Amazon is extremely shady and it doesn't just hurt companies like PopSockets. Amazon has a counterfeits problem and it's bad for customers. It is totally obvious now that Amazon embraces cheap Chinese knockoffs, and I'm sick of having to send them back.
I was recently searching for 1TB flash drives. Currently, when I search for "1tb flash drive" on amazon.com, after ads and an Amazon's Choice banner, the top result is a listing for a $20 product: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...
This was my prime reason to cancel my Amazon Prime. For 20$ of revenue, people are willing to destroy other people's work and memories.
In my case, it was a fake Kingston SD Card and luckily used it only for a Rasberry pi. It cost me only a day of figuring out what I am doing wrong but easily it could have cost me my photos from a trip to a remote place.
Of course, Amazon would deal with that as if it was 20$(or whatever) issue and everything is supposed to be O.K. when you get a refund.
For those who don't know: despite having a name that implies curation, Amazon does not choose "Amazon's Choice" at all. It simply indicates which product is most popular, based on reviews that are widely known to be faked. Yet another utterly deceptive dark pattern.
That's incorrect. "Amazon's Choice" is based on sales. If you search "flash drives" the product that has the Amazon's Choice badge is the product that is bought most often by customers using that search term. It's one of the only organic things on the Amazon platform.
There was actually a discussion on HN a couple of months back [0] about what "Amazon's Choice" actually means. The consensus then was that it's not simply based on sales.
> If you search "flash drives" the product that has the Amazon's Choice badge is the product that is bought most often by customers using that search term.
It only vaguely verifies that it's in the same product category though. For the "1tb flash drive" search term, Amazon's Choice includes a 128GB flash drive, a 1TB HDD, a 2TB HDD, and a single 1TB flash drive.
It's broken down by price ranges... but it's like going to a car dealership, inquiring about a compact car, and being presented with a skateboard, a road bike, a mountain bike and a car.
Having Bill for <some department> choose a product to endorse is also 'choosing an algorithm to choose a product'.
Just because your algorithm is a digitally encoded series of steps, as opposed to a a meat-encoded series of steps, doesn't mean you can wash your hands of the responsibility for its outcomes.
If an algorithm told me that the best way for me to optimize my tax bill is to commit tax fraud, I'd be just as liable for it, as if I followed the advice of an accountant to do so. I'm responsible for my outputs, not my inputs.
That's amazing. It's clearly a scam and it's been going on for almost 1 year. This really hurts Amazon's credibility and can't be good for them in the long-term. It doesn't seem rational at all.
It seems incredible to get away with selling such a brazenly fake product for so long - as well as the reviews, I would expect that Amazon have had several complaints about this.
I don't know if perhaps there is some weird legal shenanigans going on, where Amazon are more able to get away with this in the US? Here in the UK, I've never come across such obvious deceit, or (knowingly!) ended up with a fake/counterfeit, across what must be at least hundreds of purchases, spanning 10+ years.
It certainly hurt their credibility with me–I cancelled Prime and stopped buying on Amazon a year ago because of this nonsense, after being a subscriber for nearly a decade and having an Amazon rewards credit card since 2008.
What’s the point of paying a membership fee for the privilege of sorting through garbage, scams and counterfeits yourself?
Speaking of ads... Search results now show "Editorial recommendations" products above the search results, but are really just ads. It's getting increasingly difficult to trust anything Amazon shows me as being actually beneficial to me.
This is common. Amazon lets sellers tweak their product pages. What unscrupulous settlers have realized is that you can slowly change one product into another and keep the reviews. This allows them to have fake products with hundreds of verified purchases.
Just received a pair of counterfeit North Face ski pants here. Only identified them due to owning an identical but not fake pair bought directly from TNF.
I report them when I see them. I don't know if anyone at Amazon actually looks at reports but it's something.
One thing that I look for to avoid junk like this, if the brand is in ALL CAPS then its almost 100% sourced from Alibaba or similar. Not many reputable brands use all caps like that.
I don't see what the big deal is. Even a cursory glance at the 3 star rating - not to mention the reviews - makes it clear that it's a product to avoid.
Anyone remember that it's Amazon that pioneered the customer reviews that make it possible to identify such fakes?
An issue I have with Amazon these days is with books. Many slightly obscure books these days come print-on-demand rather than from an earlier, larger offset-printing run. I don’t know if the original publishers do this service or if the books are counterfeit too (I remember reading complaints here about low quality copies of books which the commenter thought were counterfeit. Though I’m not so convinced of that)
Print on demand means that the book is only printed when (or shortly before) your order comes in. This reduces the risk of not being able to sell all the copies in a larger offset run and of storage but at a higher per-unit printing cost. I typically recognise these books by soft edges on letters (even dots of ink around the letters giving a fuzzy underline) and blurry diagrams. This is particularly bad for small labels or footnotes. I also saw some absolutely awful photographs that looked like they came out of an inkjet printer running low on ink (ie not great resolution and big stripes of off colours running across the image). Another sign is a sparse first page (the one listing information about the publishers and print run), or even a blank first page with a little printers name in the back.
The kind of offset printing one normally sees in books leaves much crisper edges (I think the ink is more sticky and more shiny too; perhaps sitting ever so slightly above the page rather than feathered into it). Plates also somehow look much better. I don’t know how they are made.
I wish there were a way to know whether or not you’re going to get a print-on-demand book because often the quality is very poor and I’d be willing to invest time looking elsewhere for an offset printed copy.
