Amazon Responds After Third-Party Sellers Put Bootleg Games on Its Store (venturebeat.com) 91
Jeff Grubb, reporting for VentureBeat: Over the weekend, some thrifty gamers spotted a deal on Amazon. A downloadable version of the tough strategy survival sim Frostpunk was available on the Amazon Marketplace from a third-party seller for $3, which is a 90 percent discount from the standard $30 price. But after looking into the game, some customers who dropped the three bucks had some questions. For example, why does the metadata for this version of Frostpunk refer to the DRM-free version that people can buy from GOG. [...] So I reached out to Amazon, and it provided the following statement from a company spokesperson: "Our customers trust that when they make a purchase through Amazon's store --either directly from Amazon or from its third-party sellers -- they will receive authentic products, and we take any claims that endanger that trust seriously. We strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and these games have been removed." That's all it would say on this.
The games have been removed. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And the sellers have been removed as well?
Probably not... and they probably wouldn't have removed the games if public attention hadn't be made. They don't care about sellers selling counterfeits- they do care about the public knowing it though.
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Probably not... and they probably wouldn't have removed the games if public attention hadn't be made. They don't care about sellers selling counterfeits- they do care about the public knowing it though.
Pretty much this. From board games to clothing to unlicensed materials, Amazon only seems to take fakes seriously if someone raises enough of a stink about it in the media.
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Amazon river of counterfeits and they don't care. (Score:4, Informative)
Popping up as a new one. It is not as of their stock has been confiscated. Nothing a bit of scripting could not handle.
Because it all depends how much they get, not how much they did not get.
I bought a microSD card from Amazon and I got a fake labeled with more capacity than it really had. Amazon really didn't care; they got their commission. I had to fight to get a refund from a Chinese seller who is still ripping people off many years later.
I will never buy from Amazon again.
You can say what you want about Walmart and Home Depot and other retailers, but bricks-and-mortar retailers hate thieves more than anyone else. If they accidentally sell counterfeits, they take it very seriously.
Jeff Bezos may be the richest man on the planet but I feel like he's one of the most unscrupulous. I wish only the slowest and most painful of cancers on him.
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Some people shop locally, find what they want, then buy on Amazon. I do it the opposite way, I find a product on Amazon, read the reviews, check out the user guide, then do a search to see who has it locally and go there.
Amazon: the world's greatest catalog. I like it. :)
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Spoken like a bigblockmopar fan. Get a real car, gramps.
No wonder you're posting as AC. Even from here, I can smell the cheese under your foreskin.
Half an engine, pointed the wrong way under the hood, and driving the wrong set of wheels... is that what you like to drive?
Gramps is crazy, Gramps takes shit from no one, Gramps was on the Internet before it was even called the Internet, and Gramps will step on your face.
Too bad you're not man enough to post under your own name.
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Best if Amazon removes itself from the counterfeit scene.
Of course, that would dent their ability to be the "everything store".
What else did they need to say? (Score:3)
What else did they need to say? Someone violated their policy and they bounced them.
Just be careful out there: when buying from Amazon/Walmart/NewEgg, NEVER buy from ANY of the marketplace folks and use the vendor filters if necessary, and they'll eventually just go away on their own.
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>> "We strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and these games have been removed." That's all it would say on this.
What else did they need to say? Someone violated their policy and they bounced them.
Except, they didn't say that at all!
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>> "We strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and these games have been removed." That's all it would say on this.
What else did they need to say? Someone violated their policy and they bounced them.
Except, they didn't say that at all!
That was a direct quote from an Amazon spokesperson. It came from the article, and even made it into the summary. I don't see how you can say they didn't say that.
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My words were accurately explained to you by the other coward above. You're being willfully ignorant, is all.
Perhaps you forgot about the existence of identity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
One of the reasons that English is such a popular language is that it is easy to talk about identity of both subject and object with arbitrary precision.
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This doesn't work with Amazon due to comingling with 3rd party vendors who use Amazon for fulfillment. To improve the efficiency of their logistics, everything gets thrown into one virtual and many physical bins, I'm not even sure they maintain any traceability. So when you think you're buying it from them,
Amazon is garbage (Score:2)
Amazon doesn't do quality control (Score:2)
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Perhaps they should hire some people to do it then. Everyone would be rightly pissed if Target or Walmart was selling knockoff Chinese laptop chargers in their brick-and-mortar stores, yet they seem to be able to avoid this, and they have less cash and more overhead than Amazon.
Re:Amazon doesn't do quality control (Score:4, Insightful)
First, unless it goes through an Amazon warehouse, the product is handled and shipped by the third party. Amazon is only the store front. Second, the third party could always provide correct samples to Amazon while then provide fake ones to the customer, unless they manually test each and every product(Would be counter to the first point). Third, if it comes to digital products, the people they hire would have to be very knowledgeable about every digital product they check. They would also need to buy multiple copies of the product through "personal" accounts to verify they're getting what the customer gets and that each time it matches up. Then, determine if the digital product they receive is correct and contact the developer/producer/etc and verify. Again, this would be for every seller of every product.
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That's bullshit. I work in an independent briack-and-mortar chain with 30,000 SKU's, and we know each and every product we bring in.
Why are you so eager to defend Amazon, which is clearly interested in screwing over its customers? Amazon could absolutely verify all of the products they sell. They choose not to.
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Yes. That's what stores used to do. We still do it. That's probably why we're still in business (and doing well).
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Re:Amazon doesn't do quality control (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know what you're talking about, opening every product and testing it before selling it. I don't know what that has to do with this conversation.
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That's not true. You don't have to check every single item, if you know who you're buying from. Amazon doesn't know who they're buying from, because they don't take the time to check their suppliers.
