Shady Amazon sellers

Factual Questions
1

I bought this battery on the German Amazon (amazon.de) last year. Very happy, has the promised capacity and works as promised in every way.

I was looking to buy another one, especially since I occasionally see it offered at less than half the normal price.

So I was in the process of ordering yesterday when I noticed that this wasn’t the normal seller. It was some very shady sounding seller name, with no business info, no track record, a few fake feedbacks and altogether scam looking.

Investigating further, I noticed my chosen version (48V 20Ah LiFeO4) was available from 5 sellers. One is the original seller. Four others were these unknown, shady looking, no-track-record recent pop up scammers undercutting the real one by more than 50%.

All of them are already gone today but there’s a new one right now.

(Addition: it already disappeared while I was writing this post, although Amazon still shows his price of 205 euros.)

(Addition: 5 minutes later, two new ones show up, one of which looks like a long established, well regarded outfit!)

I wouldn’t mind getting that battery for less than half its normal price but obviously don’t want to be scammed.

So what’s the scam here?

What is looks like to me is scammers listing thousands of items from other sellers, collecting money from the orders, shipping out maybe some crap or maybe nothing, and then vanishing without trace when (or before) the negative feedbacks and complaints start rolling in.

I can’t be the only one who has noticed. Is this a known scam on Amazon and do people already have write-ups on the internet? Can’t find this particular form of scam described anywhere (if it is a scam).

2

Amazon doesn’t seem to be very good at policing third-party sellers. Apparently, even “fulfilled by Amazon” just means they ship it from their warehouses.

There was an article in the Wall St. Journal a few days ago about how Amazon sellers are falsely advertising products as being FDA-approved or meeting safety standards, when in fact they’ve already been identified and/or recalled for safety problems.

If sellers don’t have an established track record and a significant number of reviews (which aren’t all five-star), I’m wary of them.

3

I bought an LED headlight from an Amazon seller that didn’t fit. I returned it to Amazon and got my money back. I’ll wager that if it hadn’t gone through Amazon, it would be more difficult to return it.

4

I suspect there are third-party sellers who are selling counterfeit goods. There are also third-party sellers who do drop-shipping from either legitimate or sometimes not-so-legitimate sellers, often in China (due to a an international postal treaty, China shippers can send things to American customers more cheaply than American shippers can send things within the country). And I suppose that there could be outright fraud where nothing is shipped and the seller vanishes, but I have not heard of those.

I agree that Amazon does not appear to actively manage its sellers. They seem to operate it like a hands-off e-marketplace rather than taking any responsibility for what they put in front of their customers. I do not know to what extent they support their customers if they get a bad deal from a third party.

5

That’s the thing, I haven’t either. Yet I’m seeing it right before my eyes, at least, looks like.

I checked that listing a few times today. It listed the original seller and the original price every time, but always together with a different set of those “scam” undercutting sellers.

I thought they would be skimming off orders for a few weeks and then vanish without a trace. But they’re not offering their wares for a few weeks. Those whole outfits, with their thousands of listings and strange reviews are only up for minutes at a time.

Actually, maybe the seller is there all the time but only this one item (and likely others) gets listed, unlisted and passed among them in a rapid, continuous cycle.

I could be quick and grab one of those deals right before they disappear. But I guess I should pass for the time being.

6

Amazon does a lot to stop shady sellers, but not enough given their huge size. They end up playing whack-a-mole with resellers who just pop back up again.

They have a series of passive defenses that are designed to avoid troublesome regions: For example you have a number of hoops to jump through if you want to sell toys in the toy category around the holiday season. Things like having already sold toys for several months on Amazon, have a x% fulfillment rate, and other things so that Amazon doesn’t have a horde of screaming parents yelling at them that X-mas was ruined.

The have a lot of automated defenses that can be overzealous. I’ve seen things get misclassified by these systems, such as basic lab equipment being classified as medical equipment (there is a huge difference). And I’ve also seen stuff get flagged for being rat poison or weed killer when they were decidedly not these things.

Active measures is where Amazon is dropping the ball. Like a lot of huge systems they try to save on salaries by using as few employees as possible to root out bad sellers. To avoid bad faith tactics and maintain plausible deniability they make it extremely hard for vendors to report obviously bad vendors. There is a good reason for this, but it also means some of the best people for rooting out counterfeiters have their hands tied.

As an example: I know a vendor who has a product that is made in China. He imports it and sells it direct. Now this product is backed with a lot of support, and he has things like testing the item before shipping, a warranty, and lots of spare parts to service the product. He has a UPC to denote this product is from his company and he stands behind it.

Well, like clockwork, once a month someone in China thinks it would be great to undersell him and lists the same product, but without a warranty, instructions in English, pre-shipping testing, and all that other service stuff. OK, fine if you want to sell it as such, but you do not get to use his UPC. Amazon made it extremely difficult for him to get those vendors off his product page. It took him months of threading through Amazon red tape to get control over what was essentially his company’s exclusive product (as presented with the included services) in the first place.

