I have drastically cut down on the number of amazon orders I place because of the amount of no-name imports that have flooded their catalog in the last few years. I finally decided that if I was going to be getting crap from china anyway I might as well buy it directly from the source, so I buy a lot of stuff on Aliexpress now. Sure, it sometimes takes upwards of 3 weeks to arrive, but when you're getting stuff for a tenth of the cost elsewhere, 3 weeks doesn't seem so bad a lot of times.
This. Amazon has eliminated its own usefulness for me with its permissive approach to no-name sellers (and also its permissive approach to gougers, and the poor quality of search results where gougers and no-name sellers are difficult to filter from the actual good results).
In general, the typical "retail" product results get mixed into the sketchy sellers way too much on the platform.
I've actually gone back to buying from brick-and-mortar for things where I care about quality, and aliexpress where I'm willing to experiment. Amazon mixes those two categories poorly, providing a bad experience for both use-cases.
> the typical "retail" product results get mixed into the sketchy sellers
And sometimes in the same listing! Like some colors will be the regular retail version and other colors are from a different seller and either a no-name copy or a totally different year or model and price, and then the reviews are all but useless because you don't know which version they're referring to. Or what used to be a high quality product stops being for sale or stops being prime, and a different product gets merged with it and gets to start with 4 stars and hundreds of reviews.
There's definitely value in having access to cheap products, I guess I'm just surprised that Amazon has basically turned into Ebay rather than the other way around.
the reviews are all but useless because you don't know which version they're referring to
This is an, err..., "prime" point: Their aggressive and increasingly universal "mushing together" of reviews for specific items/entries into a single set of less-specific reviews.
Even if you've developed a nuanced view and ability to assess Amazon reviews, they've made it yet harder by dissassociating reviews from the specific, exact item in question.
The primary remaining value that Amazon has, for me, is that so far -- anecdotally and as far as I recall reading -- their payment system and record-keeping has not been directly compromised. (There was the password shortening/weakening behavior, exposed and fixed some years ago.) I hesitate to face replacing an exposed credit card -- maybe months down the line, and with fraudulent entries to clear up -- due to competitors' less robust payment systems.
That, and the fact that I now find the Prime video selection better than Netflix (in the U.S.).
But actually shopping on Amazon -- trying to find a best choice when you haven't already decided and know how to differentiate the authentic from a counterfeit or gray source -- has become damned frustrating.
I have ceased entirely. All product categories. For most of late 2016 I played the annoying game of "would some really counterfeit this product?", which usually ended in a stalemate.
First I stopped buying anything that goes in my body.
Then I stopped buying anything that goes on my body.
Then electronics.
Finally, sometime early this year when I caught myself pondering whether paper cat litter pellets might be dangerous if counterfeit... I just realized it was time to stop.
Until they show they care about this, I'm Amazon-free. It's nice, I'm walking more than I used to and it feels good.
In the EE community, it's generally understood that if you use ebay or amazon, you're probably going to get counterfeit electronics components. Mouser and Digikey are largely considered safe places to order components from, and presumably they have incentive to maintain their supply chain as free of counterfeits as possible.
For physical goods, I'm more inclined to go to local retailers, since I can inspect them. Case in point, rat traps, I couldn't find a place on line where I could convince myself they weren't selling cheap knockoffs, so I drove to home depot and bought them there. I can't guarantee I didn't buy counterfeit traps, but at least they were high quality.
At the end of the day, no one but the sellers are concerned about counterfeit vs. real. The only thing that matters is the quality, and any marketplace with insufficient controls is bound to suffer in that metric.
Thank you. What about less specialized but pricey and thus likely to be counterfeit items, like electronics ( headphones, speakers, hdmi cables, dashcams), cookware (don't want toxic stuff in my food), wool/leather clothing, organic teas etc.
I bought a charger with a fake Intertek -- a UL competitor -- mark on it. Internek at the time had a pdf on their site warning the product had not been tested by them. I discovered this by googling the product after arrival. I notified Amazon and they immediately refunded my order... but didn't remove the charger from their site. Instead, they continued to sell it.
So, how does Amazon know you're not lying? If they lower the threshold enough to pull products, people would just game the system (not that it isn't happening now) to pull their competitors products off of Amazon.
The good news is that the solution can come from the community. Aren't we all startup people here? But the bad news is that very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. People rail on about Big Corp screwing over the little guy. But supporting the 'little guy' companies means buying products that are made by smaller non-established companies. Sometimes doing things "right" means paying employees more benefits, having higher product safety standards, sourcing raw materials ethically, etc all of which adds to the cost of doing business. That money has to come from all of us buying those products.
I think the answer is to provide proof of authenticity. Perhaps something like a hash that users can use a website to verify if their purchase is indeed authentic, and actively encourage customers to file chargebacks for products that fail the verification. Hit them where it hurts. This is something that needs to be actively fought by both governments and consumers.
Knock-offs are a particularly big problem in the electronic cigarette industry, so many of the device manufacturers already do something like this - usually a code on the device or behind a scratch-off panel on the box (ie somewhere you can't read it without obvious tampering), then a form on their website that tells you whether the code is one of theirs, and if so, whether it's been submitted before (to catch knock-offs copying a genuine code). Eg:
I think you'd be surprised how easily Grandma cottons to the idea of cheap knock-off crap, and that by typing a code from her multivitamin bottle into product-validation.gov, she can verify it's not full of heavy metals.
Not sure a system like that can really work. All a counterfeiter needs to do is buy or scan a legitimate product if it's just a code printed on it and now all the devices validate as 'real'. Can't do a challenge response authentication with a simple printed HMAC.
I guess if we did a lot more intensive inventory tracking so whatever validation service knew batch 213489234 was made 10/21/2019 and was being sold by Amazon/CVS/etc. and was all sold out by 3/14/2020. Then grandma could say 'Oh no' I bought this from BobsDiscountPharma.com so it's maybe fake.
Another option that could maybe make it work with a little RFID/powered chip so you could actually do authentication but that's more expensive and creates a lot of ewaste if it gets applied to a lot of products.
If retailers actually started using the EPC standard this would be easy. EPC is the RFID equivalent of a UPC barcode, and it has the capability to also transmit a unique serial number for each product. If this were actually used, it would be simple to deploy an interface for a customer to verify when/where the product was manufactured through when/where it was sold. Unfortunately it seems the adoption of EPC has stalled in the last few years (AFAIK, I'm no longer as involved in the retail supply chain), which is interesting because I had high hopes for it. I remember buying a package of socks 5+ years ago that already had an RFID tag embedded in the packaging.