But perhaps I get more print on demand books than I know. Indeed I read that Amazon’s own print on demand service produces very high quality results and if thats true it would probably be a good thing for getting consistent quality books from Amazon. Certainly all the poor quality books I’ve ever gotten were print-on-demand (or digital printing which, as far as I can tell, is basically the same thing).
My last book purchase was print on demand. I knew Amazon did that for some titles but I assumed they’d tell you. If it said somewhere, it wasn’t obvious. The book arrived with the printing offset vertically by about an inch so the bottom margin was huge and the top margin just under the top of the page. It’s not unreadable but it’s a pain to read and I’m looking for the title elsewhere and just not buying books from Amazon again.
It’s really not excusable. Either there are no humans in the loop or some actually looked at this and decided to send it anyway.
I’ve already got a list of products I won’t buy from them but I never thought books would be on the list.
I sell print on demand books through Amazon, and I see misprinted books occasionally.
I ordered a box of 500 recently. One was an utterly different book, and one had a printing issue where some pages from some random book were in the middle of my book. It's a shame to think paying customers might get one like this, but it's easy enough to return stuff to Amazon, so I don't think it's a huge deal.
I try to buy the highest quality version of whatever product I'm looking for and this is completely impossible on Amazon. Every product is a cheap Chinese clone and the next 100 products are the same exact thing with a different color scheme.
For electronics, B&H or BestBuy. For outdoor goods REI or any of the Backcountry online stores. Or direct from the manufacturer.
My typical shopping pattern is to search for whatever I want, scan several review sites (realizing many of them are paid to pimp stuff), figure out which brand/model I want, then start googling.
I have purchased hundreds of items from Amazon and have yet to discover one of the items being fake. I think this problem is blown out of proportion by consumers who lack common sense or are proponents of further regulation of Amazon. I suppose the proponents’ argument is we have an obligation to these consumers who can’t differentiate between junk and non-junk because not everyone has two eyes and a brain behind them. Some people are blind etc. which actually is a fair point now that I think about it..
Amazon could require all sellers to send in their product for review to confirm it’s validity. This would add additional costs but the costs could potentially be offset from the positive response from consumers who have had issues discerning product realness.
I find that it depends a lot on what you buy. I have not noticed any fakes on regular household items. However, I buy a lot of cables and adapters because of what I do and for those items it's a problem.
The article says they mentioned gray market suppliers. Gray market is not the same as "knock offs" or the black market. Gray market usually just means "sold legally without manufacturer warranty."
So, stop buying them? As long as people continue to value absolute cheapest crap over quality, even if it means frequent returns, Amazon will continue to do what it does.
> Happened to me once with a watch strap, but the price wasn't high enough for me to go through the hassle of returning it
In my experience, Amazon will just refund cheap items without even asking for you to return anything. I have no idea how many things I've returned to Amazon over the years, but it's a lot - easily many dozens of products. I'd guess about 20% of the time, because the item is cheap, they just let me keep it and give me back my money.
"Just send it back" is not the solution here.
And not just for - as one real example - safety carabiners (for mountain climbing).
Deceiving people is not okay. Ever. And especially not on the scale of Amazon. They're not tricking people to survive or feed their family, but as a multi billion dollar business modal.
Being happy to be able to send back is either ignorance or sticking your head the sand.
(that's being blunt, but still meant as friendly debate)
You are out of your mind for buying a carabiner from amazon (or any huge online retailer). Don't risk your life like this, please. The only big retailer I would buy from is REI, and probably in person. Most likely I'd go to an actual local climbing shop.
And then what am I supposed to do with a cheap, fake watch strap I don't want? Throw it in the trash? No thanks. I'd rather not get sent the item in the first place.
The waste occurred when the item was manufactured, not when it was sent to you. Given that nobody wants it, creating it was a destruction of the value of the raw materials that went into it. Whether you throw it away or do anything else with it is irrelevant; the value is already destroyed.
Worrying about the fate of that watch-strap is a bit like fishing some food-soaked plastic wrap out of your garbage bin, and then feeling bad about throwing it back into the garbage bin. The plastic became non-recyclable earlier on, when it interacted with the food during packaging. It interacted with the food before you ever bought it. The standalone recovery-value of the plastic wrap was destroyed in the manufacturing facility, and would be destroyed whether or not you chose to buy the item. Just like those cheap watch straps nobody wants would have been manufactured whether or not there was demand for them. (Because there isn't demand for them, and they still clearly are manufactured.)
Only partially. Vendors will buy more to replace sold stock. If it never sells, the manufacturer will never get another order for production, and the total waste is capped at what's already been created.
I find that in AliExpress land, the long tail of stuff being sold (i.e. the stuff outside of the brand-names) was almost always created as a single batch by a process that can’t be replicated (e.g. because the people who made it only came together at that place and time to make that thing), and when that stock is depleted, the individual item is never sold again. If there turns out to be high demand, then another product will be produced that will be similar (sort of a knock-off, but sometimes it’s better rather than worse) but not identical.
One place you’ll run into this approach with higher-ticket items (i.e. not a $0.03 comb) is in the handheld emulation-console market. Some cool little device was created that everyone wants (e.g. the aluminum-alloy RetroGame 350)? Too bad, they can’t make more even if they wanted to.
