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.