That's what I thought too, then it was pointed out that another part of the system is that "someone else has scanned this code".
Which if you're a counterfeiter, you obviously don't scan the code... but then you use it to make your product, and as soon as one of your buyers uses it...
>That becomes a huge amount data to track though if it's individual labeling. It'll start out ok but quickly get huge.
No, it's the same pattern as software CD-Keys and that's been working fine at scale for decades. You draw from a pool of unique, unpredictable codes based on a secret seed, and keep a tally of the number of claims over that code. The only difference here is that instead of the online service 'failing activation' for your software, it simply displays the number of activations to the end user. If 'this code has already been redeemed' comes up for your $2 ali express MOSFETs, you know you're dealing with a knock-off.
>doing that requires a decent percentage of people to be actively scanning things, otherwise counterfeiters could just play the odds
I'll partially concede this point - It's certainly a factor. However, if the down-stream effect is product returns, the middle man sellers are likely to take corrective action against the suppliers. I'm not convinced that this limitation of the proposed system will render it ineffective.
> No, it's the same pattern as software CD-Keys and that's been working fine at scale for decades. [Truncate for brevity]
It's similar except you're not tracking one product with a few hundreds of thousands to a million or so at the largest scale to tracking many products with billions of copies sold. Just taking vitamins/nutritional supplements for example, last year that market sold 36.1 billion dollars in the US alone so ROM that's 1-3 billion codes to track. That gets whittled down pretty quickly by people who don't use the service but it's still a lot when you start adding other industries too.
The variety of products shouldn't matter though - You only need to know unique code and number of times redeemed. There is no need to track it back to an individual product.
For example, if you ship the unique codes with your products via a small card in the packaging, or a small product-neutral sticker applied to the outside, the end result is the same.
I hear you on the volume problem but I'm not sure it's a significant issue. A key/value store meets the need and will scale to billions while remaining space and compute efficient.
So it "needs" to be "actively fought" for but my point was consumers don't "actively [fight]" for things when they don't understand why they will benefit from it.
So the counterfeiters will use a real hash from one (or from hundreds) of the real products.
That's why creating counterfeit-proof physical money is still an unsolved problem.
I've been thinking - maybe something like bitcoin can help. When you buy a product, you get 1 coin with it. When you resell, you have to send that coin to your buyer. Since counterfeiters can't make coins, that serves as a proof. Unfortunately it creates an annoying layer that all sellers of goods must follow.
Sure, but what you do is provide a response that shows the amount of times it's been checked. If it's more than once, then you can be sure it's counterfeit.
If the code has been checked more than once, then you can only be sure that >=(n - 1) counterfeits exist. Checking the code does not verify whether yours is the counterfeit, only that you weren't the first to attempt verification.
If the code is behind a scratch off strip, then because you scratched it off and the code was already used, you can be assured that your item is counterfeit.
On the other hand, being the first to check the code is NOT perfect proof that your item is legitimate. If the counterfeiter makes 100 of an item, the one of those will still pass verification. Unless you get notified of other attempts later, of course.
If you don't have Amazon Prime you save money by shipping direct from China since China subsidizes their shipping and the United States accepts the parcel and delivers it at no extra charge. If something costs $6 to ship from Amazon then it will probably cost around $2 in shipping from China. Plus no sales tax.
The worst category is buying "OEM" cell phone batteries. Battery looks the same but it is fake. It gets listed with all the regular batteries so you dont know who is legit seller.
Consider going even further if you order stuff bulk. Chinese domestic marketplace Taobao, has surely overgrown Aliexpress since its launch.
P.S. Aliexpress itself is an English language "fork" of Taobao. At some point, amount of active merchants on Aliexpress was that high, that it seemed that it is about to overgrow the original, but Taobao caught back after few years.
You're usually fairly safe if you pay the 'going rate' for a product. Check several listings. The ones listed as 1.00 yuan are asking you to negotiate which is more effort than you probably want to deal with, the ones 15-30% under are probably from a rejected batch or a line of functional fakes, the real bargain prices are probably not even what you think you're ordering, etc.
You'll still get burned sometimes. But the savings!
Well, that's where the second thing to look at comes in; how many sales the individual listing has. If more than a half-dozen people have bought it and it's still up, it's costly for the vendor to take the listing down and replace it when a 1-star rating is left.
Sometimes you gotta roll the dice, but yeah that is very risky with things like integrated circuits, or really anything more complex than discrete components.
As a frequent Aliexpress customer, I was suprised to find that Amazon had the best price on a particular item.
I've only seen for one product category (Solar LED string lights). I assume it only happens when a US distributor has too much supply and sells at cost/below. Also, prices on AE have risen about 20% as winter season approaches, so it could be that Amazon sellers still have units from 'summer' prices.
I'm still buying from Amazon, but only items they stock, and I'm sticking close to well name brands. Nothing shipped from anywhere else, I've just been burned far too many times.
For the same reason, I avoid Chinese-produced goods if at all possible - plus, I swear they're using gasoline as a solvent when they make anything plastic. What a stink.
> I'm still buying from Amazon, but only items they stock.
Won't help. Amazon mixes their stock with "fulfilled by Amazon" stock from third party sellers. So as long as it appears to be the same product it'll end up in the same batch. Funnily enough, due to this even sketchy sellers that provide counterfeit goods using the FBA service might actually sell original products.
this is so infuriating. Why can't you just select to only buy from teh specific seller on Amazon. ARGH. All I want to do is buy makeup and shampoo on there and I can't after having gotten way too many fakes.
I'm still a loyal Amazon shopper but I've been victimized by this many times. The worst part is that some of the counterfeit items will actually cause property damage when they malfunction (chargers, batteries, etc.)
Others are so inexpensive that it's not really worth the hassle to return them.
Now I'm reluctant to order any electronics product that doesn't have at least 500 reviews, as the scammers have become good at getting 50-100 fake reviews for counterfeit items.
Amazon needs to step up and fully insure all purchases against counterfeiting. The worst part is that this kind of stuff is ammunition for the Trump supporter view that Amazon is doing harm to the American economy by promoting goods manufactured by cheap labor abroad.
