There’s been a lot of heated discussion about this on HN previously, but it would be interesting to know 1) how big of a problem it is, and 2) what people are buying that seem to have this problem.
My household buys on average 10-20 items from amazon each week for many years (combined personal, my business, my wife’s business) and have yet to receive a counterfeit item. Am I doing something different?
Amazon's last 10-K report specifically listed counterfeiting as a risk factor for investors. Quote:
"Under our seller programs, we may be unable to prevent sellers from collecting payments, fraudulently or otherwise, when buyers never receive the products they ordered or when the products received are materially different from the sellers’ descriptions. We also may be unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies. Under our A2Z Guarantee, we reimburse buyers for payments up to certain limits in these situations, and as our third-party seller sales grow, the cost of this program will increase and could negatively affect our operating results. In addition, to the extent any of this occurs, it could harm our business or damage our reputation and we could face civil or criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers."
Anecdotally, it's trivially easy to find obviously counterfeit products on Amazon. For example, the eighth result when I search for "yeezy" is this listing for an obviously fake pair of Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 v2 shoes. In many product categories, Amazon looks more like a seedy flea market than a multinational retailer. I have no idea what proportion of supposedly legitimate listings are for counterfeit products, but I have personally received counterfeit SD cards and USB chargers.
I agree with their assessment that the A2Z Guarantee is a financial risk as the potential for counterfeits increases with scale. Amazon returns are shockingly easy and I am always given the benefit of the doubt. Makes sense that they would call that out as a risk factor.
That listing for the "yeezys" you linked, though, is a great example of something I would never even consider... I don't have a specific heuristic for how I select products, but this listing violates a lot:
-Prime availability
-Multiple sellers with extensive trading history
-At least 10 ratings and preferably at least 100
-Rating above 4* and maybe 3.5* if there are limited options
-Description that is written in legible English and reflects the copy on the item as found in a store
-And only after multiple searches using different search terms to identify the "right" keywords that bring the most relevant products
This has and will be a problem on any platform, whether it's eBay or Alibaba or on Canal Street in NYC [1]. If it seems shady, it probably is.
Hair products are heavily counterfeited on Amazon - I only buy them direct from companies now. High end shampoo/conditioner/treatments can cost $50 a bottle for large sizes. They're just colored plastic bottles with text and some gel inside. Trivially easy to copy the bottle, costs essentially nothing to produce, and only obvious that it's fake to the consumer that receives it, not others involved in the supply chain.
Do the listings say "Sold and shipped by Amazon"? If so, Amazon has procured it. If it says "Fulfilled by Amazon", anybody in the world sent the product with a matching UPC label to the fulfillment center and Amazon shipped it.
It's possible your sample is not representative of the larger sample.
My understanding on this matter is Amazon is going the way of giving the brand owners more control of the brand as one part of the solution. Ultimately they know their product(s) the best and are likely most aware of matters no heuristic is going to catch. Maybe it can be used to train an automated counterfeit identifier since this solution only scales for large brands that have resources already dedicated to the problem. You still get stuck with a McDowell's vs McDonald's problem of brand erosion from very similar knockoffs that tread the legal grey line.
The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else.
Occasionally I'll see a broken-English listing from a third-party seller advertising a $800 camera for $200, but when that happens I just...don't purchase the obvious counterfeit product.
> The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else.
I'm sure that much of the anecdata on HN unfairly paints Amazon in an poor light in regards to counterfeit goods. At the same time, I suspect that many, many people have bought counterfeit goods on Amazon and don't realize it.
One side issue you'll run into when discussing things like this is a major response bias. People who have neutral or good experiences are far less to chime in saying as much. By contrast you'll have a very large percentage of anybody who ever had a negative experience say something.
Like I suspect the vast majority of people, I've ordered plenty of items from Amazon and also never run into a single counterfeit.
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As a tangent, you could also apply this same bias to driving the things like the division in social media. People surround themselves with people of the same affection and biases which, in turn, ends up being seen from their perspective as 'normal' which, in turn, drives radicalism since their distorted perspective creates a false reality.
So I've been using Amazon for years, and only had a bad experience once. I always used to use Anker products, especially their screen protectors that were cheap and worked well enough.
I ordered the exact same listing maybe 4 or 5 times (at the top it would say 'You ordered this item on XX.XX.XXXX) and the sixth time I ordered it, what turned up wasn't Anker at all, and wasnt' even pretending to be. The pack was completely different and this was from a store listed as 'Anker'.
Of course, Amazon refunded and sent the correct item but it does happen.
I suspect there’s something to what you say. People buying on price are more likely to hit counterfeits. It’s also statistics. With a large enough population, some people are going to get unlucky purely by chance.
My household buys on average 10-20 items from amazon each week for many years (combined personal, my business, my wife’s business) and have yet to receive a counterfeit item. Am I doing something different?