Extra inventory. More sales. Lower prices. How counterfeits benefit Amazon (LAT)

[dalton99a]

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-amazon-counterfeits-20180928-story.html

Extra inventory. More sales. Lower prices. How counterfeits benefit Amazon
By David Pierson
Sep 28, 2018 | 3:25 PM | Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Jon Fawcett wanted to build a cellphone cable that wouldn’t fray. So he developed a charging cord wrapped in stainless steel sturdy enough to withstand an electric chainsaw.

It was a niche product that turned Fuse Chicken, Fawcett’s company of half-a-dozen employees, into a quick success. Customers raved about Fawcett’s durable designs — until he started selling them on Amazon.

Fawcett’s customer reviews plummeted without warning. In came a deluge of one-star pans.

“Really bad quality,” read a description of an iPhone car charger in a review titled, “Broke in a week.”

Fawcett was dumbfounded. Then he found a clue in one of the reviews: a picture of a charger emblazoned with a Fuse Chicken logo that wasn’t quite right.

Over the following months, Fawcett placed numerous Amazon orders for his own merchandise. What he found would become the basis of a lawsuit he filed last year against Amazon.

Mixed in with Amazon’s inventory of authentic merchandise were crude copycats. Some looked like the real thing, but didn’t include Fuse Chicken’s name. Others bore the name, but weren’t made by his company, Fawcett said in an interview with The Times in his Ohio office.

His experiment suggests there is no way for even the savviest Amazon shopper to avoid the threat of counterfeits. The goods may look real online, but there is no guarantee of authenticity — whether sold by a brand, a third-party seller or Amazon’s direct-sales arm.

“That’s when I recognized how big the problem was,” said Fawcett, 43. Products were “being thrown into a single bin in Amazon's warehouse, real and fake.”

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[TygrBright]

1. Sounds like a class action suit waiting to happen.

No single provider of goods has the resources to take on a company with pockets as deep as Amazon's.

But if the problem is as ubiquitous and egregious as the article paints, I would think that suppliers large (Daimler, Birkenstock) and small (Fuse Chicken, Forearm Forklift) could pack a powerful punch by pooling all their evidence and all their examples and information.

speculatively,
Bright

[ecstatic]

2. It is a big problem. Never order phone chargers or proactiv

from Amazon. There are several other niches on Amazon that are overrun with counterfeit products and fake reviews.

[Mosby]

3. Question for the legal folks at DU

If the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects youtube, FB etc from claims of copyright infringement, why didn't that work for napster, limewire, morpheus etc?