Recently ordered a bathing suit for my kid on Amazon. Supposed to arrive in three days. Email that it shipped after a day. Four days later an email that basically says "We have no idea where it is. Click here if you want your credit card reimbursed." Overall weird experience.
Four days is nearly instantaneous in logistics-system terms. I'd be surprised they managed to lose the thing, realize they lost the thing, and then give up on the thing turning up later on, all so quickly.
Four days is more than long enough to figure out that a tracked delivery has probably been lost. You refund and tell the delivery company to return to sender.
This wasn't even a direct refund, just an email making it easy for the customer claim one.
For international shipping—often something will be in a black hole on various boats + transdock facilities + customs for two months or more, before anyone knows where the package is, or whether it was received at all.
And, at that point, you often deal with carrier hand-off, such that the package immediately stops getting tracking updates from carrier A and there's potentially >4d of delay before you start getting tracking updates from carrier B.
>For international shipping—often something will be in a black hole on various boats + transdock facilities + customs for two months or more, before anyone knows where the package is, or whether it was received at all.
Is that very often the case with Amazon? I've done 500+ orders and haven't seen that happen unless I go out of my way to order from outside the EU (Ok, crossing EU borders is technically international, but not the way you meant it.)
the "automatic" adjective is what the problem is. i had the exact same experience. i expect an "automatic" refund. i had to search my order, and notice the comment, as if the refund is optional. any other companies would have issued the refund without asking if i really want it, and hoping i will not check the order and notice the question
You would’ve eventually received an automatic refund (or the product!) even if you did nothing.
Amazon really isn’t trying to screw you here, they’re just being transparent about a likely delivery issue and offering you the opportunity to cancel the order.
So stop buying from Amazon. Period. They have obviously decided that they'd rather sell you crap, telling you it's a genuine item, than the real thing. Why give them any more of your money?
We have fraud laws to starve fraudsters of new victims. We have fraud laws so we don't each individually have to vet every seller. The more due diligence we have to do, the less business we're going to get done. It's better for the economy as a whole as well as us buyers individually if we can hold Amazon accountable when they fuck us over.
Yes, and the most direct way you can hold a vendor accountable is to stop giving them your business.
If there are other legal, political, or regulatory avenues you wish to pursue, that's not mutually exclusive to taking your personal dollars elsewhere in the meantime.
Are you referencing any fraud laws in particular? They could be useful resources for folks on this thread who've received fake/counterfeit items.
As I understand it, although purchases are made through a single service (Amazon), products are sourced from a large number of sellers who list items on their marketplace. It could be useful to find out how the laws you mention are written and enforced in that kind of environment.
At the moment I'd suspect Amazon are keen to handle disputes/concerns directly which might lead to fewer regulatory complaints from customers and avoid scrutiny.
And if you look at the reviews they reference a different product or are too generic to be taken seriously. Amazon has allowed this to happen on a big scale. I personally avoid Amazon now.
For me it stopped being convenient because I was getting too many fakes and too much garbage. Yes, those aluminum tent stakes are cheaper but they're also not designed with the same level of care as the ones you get locally. And it really matters if you're expecting them to stay in the ground and not saw through your guy lines.
You mean stop thousands of other people from buying cheap watchbands from Amazon, unless and until they get better quality control, as determined by some impartial third party, who then signals to thousands of people that it's ok to buy again? Or maybe stop thousands of other people from buying watchbands from Amazon forever? Because if one person stops buying, it's not a solution, and to get many people to stop buying is not simple.
"Shipped and sold by Amazon" means amazon sold it to you.
Fulfilled by amazon means someone rented amazons warehouse and used their logistics services and payment services (and multiple suppliers stocks may have mixed together.)
If shipped and sold by amazon is an option around the same price, you can choose not to involve the reselling middle man.
Im mostly looking at it from the perspective of "if I have to return this because its not right, its a ton less hassle if Amazon is the party I have to deal with the return through."
>The issue is that the listing is for a genuine product, but then you get sent a fake (even when 'fulfilled by Amazon')
That would be the issue the first time, but I agree with the parent down voted into the gray...You are knowingly doing business with a company that knowingly and willfully fulfills your orders with fakes.
At a certain point you have to stop saying Amazon's counterfeit practices are the problem, but the problem is customers. They will never stop advertising legit products and shipping counterfeits, because people will keep buying and even just accept it.
Name 3 things in your entire life that were fake. Theres likely a bunch of 200 packages a year people in this thread. What could you be buying that lacks sufficient reviews and is of such opaqueness and simultaneously over a nominal amount?
Not an Amazon apologist but it seems a bit ridiculous. How do they get paid? The customer first mantra is nice but do they not prefer a higher price too?
Actually I've had something similar. Samsung charges better with Samsung usb cables (per ATT in store and tmobile in stores ppl). But the Samsung USB cables are realllllly poorly labeled. Like suspiciously so.
1. USB Chargers
2. Apple TV 4K Siri remote
3. Sensodyne Toothpaste
4. Pretty much any name brand clothing
5. Maui Jim Sunglasses
... I’m an idiot. Plenty more that I ignore.
Reminds me of the Chinese milk scandal where people were literally poisoning babies by selling fake milk for a profit of a few cents apiece. This is why you can't just say it's just everyone's responsibility to be careful what they buy, no one has time to run chemical analysis on every single item they take home from the grocery store.