> The worst part is that this kind of stuff is ammunition for the Trump supporter view that Amazon is doing harm to the American economy by promoting goods manufactured by cheap labor abroad.
So you're saying the worst part isn't that people are getting ripped off with fire-hazard chargers and lead-paint baby toys, but that a Trump supporter might be able to make a point because of it?
I think that the ideological shift toward hating/resenting foreign people is a bigger problem than the fraud inflicted on some consumers due to the practice, yes.
The other day I was shopping for tooth whitening strips and the top result was a sketchy no-name product with 400 5 star reviews and only 2 verified purchases. I left a review warning people that the reviews are fake and amazon rejected it. Apparently fake reviews are fine, and thousands of prank reviews from redditors are fine, but calling out fakes is against the TOS. It was so infuriating and made me feel like amazon is intentionally allowing their customers to be defrauded.
Amazon makes tremendous profit on all of the counterfeit goods, so unless customers resort do doing credit card chargebacks Amazon is unlikely to notice. Chances are chargebacks would result in account termination, so Amazon's market power is sort of obvious in this case.
I started figuring in the cost of toxic landfills, and the pollution (manufacturing + transport) for items to come to my door. So I do mind throwing away cheap electronics, because they’re anything but cheap.
True. Countries with lax emissions laws arbitrage environmental damage in exchange for short-term profits.
When we import goods from these countries, we too arbitrage environmental damage for short-term profits.
Since the environment is global, a filthy and polluted river or smokestack in China is harmful to all of us in the US, even if we are not directly drinking out of it or breathing it in.
I think all products made from imported parts should contain disclosure about what environmental harm was created in the manufacture of the parts. I'm not loyal to American manufacturing in the least, but it's silly to pretend that there is fair competition when a product manufactured in the US must comply with extensive environmental regs that the Chinese product does not.
This is highly reminscient of the iOS vs. Android app distribution model. If Amazon aggressively curated its platform for quality, I expect we’d be hearing a deafening and righteously indignant chorus against its existential threat to freedom and consumer choice. Also makes you wonder whether “Amazon, but with quality control” might exist as a smaller but more profitable niche, similar to Apple.
There's another issue where middlemen like Amazon are mixing counterfeit product into the flow of real products.
This discussion came up during the 2017 Solar Eclipse where Amazon was selling counterfeit viewing glasses and then recalling legitimate product from real vendors in the confusion:
This is exactly why I no longer buy electronics or other higher ticket consumer goods from Amazon. Inevitably I'll be researching the product on Amazon and it will have 5 stars reviews with a healthy smattering of 1 star reviews. If you investigate the 1 star reviews it turns out most of them are usually from people who received a counterfeit.
So you have people buying from (ostensibly) the same product page on the site, but some percentage are getting inferior counterfeit products. If there's a way around that I haven't figured it out and won't be spending any more time to figure it out. I now buy from authorized retailers and have yet to have a problem.
Unless I'm buying little plastic things that stick on my desk and hold cables. I still buy those from Amazon. I don't really care if they're counterfeit, insofar as they could even be.
I only order items "Sold by Amazon" and have never received a counterfeit item (AFAICT). I always assume those reviews are from 3rd party sellers -- is that an incorrect assumption?
Amazon commingles everything, even "sold by amazon" products, unless they've changed that recently. Everything goes into the warehouse by SKU and has no further tracking.
I've heard many anecdotes to the contrary. At this point I don't know what's true about it or not so I just choose not to trust Amazon until I can be convinced otherwise.
Co-mingling of inventory is why i'll never buy anything vaguely counterfeitable from either. I previously had fake Sennheiser headphones sold by Amazon themselves.
It's also pretty bad for the merchants. If you sell a product via Amazon, and it gets comingled with counterfeits from another merchant you can get fined because you ended up selling someone a counterfeit.
Bought a 64gb Kingston micro SD from ebay, and appeared fine at first but after running some checks was clearly fake. Reported it to ebay and the seller. Was refunded instantly (and could keep the duff card) but the seller is still selling and ebay do not appear to have taken any action. I now realise that no-one would sell for 64gb card new for £12, so ALL the sellers there must be selling fakes - but ebay allows them to make new listings and others to sell. Sad thing is someone won't notice until they get back from their holiday and find their pictures aren't there. And by then the seller will have closed that account and opened a new one.
This has been going on for almost two decades, or as long as eBay has been around. Back in the days, once you unknowingly bought a fake SD card, you not only had to prove that you had a fake, but also ship it back to China to get a refund! Even though the cheap fake memory card problem was widely known (there were selling in thousands), eBay didn't seem to care and quickly lost me as a customer.
I doubt it's a good idea to knowingly mail a counterfeit product. Crossing state lines, etc.
If any seller or retailer asked you to do that today, I'd recommend refusing and instead offering to make it available for them to pick up via their choice of carrier.
Last year I bought a genuine Samsung 128GB card for $25, so what you paid isn't that suspiciously low. Flash memory prices have gone up over the past year, but you probably still paid more than wholesale price for a real 64GB card.
Who is responsible when a counterfeit device results in injury or damage to personal property?
Is there much difference between Ulbricht's culpability for Silk Road and Amazon (Bezos) liability for Amazon's embrace of counterfeit products? True, the former was criminal liability, and perhaps that might be enough of a difference, but it ought not be.
Decades of product safety regulation and tort deterrence is being washed away.
I mean, Amazon is even doing the logistics for this stuff. A lot of counterfeits are "fulfilled by Amazon". You pay Amazon, Amazon delivers it, you return to it Amazon - who on earth is the 3rd party supposed to be in this transaction? There is none. How can Amazon escape liability for this crap?
Not even the great pirate Ulbricht himself would warehouse and ship the narcotics.
The seller has implied liability, I think it would be the Amazon seller. Even though Amazon corporate sent the customer a fake not from your sellers inventory but from another sellers inventory you would still have the sue the seller first and then the seller would have to prove it wasn't the same one sent by the seller to Amazon. By the time the seller was cleared they would be in bankruptcy.
Under US product liability laws, the manufacturer and any seller between the manufacturer and the end consumer.
In other words, Amazon.
(Amazon can then sue the vendor or manufacturer under contractual indemnity clauses, but that's between Amazon and them; it doesn't affect a consumer's right to sue Amazon.)
Perhaps there needs to be a new open standard for authenticating physical products.
