http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazo...ing-worse.html
I'm not sure what the upside is for Amazon to sell Chinese crap. Their return policy is as good as it gets, so I'm guessing this is costing them plenty in returns. I'm sure I'll get boned, I buy a lot of socks and underware on there.
http://boingboing.net/2016/07/11/ama...nese-coun.html
Hilarious that they warned about sex toys from China being toxic. Also, counterfeit books? Dayum.
I just bought some ultra boosts off amazon the other day and they are lol quality compared to the real thing. Shipped from China. I paid a little over retail for them too. Gotta get that return going.
So amazon is as big a piece of shit company as walmart is?
Wait til these third world Asian shit holes start importing our food.
But yea haha I bet they're gettin pretty good a making fakes, 1992
I have recently been suspicious of a lot of the goods I've seen on Amazon.
For example, I was looking for some new lightning cables for my iPhone.
So I would search on Amazon, and would find cheap lightning cables, and it would say "by Apple", but then I would notice that they were horribly reviewed (or no review at all), and sold by some recently-created third party merchant.
I figured that these weren't really "by Apple", yet it was very misleading, as you could even click on the word "Apple" and be linked to a page with Apple products, so you would believe that Apple sells on Amazon.com and you're buying from them.
The problem is that these Chinese merchants are almost freerolling Amazon and its customers. Yes, you can easily get a refund if you buy crap merchandise, but only a small percentage of people both returning and getting a refund, while most just chalk it up to a loss and move on (or believe they just had randomly bad luck with the product). So if Amazon only charges back a small percentage of sales to the company, they still make a killing.
The Fulfillment By Amazon thing is especially disappointing to read about, though. I had always thought that Amazon was simply contracting with certain third-party companies to sell certain goods they didn't carry, and thus had some kind of quality control in place. (By contrast, I never thought that the non-"Fulfillment" third parties had any vetting.) But now I'm reading that you could be buying knockoffs when using the Fulfillment merchants, which makes the sales tax savings I've been getting perhaps not so worth it.
Anybody can sell FBA. You just set up an account online and give them some banking info, tax ID, etc. I did it this past spring when yard sale season hit my area. The ROI was pretty sick, I could go spend $50 every Friday morning and come home with $500+ in merch. Retail arbitrage can be profitable too if you happen to find a good clearance somewhere.Originally Posted by Dan Druff
Fulfillment by Amazon simply means that it's coming out of their warehouses. Third party sellers (like me) just bag up the items, label them, and ship them to the warehouse. Then you wait for orders to come in and Amazon handles the rest.
For the most part, this system has worked fine. Sellers that scam or get too many refunds get banned for life, and Amazon has not been known to be lenient. I'm not sure how these Chinese sellers are getting around that. From what I've gathered, they're mostly targeting private label products. Instead of selling knockoff Keurig machines or whatever, they copy products that small-timers bulk ordered on Alibaba and rebranded. So when an American seller "creates" a shitty garlic press, the Chinese create shittier ones and undercut the price. That way the customer has no idea that it's counterfeit, they just think the brand is cheap crap. Most products like that are anyway.
Oh, to clarify how Amazon listings work... it's not like Ebay where each listing is tied to one individual seller. For any particular product on Amazon, there may be dozens of sellers. Sometimes the original manufacturer is one of them. Sometimes Amazon itself is one of them. With a few extra clicks, you can browse through all the different sellers of the item you're looking at decide which one to buy from.
When you click the "buy now" button, various factors are involved as to which seller you'll get. Price is the main one, but being established and having good ratings helps too. The thing is, if you leave a bad review on a product, it doesn't hurt the particular seller you bought from. That review goes to the product itself. Most people never bother to review sellers.
This is why you'll sometimes see a product that is well reviewed overall, but there will be some few odd 1-star reviews claiming the product is not as described or that it doesn't work at all. Those are people that happened to get a shitty/scamming seller.
Most of the time, if Amazon is a seller, they'll give themselves the buy button. Obviously. In those cases, you don't typically see price wars with sellers because there's no point in undercutting Amazon.
pretty simple..once amazon allowed 3rd party sellers for 20% profit on it, the shit got bad. i won't buy anything from them unless it comes from them
I thought the article showed an example of the Chinese selling knockoff Birkenstock products, though. I also saw the discussion of the private label thing (that woman with the bedsheet holders), but it's much worse for the consumer when mainstream brands are counterfeited there, as you have a certain expectation of quality with those.Anybody can sell FBA. You just set up an account online and give them some banking info, tax ID, etc. I did it this past spring when yard sale season hit my area. The ROI was pretty sick, I could go spend $50 every Friday morning and come home with $500+ in merch. Retail arbitrage can be profitable too if you happen to find a good clearance somewhere.
Fulfillment by Amazon simply means that it's coming out of their warehouses. Third party sellers (like me) just bag up the items, label them, and ship them to the warehouse. Then you wait for orders to come in and Amazon handles the rest.