You can make a tube of toothpaste for a few cents. With counterfeit branding you can sell it for a hundred times as much. It's drug dealer profitable at much lower risk.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between fakes and the real thing. Sometimes it is obvious, heavy cotton shirts that feel thin to the touch. Other times it is not. Some overseas manufacturers will put corn starch in a shirt to make it feel thicker then it is. Wash it several times and the shirt feels thin.
Allowing counterfeits destroys the incentive for people to make quality products.
Why build a brand when someone will sell a fake for half the price and people will complain about it on your website?
Allowing a giant marketplace to willfully infringe products harms the market as a whole.
Yes yes. But these things aren't mutually exclusive. Every extra dime of profit you willingly give Amazon is another they have to lobby and fight against government regulation. We can fight these battles on two fronts: stop voluntarily giving Amazon your money, and demand action from your elected representatives.
I wholeheartedly agree. I just take opposition to those who say Amazon is doing nothing wrong and that I should just stop buying from them and that somehow makes everything better.
Oh boy it's the hourly "don't punish the fraudsters, just try to teach a billion people to work around this particular fraud too, and blame them when they don't" post
I never agreed to buy a Chinese fake version of product X because it is Y% cheaper. Quite the contrary, I would pay more if I get the original, every single time I place an order. Amazon stopped being an option for anything serious or easily faked. I simply go to the physical stores or order it from online stores that do not have counterfeit problems. I could not give 2 shits about 10 cent price differences, which is usually the difference.
Not sure what he means by sourcing from the gray market? Does he mean that it's illegal to produce pop sockets because of copyright or patent infringement and Amazon is facilitating this? Or is he thinking that anyone who produces a competitive product is somehow wrong?
If the former, that truly is (or should be) illegal and I hope Amazon is punished dearly. If the latter, what a wimp. This is capitalism baby, and you need to buck up.
You think walmart doesn't use it's market dominance in retail to try to push prices down? How do you think we've got so much progress in our consumer markets. Understand, that Amazon is not profiting here when it pushes prices down. It's just trying to deliver a better service for it's customers and compete with other companies like Walmart.
In fact, Amazon's margins decrease when it pushes prices down.
That all said, I really have no idea what he means by gray market and willing to learn.
Grey market is buying a companies items (not counterfeit copies) outside of the official supply chain. For example, many goods are sold cheaper in other markets. So someone could buy the item there and bring them to a market where they are usually sold for more and be able to undercut the the official supplier's prices. This is perfectly legal thanks to the First Sale Doctrine. Companies don't like this though, because they don't make as much, so they brand these goods grey market to make them seem shady to consumers.
> Grey market is buying a companies items (not counterfeit copies) outside of the official supply chain. For example, many goods are sold cheaper in other markets. So someone could buy the item there and bring them to a market where they are usually sold for more and be able to undercut the the official supplier's prices. This is perfectly legal thanks to the First Sale Doctrine.
You're mixing up a bunch of ideas. The traditional definition of "grey market" is buying an item oversees at a low cost and then importing it into the US. For example, the identical textbook usually sells for much more in the U.S. than it does in Asia. The supreme court has indeed ruled that the First Sale doctrine allows people to buy that book in Asia, then sell it back to someone in the U.S. for more.
However, the first sale doctrine only applies to copyright, not patents. It hasn't yet been decided as to patents.
More meaningfully though, the meaning of the term "grey market" has expanded. It used to refer to authorized items sold overseas, but now it more generally refers to items with questionable IP rights. When Amazon is using the term "grey market", they are referring to counterfeits and infringing products as well.
See the Supreme Court decision in Impression Prods., Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc.
It absolutely does apply to patents.
It applies to copyright, patent, and trademarks, the three major areas of IP rights. There are some subtleties with each one, but it most definitely applies.
Something else to add is that when you don’t buy through official channels you actually may end up with counterfeit parts. This is a huge issue in the electronics component industry.
So it’s entirely possible that what Amazon sources on the grey market were actually counterfeit items (whether or not they know it for sure, or care to to know).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the difference is amazon is telling the company to make up the difference between grey market price and the price they're selling the non-grey market ones on amazon.
In other words:
- amazon price $100
- grey market version amazon threatens with: $90
- amazon asks company for $10 for the ones sold at $100
This may mean not buying from official distributor for a region, but sourcing from another (ie because another region is cheaper) or bypassing local distributor - this is not uncommon for camera lenses for example (see Adorama).
In this context he seems to imply "any source providing the goods without looking too closely if they are counterfeit or not"
That is the traditional meaning of grey market, but I don't think that's what Amazon meant here. Amazon isn't threatening to import Tile and Sonos devices from other countries, they are threatening to use cheaper no-name knock-offs. The meaning of "gray market" has expanded over time.
I think that's exactly what Amazon meant here. See the comment someone posted elsewhere in the discussion about PopSockets suing companies who resell their actual, genuine products sold by them at wholesale for lower retail prices than they want under the dubious pretext that they become counterfeits simply through leaving the approved retail chain.
> I think that's exactly what Amazon meant here. See the comment someone posted elsewhere in the discussion about PopSockets
I can't speak to PopSockets, but both Tile and Sonos are companies that are small enough to still have a huge amount of runway within the U.S., Europe, and Japan. I would be very surprised if this dispute was because Tile/Sonos were selling their products at a discount abroad and Amazon was threatening to bring that discount into the U.S. The far more likely scenario is that Amazon is threatening to promote cheaper knock-off goods that likely infringe patent and trademark rights.
