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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Is it bad when you carefully try to make sure you are ordering a good quality product and instead get something shit quality? I think it’s wasteful and bad for the environment. It’s also a waste of time spent trying to choose the right thing and a waste of time and thought spent returning it (if one even bothers).

It is also bad for the company whose product is being counterfeited because their brand is associated with the poor quality knock off.

This is also the reason I hate print on demand and think the seller should have to specify how a book was printed.

Maybe you think counterfeits are equal in quality to the genuine articles. In that case I think the argument is different. But I don’t believe that is the case.

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The issue - as I see it - can be divided in two.

I mean, if you are really willing to buy an original product, a minimal check can be the price asked for it.

Any good today is made of materials+manufacturing+marketing, it has some costs and a corresponding selling price with a given markup.

Once said that a number of branded items can have a selling price that seem completely disconnected from the relative costs, there are limits.

If you can find an item on the manufacturer site at US$ 100, do you really believe that you can find the SAME item on Amazon for US$ 10?

If you find it at say US$ 80 or 75 or even US$ 50[1] and it comes out as being counterfeited, you may have some valid expectations ruined by Amazon, but if you ordered it for 19.95, free shipping, did you really believe it was "original"?

[1] it is one of my per peeves, if you look at the price of many electronic goods, let's say printers or TV on the official site of the manufacturer they are often double their "street price", either online or at the nearest large shop chain. I often wonder how many printers Brother (say) sells from their site.

20 years ago, I was looking for a SCSI card, direct from the manufacturer and knew it should be like $250-$300. However, no price was listed. I figured if I added it to my cart and went to checkout, theyd have to tell the price. It showed as $0. Proceeded to checkout, paid $7. Thought for sure theyd cancel the order, but nope, it shipped and arrived in about a week. That card was awesome.

I don't understand the relevance, you exploited a bug in the vendor's paying or ordering/delivering system, what has this to do with counterfeiting?

This isn't just about electronics though, or about big ticket items being sold at ridiculously low prices that seem too good to be true. It happens all the time with products a normal person would never assume to be the target of counterfeiters. As I stated in another post, I've personally had it happen with cotton pillow cases and light bulbs. If the fake costs $0.10 to make in China and the real version costs $5 to make in Ohio then there's still a lot of money to be made substituting cheap Chinese junk for a name brand product that should only cost $10 to begin with. Because of how Amazon bundles listings for "the same product" this is extremely easy to get away with.

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