Amazon can be held liable for third-party seller products: U.S. appeals court

And they should be.

I think that this article means the opposite... and that Amazon could be liable for stuff that you buy from random Chinese dudes. So it should become less risky.

And it allows manufacturers to see which sellers are skirting their reseller agreements and tighten up their distribution if they so choose.

Why would it be a random Chinese dude instead of a random American company?

They can be banned from amazon at least

And this is deliberately misleading

" Seems like Amazon can just force third-party vendors to reveal their full legal identity to the customer then?"

I bought a defective sever power supply from a 3rd party seller at Amazon in Europe. Amazon claims they don't know the identity/address/email of this seller. Wrote it off as a loss.

Edit: I mean, Amazon must have given this guy my money. They must have something from him. Bank account, Email etc.

Amazon could end up being required to declare the seller’s information to the buyer (at time of purchase!), and required to validate that information using expensive non-trivial practices such as business license lookups and tax form SSN/EIN checks. This court decision implies that liability defaults to Amazon under their current practices, and shifting that liability would need to involve disclosure prior to sale. These are all absolutely market-destroying things - and when you apply them to eBay, which does not provide seller contact information or perform tax validation before the sale occurs, it only worsens in potential impact for businesses profiting off of their enforcement-free approach today.

Bullocks.

For example, try to track down this seller (Amazon Germany)

https://www.amazon.de/sp?asin=&isAmazonFulfilled=&isCBA=&sel...

On invoice? What invoice?

When I order from a third-party seller, there's no guarantee there's any invoice?

If they ship directly, sometimes it comes with a kind of paper receipt, sometimes it doesn't.

If they fulfill via Amazon, it definitely doesn't. I don't think I've gotten a receipt/invoice with any Amazon package in years... (I remember it used to come with them.)

And I click through my online order and click on the name of the seller, it just has tabs with things like generic shipping and return policies. I can't find any legal or contact info whatsoever beyond the name.

I just try to avoid Amazon because of the horrible warranty experience I had with an Amazon Fire Kid Edition tablet

I know right? I actually used the Walmart website recently for a purchase _shudder_ of razor blades because I simply don’t trust Amazon any more. I cannot understand how this is good for them.

That is correct.

I have found that “shipped and sold by amazon” also involves a very high proportion of defective or counterfeit items.

Even with books, there are many copyright-violating counterfeits, alongside many “printed on demand” copies at horrible quality (but not advertised as such) under some kind of shady deal Amazon forced down publishers’ throats.

Unfortunately Amazon has driven many alternative vendors out of the market, so it’s sometimes hard to find things elsewhere online.

It's kind of accurate but incomplete. What you're missing is that Amazon does "commingling" in which all sellers of item X (including Amazon itself) submit inventory to Amazon and all of that inventory of supposedly identical items is put together into one big pool. If someone manages to submit counterfeit items, they have successfully contaminated the pool so some seller's customer is going to get counterfeit goods by it probably won't be a customer of the counterfeiter.

That's not actually relevant for this case, however. In this case it sounds like the item in question was not fulfilled by Amazon but was directly shipped by a seller who is no longer active and cannot be reached using whatever contact information Amazon has.

I'm actually kind of surprised by this ruling because it seems like it is requiring Amazon to maintain current contact information for former sellers for some indeterminate amount of time. I guess the closest thing that I'm thinking of in terms of another business working like this is dropshipping where you sell items without maintaining an inventory but instead have the order shipped directly from a manufacturer or wholesaler to your customer. That's actually fairly common with a lot of computer equipment, where you'll see on a website a mention of "ships directly from manufacturer"

So what happens once you identify as Chinese national/ Chinese business, sent some counterfeits for a bit and eventually get kicked off?

The penalty is just no longer being able to sell, nothing will happen with the products you have already sold unless a customer complains.

Nope. I am still down £209 and have gotten no further. I have:

- Sent them a video of me opening the 2nd delivery to find playing cards (Literally from opening the Amazon box through to finding the playing cards inside the Samsung SSD box)

- Reported the matter to my local police, who phoned Action Fraud on my behalf. I've got me a crime reference number from Action Fraud.

- Signed 2 affidavits declaring what I did / did not receive

I've phoned them numerous times, and twice now that has involved speaking to someone, being put on hold, and then redirected to my own voice mail.

If I was the only person to have received card and a deck of playing cards I could understand their reaction, however they've removed the item from sale because a number of other people in recent days have received the same things [1].

When I spoke to my local police they were extremely confused by Amazon's behaviour. I gave Amazon the details of the officer I spoke to and the crime reference number, but that got me nowhere other that the same boilerplate email.

At this stage, I fear I'm going to end up taking Amazon to the small claims court here in the UK just to get my money back.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B07MBQPQ62/ref=cm_c...

Not to mention the costs associated with Amazon recovering that money from a third party as substantially lower than for an individual.

Yeah that seems fair. And like an opportunity for an insurance market. It will raise the price of goods on Amazon, but whatever, safety costs money.

Bought an item that was supposed to be Prime and it apparently wasn’t.

If I was Amazon, I would start tracking which vendor supplied a particular instance of a product. Seems less costly than dealing with owning the liability of third-party vendors.

Co-mingling allowed Amazon to cut the "real" vendors from the piece of the pie, and make tons of money from having "hundreds" of options (all looking like the original).

Case in point: you couldn't buy an Apple product from Amazon without getting a fake, even though the listing said "Apple".

Why it took this long to get Amazon to be liable bewilders me.

> For context, concealment is bad here because co-mingling means Amazon doesn't even know which vendor shipped the defective product

That is not true.

From Amazon documentation on commingling:

> Note: Amazon ensures that the initial source of the commingled units can be traced throughout the fulfilment process.

> How does Amazon track my commingled inventory?

> Even though your inventory does not have additional labels, Amazon will assign a virtual trackable label to your units once they have been received. Virtual trackable labels allow Amazon to keep a track of your inventory at all the times.

> Important: Amazon ensures that the exact same units from two sellers, participating in the commingling programme, are always physically segregated. This means that Amazon storage logic does not allow same ASINs of different sellers to be stored in the same bin in our warehouse if they are commingled.

Thankyou for the link - it's quite interesting. Here's the section:

In its opinion, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made clear that courts later tasked with determining whether an actor is a “seller” should consider whether the following four factors apply:

(1) Whether the actor is the “only member of the marketing chain available to the injured plaintiff for redress”;

(2) Whether “imposition of strict liability upon the [actor] serves as an incentive to safety”;

(3) Whether the actor is “in a better position than the consumer to prevent the circulation of defective products”; and

(4) Whether “[t]he [actor] can distribute the cost of compensating for injuries resulting from defects by charging for it in his business, i.e., by adjustment of the rental terms.”

Honestly if Target and Walmart get free shipping figured out (like Prime) they could eat away a large part of the Amazon customer base.

I hope they do. That might put pressure on other "platform"s to better police themselves.

Walmart is pulling the same crap on their website now, too. Tons of products lists sold by junk third party sellers.

I get so frustrated every time I forget to add the "available in store" filter while searching. The results are useless otherwise.