The reason that Amazon can get away with this, is that enforcing those patent and trademark rights is incredibly expensive, potentially millions of dollars a year. Amazon is smart and knows the cost of litigation, and likely asks for discounts close to (but a bit less) than the amount that it would cost the company to actually defend their rights.
I don't think he is describing activity that is outright illegal. That's why he's calling it "bullying" and "incredibly shady" rather than suing for breach of contract or patent infringement.
The whole idea of grey market products is shady to begin with. If the genuine product is available for sale elsewhere for less, I as a consumer should be able to purchase it at that discounted price. If Amazon is strong-arming manufacturers by sourcing genuine grey market products, that's a good thing for consumers and we should support Amazon. If Amazon is strong-arming manufacturers by sourcing counterfeit products, that's bad for consumers and we should not support Amazon.
> In fact, Amazon's margins decrease when it pushes prices down.
Exactly. That’s why this guy sounds butt-hurt and far from having any meaningful antitrust evidence.
Retailers always have the leverage that comes from rightfully owning their distribution channel. Amazon, Walmart or the little store in the corner are all in the business of sourcing products and they can set all the conditions on how those things are sold on their side. Pushing prices down isn’t hurting the final customer, so if PopSockets feels that their product is not profitable due to Amazon pricing policies they should not sell there.
This guy is basically saying that he doesn’t like how Amazon treats his business, and to be fair Amazon is probably treating them poorly. But besides that, there’s little to argue.
As Amazon said in their statement he is free to stop selling with Amazon and go somewhere else. His customers can buy the product through other channels.
You only have an antitrust case when you can prove that customers are being hurt.
Pushing prices down and sourcing similar products is not evidence for monopolistic behavior, at least not until you can prove that they are doing this to put your business out and then raise prices on that type of product you produce.
Problem is that this product is so useless and easy to copy that even if you can prove that somehow, it’s hard to imagine a way to claim in the bigger picture that Amazon is building a monopoly on “pop-sockets”. That’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.
...and definitely not defending Amazon here, but this is a very weak angle/evidence to prove that Amazon is engaging in shady anticompetitive practices. There's probably a stronger case somewhere else.
Amazon gets >50% of US retail online sales (by total spend) and it's largest competitor (ebay) is almost 10 times smaller. Next is Walmart, below 4%.
His company can't afford not to be selling on Amazon and Amazon is strong-arming him into lowering prices from a position of power due to it's market share.
If that's not enough for antitrust laws to apply then what is?
Remember that US e-commerce sales still only account for 15% of total retail spending. That doesn't completely invalidate your point, but I think it recontextualizes it.
As a wrinkle to this conversation, Amazons product and treatment of customers/vendors causes even more harm to the environment. People buy more things that they are unsatisfied with than ever before. There are more returns than ever before. There are likely millions more frivolous purchases and many thousands of tons of cardboard and non-recyclable plastics generated each year thanks to Amazon Prime.
I know I'm an N of 1 but speaking purely as a customer Amazon has been nothing but awesome. And I know that's probably seen by many as maybe selfish and wrong, and I get that argument totally. But I can the stuff I want* pretty darn fast and pretty darn cheap and if it's not what I want it's easy to send back. I understand that might be short sighted with all the drawbacks, but I still keep ordering. The pluses outweigh the minuses. Am I being selfish?
* Not the stuff I need, but the stuff I want. I think that's an important point.I guess I go to Wegmans for the stuff I need.
They used to be pretty consumer-centric a decade ago, but personally I pretty much stopped buying on Amazon in the last couple of years.
Having to inspect the items for counterfeits, dealing with support if the item isn't functional (or slightly defective), getting messages from sellers to "make sure to write us a 5 star review", eventual consistency on the shopping cart price (eg. if the price of an item increases between adding it to the cart and checking out, there's no big red warning like "hey this item is 30% more expensive than when you put it in your cart three minutes ago, are you sure you want to check out at this new price"), awful delivery experiences, it's just not worth the hassle anymore IMO.
wow. Am I glad to be in a country that bans most of these tactics by regulation. I have two weeks to send back items, no questions asked. Price isn't allowed to change negatively between when I decide to put it in my basket and buy it.
and I have never had an email asking for a positive review.
Another single data point here, this time from the UK.
On the rare occasions where I have a problem, Amazon are great to deal with - no quibbling about returns, no "30 days before refunds" (a lot of companies do this...), and they make it easy.
This is an angle I’ve often attacked when trying to argue (unsuccessfully) with a lot of my peers that Amazon is a scumbag big business. Sure, Amazon’s return policy insulates my wallet against getting garbage, but it doesn’t insulate my conscious. I liked Amazon for a long time because it saved me time and lowered my carbon footprint by saving me from having to drive to the store, but when I have to return an item from a third of my orders, usually having to drive to the UPS store for drop off, it really degrades one of the more compelling aspects that got me into the habit in the first place.
Also cheap “good enough” products that don’t have a rigorous design process and carry no warranty are certainly unhealthy for the environment. “Scratching the itch of novelty” as a counter argument is very selfish in my opinion.
A lot of products these days are intentionally poorly designed with no longevity. "Planned obsolescence" is the term. Part of moving everything to as-a-service model :)
They've done everything possible to engineer impulse buying into e-commerce. At a high level, conflating excess with "convenience" is not a good thing for the environment, or for anyone but them.
