I just bought some gym shorts from Target for $20. Amazon had some for the same price, but numerous reviews with photos showed people were getting fakes. Fuck that. Target of all places seems more curated than Amazon.
> Target of all places seems more curated than Amazon.
Isn’t this going to be true of any “pure” retailer? The nature of FBA and third-party sellers just means there will always be at least some percentage of fraud and so on that’s higher than “trick various people in the retailer to sell fake goods”.
Particularly as it’s much easier for insiders at a retailer to steal from their employer (and then resell via whatever means), I think the utility for “put fake goods on the shelf” at a retail shop is basically zero. I dunno, maybe you can trick/bribe the person near the start of the supply chain, but it wouldn’t take long for returns to pile up and an investigation to find “Jim and Sally colluded to sell fake gym shorts”.
> Isn’t this going to be true of any “pure” retailer?
No. First-party retailers don't generally commingle stock with other third-party retailers. They typically have few suppliers, often one supplier, for each good. That's for many reasons, but it also makes it easy for them to identify who sent them counterfeits.
Amazon is discovering what old-fashioned retailers learned long ago: customers do not give a fuck who, ultimately, has injected the counterfeit. They will blame the retailer.
If I was Wal-Mart I would be absolutely hammering this point to customers. I'd be running ads about "Shamazon". Tearful mothers whose child got sick. Teens who saved up for a game system or phone and got a block of wood. Grandparents who bought medical equipment and got a faulty knockoff. Everything dangerous, disgusting, outrageous or even just annoying. I'd be carpet-bombing every channel with ads amplifying the message that Amazon can't guarantee what you get. Wal-Mart aren't saints, but their historical success has rested heavily on an incredibly tight grip of their supply chain and logistics. They do actually know what they have on the shelf.
Walmart's online store is a mess of 3rd party options now too. I went looking for hair clippers at the start of the pandemic and all I could find were no-name brands offered by third party vendors on their website.
Yes, unfortunately even Target is getting into the 3rd party seller game. Which I wouldn't care about as long as I have an option to filter for only items sold by Target (or Walmart or whoever) and them stating they don't commingle on their website.
I just go to the brand's official website nowadays and pay whatever they ask so I don't have to research what channel it's coming from.
I've had good luck ordering directly from companies. For me it was Nike, a yoga mat company, and some local toy retailers and a frame company.
I still buy stuff from amazon, but not critical stuff.
I knew things were going bad, when rock climbing gear was being counterfeited. (2011).
Oh, that comment wasn’t clear: I mean, any pure retailer is going to be better at this than Amazon (and so why single out Target) because unlike Amazon they know their vendors.
The more you focus and the more you curate, the more you can trust you're getting what you think you're getting and the more confidence you can have in the overall supply chain.
The tradeoff is selection and probably price--although for some large specialist retailers like B&H Photo you largely do get both price and a pretty good selection of products.
Amazon should at least better separate the products it largely has control over the provenance of and everything else. But a third party marketplace is always to be hit or miss in terms of what you get.
"Throw of the dice" is an exaggeration. Personally, I haven't (knowingly) had an issue with counterfeit. And I have found things on Amazon or eBay that were super-obscure and I'd have had difficulty tracking down elsewhere. And it's not like various obscure websites can't be dodgy themselves.
Yes, I initially thought so as well, and shifted my buying accordingly. However, I bought an HDMI dongle from one of Target's supposedly vetted partners and when I got it it was clearly open-box. When I tried to get Target to replace or refund they weren't able to help me via normal channels and told me I had to call some other number. Given the time cost was non-trivial, and the item was, I just decided to never order electronics from Target again. I'm down to BH at this point.
Amazon traded their quality for being a market platform and taking a cut of a much larger pie with more selection
Unfortunately they also completely ignored counterfeit issues which has sabotaged their reputation. I think this is just damage control because I'd they're selling coungerfeit goods with some knowledge of the issue they mm at have some Liabity.