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The only way for 3rd party sellers to be able to sell through Amazon, with the level of quality control you're talking about, would be for Amazon to require everything to ship through them. They would have to test each individual item, software included. Th
Re:Amazon doesn't do quality control (Score:5, Interesting)
Target doesn't allow third party sellers. You don't have these problems if you stick to stuff "sold by Amazon", but everything else is sort of a flea market. IMO, fraudulent sellers in general are a big problem. If the Chinese seller ships you anything you're better than average.
Amazon needs to get on top of obvious patterns of fraud. If I can recognize that a seller is likely fraudulent, so can an algorithm. Some of the problems are more subtle and require a specialist to spot bad products (e.g., hard drives or camera lenses), but Amazon can hire those.
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If the Chinese seller ships you anything you're better than average.
From my experience, the Chinese are very reliable when it comes to shipping you something.
I bought maybe a hundred different items from Chinese sellers, on eBay, AliExpress and Amazon. Only once I didn't receive what I ordered, and it was lost in shipping (I had a tracking number) and I didn't file a dispute on time. The other rare times I didn't receive anything, I just contacted the seller and they send me another one for free or a refund, no question asked. 1 month delays are common though.
Counterfeit go
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I've had multiple problems with Chinese sellers on Amazon not shipping anything. I'll get a delivery data 6-8 weeks out, but then nothing ever arrives.
At thin point I won't by anything off Amazon unless it's either fulfilled by them, or a very large seller (too many ratings to be fake).
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In fairness they have a directly curated product supply chain, as well as an incentive since they purchase the goods till its sold (or so I would expect).
The only way that sort of checking would happen, is if Amazon were required to purchase the goods sold and then resell them, instead of just acting as a middleman/facilitator.
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Amazon doesn't turn a blind eye to counterfeiting because they are cheap or lack quality control. They do it because it makes them money. End of story.
The day counterfeiting risks losing Amazon money will be the day Amazon clamps down on counterfeits.
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No doubt.
FB ads are the same despite all the "cleanup" ... the other day i repeatedly got ads for a Raspberry Pi-based "SNES Classic alternative" which they bragged had every NES, SNES, etc. game. Basically your standard Pi emulator loadout of every (unlicensed) ROM for all the old systems.
Not a bad deal TBH, but very much not legal...and oddly enough FB doesn't really even have a relevant reporting 'group' for that.
In the end the platforms DGAF unless/until they're forced to act in the face of fines or la
Authentic (Score:2)
Our customers trust that when they make a purchase through Amazon's store --either directly from Amazon or from its third-party sellers -- they will receive authentic products
We HOPE to get authentic products; however, I generally go by the belief that if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't. Amazon sells a lot of pirated and counterfeited goods. I've seen a lot of sellers on Amazon even include in their description of a product "if you see this product sold by a different seller it is counterfeit"- sellers know just like we do that there is a lot of "not genuine" products out there.
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I have noticed that when on amazon multiples of the same product with a different label on them. You know it's a bulk item they have ordered on the cheap and branded.
My brother owns a small skateboard company and buys his bulk branded items from the same manufactures that make the big label accessories.
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The problem is that since Amazon mixes same-ASIN stock in its warehouse, you can buy directly from Amazon.com and still end up getting a counterfeit from a 3rd-party seller. There is no separation whatsoever. This is why a lot of legitimate sellers of eclipse-viewing eyewear unfairly lost a lot of money last year.
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Stuff "sold by Amazon" is not mixed with stuff from third party sellers, but that's different from "fulfilled by Amazon". And stuff from different third party sellers can theoretically get mixed, which is just frustrating for everyone. Most people aren't going to be looking for the difference between "Sold by" and "fulfilled by" either, especially for stuff that's "prime eligible". Sold on the main page and "prime eligible" really make it look like Amazon is selling it.
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is not mixed with stuff from third party sellers, but that's different from "fulfilled by Amazon"
Fulfilled by Amazon is still a third-party sale. Amazon is not selling the item. I was referring to FBA third-party sellers.
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They're working on keeping the 3rd-party sellers stuff straight, but it's kinda sad it wasn't that way from the beginning.
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Before applying a lot of heuristics that allow me to (I think) safely buy various items from a small set of categories, I don't share that hope, my default assumption is that what Amazon will ship me is counterfeit. If it's safety critical in a way I can't judge until I've for example suffered a c
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3rd parties (The one guy "shop") are tough to deal with. Any company that deals with 3rd parties that has a good track record with them is probably out of business or soon will be.
The problem that Amazon and others have, is this one guy shop, there are a bunch of them just trying to get rich quick, without any real work behind it, and combined with an amateurish and cynical understanding on how business works, means they are often trying scamming people because hey it cost Apple $100 to make a cell phone
Fake Board Games (Score:1)
Re:Fake Board Games (Score:4, Insightful)
Some attorney will probably get rich someday with an IP-based class action vs. Amazon on this kind of thing, but until they do, it's best to support your favorite goods and shops directly.
Jeff Bexos Don't Care (Score:2)
Jeff Bezos don't care.
Jeff Bezos don't give a shit.
Amazon got their cut of the sale. Amazon LOVES fraudulent products and sellers. They profit from them.
No they don't care about counterfeits (Score:2)
I bought a projector lamp from them (being sold by Amazon itself not a third party) and it overheated and melted the projector mirror. I sent the projector off to Optoma who examined everything and said the bulb was a counterfeit. Presented with this evidence Amazon said they believed their supplier that the bulb was genuine and refused to admit any liability.
They literally said the people that make the product were wrong. I've never bought from them since (5+ year
making copies (Score:1)
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