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> Long-term

That is the trick. If short-term Amazon accumulates enough money it can later on purchase businesses with a better reputation and repeat the trick again.

I have seen this done by General Electric. It purchases a medium size company with good reputation and loyal customers. GE reduces costs (quality, employee salaries, etc.) and milks the cow for a decade. When many customers have left because higher prices and lower quality then GE sells the company and repeats the trick with a new one.

For mega-corporations there is no incentive for quality beyond what regulations force them to assure by law. Making Amazon liable for defective 3rd party is the only way that Amazon will care about fraud and counterfeits.

So the demos should be able to improve quality by increasing regulation - like the EU's goods regulations that dictate a minimum 2 year warranty (AIUI); which I hope they're going to gradually increase.

The people need to cede power from the Capitalists sufficiently to do that in USA; apply some democracy to the situation.

We need to build longevity into our planetary systems of production.

It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product.

How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.

This is as good a time for blockchain as any. Register genuine products on a blockchain and have them scanned once they hit the Amazon warehouse to ensure they are authentic.

How does blockchain help here? The database would be extremely large - too large to hold for any ordinary computer system.

The basic problem is solveable without blockchain by simply registering products by their serial number on the brand's website, which a lot of brands actually already do for higher priced products.

Then the scammers would just copy the serial numbers, you would have to link every number with a customer name

You don't need to link it to any customer details. The way it usually works is the website records every serial number checked, and warns you if somebody has already checked that serial number. For additional assurance the serial number can also be concealed with tamper-evident packaging, e.g. scratch-off paint.

D’Addario has a “serial number” check webpage for their guitar strings. If you enter an invalid (or previously used) serial number, supposedly (I’ve never had a counterfeit set) they’ll send you a genuine set for free.

Sure, some people will input fake serial numbers to get a free product, but they probably weighed the cost of counterfeit strings affecting brand image (if I don’t know mine are counterfeit, I’ll assume it’s D’Addario’s fault if they’re bad) with the cost of sending a free set of $5 strings.

Sorry, this doesn't seem to be the fabled, elusive use-case for the Blockchain Industrial Complex either.

> How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.

You buy them wholesale from the manufacturer?

> Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.

This has been a solved problem for any legitimate business. The only other place I've seen such lack of quality control were at flea markets, which doesn't say anything good about Amazon.

They already have exactly that, minus the unnecessary blockchain bit. It's called Transparency.

The problem is that manufacturers need to opt into it and there is no way as a consumer to tell on a product listing whether or not the product is part of the registry.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency/learnmore

This the example I point out whenever an Amazon employee mentions letting customer QA 3rd party garbage.

I think a big theme in tech in the last decade has been there's a lot of extra margin to be made if you can find a way to circumvent regulations designed to protect the general public.

> Simply adding "Shipped by: X, Sold by: X" text on the product page doesn't really help.

Amazon doesn't even do this, though.

Recently I was helping someone look for memory on Amazon. We couldn't tell the difference between two different listings for crucial ram, both with the same model, speed, size, etc. Figuring out who the seller was can be difficult; the place that used to say the store name simply had a link to Amazon's products manufactured by Crucial. We eventually noticed that in the comparison at the bottom it says who's selling the product you're looking at; searching the page for this store name found no other instances of it.

*scammed or injured

> Long-term

Short term, it would be a good idea to fine Amazon $1,000,000 a day until the problem is fixed.

There's no way Bezos doesn't know how to fix this, he's a smart guy.

$1MM/day is a bargain compared to what ignoring and neglecting this problem is going to cost Amazon in the long run.

It's inexplicable that search/discovery and commingling of substandard/counterfeit merchandise are not both considered five-alarm fires at Amazon HQ.

Rigtheo then.

Prohibit Amazon doing business until they fix the problem.

You can bet the problem will be fixed overnight.

My wider point is this: Bezos knows this is happen, and the only way he gets away with it is because the USA doesn't have enough consumer protection and no desire to.

This has gone beyond fraud, it's abuse of customers.

I prefer the option of financial penalties. Amazon is a useful logistical system; you don't want to kill it (nor disproportionally punish employees with no real influence on the immoral actions), just make it not profitable unless it's moral.

The system should also be holding anyone in the decision tree accountable for fraud: something like "if test purchases show fraud in >1:20 cases then CEO fine := last month's income from all sources".