My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:
1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.
2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.
3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?
Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.
I suspect when there are gaps that either the counterfeiters win or nobody wins.
I've noticed that too in manga. It's amazing they screw it up so bad, given their origin as a book seller.
Amazon lists thousands of junk products from China that violate US laws around product safety. Toys containing lead paint, crib bumpers that can suffocate babies, etc. The process seems to be that Amazon just needs to remove the product in violation but it really appears that this is a wholesale attempt on Amazon's part to circumvent legislation. It should not be this trivial for consumers to find products that are potentially dangerous.
Today, you can only buy two kinds of such products: The (I assume Alibaba-sourced) Amazon Marketplace, fulfilled by Amazon items which are never UL listed, and brand-name items from a brick and mortar store, which cost 8x the price of the equivalent 'Amazon special.'
I know "UL" is just a label and that not having it doesn't necessarily prove anything, but absent any form of certification, an device on Amazon Marketplace may come from a vendor that has literally never even submitted a sample for quality testing to anyone. BigClive on YouTube has shown some shocking (literally) teardowns.
I've heard that insurance companies will deny a claim if your house burns down due to a non-UL-listed device causing a fire. Terrifying.
> insurance companies
UL stands for underwriter's (aka insurers) laboratories
For that point, yes it is "just a label", even though the context behind the label / the label's meaning is very important.
Walmart does (or at least did) something similar.
* About 7 years ago, I purchased a toy drone online from Walmart for one of my sons for Christmas.
* I purchased it before Thanksgiving because the Walmart website urged me to purchase in time for Christmas delivery.
* My son opened the gift on Christmas and the drone was broken (out of the box).
* I tried to return the drone to a brick-and-mortar Walmart store and they told me that they couldn't issue a refund because I bought it on their website, but it was through a 3rd party seller. I had to take it up with the 3rd party.
* Remember the part where I said I bought the drone before Thanksgiving?? Well, I contacted the 3rd party and was told they had a strict 30 day return policy and they could not issue a refund.
It was a cheap gift, but the whole ordeal bothers me to this day.
This isn't just Walmart though. Most non-Amazon websites have a similar option. Lowes, Target, NewEgg...
I couldn’t help to think that I wanted anything but that. I want a lot of items, but I prefer quality items over random crap.
There was a cool design (or at least I thought so) I came up with. Had about 100 of those printed.
Went to Amazon to get a seller account:
1) learned that if I had only 1 tee-shirt with a single design to sell, I couldn't get the account.
2) after researching the competition, discovered that many of the tee-shirt designs for sale were:
a) clearly in copyright violation (e.g. Disney characters on some mom & pop store.
b) their images on their store were just a photoshopped tee-shirt. I.e., not photos of the actual tee-shirt they had for sale. But the design photoshopped on to a photo of a blank tee-shirt.
I'm not complaining, cause I love my Mario/Banksy crossover t-shirt, but it's just how it is, Disney & co just don't bother going after them, they're happy to sell you their official™ stuff through other channels.
If you hire someone to print it on the shirt for you, and then distribute the shirt, you would be liable for copyright infringement, not the printer, because the printer isn't supplying the artwork, you are. It's no different than placing phone calls to perform an illegal activity. The phone provider isn't guilty, but you are.
If you order a custom shirt, and provide unlicensed copyrighted artwork, but don't distribute it, then no one is in a position to get in trouble.
That is just not true. A copyright gives the owner thereof exclusive rights to make a copy of his work. Neither the creator nor the copier have to sell anything.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
Noncommercial use is a factor to be considered for fair use if the copier is doing it for a protected purpose. (Creating a t-shirt for your personal use is not a protected purpose and can therefore never be fair use on its own though.)
The reason someone making a personal shirt doesn't get sued is because suing people is expensive, that harms goodwill, and Disney isn't getting any money from such a person anyway.
So I assume that a lot of self-publishing type companies may refuse to do copyrighted stuff, even for one-off jobs.
So torrenting movies is legal?
Why are we romanizing middle-men between you and a web form?
At this point, if it's online, it's worse/crap/designed to screw you and whoever you are dealing with as much as it can get away with.
Maybe you can round up enough people for a common cause as discussed in the article, but that doesn't scale. Take notice that for all its talk about America first policy & general sinophobia, the current admin in Washington hasn't done anything about this either. They don't care about American small businesses or consumers. They only care about people like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc.
He lives in Seattle.
It really feels like people's behaviors have been permanently changed for the worst, even if a "proper" competitor comes in.