Put a unique key on each item- added cost, I know- that validates against a public key for the company and product. At each sale of the product or passing of possession from a supplier to a vendor, the keys would register a transfer. Anyone in the supply chain could use the company's public APIs to say "I have this item, does that make sense? Or did someone already sell this one?".
Companies could sue anyone selling unverified goods. Border police could easily identify fakes. Customers could confirm authenticity. Sellers could prove they are or are not selling fakes.
Bunnie's blockchain code is a serial number that is (theoretically) impossible to guess or fake. This prevents scammers from guessing/faking serial numbers to scam him out of product.
Sorry, I didn't mean UPC, I meant serial number. You can generate unique, nearly impossible to guess serial numbers using all kinds of methods without any need for a blockchain.
A UUID would work fine. Every product gets a UUID and it goes into a public DB hosted by the manufacturer (or a 3rd party that verifies who is publishing the data).
Then anyone can query against that database to verify if a product is legitimate.
Wouldn't counterfeiters scrape that database for legitimate UUID's? You could allow consumers to "claim" a UUID as theirs (and when I get a product with the same UUID, I can assume it's a dupe), but that requires every consumer to actually do this...
Except that a blockchain is the exact wrong technology to use here.
Look at Bitcoin, for example. That blockchain is entirely controlled by manufacturers in China. How would this blockchain viably guard against manufacturers in China?
Besides, the blockchain or other storage mechanism is irrelevant. All the counterfeiter needs to do is copy the serials or other numbers from the blockchain or wherever they are stored.
These methods all make it easier to pass-off a counterfeit as legitimate.
There already was such a standard. Physical good stores. A large chain will not risk their reputation by selling you a dud, or counterfeit item. They're also easier to sue in your local jurisdiction than some random online seller, etc etc. People have made their choice, and they would rather save money by shopping online.
From the article -- "This is a world where just about anything can be made almost instantaneously; a world where a product can be iterated, produced, and then sold around the world within a couple of weeks."
And yet every Kickstarter that uses Shenzen to manufacture is months if not years late in delivering.
Presumably if you could make money by taking out counterfeiters it would inspire a some subset of people to do so. Most of what I've read on this problem though seems to hinge on the fact that even if you identify the business that is at fault they just vanish and a new business pops up to take their place. And their does not seem to be a lot of incentive on the Chinese government to regulate these guys.
A lot of that is inexperience. If they spoke Mandarin and had ongoing relationships with people/places having access to everything ranging from simple milling equipment up to a superfactory in the space of a few square miles, (and next-day shipping from Taobao,) they might have less trouble.
I feel like Shenzhen factory owners must work very hard to keep a straight face when someone shows up and says "I have a bag of money from Kickstarter, and need a one-off large order under a tight deadline."
Furthering the other replies, manufacturing is hard.
In a similar vein to the way software devs roll their eyes when a client says: "..It's just a tiny change, it won't take any time", there are so many hidden gotchyas when you're working with physical products.
If you're randomly picking a factory off Alibaba and thinking you've got it nailed, you're very, very wrong.
Furthermore, when you're making physical products, there's no undo button. Some errors cannot be corrected. Didn't plan your mold perfectly?
Oops, the 10k USD and one month that you sunk into your mold .. gone.
Don't have someone on the ground that actually cares about you and your product? You're going to get screwed, even 'unintentionally' - the factory probably won't care that this batch of plastic is grey, not black, but your customers will..
Over the years, I've worked on delivering dozens of physical products projects in China. The biggest rule to learn is ego: when to apply it, and when not to apply it. (And typically, you should very rarely apply it..)
Any advice if you really do want to produce a cheap, disposable product? I’ve seen a ton of postmortems about what not to do, but few write-ups on what to do
In case kickstarter applicant is a domestic Chinese company, they rarely have any problem delivering even biggest projects.
Everything changes when the applicant in question is some kinda American Silicone Valley hoodie startup wunder kinder, with an idea that he he can make a manufacturable product from scratch during a one week hop to Shenzhen.
Related question: what online sites, if any, are better to purchase items to avoid counterfeit?
I've been thinking of using B&H instead of Amazon for
electronic stuff, assuming that their reputation means they are less likely to enable counterfeit sellers, but I don't know that for sure. I also don't know if other online sites (jet.com?) have or don't have the counterfeit issue.
A lot of times I buy for the websites of big name brick and mortar stores. Some B&M stores also have third party sellers, so watch out for that. Walmart.com offers free two day shipping for orders over $49, which I've used quite a bit since they implemented that policy. I've also bought direct from the manufacturer.
As far as jet.com, I think their suppliers vary and I don't know if they have better vetting of their suppliers. They are owned by Walmart now, FWIW. I've bought a few things from there and they have very bad problems with packaging, all my orders had something destroyed during shipping due to poor packaging.
I only buy from websites that control their own supply chain -- meaning they know who they are dealing with when they procured the goods, not randos from overseas.
I love Target, free shipping threshold is $35 but you get what you ordered 100% of the time. They have a good selection for most of what I buy often. You can mail back returns or take them to a store. I like Microcenter for electronics.
I also buy from brand websites directly, since they have no reason to send anything but their authentic products. Brand websites often have deals. Join the mailing lists of your favorites, a lot of them send out discount codes.
Grey market is not black market though. They aren't counterfeit, knockoffs, or potentially dangerous. They are legitimate products made by the manufacturer. They are very upfront that they sell grey market items.
We also sell some products we've obtained from sources other than the manufacturer or its licensed importer. These are "grey market" products. "Grey market" is not illegal, not factory seconds, not demo merchandise, not cheaper or inferior products. In fact in almost every instance a "grey market" product is absolutely identical to its US-warranted counterpart. "Grey market" and US-warranted products are manufactured in the same factories from the same components, and sub-assemblies, to the same specs and tolerances, by the same workers. In terms of the item itself (excepting PAL video -- see below) there is no difference at all. A "grey market" Nikon 50mm f/1.4 D-AF lens (for example) is exactly the same in every possible way as the US-warranted version.
There are a lot of honestly-marketed and fun products that you can buy China-direct on eBay, e.g. nuts and bolts of all types and random titanium or carbon bicycle fabrications, all with shockingly low shipping.
But I wouldn't trust them for something safety-critical, since you have no idea what engineering went into them and no recourse if they fail.