7

Amazon is a huge business and indeed in my experience they do not police their third-party sellers that well. They are taking on too much IMO, and in fact I believe the third-party sellers overall detract from the Amazon brand. If I go into Target to buy something I don’t want a bunch of Walmart or Dollar Tree products pushed at me.

That said, if it’s something you can afford the time and money to take a chance on, Amazon usually does a good job of supporting the buyer in a dispute.

8

I had a thought as to what might be going on:

Imagine Amazon has the item sitting in its warehouse on behalf of the seller. Amazon receives and processes the order in behalf of the seller and ships the item out of its warehouse on behalf of the seller.

Nothing at Amazon requires the item to have a single, unique listing (1) or even single, unique seller (2) on its site.

What if the original seller was hacked, and the hacker got access to their Amazon account and managed to put up their own listing but referencing the victim’s merchandise?

In the case of (2) they could even arrange for the money to go into the hacker account instead of the victim’s account.

Having the listings pop in and out for minutes at a time might be a trick to make it more difficult to find the hacker.

What mechanism does Amazon have to prevent this scenario?

Or would Amazon take the not uncommon attitude that “it’s your fault for getting hacked”?

9

Amazon doesn’t pay 3rd parties until they show proof of shipment. And even then they wait a week for reputable vendors and 2+ weeks for new vendors. It isn’t like the old days of eBay where they could yank the money out of PayPal and disappear. So I am uncertain how they would pull this off.

10

I might misunderstand something, but I thought Amazon offered a service where they would hold merchandise in their warehouse for a seller and also ship out the merchandise for a seller.

I don’t know if that’s correct, or how/whether a seller would “show proof of shipment” in such a scenario since Amazon would already have that proof.

Also is merchandise held by Amazon uniquely tied to a single entity that gets any and all proceeds from its sale? If so, a hacker could harm me by selling my stuff cheap but not benefit himself by getting any money from the sale.

11

Any idea what is considered proof of shipment? It seems this would be trivially easy to fake.

They do, but only for a fraction of their merchants (I do not know what that fraction is). The others still need proof.

12

You ever go to a store and they have some items on clearance for very cheap prices? There are a very large number of Amazon sellers who systematically visit the clearance sections of stores and other places that sell used or overstock goods and buy items for resale on Amazon, eBay and other sites. Often there is only one copy of an item to buy, and seldom a large number. So they list it on Amazon and when their single copy is sold their name disappears from the listing.

Or if it is a listing where a seller has very few feedbacks it could be a person who bought the item from a store and didn’t use it and it was too late to return for a refund–so listed it on Amazon.

Remember Amazon has a guaranteed satisfaction policy.

13

Altho it is suspicious, calling them scammers before you have confirmed it is kinda confirmation bias.

And Amazon will refund if no delivery confirmation.

I have had a issue with exactly one seller on amazon. He send a book with a mouldy smell. Now, the price was like under a $1 plus $3.99 S&H. So, he wouldnt refund unless i returned it, which is his right. But I was afraid he’d resell it. Most sellers wont demand you return a defective cheap item.

Now, I will point out it is his right to demand I send it back for the refund, so he wasnt a scamster. Poor cust serv, but perfectly within his rights.

And that’s the worst i have had.

14

A tracking number. Yes easily fakeable but usually catches up with you real fast. I’ve seen some scammers try to use fraudulent shipping companies but their use may make the customer even more vigilant.

15

Actually, I got a refund from Amazon surprisingly quickly from a third person seller. I bought an electric fan from some unknown company a couple of months ago, and it took forever, with no tracking information other than that it was coming from China. When I finally got a notice that it had arrived, our $200 plus fan was a book of blank paper. That was it, and we were told that it had arrived. So I contacted Amazon, and they told us it would take a week for the money to be returned. It took about two days.

16

Okay, not confirmed to be a scam. Still not sure what’s going on. I write “scammer” just for the sake of clarity and brevity.

My worst experience with Amazon was once when I got a DVD box set that had two copies of Season Three and none of Season Four.

Went through the completely automated return procedure, sent the thing back and got a new one.

Old curmudgeon me just didn’t like not having a human to explain the issue to (so that they could have exchanged just that one stupid missing disk) or the thought that a perfectly fixable box set went to the trash as entirely avoidable waste.

Other than that, it was very impressive how well the process worked and how efficient it must be for them.

Always have been impressed by how well the site works, the front and back end, the logistics, the tech, the innovation, everything (AWS too). It’s a great achievement and they deserve their success.

But what’s going on with these now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t scammers (for lack of a better word) I still don’t know. Can’t rule out PastTense’s explanation, though I can’t imagine it being applicable to this particular kind of listing. I can also see now that my earlier speculation would not really work.

17

I think they have at least 3 types of items. They have items that are sold and shipped by Amazon, items that are “Fulfilled by Amazon” where Amazon handles the warehousing and shipping for another company, and then third-party items that are shipped by the third parties but the payment is still handled by Amazon. So the seller would only need to show proof of shipment in the third case.