I no longer have prime shipping, and seeing "shipping: $5" next to anything on Amazon definitely helps me to do at least cursory searches in local stores... would probably be a net benefit to society to outlaw Prime
Stoll's site, the Klein bottle hats and Mobius scarves! "Two manifolds for one low price". I'm after those for autumn.
Stores may have it, but have it locked up or behind the counter (or just not carry it at all) my (seattle) grocery store carries hand sanitizer, but not on the shelf. You have to find an employee (good luck...) and ask them to go get it from the back/wherever. Or order the same product on Amazon for same-day delivery for the same price or cheaper :-/
(*) Of course you pay for shipping via the purchase price but you do that even if you order individual items and also with Prime.
I recently spent a year in Shanghai, and when I would ask a friend where to go to buy something I needed, the response was always a confused "buy it online and have it delivered".
I don't care for that. I'd like to have things available in stores.
Perhaps that acquaintance was in a similar situation.
As a result, nearly all pharmacies here dropped the entire lines of making medication on-site and selling chemicals, because only the latter kept the former financially viable.
So, your only options left are either: a) buy from Amazon or eBay sellers that outright don't care about the German peculiarities or b) if you manage to qualify, buy from the usual selection of lab supply wholesalers. But something like "start a German NileRed channel", that's completely out of the question. The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
You can also just make most things yourself. It isn't cost effective for a commercial entity (due to wages for highly educated professionals) but for a hobbyist, who cares? That of course calls into question the bulk of the regulatory approach. When I can pull up a youtube video of someone making solid rocket fuel with a plastic jug and a phone charger what was the point of requiring all the paperwork?
If you're lucky the recommended videos will even have footage of someone getting arrested for misusing something substantially similar.
There's a reason why you can't get industrial strength cleaners in a Walmart - too many people would either seriously injure themselves because they don't know they actually need PPE or otherwise this stuff will break down their skin, because they mix it and make enough mustard gas to actually kill them, or because they break down their homes because guess what, a highly acidic cleaning agent and most kinds of stone don't mix.
Of course, yes, one can try to concentrate H2O2 but there's easier and less messy ways to off oneself than this.
TIL, didn't know that. Acetone is right next to peroxide in the local household items store (in the Netherlands) over here. But a few aisles over you can also find CBD oil and melatonin, heavy duty painkillers like diclofenac, etc.
> The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
NileRed has a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology.
It's easy to sneeze at "deficient competitors" as well, but the whole massive spend on infrastructure - warehouses, delivery vans, etc. is hard to replicate. In one sense, it's worth an antitrust look if that whole system essentially stiles competition
It’s a tough problem I guess with so many stock systems out there and inevitably whoever creates the site will want to monetise it, then slowly enshitify it.
People are going to discover your prices anyway. Hiding them just means it will take longer. I remember my grandpa used to go to five different grocery stores weekly, just to do grocery shopping, because he knew store A had the cheapest eggs, store B had the cheapest vegetables, store C had the cheapest milk, and so on.
Here's an example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rubbing+alcohol+nearby&udm=2...
That's the big thing for me. I don't live close to a big city, so local selection is pretty limited. For some things there isn't even a local store available.
For obscure items, all it takes is once from Amazon to kill you:
B&N bought Fictionwise, and first thing they did was determine that you need to be physically inside USA to download stuff.
Now only way for me to get those books is pirated. :( Maybe I should just download them pirated and donate the price of the books directly to the author account or something. I really don't understand what is the problem of B&N or how they still exist, they are literally anti-business.
Supplements are a scam industry, so you’re always going to have issues there, that’s a feature of the business.
Walmart's pricing is also accurate but their stock indicator isn't as good as target's.
To elaborate - in NYC, I usually avoid ordering from Amazon for anything where it's cheap or something health-related, but even when I've sometimes given up finding it easily elsewhere and bought it there, it's not been, as far as I could tell, a counterfeit item.
That's not to say I can easily prove that or that I'm encouraging people to order from there, but I personally haven't encountered boxes full of things other than the intended item, or the like, and I would suspect the problem's prevalence varies heavily with volume (and thus, turnover) and location.
I don't trust Amazon offers because of this. So I either just buy the super cheap, disposable stuff where a trip to a shop isn't worth it, or things that have guaranteed free returns. Sometimes I'd rather order online because I have a guaranteed window to test and return if it's not what I want. For purchases in person the law here doesn't guarantee a return window for products that work but just aren't what I thought they'd be. Or I have to argue endlessly at the store for them to take it back.
