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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

I bought a product on Amazon this Christmas that was completely fake. It was "sold by Amazon" but didn't even have the same label as the brand I had ordered. I complained to Amazon and they just gave me a refund without requiring that I return the product (I ended up just throwing it out).

I suspect that they knew the inventory was tainted but figured the cost of dealing with noisy customers like me is less than the amount of money they make selling a cheaply made ripoff of a $15 product.

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If multiple suppliers ship same product to Amazon warehouses Amazon will ship closest one to buyer regardless who supplied it. In fact if the seller requests their goods back they won't get the same ones they sent to Amazon - they are mixed together with others sharing ASIN

There must have been an Amazon marketplace seller using same listing but shipping fakes. Or Amazon got duped.

What bothers me most is the fake was incredibly lazy. It came in a plain white box with the brand I ordered stamped on one corner. The product inside looked completely different and was from a "brand" that I can't find sold on any legitimate site. I suspect it didn't even include a functioning battery, I couldn't get it to hold a charge for more than a few seconds.

If Amazon got "duped" by this they could have gotten duped just as easily by a guy selling a box of old newspapers. I don't understand how it's not fraud to label it as "Sold by Amazon" when they don't have the slightest idea what they're shipping to me.

Please tell us the product name so we are aware.

The product name won't help. This could happen with almost any item Amazon sells because of how they commingle inventory.

This is very common. For example I was recently shopping for a popular brand of silverware and it was crystal clear from reviews that lots of people were getting fakes - some terrible, some subtle, like rusting after a couple washes.

So if you are selling the absolute lowest-quality stuff, you may increase the quality of your inventory by simply giving it to amazon and request them back? Now I sympathize with Amazon, knowing how shady some merchants could be.

If it's true that they do not track products by suppliers, this could be a scalable fraud. Send in absolute garbage and take it back/buy it to enrich your metarial.

What are you going to do with your "enriched" inventory? Sit on it?

Sell it on eBay as a merchant, or in a physical store.?

You can sell it on Amazon because they don't care if you send them counterfeits or stolen goods.

But you will have competition, instead, you might be able to sell it somewhere with quality standards - like a real shop - and have ticker margins given that you bought your inventory for dirt cheap and revitalized it in Amazon.

In that case you wouldn't bother trying to get "real" inventory back, you'd just send them the inventory and be done with it.

I still don't get how this commingled inventory happens. I know that Amazon has different inventory owners for FBA and AMZN stock. So technically they should be able to separate between different FBA owners, too. So at the very least AMZN and FBA inventory shouldn't be mixed.

Only explanation I can think of is returns, issues in the return reception could add FBA returns to AMZN stock. Which should trigger some kind of investigation. I don't like the fact that this stuff keeps happening as it points yo bad processes and, IMHO, some WMS issues as well.

It's to save on shipping. They got quite a bit of warehouse nowadays. They just share all the same inventory, thus have to move less stock in between warehouse and you get your stuff faster. It fail when their FBA inventory is fake though, and they weirdly don't care enough about it to stop doing that. I guess the cost of refunding theses cases is less than the cost of shipping.

I buy so much stuff on amazon, and have never had a fake anything. Can you give more detail? I’d love to know at least what kind of product it was.

We bought a PlayStation 3 controller on Amazon many years back. It was a pretty good fake, the buttons felt slightly different, but we thought it is just a different production run. After six months or so, Sony disabled this range of counterfeits (IIRC because the built-in battery was a fire hazard). So, we had a useless controller.

Luckily, we got a refund.

Just over Christmas I heard a story from my Aunt who had their basement flooded because of a fake replacement water filter she bought on Amazon. The entire filter unit exploded and water just poured out of the pipe.

It's a lot worse. I bought an RCA minifridge, "sold by amazon." 10 months later the compressor starts clicking. I check the "RCA" manual - it's clearly written by a non-native speaker in broken engrish. Nor does RCA make this model apparently. The listing now has the same fridge with a different logo on it.

I complain to Amazon that it's counterfeit, and need a refund despite it being 10 months later. I ship it back, get a refund less than purchase price. They charged me a restocking fee. They're now going to sell it used.

They know it's fake - they knowingly sell fake things.

I just use walmart.com now. I spent ~80k on Amazon over the last decade, and they will never get another penny from me, even if they fix this. My two brothers stopped using amazon too. And my wife. Walmart has most things Amazon does, as a first seller. Their 3rd party sellers are the same as amazon - just less of them. Because walmart actually investigates and kicks people off for selling fakes. Amazon literally knowingly sells fakes themselves. Prices are same or less. If I want aliexpress, I'll buy there. But I don't.

On that one I'd suspect RCA, actually. They've become a meaningless sticker on so much generic Chinese lowest-bidder trash that I would not be surprised if they'd lost track of several SKUs they supposedly sell.

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