
Amazon Dodges Responsibility for Unsafe Products - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibility-for-unsafe-products-the-case-of-the-hoverboard-11575563270
======
mc32
Shouldn’t these devices be UL or CE or TÜV rated so that we know they’ve gone
through some kind of basic safety testing?

There is so much cheap untested crap that gets sold on these platforms. We
should stop it.

~~~
Rebelgecko
A lot of the product descriptions just lie about that. I recently wanted to
buy some dust masks during the fires here in California. People recommended
getting N95 certified masks, but when you go to Amazon and search for "N95"
most of the listings will claim to be N95 certified but aren't listed on the
government's lists of masks that are actually certified. I even found some
masks that claimed to be certified _and_ listed their certification number,
but when I went to the NIOSH website the certification number was listed as
"revoked".

The only legit ones seem to be the 3M masks, and there's no telling if the
ones they're selling are actually real.

~~~
mcv
But isn't it incredibly illegal to claim false certification? Sounds like all
those products should be recalled and some companies should be getting steep
fines.

~~~
bradfa
I don't believe it's a felony or misdemeanor crime, but it could be copyright
or trademark infringement if you use a safety approval logo on your product
without paying and certifying your product with the agency who owns the logo.
A company like UL could sue an infringer for using the UL marks on products
which UL has not certified, but I think that's about it.

UL enforcement info: [https://www.ul.com/news/ul-teams-law-enforcement-brand-
defen...](https://www.ul.com/news/ul-teams-law-enforcement-brand-defense)

If you claim your device complies with regulations set forth by government
agencies such as the FCC or OSHA when it does not, then I think the criminal
or other special courts may get involved as it may no longer be just a civil
matter. Although FCC violation investigation usually just involve recalling
product and paying a "voluntary" fine (it's voluntary, unless you decide not
to volunteer, and then it's no longer voluntary).

FCC enforcement info: [https://www.fcc.gov/general/enforcement-
primer](https://www.fcc.gov/general/enforcement-primer)

~~~
Nextgrid
Wouldn't it be fraud? At least according to the UK definition of fraud (lying
for profit) it would fit the bill.

~~~
diroussel
But if you order it on amazon and it’s shipped to you from China, then is it?
And if it is you have no way to prosecute.

------
zxienin
Related is their recently leaked internal AHM transcript:
[https://outline.com/ZrDE7w](https://outline.com/ZrDE7w) (section: "On bad
actors on Amazon's marketplace")

Message is they seem to be on it. Contradicts the media reports, which happen
to argue wilful shirking of responsibility.

~~~
alehul
> we also ensured that 99.9% of all pages viewed by our customers were to
> products that had never received a counterfeit notice of infringement

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...](http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/2010.09_Brynjolfsson_Hu_Smith_the%20Longer%20Tail_286.pdf)
[2] [https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/marketplaces-
power...](https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/marketplaces-power-law)

~~~
ar-jan
Also, absence of a counterfeit notice does not mean the product is necessarily
genuine. It seems to me that actively preventing counterfeits would entail
much more than responding to notices.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/N2sPz](http://archive.is/N2sPz)

------
okprod
I've been a Prime customer since the program started, a customer of Amazon
before that, and probably order from them on average twice a week (including
groceries). I would say when it comes to products from Amazon (not Whole
Foods), 1 out of every 4 purchases of mine have been defective, expired, a
return, or etc.

Examples include a 4 pack of Eneloops containing 3, a Magic Mouse with a
scratch under it and the instruction booklet in a different font and language
from what it's supposed to be, a glass candy jar with multiple cracks in it, a
cell phone case with some sort of mold growing inside, expired food and drinks
when ordering from Fresh, ordering two matching office chairs and getting two
different models, etc.

It's gotten to the point where buying from Amazon feels like buying from a
garage sale or dollar store. They make returns fairly easy, but I've found
myself choosing other online and physical vendors that charge a bit more but
who I can trust to have more reliable products.

I haven't had any product issues from Amazon Whole Foods delivery yet; one of
the drivers told me they deliver from the store to a centralized warehouse
before it gets delivered to me, so I'm hoping at some point groceries don't
turn into how Amazon works in general, and I'll end up getting discount, bad
food that they routed from a central location.

------
zxienin
Is it a realistic target for Amazon to detect and manage this at the scale
they operate?

Does a set of solution options exist, but Amazon doesn’t work on those?

Just thinking from solution angle, rather joining on Amazon bashing. (not that
I lack reasons to do so)

------
robsinatra
It's as if the Wall Street Journal has conveniently ignored how markets work
and the legal system governing them so that it could target Amazon for
something that no other reseller has responsibility for.

~~~
myself248
How's that? If I buy something from Home Depot and it later turns out to have
been defective and injured me in some way, I absolutely can sue Home Depot.

The fact that Amazon has tried to position themself in such a way as to take
my money and ship me a product but "they're not really the seller" should be
immaterial. They walk like a seller, they quack like a seller, I should be
able to sue them like a seller.

