> The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance, noting that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had facilitated payment, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus being liable under California law.
eBay does not meet the second qualifier and rarely meets the last. Additionally, it is more obviously a marketplace - the seller of a given item is highlighted and their credibility made known in the form of their star ratings. Amazon de-emphasizes the seller name for non-Amazon sellers and completely hides their rating on the product page.
Of course, the only way to know for sure is if eBay's liability is litigated.
Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses.
Had facilitated payment: Maybe, but eBay typically just links one Paypal account to another Paypal account. eBay does not actually touch the funds. (Paypal has been it's own separate company for awhile now.)
Shipped it out in eBay packaging: Unless they're using a service, typically shipping is up to the eBay seller.
They do now. They are in the middle of moving most of their sellers to a program called Managed Payments. eBay handles the payment processing through the program. Sellers do not receive money via paypal, but their own bank accounts. eBay batches the proceeds of the sales and ACHs the money daily M-F.
The transition is ongoing, but the goal is all sellers with stores will move to it eventually.
> Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses.
eBay used to have a service where you could take any random junk to their mall kiosk or a FedEx store and eBay would sell it on your behalf. That would pretty much require them to have warehouses.
They have a Consignment Center [0] but that only really seems to hook you up with on the the various "I'll sell your crap on eBay" that exist instead of doing it themselves.
I found some interesting forum discussion taking the opinion that eBay strangled consignment businesses by choosing to heavily discourage auction sales (as opposed to fixed-price listing). They did that because customers on average strongly prefer fixed-price sales, but I'd be open to the idea that this could be a case where giving the customers what they want turned out to be a mistake for the business.
eBay saw themselves as competing with Amazon in the "buy things over the internet" space.[1] But by emphasizing fixed-price sales so much, they arguably made themselves much less distinct from Amazon.
[1] I was surprised to learn this, as I had always thought of Amazon as being for buying things new and eBay for buying things used.
I think a lot of people didn't understand or know about how the eBay auctions worked [0]. I only learned about eBay being a second price auction, effectively, ages after eBay was a thing. Without knowing how the proxy system works doing an auction would be pretty frustrating because it'd look like you were usually instantly outbid.
[0] At least the later version I don't know if they used a different scheme earlier. They must have because the sniping services that existed in early eBay don't really make sense with proxy bids.
For international, they have GSP. It's different from Amazon in that sellers ship send items after completed order to eBay's shipping center, where it gets forwarded to the buyer. A nice thing for the buyer is that the predetermined price includes customs clearance fees.
Yesterday I purchased the first thing in a long time from eBay. I was surprised that I could just use my credit card and no longer needed to use PayPal.
Big fan of Amazon here... I’ve been using Amazon since 1990-something… yet the co-mingling counterfeit items has caused me to stop using it for many items I formally purchased there.
Amazon make inefficient use of truck rolls for delivery, often sending many trucks through my small residential subdivision every day, needlessly delivering one non-urgent item at a time.
This is probably the key competitive challenge facing Amazon today: somehow keep up with the rapid growing overall demand while simultaneously improving execution fast enough to not leave the door open too long for someone else.
I keep seeing these complaints on HN... Is co-mingling a bigger problem in some regions, or have I just gotten consistently lucky? Or maybe I'm a sheep and haven't noticed?
In all honesty, I would appreciate an excuse to stop using Amazon, because the amount that I buy from them compared to any other store makes me uncomfortable. But the co-mingling thing just hasn't come up for me...
Probably depends on what you are buying. I am a board gamer and counterfeit board games from Amazon is a huge problem. I stopped purchasing board games from Amazon after getting three counterfeits in a row.
Poor print quality and materials, incorrect/missing pieces. I don't know if you've seen counterfeit DVDs before, but they often have badly printed (misaligned, pixelated, even watermarked) graphics and cheap packaging (a basic jewel case with a printed slip of paper vs. a cardboard fold-out, for instance). But at least the DVD itself stands a chance of being a good rip. For a board game, the print quality and materials are kind of what you're paying for.
What djur said, plus some board games you register the serial number on a website. If the serial number is invalid you know you got a counterfeit copy.
Co-mingling with counterfeits seems to not be present in Canada - most merchants don't want to deal with filling out customs forms, FBA barely exists here, and most items sold on Amazon.ca are either sold by the manufacturer or by Amazon.ca. still a ton of unknown brands doing self-sales, but you're at much less risk of counterfeits so far.
I've occasionally seen such listings at 10x, but commonly 2x-3x is common (as with this listing, after exchange). You also lose all 'shipped by Amazon' protections, and if the listing at .ca was FBA, you'd have free shipping in .ca.
(As a note for .com / US users, Prime membership on .ca does not give any discount when shipping to Canada from .com, as Prime membership is restricted to the .XX property which you buy it on. EG, .ca in my case.
Nor does buying a .com prime membership help, for that only gives speed/discounts/free shipping for US addresses.
When I travel to the US for the winter, I basically have to axe my .ca prime membership, and buy a .com membership. So as a result, I don't buy yearly memberships. And when I travel to/from, I cancel .ca early, and .com early, upon return.
It's not like I order a lot of stuff 3 days before leaving, or while traveling, or the second I arrive.
A result of all this is that Amazon loses out on sometimes 4 months of Prime membership, which they would have if it just worked everywhere.
It's not that much of a stretch to say that the entire business model for sales and gig economy platforms is to provide investors with a legal revenue stream from dubiously legal activities ranging from civil fraud to regulatory arbitrage intended to evade tax law, consumer protection law, employee protection law, and minimum wage law.
Hard to tell between lucky and have you gotten some and not noticed. Some things are definitely more faked than others so it can really depend on what you're buying and when.
> The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance, noting that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had facilitated payment, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus being liable under California law.
> Physical stores should do this too. Gets rid of the liability for what you sell.
That is the only way to compete with Amazon. It is a race-to-the-bottom of quality and safety for the consumers.
Amazon takes what are common rules with their customers and their retailers and has broken all of them. Amazon competes directly with its retailers using the information that got from them. Amazon brands 3rd party retailers products as if server-by-Amazon but it takes no responsibility on delivery or quality.
Or Amazon is forced into compliance or we are going to go back to the middle-ages experience where everything is a flea market and weights and measures are never correct.
I'm pretty sure if I went to Target and was told "this toaster was made by NoName Super-Quality Manufacturing in China and if you have any problem you'd have to take it with them, whoever and whereever they are, and we accept no responsibility for anything but processing the payment" I'd not buy it.
Physical stores don’t really have anything analogous to what’s going on here with Amazon. No random small business can sign up and get their products shelf space in Target or WalMart next to what Target buys and resells. Literally everything physically in a Target is something they bought, warehoused, and are reselling themselves.