I would say a bike frame and associated bolts are safety critical since a failure could result in serious injury/death, especially if you are in traffic. However, I've read a bunch of positive reviews of the Chinese frames and its likely that they are produced on the same factory lines as branded frames, unless you buy something hand made in US/Europe.
I don't have a Chinese eBay bike frame (though I do have a lovely Taiwenese titanium one ordered from the ORA factory[0] by an American importer that sold for less than many steel bikes)— just a water bottle cage and a random headset spacer.
We live in the information age, people in China are spinning up factories overnight to mass produce something in demand in the west and sell it through marketplaces on websites, but we have no way to inform people what is real and what is fake.
Like, per manufacturer product reviews that are trustworthy. Seems like something akin to Consumer Reports for online merch would be a thing, but I guess there is not enough money in it.
I don't know why Amazon continues to jeopardize their reputation with being a counterfeit reseller, but they're becoming worse than eBay. I guess the money must be so good that they just don't care.
There's a lot of money to be made and it hasn't backfired on them at least yet, they are still dominating online retail and still growing, to my knowledge.
Average Joe on the street doesn't know Amazon has a counterfeit problem or even that third party sellers exist, they just press "buy" without thinking much about it. I know because I talk to Average Joes all the time about it and everyone I've talked to so far is surprised. They are surprised it possible to get counterfeits on Amazon and they are surprised I have the ability to sell on Amazon. So I guess customer education is an issue?
I think their long term plan is to stop selling themselves and turn into a logistic company.
Wanted: Amazon Custody Chain - assurance that the product in question was in fact purchased by Amazon directly from the manufacturer, or otherwise Amazon vouches for the authenticity of the product.
One of my laptops is running with a counterfeit charger (Amazon) and a counterfeit battery (eBay). As soon as I realized that I have never left it plugged in where I don't see it - who knows what kind of fire hazard it could be.
Also, lasers. There are plenty of illegal laser pointers on eBay and output rarely matches the claims. And you really don't want to play with these illegal lasers unless you have real wraparound lenses.
I had a knockoff laptop power supply energetically self-disconnect. That was surprising!
Laptop was plugged in, cord draped over something and under mild tension. As near as I can tell, the wires shorted on the DC side, instantly melted the plastic insulation, and suddenly I had a severed cord and two live wires sticking out of the brick.
... so no, I would never leave a counterfeit laptop charger unsupervised.
Youtube has done a decent job of filtering out copyrighted material (or even making sure certain videos are sold -- not distributed for free). I'm not sure why this can't be managed in a similar way.
The people in the article mention they had patents, etc. This would be easy to prove to corporations like Amazon and eBay.
I'm also surprised the US based companies distributing the goods aren't getting their pants sued off in court.
As a small publisher, I can also tell you our copyrighted materials regularly find their way onto YouTube (and Google SERPs) with links to torrents or other unauthorized sites. Filing a DMCA to get them taken down is a PITA, and YouTube/Google is not proactive about handling the problem.
Digital goods are different from physical ones. The first-sale doctrine means the seller doesn't need any licenses (patent or otherwise) to sell the product. They still can't counterfeit, but you have to show that the product is counterfeit, not just that the seller is "unauthorized" like in copyright.
Amazon could still refuse to list those products, of course, but it's not a legal obligation.
Consider me cynical, but I think it's far more likely, given Amazon's power, that the company convinces their consumers that counterfeits are "status quo".
US consumers exist for their masters, not the other way around. Where else will they go to buy?
Interesting. The producers in China operate in a more capitalist market than in the U.S. In some ways this has created an entrepreneurial class in China of high innovation, instead of rentiers owning a market. That said, whatever your feeling on patents and IP, stealing someone's brand name crosses a real line, even in the most capitalistic ideology
I've been buying from B&H and NewEgg for electronics, and avoiding Amazon if I can. I use Amazon for cheap stuff out of convenience with "prime", and buy only from Amazon, LLC and not other sellers, although that is not always guaranteed to solve the problem, as others have mentioned (such as mixing of counterfeit with real products). When writing a review of counterfeit product, make sure to include the Seller's name in the review so that buyers are aware.
I believe it is very "if you can't win them, join them" moment for the Amazon.
If they will not engage with Chinese makers, people will simply shop on Chinese mail order sites as is particularly popular with current American college age group now (and yes, Alibaba provides a lot of hard statistics on that.)
If they will begin actively working to detriment of existing Chinese sellers, they will loose even more.
They are choosing in between "not winning much in move 1, and loosing a lot in move 2"
shouldn't there be a mechanism that allowed legitimate sellers to report and block knock-off sellers on ebay/amazon?
Amazon and eBay are American companies so they the problem here it seems to me. How are they getting away with it? Arent they technically participating in the copyright/patent violations by providing the counterfeiters a platform to sell their knock offs?
Knock offs on alibaba are another issue but then again average American is not shopping there. ... yet.
Well, Apple and Sony together effectively bribed Alibaba to prohibit trade in factory refurbished second hand electronics.
I was making money on that myself in my teenage years. Probably, I would not be a developer now if Apple did not come up with Iphone and Sony and Nokia did not tank to the bottom so quickly at around 2009.
First and second generations of iphones were easily refurbishable. They turned to optic medium and harder adhesives in third gen, and in the middle of production run for the third, they began using one that was completely impossible to undo in garage workshop conditions to finally kill refurbishment industry
There is, sort of. On Amazon, you have to do test purchases. You can then file complaints to Amazon. In many cases, this results in a suspension or some other kind of ding against their account particularly if they can't verify an authentic supply chain.
Amazon avoids getting in trouble by putting the legal responsibility entirely on sellers. They are just a 'dumb pipe' running the marketplace.
funny thing is, they actually block you from posting if you let people know it's a fake or replica. ebay and amazon do tend to side with the buyer most of the time, making it a tough problem to solve because it can be exploited on both sides.
on the other hand, this has opened up other places for people to buy and sell with authentication provided as a service ie: StockX and GOAT for sneakers.
I run a mid-sized online distributorship: there's a lot of factors at play. Have a few private label items + exclusives with a few US manufacturers and fought the war against counterfeiters for the past 7-8 years on Amazon, eBay, and a few other sites. These thoughts pertain primarily to Amazon.
THE ARTICLE'S PROBLEM IS BEING SOLVED: Amazon Brand registry 2.0 just came out late 2016 - if you have applied for a trademark (with USPTO registration), you can brand gate your products and prohibit others from selling. Amazon had to do this as a response because things were entirely out of control the past few years. It's definitely a process full of friction to the rights-holder, but this overcomes not only counterfeit items (other people stealing your brand) but also inauthentic items (grey market products not authorized by you as a vendor).
