be logical on the surface.
And yet many consumers conflate "Amazon Choice", "Amazon Prime" and "Sold by Amazon" and think they all mean roughly the same thing, some stamp of approval by Amazon. But Amazon has no incentive to disabuse them of that notion.
And it's not even that any more. You ALWAYS have to check the guaranteed delivery date. ALWAYS. At least half the stuff I start to order -- even with the "Prime" label -- will take longer than 2 days. This situation has caused me to start shopping retail again, whenever I can. It bites me EVERY time I don't specifically check, and stuff winds up coming on a slow boat from China. Prime literally means nothing to me anymore, except their video service (which has a pretty good selection).
The more crucial difference is that the products were sold by third party sellers. I'm assuming counterfeit goods are almost never a problem if the seller is Amazon.
That may have been true once, but no longer thanks to "commingling":
"Sellers on Amazon can pool their goods with the same exact goods offered by Amazon itself, a practice known as commingling. This has advantages for sellers — less processing is needed, so it’s cheaper — but it also explains how Amazon can unknowingly ship counterfeits despite getting stock directly from the printer."
Anecdata: A guy bought a small usb fan for his laptop, inserted it and bricked this laptop. Not worth the 50% discount in any way.
As other comments mentioned, we are entering a hyperfake decade - and we are only at the beginning. I am virtually certain, we will exit this decade with a profound experience of more and more private universes (which may deteriorate what is left of civil societies even more).
Amazon third-party sales have been steadily rising for the past decade and now account for more than 50% of product sales on Amazon. More than 70% of searches on Amazon are for non-branded merchandise.
Unless these trends reverse, or there is a massive rise in the number of complaints from customers who've been cheated or injured by fakes, there won't be any significant changes.
You could tell by looking at the two gloves in the story that they were different, but the "fake" actually looked better to my eyes - the blue rubber appeared thicker and more pronounced. Which brings up a really interesting question about fakes - if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"? I fully recognize that there is a need to protect copyright / product dress / brand and that there is a distinct consumer interest in ensuring that products are safe / made from safe materials, BUT - so many of the products that are cloned on Amazon are only distinguishable by price anyway, and have no unique value proposition from one "brand" to the next.
> if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"
Quality of an individual product aside, the issue surrounding counterfeits is that confidence in the market as whole will wane, which isn't good for anybody.
I think there's certainly a terminology issue here.
A product that looks like a name brand product, but doesn't claim to be that product is one thing.
A product that claims to be the name brand product, but isn't is a different.
The name brand probably doesn't want either to be easily avaialable, and will call them both fake. A purchaser might want to take a chance on the former, but shouldn't have to have a chance of getting the latter.
This is an excellent piece, but the writer is also working on the assumption that an item marked "ships from and sold by Amazon" is a reliable control group versus a third-party seller.
As many know, Amazon's practice of commingling inventory in its Fulfilled by Amazon program can just as easily result in a fake being sold by Amazon as from a third-party seller. The author got lucky and didn't get any fakes in the control group (though one might not rule out the possibility of a more sophisticated counterfeit!), but it will continue to be a risk so long as Amazon continues commingling in FBA.
I am at the point where I never purchase from a third party seller unless I verify that seller independently from their own website (e.g. Anker). I treat everything sold by a third party seller as a scam.
For the products that are actually regulated like the child support seats: hold Amazon liable for selling product that is illegal.
Make it expensive for Amazon to not police the shit that third parties are throwing on the marketplace - and soon you won't see any fakes any more.
You want to know where Bezos got his billions? Partially because Amazon outright shits on all the regulation that traditional brick and mortar places have - like, not selling product that is illegal, counterfeit or offensive.
Let's assume a brick-and-mortar store where in the inventory there is Nazi propaganda such as the Reichskriegsflagge (commonly used as a substitute for the Swastika flag which is banned in many countries). No sane person would put this item up for sale because the same second it became public knowledge the store sells such flags it would be swarmed by protesters, and most likely would also attract a lot of vandals, thieves and other more radical protesters.
But on Amazon? There is no such thing as a public space to protest here, there is no cost (not even from lost business) in selling Nazi merchandise, so Amazon happily sells Nazi merchandise that Nazis then fly on their balconies and gardens, thus incurring a cost to society.