For the most part, this system has worked fine. Sellers that scam or get too many refunds get banned for life, and Amazon has not been known to be lenient. I'm not sure how these Chinese sellers are getting around that. From what I've gathered, they're mostly targeting private label products. Instead of selling knockoff Keurig machines or whatever, they copy products that small-timers bulk ordered on Alibaba and rebranded. So when an American seller "creates" a shitty garlic press, the Chinese create shittier ones and undercut the price. That way the customer has no idea that it's counterfeit, they just think the brand is cheap crap. Most products like that are anyway.
Thanks for the Fulfillment explanation, though. I never knew how that worked. So you're saying that you were shipping your stuff to Amazon's warehouse BEFORE sales were made? Is this kind of like a consignment thing?
Regarding the Chinese, I'm guessing they are just creating massive numbers of sellers at once, which are in reality all the same entity? That would work as far as avoiding the consequences of getting banned.
Honestly I think one solution for this would be for Amazon to be more transparent about who you're actually buying from, and to tie product reviews directly to the seller when people read them.
So, for example, when reading a review of an Apple Lightning Cable, it would say, "Bought from Seller: SevenToedPete (13% positive reviews)".
That "Fulfillment by Amazon" thing is highly misleading, too, and should be clarified to the consumer.
I always knew I was buying from different sellers there, and that never bothered me. However, I never understood the Fulfillment thing fully, nor did I understand that poor reviews of a product may be a seller's fault, rather than the product's fault.
Another solution would be for Amazon to simply stop doing business with these Chinese sellers, aside from longtime existent ones with known good reputations.
Sorry, I didn't read any of the links in the OP. Yeah, you certainly can make knockoffs of anything and include yourself in the listing. If you do it on mainstream brands, you're going to get caught and shut down much faster. You also have more competition from other sellers. Most of the time I hear about this stuff, it's happening to small business owners with successful products.
Yeah. Say I score a popular video game. Of course there will already be an Amazon listing for it. I tell Amazon "Hey, I have one of these too." Then i ship it, and once Amazon receives the game from me, scans it, and stocks it on the shelf, I get included among the sellers.
Yeah, that's the only way I can see it working. Just a cat and mouse game. Still seems to me that it would be easier and more profitable to just leech off private label items, and I suspect that's really where most of this is happening.
This is the only reasonable thing to do, just cut them off. It's been going on for quite a while, but now it's slowly beginning to destroy Amazon's reputation.
Are you saying you sent used stuff w no original packaging to Amazon and they scan and ship it once it sells? Wouldn't their warehouse start to get filled all kinds of wore out crap?Anybody can sell FBA. You just set up an account online and give them some banking info, tax ID, etc. I did it this past spring when yard sale season hit my area. The ROI was pretty sick, I could go spend $50 every Friday morning and come home with $500+ in merch. Retail arbitrage can be profitable too if you happen to find a good clearance somewhere.
Fulfillment by Amazon simply means that it's coming out of their warehouses. Third party sellers (like me) just bag up the items, label them, and ship them to the warehouse. Then you wait for orders to come in and Amazon handles the rest.
For the most part, this system has worked fine. Sellers that scam or get too many refunds get banned for life, and Amazon has not been known to be lenient. I'm not sure how these Chinese sellers are getting around that. From what I've gathered, they're mostly targeting private label products. Instead of selling knockoff Keurig machines or whatever, they copy products that small-timers bulk ordered on Alibaba and rebranded. So when an American seller "creates" a shitty garlic press, the Chinese create shittier ones and undercut the price. That way the customer has no idea that it's counterfeit, they just think the brand is cheap crap. Most products like that are anyway.
Last edited by FPS_Russia; 07-12-2016 at 04:23 AM.
http://www.miraclecovers.com
"Donk down, that’s what you say to someone after they have lost 28K straight?" - Phil Hellmuth, online
About half the stuff I sent in had no original packaging. For used stuff, you have to carefully follow condition guidelines. They're categorized as like new, great, good, and acceptable. Acceptable doesn't mean rusted, cracked, or somehow fucked up. It means some minor wear and scratches. Amazon customers love to demand refunds, so you can't fuck around too much with this or your account gets dinged. I threw out or passed on a lot of good stuff that would probably sell because of condition.
But you're right, their warehouses are stuffed to gills. They charge a monthly fee per cubic foot of space, and recently that fee went up. They also charge for destroying or returning inventory, but recently they had an offer to do this at no cost, obviously to clear up space. A few months ago they started limiting how many units of certain items you can send in. These limits mostly apply to items with low turnover. They don't want shit sitting on their shelves for years. The warehouse/stocking fees have been so cheap, and the shipping discounts are insane (my last was $8 for a large 20-lb box), that people have been happily sending in as much stuff as they can.
Once again China is fucking everything up.
Even worse in some ways. Their warehouse workers have it even worse than Walmart's front-line employees. There's no climate control in most of those places. And they didn't pay for the time employees spent before and after their shifts being inspected for theft and/or putting on/taking off safety equipment, but I believe a court order put a stop to that.
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