Interesting conclusion to the article. I stopped buying Apple items off Amazon a really long time ago because they let counterfeit chargers list as real Apple products and did jack shit about it. To some extent this has begun flowing in to other product categories for me as well.
"Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and towards trusted Apple retailers. Amazon and customers lose, but Apple possibly gets more customers."
Buying Apple brand products on Amazon at this point is just essentially impossible.
Buying printer ink I have found to be essentially impossible.
And there are more examples, those are just two obvious ones. It really doesn't seem like it would be all that hard for Amazon to distinguish between things they themselves are selling and things they are brokering through third parties.
The site claims to do this but in reality it doesn't. For one simple example, all reviews for a specific product are in common, so the reviews for off-brand fake printer ink and OEM real stuff are just all in the same product listing page because they have the same SKU presumably.
These problems are obvious, and it seems like Amazon is more than capable of fixing them, so you have to assume they don't by choice.
Watch out for counterfit memory cards too. The jerks openly label them Sandisk, Kingston etc., but of course they are junk. I am puzzled why Amazon can't "follow the money" and completely shutdown these crooks.
I would assume they're following their own money. Still not sure why the name brands (Sandisk, Apple, etc) can't just sue Amazon for contributing to the trademark infringements...
Everything that's fulfilled by Amazon gets mixed in the same warehouse. So if a third party seller that uses Amazon fulfilment sends them counterfeit goods, people buying "sold by Amazon" might get them. http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope...
Rode Microphones actually has a huge banner on their website warning people against buying on Amazon because of the sheer amount of fraud on there: http://www.rode.com.
"Meanwhile, the product page is flooded with fraudelent (sp) reviews, poisoning the well and moving future customers away from Amazon and towards trusted Apple retailers. Amazon and customers lose, but Apple possibly gets more customers."