I don't have Prime or use one-click and for me making an online order still involves the mindset of asking myself, do I really need this?
Avoiding Amazon also saved me money on my last purchase because I picked something up for $4.80 from Michaels on the way home from work when Amazon's price was $8.50.
That’s literally the same behavior of most stores. Your local grocery store probably is not laid out for the best customer experience, it’s laid out to best maximize profit.
They definitely optimize for impulse purchases, which is the whole point of one click checkout and "free" prime delivery.
If you think about the process of purchasing as a series of decisions, each decision that one has to take is a chance to think "Do I really need this?" and bail out of the check out funnel. Say that delivery wasn't free, you could add add a $5 widget to your cart, then as part of checking out one has to think "is this $5 widget really worth $9 because of $4 shipping costs?"
Instead, it's possible to have this one decision shopping experience where the sole decision is "do I want this $5 widget" and if yes, click the button with no further input required.
My fiance ordered a dress from Amazon that was shipped by the seller from China. She then attempted to return it per Amazon's request back to the seller in China. Amazon claimed they wouldn't issue a refund for the return shipping or the dress until it arrived with the seller. It sat with China Post for like a month, then mysteriously ended up back on her doorstep. She then spent another 3 hours cumulatively arguing with different CSRs at Amazon before they would issue her a refund, on the grounds that the package bounce was her fault. Through this process she was following their directions, used the shipping label provided, and generally tried to comply.
After that and after AZL failed to deliver yet another package to me and the ensuing terrible customer service I received there, I canceled my prime membership and have not ordered a single thing from them since.
It's not worth it because you can't even rely on their customer service anymore.
This is not new behaviour out of Amazon. I mean... look at what happened with Diapers.com (Quidsi) and Zappos back in the earlier days. Amazon approaches most deals with "Play our game our way in our stadium or we'll ruin you. Oh, by the way, you have to pay rent on the stadium and if you make too much money we may just ruin you anyway."
One of the most compelling reasons to not use AWS is every time a company does something novel and has any business relationship with Amazon, they start a competing business. From that perspective, they're a huge IP risk. If they can't win at the competition they try to buy the company. If they can't buy the company, they use their deep coffers and dominant e-retail position to apply unethical (if not illegal) screws.
They're pretty much the modern equivalent of Standard Oil or U.S. Steel.
I don't really believe that it will happen, but I really hope that Congress gets off their butt and does something about it.
Yeah, AWS needs to be split out. But, alas, amazon can't afford to do that because those profits are funding the rest of the company. They are extremely vulnerable as a company here and is a strategic opportunity for other cloud vendors. Just push down cloud margins and Amazon will slowly be out priced.
Without having some kind of control over prices, you are not a very viable business. Amazon is in a very fragile position.
Honestly, I have no idea why government is getting involved here. Let the market eat them.
'"Multiple times we discovered that Amazon itself had sourced counterfeit product and was selling it alongside our own product," he noted.'
How do they know that Amazon sourced the counterfeit?
Amazon's own inventory may be commingled with those of third parties so, even if you receive a counterfeit, it may have nothing to do with Amazon's own sourcing. (Unless you consider the whole commingling approach to be part of Amazon's sourcing.)
Popsockets is one of the biggest bullies in the marketplace. They've sued many, many sellers that were selling legitimate products trying to bully them off the market with various loopholes in the first sale doctrine.
The basic strategy is to include a bunch of FUD about how there's counterfeiters in general on Amazon, then try to lump legitimate sellers in with that. See the 79 page complaint from my last link, filed just last month. They have a template lawsuit that's dozens of pages long, and they just fill in the specific seller details. They have a bunch of screenshots of negative customer reviews, but those are from Amazon broadly and are not connected to the seller they're suing - they use the same negative reviews for all their lawsuits. (It looks like they have two negative feedback for popsocket sales traced to that account out of the many pages of negative reviews that isn't connected to an account.)
To be clear, they are not alleging counterfeits in the lawsuits. The claim is that the product doesn't carry the manufacturer warranty, and that sellers don't follow the right quality controls, both of which are very shaky claims legally (warranty restrictions are problematic under federal law, and there's no serious quality control concern on sealed electronics accessory products - it's the same product in the same warehouses, it doesn't magically become lower quality just because a different seller is selling it. There's a potential quality control concern with groceries or products requiring temperature controls, but it stretches credibility to argue that applies to sealed popsockets.) But a small seller can't afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to get a court decision affirming that. I know multiple sellers that have settled rather than fighting it. It's the path of least resistance.
Popsockets is not the only brand that's been using these abusive tactics. There's a string of lawsuits by Otterbox, Skullcandy, GNC, Murad, Standard Process, Noco, and others. Most of them are being pushed by a lawfirm called Vorys, which is associated with a large Amazon seller by the name of iServe/Pattern (one of the top 10 third party Amazon sellers, see https://www.sellerratings.com/amazon/usa, note Zappos and 6PM are Amazon-owned and Asurion, LLC is selling services, not products), that gets exclusive contracts with brands and then sues many of their competition that's undercutting them.
It's a scheme just begging for an anti-trust investigation.
iServe and Vorys also are fairly effective at working with manufacturers to get the desired price levels.
Consider the example of Spectra Baby, one of the largest suppliers of breast pumps in the United States. Spectra Baby is involved with both Vorys and Pattern (iServe). For example, their website states that if a breast pump was purchased on Amazon, they will only honor the warranty if iServe was the seller.