AS A CUSTOMER: as long as you can identify you have a counterfeit, you just use the magic words and apply for a refund saying it's a counterfeit and you're protected. From personal experience -- you can do it post-facto ~90 days and Amazon will still be on your side.
AS A BUSINESS: basically enter the brand registry program and gate your products as needed, depending on who else is selling your stuff. You need to spend some effort making sure people aren't stealing your photos and designs and camping out on other listings -- that's probably the highest point of friction right now, but note those knockoffs can't enter your brand without triggering gating effects. There's a chunk of opportunity here for full service, value-added resellers like myself here who essentially run the online channels for older American businesses that aren't techified at all and need to navigate all the techno-bureaucracy.
AS AMAZON... it's tricky, you need to set up strong controls for brand and facilitate a system so that it forces the eventuality it desires -- every manufacturer directly working with Amazon ("most efficient"). Letting the counterfeiters run a bit amok actually forces the hands of the brand owners to be really hands on in Amazon sellercentral, sell direct to Amazon via vendorcentral, or deal with the constant irritation of counterfeits, review/performance bombing by competitors, and their associated performance notifcations (that can shut down your store). Kinda brilliant actually.
ON BRANDS and knockoffs: when I as a consumer buy something, I am spending money to solve a want or need. The brand and its associated reputation gives me an expected value that said shirt/snack/shaver is going to give me what I want without much downside -- it's gonna fit well, or is tasty and will not poison me, or will trim my hairs cleanly... and that expectation is the value of a brand. In this regard, yes, I think counterfeiting is unethical since you are delivering a fake promise that your shitty product will do XYZ based on a good marketplace actor's performance.
Whoever FIRST listed to that item picked the title, description, pictures.. and it created the page on Amazon and assigned it an ASIN. If you have an identical shirt to that, you can list it with ASIN B00KRYMB88, and it will appear on that page (But you can't edit the listing details). That is how Amazon is built.
The problem is, what if you have a counterfeit shirt, and you sell under the same ASIN. A customer will get it delivered.. it sucks maybe.. and you blame the listing and leave a bad review.
Yah it is a bit of a process. It is much easier if you are say, selling something with Brand = Nike and you have a company called Nike.. vs just being the first person to sell generic widget X.
I think they can just say they sell the same product and then they are shown as another seller on the same product page. Reviews get mixed, the counterfeiter might be shown as the cheapest option, ...
It's a reason why buying anything on Amazon that could be counterfeited is a minefield, especially (given commingling of inventory) if the seller is Amazon or anyone using Amazon fulfillment, because then you can't even rely on experience with the seller, since the item you get may not actually be from the identified seller.
This scares me, a lot. After watching enough videos online I've had to start using the Apple Store, paying shipping, to avoid any potential fire hazards. Most consumers probably never know. :( It's crazy that they sell the fakes on the official Apple product pages.
Amazon also co-mingles inventory. If we both have the same exact product to sell it gets put into the same physical warehouse space. Then when it's sold, they just grab a random one out of that space.
So its possible that you can "sell" an item that a different supplier actually sent to amazon.
Amazon does not always co-mingle inventory. Sellers can opt out of co-mingling. There's no indicator to the user, however, that something is coming from co-mingled inventory.
As a consumer/customer I have no way of knowing. So as far as I am concerned all products Fulfilled by Amazon are co-mingled inventory, possibly items directly sold by Amazon as well (I don't think they have commented on this).
Yes, but he's saying that Amazon commingles the inventories of different sellers if they recognize it to be the same item.
In other words, if Seller X, Y, and Z all sell Widgets, Amazon puts all their Widgets into the same box. When you buy a Widget from Seller X, you may actually be getting a Widget that originated from Seller Y or Z. From the buyer and seller perspective, it's transparent...unless, of course, one of the sellers is a counterfeiter, in which case the buyer gets agitated that Seller X is selling counterfeit Widgets and yells at Seller X for selling counterfeit Widgets when the item actually originated with Seller Y.
You're probably more likely to get something co-mingled sold by Amazon.com than from a third party seller. Generally speaking third party sellers have more of a reason to opt out of it unless they know their inventory is junk.
Wow, that seems like a horrible practice to me because if I chose a seller over another I'm generally trying to guess who is not selling counterfeit goods at a reasonable price.
If a product is not on Amazon, you create a listing, add images, descriptions, etc.
Then everyone that has the same product has to add their under your listing.
That means that if you put hours and hours into creating the best Amazon page, a counterfeiter can simply add his version under your listing and gain all your images, descriptions, reviews.
I don't care if its a counterfeit as long as its completely indistinguishable in every manner from the original.
If it is distinguishable, then amazon should be distinguishing it and selling it under a "counterfeit" label with its distinguishing qualities on the sale page.
Easier said than done of course. But I think this is the right approach in dreamland.
Not all products are obviously counterfeit; the "distinguishable" part may come later (for instance, iPhone chargers that fail due to lacking safety internals authentic parts have)
Not long ago people got sent to jails and had their lives ruined (sure they broke law) for carrying counterfeit stuff. They were treated like drug dealers.
Now same is done but it's considered ok and even a brilliant business move, all because some MBAs and their bosses make it look ok.
I believe American companies are uncompetitive in the "new world order" - where 99% of durable consumer goods (yes, that's how economists call it) categories are either made in China, or not being made at all (edit.)
Americans are not as innovative and strong as Chinese in the way they appropriate designs and ideas: Chinese extract all value from novel high margin niches quickly, they run at the forefront at the race to the bottom in mass market goods, and do painless exits from product niches that are sucked dry and are out of trend/hype cycle.
American companies needs to become more innovative to compete with Chinese. Completely scraping the useless concept of "intellectual" property of every kind, and the idea that one can "own" and idea and create captive markets through that ownership will be the first step in that direction.
Let's ignore the ridiculous 99% figure on which you rhetorically position your argument.
- I don't know that innovation is the right term for the rapid value extraction you're talking about. It's more like a powerful and well-configured economic environment for manufacturing-related value extraction. Many aspects of that environment are temporal and historically contingent. Things like labor costs, labor conditions, rule of law/regulations and international tolerance for norm-breaking are not constants. And some of those may have passed inflection points recently (ie- labor costs and tolerance).