I never in a million years thought I’d be suggesting this, but Walmart.com offers a similar level of convenience and I’d wager you’re far less likely to receive fake stuff
I disagree, this is an anecdote but I ordered a bag of coffee from their "Ship to Store" option. When it came time to go to the store to pick it up, I was waiting about an hour to receive my item. Their setup is very good. You walk into the special "pick up" area of the store, then check in. From there someone is supposed to go to the back and fetch your item. That person was nowhere to be found. After alerting the manager that person eventually showed up and then proceeded to look around for the item. They then decided to call in a colleague who then took even longer to find the item. Turns out it was in a box right in front of them. All in all I wasted an hour trying to get a small bag of coffee. I'm gonna try again because I want this thing to be successful but man was it "nails on chalkboard" experience.
This is what private companies like Underwriters Laboratories are for. They provide independent review and certification of products.
Such a company can make a deal with Amazon that if they certify a product, then that product can get a badge on Amazon's product page that it is certified by that company. Like UL, the company would be incentivized not to abuse its badges, because otherwise the badges and the company would be come worthless.
When you're buying for your kids, particularly in the newborn -> infant -> toddler range, Amazon is a nightmare and we're steering clear of it. Especially since pretty much everything will end up in the kid's mouth. I even ordered formula a couple of times, figuring it was regulated, but something seemed off in the packaging and consistency.. had to throw them away. Just completely unacceptable! Brick and mortar it is.
If e-commerce in China is any indication, platforms only lead to the supreme status of predatory marketing. Those who spend the most on marketing win, in this process, marketers of garbage goods get stable revenue, platforms reap most profits.
It's destined to be a vicious cycle. The only losers will be consumers and honest producers.
I got stung buying some midrange earphones. I got my money back no problem, but the hassle was far from worth the $10 saving. When the prices of the fake items aren't obviously too cheap, its impossible to tell the difference until its too late.
That said, I left a review warning other customers. I hope I helped them.
Just add Twitter certified check marks to third party sellers. Have official amazon quality control for those sellers and everyone else is a gamble. If I buy from the Nike seller with the blue check mark, I know I’m getting the real thing. Seems like that could work.
> You can probably tell at a glance that a “Chanel” handbag going for $20 at a flea market is fake
Amazon sells these exact items with Prime as well.
> Although Amazon has taken many measures to prevent counterfeits and unsafe products from showing up on its site, plenty of fakes still slip through.
I don't believe this one bit. There are blatant fakes being shipped through Prime. They're not flying under the radar or bait and switching. Go on Amazon and search "Yuangu belt" -- you will quickly find Gucci & Hermes fakes being shipped through Prime. Are you telling me their "counterfeit measures" could not detect this before allowing it to be sold with Prime?
I’ve been a Prime customer since it first came out in the early 2000’s, but I’m letting my subscription expire this year. Too much fake crap, and increasingly it’s hard to even find stuff that I’m looking for in the store. No thanks.
I have a simple solution that seems to work very well for me. If there are negative reviews I usually try to read a few to see if there is a red flag. For the positive reviews I check the dates distribution. Many products have only 5 star reviews but when you check you see they are all from the last two months. If I don't see old positive reviews then I skip the item unless it's a brand I'm familiar with. Finally, if everything looks good I check the seller(s) rating. Then buy from the best one. (For 3rd party sellers)
The idea is that it's hard to keep a fake high rated reviews for a long time.
Ive tried to buy direct from the manufacture four times in the last two months, every single time it was more expensive than buying from amazon and these are things that are not easily faked so I'm sure they legit. One of them I contacted the manufacture to see if they would at least match the $20 difference on amazon and they said just to order it from amazon. Wtf.
It depends on the products. Old school department store brands will have an inflated price on their site compared to amazon, but I usually find name brand electronics to be no cheaper on amazon than other sites, or even the manufacturer directly.
Sorry if this is offtopic, I was planning to buy a Google Pixel 3A from Amazon in a week (It's cheaper than from Google Store). Are mobile phones also forgered on Amazon? or they don't aim to forger stuff like that? Thank you. (I am from a 3rd world country and travelling to USA next week)
I would be a little bit careful. I don't know if there's a risk of counterfeiting, but I once bought what I thought was supposed to be a US region Moto X2 but instead got a European region one. The most important difference, besides getting a different power adapter, was the fact that there's actually a different wireless antennae chip, where it did not have LTE bands for my carrier in the US.