Ditto Paypal and banking regulations. Someday, I hope.

~~~
glofish
I would disagree with this sentiment.

While I don't know what law says here - but, in my opinion, the mere act of
selling a legal product by a merchant should not imply that the merchant is
liable for all possible damages that the product may cause.

If I were on jury in a case like this I would consider punishing the merchant
_only_ of there is some sort of negligence on their part. For example not
pulling the product after it has been demonstrated to be unsafe.

~~~
vonmoltke
The implied warranty of merchantability[1] applies to all merchants, not just
manufacturers. In the case of a reseller like Home Depot or Amazon, a consumer
can seek recourse from the reseller, and the reseller can in turn seek
recourse from their supplier, and so on up the chain.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty#United_States...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty#United_States_2)

~~~
glofish
the question here is of course, how should one classify a manufacturing defect
that affects a tiny percentage of the product?

Is that a merchantability issue? Is it realistic for a merchant to test every
single product so extensively to uncover a defect of such a rare occurance?

One of the greatest ingredients of justice in the USA is that laws can be
interpreted by a jury. I would most certainly vote against applying this
"merchantability" blindly - without more context and more proof of negligence
beyond simply stocking a product. If one in a hundred thousand catches on fire
and the product is pulled makes for a very different story than if every other
ignites yet they keep selling it.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
They don't need to individually test every single product, they just need to
make sure that they can turn around and sue the supplier if the product turns
out too be defective. If they have no means to hold their suppliers
accountable for the quality of the product, then they should be testing every
single product.

------
shiftpgdn
I have been encouraging anyone who will listen to not buy anything on Amazon.
The co-mingling of goods (especially nutrition items) is going to result in
some Chinese vendor sending a batch of poison in as supplements or baby food
and get a bunch of people killed. That is the only way this is going to end.

~~~
robomartin
My wife ran a successful supplements business selling primarily on Amazon. She
was very strict about testing every batch (which costs money), ensuring
quality, etc. As an MD she approached the business with a seriousness we now
know does not exist in that domain, well, on Amazon anyway.

Things got seriously ugly when her products started to get to the top of the
search results. This took time and a ton of money and effort. That's when the
attacks started.

Two forms of attacks prevailed: Fake reviews and click fraud.

Competitors would post completely fake reviews about her products. They would
claim things such as having had to go to the hospital or having diarrhea for
three days straight. All false, unverified. The other way you could tell the
reviews were fake was when the review posted before the product shipped out of
the Amazon warehouse. I could not believe Amazon didn't have just a little bit
of common-sense code to automatically reject such obviously false reviews.

Sellers can advertise on Amazon. We did. Once her products started to show up
at the top of search results her ad budget would be consumed in its entirety
by 4 or 5 AM every day. You could look at the analytics and see, plain as day,
that all the clicks happened during the span of an hour between 3 and 4 AM
eastern US time. Thousands of clicks every day. This meant that our ads did
not show by the time people got up.

Oh, yes, the other method competitors used was to contact Amazon and make
false claims about her products. They'd claim we were not disclosing true
ingredients; fake copyright violations, etc.

It was all-out war against her in the worst possible way. At the time I
remember thinking that this experience had to be an approximation of what it
would be like to deal with the mafia. I had never seen such dishonest,
criminal behavior in my life.

I captured analytics and put together analysis to show Amazon what was going
on. Her business was being destroyed at a rapid rate. It was relentless.
Amazon could not care less. It was impossible to deal with them. I persisted.
It took them about six months to finally admit our data showed a coordinated
effort on the part of competitors to destroy her business. They also claimed
they identified who did it but refused to give us the information. They issued
a refund that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising.
Never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales, nobody paid for
that.

In the end we decided we had zero interest in dealing with the mafia and quit,
which, ironically, was probably exactly what these criminals wanted. We make
more than enough money with our day jobs and tech business, no need to
complicate our lives in that kind of an environment.

My experience with Amazon, in this regard, was an eye opener. Today I do not
buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I
want nothing whatsoever to do with their third party sellers. That entire
ecosystem is permeated with people you just can't trust, even if all you are
buying from them is a spoon.

I still have friends I met along the way who sell on Amazon. The stories,
years later, remain the same: Amazon does not seem to care about criminal
behavior on their platform so long as they are making money.

~~~
didibus
I think all you said must be true. I just wonder what they could do about it?
Better ML models to identify ad click fraud? Get rid of reviews altogether?

What do you think would have helped?

~~~
pjc50
Policing. By informed humans.

Yes, it's expensive and carries its own risk of corruption and insider fraud,
but either Amazon polices itself or others will police it, and they will be
less kind on the organisation as a whole.

If Amazon manages to get a reputation among the public for fakes (rather than
just us, a specialised audience), it will be extremely expensive and hard to
shift.

------
jdkee
Can someone post a non-paywalled link?

~~~
ce4
Firefox (also mobile) + bypass paywalls addon

[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