So, good competitive circumstances. "Innovation"... I don't know.
-How profitable and sustainable are these value extraction operations, on average? I really don't know, but how reliable of a business plan is it? I'm not doubting people get rich off it, but it feels like slash and burn territory rather than a blueprint for building big, sustainable businesses.
-Sure, there's a case to be made against IP. But this article and this thread are examining the outright fraud of trying to pass off counterfeits as a different company's product. That's categorically different and clearly problematic even in an IP-free world.
>I don't know that innovation is the right term for the rapid value extraction you're talking about. It's more like a powerful and well-configured economic environment for manufacturing-related value extraction.
Yes, you are totally right in what you are saying. You do get the subtleties of the matter even better than me here.
That environment/business-ecosystem is what China has managed to sustain for 30 years and what America never managed to create to begin with, unless you count times of Bennie Franklin.
See this: if you give a hungry Chinese business owner a hen laying golden eggs, he will probably slaughter it upon first opportunity, but he will spend the proceeds from sale of than hen and its eggs to breed more of them and do it again. If you give such hen to a hungry American or Western European, he will probably run away, hide that hen, and will be brooding over it until he dies from hunger or the hen dies from old age.
What seems to me to be the raison-detre for a lot of American business people is to find some easily securable cash cow captive market niche, and then deep a huge patent/legal/copyright moat around it to monopolize it. That is an example of very passive-rentieristic mindset.
Chinese entrepreneur can slaughter his cash cow business and go on to next big thing, while American has no willpower to do so.
>Many aspects of that environment are temporal and historically contingent. Things like labor costs, labor conditions, rule of law/regulations and international tolerance for norm-breaking are not constants.
This is true too. Western companies that were setting up shops in China in nineties are long long gone. They were there not for simply cheap labour, but ridiculously cheap labour.
Chinese industrialists have long closed businesses like rubber sandals factories and are continuously moving their industrial groups from one "next big thing" to another faster than anybody else on the planet. Nobody in SV are like those guys. Doing things this way takes special talent.
>How profitable and sustainable are these value extraction operations, on average? I really don't know, but how reliable of a business plan is it? I'm not doubting people get rich off it, but it feels like slash and burn territory rather than a blueprint for building big, sustainable businesses.
Yes, the slash and burn approach it is. You can build a substantial business group using it, but you will have to keep moving all the time.
I see it as a valid business strategy with major strength of being strong against Western type competitors. You enter early, scale faster than others, by the time any foreign competitor simply realise the existence of your market niche, you already ran margins into zero and is doing an orderly downscaling and profitable exit. You leave rotten capitalists nothing, but crumbs behind you. They can't grow and challenge you that way.
In China this tactic is called "Locust business" - any trendy product makes healthy double digit profits for three month before the locust swarm of late comers, and you need to switch to the next big thing.
This is how it was with countless novelties that make our daily lives today that came out of China - consumer 3d printers, hdmi stick computers, drones, bluetooth car monitors, dashcams, portable bluetooth boomboxes, wifi lightbulbs, LED lighting, air washers, hoverboards, vapes, spinners and so on.
I met 3 Chinese millionaires from mainland during my life in Vancouver, all of them did something in electronics, and all of them went through many many of those slash and burn cycles. One started from making socks, then phone holsters, then small gadgetry where he went through 3 very different product. Another did sandals and mp3 players. The third one started with radios, but ended making semi fab tooling where he nuked Western competitors that had 10 digit valuations.
>"Learn Mandarin, and ensure that your kids learn it too."
Why not? Getting basic Yue will not be a bad idea too.
I'm not a Russian native, but I spent a big part of my childhood in the country.
I remember that Muscovite elites had that idea at the time (mid nineties): "my kid will be going to Stanford, no money spared," while smarter far-easterners were sending their kids to back then still cheap China to learn the language and get connections. Guess whose kids fared better in 20 years time?
Now, Russia has lost its last vestiges of industrial self-sufficiency, and has no economy for all those US schooled "creative" banker kids to work in. The few people who do get business today, are ones who can drive a truck to Yiwu, have basic commerce background, and knowledge of Chinese along with local connections.
I was listening to something about economics on NPR this last weekend and it talked about some of the reasons for German manufacturing surviving and thriving after China joined the WTO and part of it was the Chinese market desired German quality in certain fields - there are niche markets that Germans specialized in that Chinese consumers recognize as having some value (not sure if brand or quality of goods or combination as it was not mentioned) over anything they could get in China, and that German manufacturers are on average much smaller, and the workers cooperated a bit with owners there to lower wages to out compete the Chinese. So it is possible, and also manufacturers were outsourcing from China to Thailand (before that last natural disaster), and Vietnam because of slight wage inflation in China at one point, too.
I was speculating it was not cars because they discussed how many of the manufacturers were small and one has to go to Maserati/Ferrari to get small car manufacturers AFAIK.
On the other hand, it's easier for the Chinese to develop an understanding of premium brand design than it is for Germany to develop hundreds of millions of cheap factory workers.
I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions here. I have a lot of experience in this space.
For starters, Amazon has very good policies that allow sellers to protect their IP and products. It's very easy to remove fraudulent products from your listing.
The problem is that Amazon is a very complex platform to use, with a lot of rules and policies, so it seems to me that the sellers in the article, and many others, don't quite know how to protect their ASINs. I would like to think that Amazon would do a little better to inform the sellers, but since so many are just starting, or are amateurs, there probably isn't time to walk each one through.
Of course, RTMFD, as they are very clear on what is and isn't allowed to be sold. For example, it is a clear and blatant violation of Amazon policy to drop-ship from overseas.
eBay and Amazon aren't able to police everything. It is up to the sellers and buyers to report products that are knock-offs. As a buyer, I've closed down a few listings. As a seller, I've done the same, but mind that there is a complex war going on between sellers. Some sellers game the system by nuking your listing over fake violations, so there is a balance to all of this that is very difficult to maintain. Unfortunately, the world is full of jerks, so if it was a blind trust, we'd be in a much worse position.
Anyways, please read through ALL the policies of Amazon and eBay before making assumptions about what is right and wrong. What is in this article and in many of these comments are very wrong.