This hints at a deeper problem; the fact that you can't trust e.g. the government to have an organization that tests and certifies anything sold, be it online or in shops. You should be able to trust things like vitamins when bought online.
Of course, if Amazon would only sell legit stuff, people would order stuff from abroad because like it or not, the general trend remains that people try to get the cheapest products. This is why legitimate products are pushed out of the market. This is why Amazon and Walmart pushed out local shops. Free rein capitalism.
In the US, for things like supplements and vitamins, the regulations are extremely lax. There isn't really any enforcement of the labels being accurate. There isn't really enforcement until people are already being injured in the market.
The only way to actually know what's in that vitamin pill is for you to send it to a lab you trust. The next step down from there is only buy reputable brands from reputable stores but even then, it can be a crapshoot. With RFK at the helm, expect this to get worse and not better.
Gotta love Mel Gibson's fear mongering political ad about vitamins to really show how absurd the messaging was in '94.
Amazon perpetuates the stealing of IP to the point that they are the global leader. They use their market power to steal anything that makes money. Whether its directly, or indirectly as above.
I am astonished that brick-and-mortar merchants haven't banded together to get someone to build a decent e-commerce front end for their local stock. That would be a killer app.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/RIVALZ/page/5690A202-6DDB-42BA...
because my wife found one flavor, slightly expired, at the Amish market and liked it fell through when I tried to buy it straight from the vendor because they charged my credit card with a scammy-looking name neither I nor American Express had ever heard of. Can't get it at Walmart.com, so... (For that matter, Walmart had the first five books of Bocchi the Rock and #7 but not #6)
Ever since the time I saw a product listing though which made no sense at all and reported it and got a reply that they don't care if I didn't buy it I started losing trust. Didn't help that 2 day delivery became 5 days suddenly and the fact that I live in a rural area is no excuse because I used to see an AMZN delivery truck driving around in my neighborhood every Sunday. After I quit Prime they started giving me free trials or a week for $2 whenever I bought something and... now I get the 2 day delivery everyone else gets.
Wonder if it's similar to what this comment mentions about Amazon (even down to the example being 5 and 7 but no 6): https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=44354938 Maybe Walmart is trying to match Amazon's stock to avoid spending too much to compete with them.
Another pain point is shipping costs. With Amazon I can just filter for free shipping with whatever the current minimum-purchase price for that is whereas elsewhere I am too often surprised by unreasonably high shipping charges designed to make the purchase price look better on comparison sites.
I don't remember the item now, but something I'd bought semi regularly from Walmart. It was boosted in my search/you may like results, which makes sense. Except the product was 10x the price, and not sold by Walmart. There's no clear indication of that until you actually click into it, though. So you can add it to your cart and buy it easily without knowing any of that, by design I guess.
It seems 3rd party sellers know how it works, and probably make a ton of money sniping out of stock items. I almost fell for it as I rarely scrutinize prices, I can't imagine how many people go through with it not knowing any better.
FWIW my main annoyance with Walmarts website is that it's not clear if you package is coming via shipping service like FedEx, who has access to my apartment complex, or just some dude in his car who needs to call me while I'm at work to be buzzed in
Point being: it doesn’t matter if Walmart does this, because it’s already an empty promise from them, too.
Just stop shopping at these behemoths.
The books are very low quality with poor typesetting that makes them unpleasant to read.
Imagine if you were standing in front of a narcotics officer on the street, and you say to your friend "Hey, I have some Cane-Coke available. wink. Want to buy it?" He's standing right there, and doesn't bat an eye.
That's Amazon. They care about following laws, regulations, etc. exactly enough to have plausible deniability and no further. Oh gee, Sarge, that guy was speaking in code and I had no idea he was selling drugs.
If they cared, they'd ban sellers immediately for evading a filter, and raise barriers to entry until it was painful to start a new account. Like requiring every seller to have a US entity with a real business license and an identity-verified named agent, and ban the agent and anyone else they represent for violations. This is just one quick idea but by no means the only way. But you can bet Amazon would never even try to police their marketplace better because they'd rather just skim their cut of both legitimate and fraudulent or illegal activity.
What the fuck, guys.
I actually made pretty good experiences with eBay.
I went to barnesandnoble.com to check this out.
There's a banner at the top of the page:
> Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
> For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
The words "upgrade now" link to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloa... .
It does look like you're right that they won't ship books to your local B&N:
> Other reasons that an item may not be available for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store include:
> The item is out of stock in your selected store
This is very odd, because they will do that if you go into the store and order from there.
I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.
I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!
Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.