According to a popular price tracking application, there were seven offers on Amazon for Spectra’s popular S1 model pump in January of 2018. The selling price was $160. As late as May 2, Amazon itself was selling this product for $169. By the end of May of 2018, however, there was only one seller remaining and the price was $200. Although there have been some one-off sales by “unauthorized” sellers, the Amazon price for the S1 pump has remained remarkably consistent at $199.99 since 2018. Fortunately for buyers of this now $200 breast pump, iServe is "glad" to “provide invoices for insurance purposes". You can check out the price history yourself with the Keepa chrome extension.
Putting legalities aside since IANAL, how would a PopSockets -> third party -> Amazon -> customer supply chain ever be cheaper than PopSockets -> Amazon -> customer? Besides abstract "fairness", what's the benefit of allowing third party resellers here?
Usually some sort of price discrimination. Let's say Brand X pays $5 to produce something and sells it wholesale for $15 to stores, for a retail price of $30. Assume Amazon fees selling at $30 are $10, so Brand X can sell on Amazon at $30 and get back $20. A third party could divert goods from a retail store, say they pay an extra $1, and price at $28, and will net $18 from Amazon and be left with a profit of $2.
Alternatively, maybe a store had overstock and sold the goods in bulk at a loss.
Or sometimes they sell the same products cheaper in another country, and it turns out to be cheaper to buy there and import to resell here.
That explains why their crap is so expensive, and you can hardly find an alternative product. Amazon is a good guy here trying to lower the consumer price for that shitty piece of plastic, but no. Everyone is so upset at Amazon for making a lot of money, they forget their own interest and would rather side with real assholes
Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality?
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Maybe it's just a bad idea to copy someone else's product unless you really plan on improving upon it.
I don't imagine pop socket has a limitless budget for lawsuits either. They may really think they are doing the right thing here.
I guess this is the gray market that he's talking about. All these companies that are just copying products and creating cheaper versions with worse quality.
And amazon is facilitating that. Interesting and certainly worth shouting about.
These are products that popsockets manufactured, sold to distributors, which then made their way to Amazon. It's not a copy, it's the real thing, just sold at a price popsockets doesn't like.
Per https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/8/18215313/popsockets-c..., they've spent over $7 million on lawsuits in 2018 alone. The article claims it's all about counterfeits, but if you read through the actual suits it becomes clear that it's not about counterfeits but mainly about what I described above. They want to protect their margins against discount retailers. It's nothing new, brands have always hated discount stores, and it's obviously extremely lucrative to get rid them if it enables your authorized sellers to get higher prices. There's a reason MAP policies (minimum advertised price) are so prevalent.
> Interesting, so is it immoral to sue someone who is blatantly copying your product and providing a much cheaper knock off with much poorer quality?
That looks like a deliberate deflection. ikeboy specifically said that, while the lawsuit alleges inferior quality, that allegation is bogus. I would say that it is immoral to sue someone alleging inferior quality when the quality is not, in fact, inferior.
Just wanted to clarify a bit of the legal terminology here. There's a loophole/exception to the first sale doctrine that says if the products are materially different, it can be considered trademark infringement even if the product was originally made by the brand.
In some jurisdictions, there's a "quality control" subcategory of "material difference". The quality controls must be non pretextual. The basic argument is that if the brands's products are subject to quality control procedures that the alleged infringer is not following, then the products are different enough that it can potentially create a likelihood of confusion between the two. Only a jury can actually decide if there's such a material difference in a particular case.
Now, quality control can be temperature controls, or it can be additional inspections before sale, and so on. It must be something where customers would care about the difference, so you can allege customer confusion.
In these cases and in most of the vorys cases I've seen, the quality controls appear very pretextual. If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control.
The cases I've seen where quality control was accepted by a court were typically imports, where there were actually different standards being used for the ones the brand was selling in the US. In my view, none of these would go anywhere if they made it to court. But that's very expensive - it's been at least several years that similar cases have been filed, I'm aware of over 100 so far across 30+ different brands, and as far as I know none have actually gone to a jury. Most settle well before that point, or are voluntarily dismissed.
> If the product is sealed, authentic, and there's no damage to it, it's hard to see why any consumer would care about any of the alleged differences in quality control.
If I understand you correctly, the only differences in quality control would be if there were quality control tests that these units failed after they were sealed. That seems... quite unlikely.
Alternately, there were quality control tests that these units failed, but they sealed them in the standard packaging anyway. That also seems unlikely.
Plus even if it was inferior that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I can’t afford the nice thing at $x but can afford it at $x-1 dollars. That’s a benefit to consumers who would otherwise be priced out. I don’t think anyone would argue it’s immoral that Apple has an iPad alongside their iPad Pro.
Amazon, or Wal-Mart in the Sky, is truly an incredible company and business. But a good name is worth more than $. If they continue these negative business practices their brand equity will slowly continue to decrease over time. The general public is not yet as wary of their power as most HN readers but it won’t be look until a new competitor (or preexisting) starts nipping away at their bottom line.
Wal-mart has a hideous reputation among the general public and that doesn't seem to stop them. Walmart grows YoY every quarter.
I'm not certain their reputation will change much so long as they can still ship a product to my house in one day for less money than at a physical store, and have effortless returns.
> Wal-mart has a hideous reputation among the general public
Does it actually? Or does it just have a hideous reputation among the upper classes because it is a thing of the lower classes (like country music and pickup trucks)?
