Message is they seem to be on it. Contradicts the media reports, which happen to argue wilful shirking of responsibility.
While this initially seems impressive (i.e. 1 in 1,000 products are fake), Amazon has a power-law distribution to its sales, and thus likely to its views [1] [2].
This means that, as long as the products on the left side of the power-law aren't counterfeit, this claim can be true.
As a result, if you venture into niche product spaces, beware that you're looking at much higher odds of a counterfeit.
[1] http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/2010.09_Brynjolfsso... [2] https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/marketplaces-power...
Really appalling all the way and nonetheless profitable - so Amazon will not change until they get sued for billions.
Yes, very good point. Stating by views is tricky. What percentage of listings? Huge numbers of items there are in the long tail, that's one of the claimed advantages of amazon, availability of weird things, and it's great. Is it 90% of all listings are in the long tail? And presumably nearly all fakes are there since high profile fakes would be discovered quickly. If 1% of views are rare long tail items and all fakes are there and .1% of views are fakes, then perhaps around 10% of long tail items are fakes. Of course these numbers are speculative, but amazon could answer many questions by disclosing more stats than % of views.
I've personally received 3 counterfeit products, and I don't buy all that much from Amazon.
But there are also whole sections dedicated to products that are labeled as approved by some agency that really aren't, like DOT approved LED lightbulb replacement for car headlihgts. Amazon is not doing anything about those, and DOT cannot do much either (DOT neither tests nor approves headligts).
I feel like they are one 60 Minutes piece away from a minor disaster.