Thanks! Yes, I checked that using https://willmyphonework.net/ and it says it will work :) I used in the past (it's pretty normal to buy phones when travelling to Europe or US) and it never failed. Bythe way, Amazon seller is Google, it says "By Google", so I should trust it, right?
Thanks. The problem is that in BestBuy the price is much higher if the phone is new, not refurbished. I found it new on Amazon fora good price. I just checked and it says "Sold by Google", and it goes to a Google landing page on Amazon, so I should be fine, right?
Not necessarily. (1) Landing pages are relatively simple to fake; just because the link goes to Google, it doesn't mean that Google has authorized an account on Amazon to sell the products. (2) Amazon has been known to mix stock, so even if the seller actually is Google, you might end up getting a product from another seller, which might not be authentic.
Personally, the last 3-4 phones I bought off of Amazon were all different models from what they had been advertised as. It's possible that you might get lucky and receive an authentic phone for less than buying from Google directly, but if you actually want confidence that you will receive the real thing, get it directly from the manufacturer.
Amazon is a total landfill these days. As much as I hate to admit it as such, my wife does reviews for 'free' products, often paying in addition. I could write a novel on how this system works, but in short I'll say, reviews are completely useless.
#3 seems like a reach, given that the generic YXTDZ device wasn't impersonating the name-brand Mifold device. It's clearly a cheap generic version, not a counterfeit.
Does anyone know if/why it is legal for China to be producing and selling these blatantly knock-off products? It seems outrageous that they are able to sell a product with the same EXACT name (the 'Ove' Glove example in the link) as the copied product.
No it's not legal, but who's going to do anything about it? Good luck suing a Chinese company in China. You might have better luck sending them a letter asking them nicely to stop counterfeiting your product.
Is it not possible to look at the seller to tell if it's the real company selling the product? I wouldn't buy branded from some no-name seller, that's no better than ebay.
If multiple sellers sell the "same" item and use amazon as warehouse, they can be binned together and you get one at random from any one of the sellers no matter which one you actually bought from.
Yup, they call it "commingling". So even if you make sure it says "sold by and ships from Amazon", and Amazon itself only buys from legitimate vendors, you could still wind up with a counterfeit item introduced by a third party seller.
All it would take is a unique crypto signature QR code on each product that lets you look it up and see how many other people looked up the same QR code.
The switcheroo problem described in the article simply does not exist say over on Ebay. On Ebay, you directly know if you are buying from a legitimate distributor, small time grey market / surplus dealer, or a knockoff shop. There are plenty of products for which knockoffs/generics are good enough, so simplistically "banning fakes" is not the solution either. The problem is this obscuring of the actual supplier, which Amazon could fix tomorrow if their entire business didn't revolve around using that confusing UI to mislead customers with dark patterns.
I'm continually amazed at the popularity of Amazon. It goes to show how powerful advertising, social distortion, and the sunk cost fallacy ("prime") are. For example, Amazon has never had good prices on anything, and yet that myth persists. Presumably the same people that repeat this can't even be bothered to just check eg walmart.com. (Walmart does find some new way to disappoint me every time I step in there. It's just so utterly huge that it's foolish to ignore.)
From the combination of store name, item description/template, quantity, other items by the seller, and comparable items. These things are up front and in your face, with each seller having a vested interest in creating a reputation. Once you see the patterns, you don't have to "investigate" each thing, you just get a feeling.
Legitimate distributors generally have recognizable names and other web presences - Best Buy, Adorama, Beach Camera, Anker Direct, Rosewill, etc. The value here is being able to search prices across all these stores at once.
Surplus distributors usually have conditions Open Box / Seller Refurbished, fixed quantities, many such listings.
Knockoffs/generics either ship direct from China, or have basically identical listings that ship directly from China.
This of course all depends on what you're actually buying, but being able to weigh such details is the whole point. Many generic computer cables/adapters/etc are great, but you'd be foolish to buy lithium ion batteries that way.
Specifically searching for "Ove Glove", I do see an item that is direct from China. So right away I know this is an item that has been heavily copied. Which is a given, with this article. But knowing this means I can either opt for the cheaper generic version (and self-verify it has similar utility), or be extra sure to order it from a legitimate channel.
Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.
Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.