I think you might be missing the point. Amazon didn't used to be a "buyer beware" e-commerce platform. You used to be able to trust them, where as everyone knew eBay was rife with counterfits and fraud. Amazon and eBay didn't used to be comparable, because one site (Amazon) used to have integrity in their product listings.
That's no longer the case. Amazon doesn't even attempt to protect consumers the way they used to. This has cheapened their value and put the burden on consumers -- most of which are unable to decipher fraud from legitimate products. I assure you my grandma has zero clue when she's getting scammed on Amazon and that's bad for business and bad for those in our society who are vulnerable to these types of scams.
Buying on Amazon shouldn't be like playing roulette.
This was all an issue 5 years ago, and even before that.
I'm not sure why people are just now noticing, but it did cause Amazon to update their policies so it's a bit harder to get started these days. I suppose it was too easy to get started at some point, but the onus has always been on the sellers to protect their product. It's just that this is a lot of work, and I don't think inexperienced sellers like you have in the article are prepared to really understand this.
>For starters, Amazon has very good policies that allow sellers to protect their IP and products.
No they don't. Maybe on paper, but not in practice.
>It's very easy to remove fraudulent products from your listing... the sellers in the article, and many others, don't quite know how to protect their ASINs.
No its not.
Big players like Birkenstock are pulling their products from Amazon due to counterfeits. If it were so easy then they would have figured it out.
> it is a clear and blatant violation of Amazon policy to drop-ship from overseas
I'm not sure what you think "drop ship from overseas" means, but its not a violation of Amazon's policies to do so. Here's their policy on drop shipping: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8... As long as you clearly indicate your products are coming directly from China and you have your shipper prepare the invoices correctly (identifying you as the seller) its not a violation of Amazon's policy. And even if it were, is has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, because Chinese factories ship directly to Amazon's warehouses in order to sell their counterfeits FBA.
Its absolute ridiculous that you say "its up to sellers and buyers to police themselves." If someone orders an item from Amazon how do they tell its a counterfeit? Do I have to, for example, do lead testing on all the toys I buy? We are talking about baby products here. You're also ignoring the brands who don't want to be in the retail business - they want to sell through merchants and distributors but not directly through Amazon.
Amazon can police its listings 1000X better than it currently does. Do we really want to turn eCommerce into Russian roulette for a quick buck? It's bad for the buyer, its bad for the seller, and its bad for the manufacturer. The only winners re Chinese factories and Amazon through their fat commission.
Your link says nothing that supports your claim. Drop shipping from China is a violation of the TOS. There's nothing more to add to that.
It's a lot of work to get these listing removed. The process is have the offending product sent to you, take photos, send the photos to Amazon. You can also hire and attorney to send a cease-and-desist notice, and you can also sue (if the company is based in the US).
If you are a large seller, then you have to do this for each and every product that is piggybacking on your listing.
Recently, Amazon added two things:
1- To list a product, you need a UPC.
2- You can restrict others from selling your brand.
What do you think "drop shipping from China" means? Because Amazon's policy, as written, clearly permits drop shipping from China.
Here it is, from the horse's mouth:
>Drop shipping, or allowing a third party to fulfill orders to customers on your behalf, is generally acceptable. If you intend to fulfill orders using a drop shipper, you must always:
>Be the seller of record of your products;
>Identify yourself as the seller of your products on all packing slips and other information included or provided in connection with them;
>Be responsible for accepting and processing customer returns of your products; and
>Comply with all other terms of your seller agreement and applicable Amazon policies.
Anyway, even if drop shipping from China was not ok, it wouldn't change a damn thing, products are shipped directly from China to Amazon's warehouses to be sold by Amazon.
You claimed its "It's very easy to remove fraudulent products from your listing." Yet everything you said is far from "very easy."
>if the company is based in the US
Lol, the entire friggin article is about Chinese companies turning Amazon into a dumping ground.
Good luck suing these fly by night companies with no assets.
Even if Amazon was so great at weeding out fakes (and they aren't) that leaves the eBay problem.
>Comply with all other terms of your seller agreement and applicable Amazon policies.
"Fly by night with no assets."
You could open up an Amazon account maybe read the policies that you agree to when you pay them their monthly fee. You could also see that selling on Amazon is far more difficult and less profitable than you give credit for.
You prevent others from piggybacking your listing by registering your brand and informing Amazon that you do not allow others to sell your product. This would prevent others from listing against you. The onus is on the seller to be educated, just as the onus of education is on literally any other field of work.
I like the Chinese counterfeits. I got a bundle of knock off Ralph Lauren polos that let me experiment with the frat boy look in college with out spending thousands on real ones.
I personally like shanzai culture. Brands are cool but ultimately quality should be an internal thing that customers should seek out and test, not rely on status symbols and brands to define their tastes. Caveat emptor is a thing you know.
What if you paid and ordered Ralph Lauren and received counterfeit? Because that's the larger problem in my opinion. Especially since it often also includes goods that are dangerous as counterfeit (like medication).
It raises an important distinction, though: protecting users vs protecting brands. There are business interests pushing to conflate the two, but we shouldn't.
Precisely, in my worldview. Brands have some amount of value for users as they are a stamp of a certain level of manufacturing standard. However that does not mean they are inherently beneficial to consumers.
Yeah exactly. I guess I didn't address the inherent way you GET knockoff shirts/clothing off of ebay which is look for the people who are obviously selling fakes pretending to be reals but for far too cheaply and order accordingly. It's not hard if you aren't totally blind to the standard Engrish language cues. That being said I am probably hurting RL's brand. But do I care? What if selling "official knockoffs" was a thing? What if you paid the smallest of licensing fees to sell an "official knockoff". A certified look alike with no quality standard. That would be a new market segment right?
What if you ordered Ralph Lauren from a guy on the corner selling shirts out of his suitcase?
The argument isn't about counterfeits, the argument is about Amazon's slide from "retail store" to "group of guys on the corner hawking crap". Amazon has always been that group of guys, it's only now people realize this.
>quality should be an internal thing that customers should seek out and test
What's the point of seeking out and testing for quality products if you never know if you're going to get that product or a shoddy counterfeit? If you identify that company A makes high quality polos, how do you ensure that the polos you order online are actually from company A.
I agree and I replied above saying I didnt really address the hidden nature of fakes. I went to ebay looking for fakes because they are cheaper and I didn't want to actually own real ones.
I mean I agree but what about something like clothing where the style is ephemeral and safety isn't really an issue (outside of blatant materials poisoning or whatever).