It's in general. For reasons ranging from union busting, bullying small suppliers, abusing employees, or being a burden on local governments. No matter your politics, you can find a reason to hate Walmart.
But Walmart was often the only shopping center in a 40 mile radius for much of the US, meaning you had to shop there regardless of how you felt about them.
>>Wal-mart has a hideous reputation among the general public
Walmart has a hideous reputation in certin area's normally upper-middle to upper class urbarn area's with high population density... This is also where they have very few, or no stores and the store they do have are not their "SuperCenters"
Outside of these area Walmart has a fine reputation and is generally well received by the population.
Congress, nay, government in general, has neither the capacity nor the ability to affect the price of anything, in the long run.
Lest we increase prices through the introduction of more regulatory in efficiencies in what would have otherwise been a free market, our government should not interfere in matters of a private enterprise.
My company did a deal with a F50 retailer that you've shopped at. About a month ahead of the first deliverable which was agreed to in the statement of work, one of their VPs called me and screamed at me demanding a live demo or they would cancel any further payments on the contract. Oh and stay on the original delivery timeframe.
We were small enough that we couldn't afford to fight that in court and losing that client would have been the loss of our biggest deal and a huge negative signal.
So we made it work but it just proved to me that contracts without the ability to enforce them don't mean anything.
> He asserted that Amazon representatives would tell him over the phone: "If we don't get it, then we're going to source product from the gray market."
Record your phone calls with customers, just like they do.
I discovered that when you receive a random Amazon package sent to your home, it’s a scam for the product.
From what I’ve read and been told by people, it’s a seller from Amazon shipping you their product using a gift card. They create an account using your info (not sure how they get it, maybe public info web sites), ship you their product and pay for it with a gift card. They then create a review of the product you received as you. It’s then considered a verified buyer of the product. So it’s essentially buying reviews.
I’m a bit skeptical of this for a few reasons. If Amazon is in breach of contract then why is PopSockets not taking them to court? What is the gray market in this case? Buying a product similar from a different company? That just seems like a smart business tactic, IMO
> I’m a bit skeptical of this for a few reasons. If Amazon is in breach of contract then why is PopSockets not taking them to court? What is the gray market in this case? Buying a product similar from a different company? That just seems like a smart business tactic, IMO
The "gray market" indicate cheap knock-offs of new products.
For example, literally days after Tile released their bluetooth powered device locators, you could find cheaper knock-offs from China. These products may very well infringe Tile's patents and trademarks, but proving infringement in court takes years and costs millions of dollars. Even if you win, during that time many other knock-off manufacturers will pop up and you'll have to start all over. At that point your company will be dead. Intellectual property litigation is simply not strong enough to protect smaller companies.
So a threat to go to the gray market from Amazon, can effectively spell the doom for your company.
As an aside, while this is a problem for small companies, larger companies can usually afford to wage these large IP litigation campaigns. A good example is Bosch which sells patented windshield wiper blades. There are numerous knock-offs from China, but Bosch goes to war with each and every one. Eventually, Bosch starts earning a reputation and the knock-offs slow down. But this takes many years of heavy investment in IP enforcement and never entirely goes away. It only makes sense at very large scales, no small company could take on this burden.
I stopped buying anything expensive and simple to manufacture from Amazon. I now only use it for things where I want the no-name version anyway, like RGB LED strips and curtains. Essentially treat it like AliExpress with fast shipping.
Everyone keeps talking about cheap Chinese clones but I don’t know what they’re talking about. Are you talking about generic products that have a Chinese sounding brand name?
On one hand, I don't necessarily mind that established brands get sent down a peg. Especially when they sell an entirely commodified product and expect a retailer to help pad their "brand".
On the other hand - the Amazon shopping experience has sucked lately. Ever since they allowed foreign sellers, every product line is flooded with cheap options and you never know what kind of crap you get.
I honestly think their e-commerce may have peeked. They only allowed foreign sellers to keep up with growing competition, are dumping huge amounts of money into ads, and from personal experience of myself and those I know, Amazon Prime feels much less essential than it used to be.
> On one hand, I don't necessarily mind that established brands get sent down a peg. Especially when they sell an entirely commodified product and expect a retailer to help pad their "brand".
For any product that's basically extruded plastic, Amazon is literally Robin Hood taking brand equity and distributing it to the people.
Ok? If it wasnt for AMZN do you think popsockets would have scaled that quick? No. Would this CEO have even 1/4 his net worth? Not likely. Seriously if AMZN is such a pain in his side why doesnt he just drop them? Thats right, because THEY are the retailer, not him.
Well, that's actually what the article is about. You'll note for example the following paragraphs:
> Barnett was addressing members of the House Subcommittee on [Antitrust law] and, over the course of the hearing, laid out how the Jeff Bezos-helmed corporate behemoth had pressured his smartphone accessory company
> [They detailed] how the major tech players have used their market dominance to squeeze smaller competitors in allegedly anticompetitive ways.
Not that easy, over half of online shopping is done at AMZN. It's where most people go first when buying something online. I believe, for most, if you do not sell on Amazon, you do not survive...
esp if you're selling cell phone / electronic accessories. Those margins have to be super thin.
Focusing on one company, pop sockets, isn't the point of the inquiries. Its to see if there is a pattern of behavior that indicates anti competitive behavior. If it happens to one or two, it's probably and industry killing epidemic.
