World Trademark Review reports……– A Reddit thread on why Amazon “has a serious problem with counterfeit goods” has gone viral in the past 24 hours, with over 62,000 upvotes and appearing on the social network’s homepage. The post focuses on Amazon’s ‘commingled inventory’, wherein Amazon holds third-party products in its warehouses to ship to buyers. The issue, the user states, is that “Amazon treats all items with the same SKU as identical”, expanding: “If you go and buy something from Amazon, you’ll be sent a product that literally anyone could’ve sent in. It’s basically become a big flea market with no accountability, and even Amazon themselves don’t keep track of who sent in what. It doesn’t matter if you buy it directly from Amazon, or a third-party seller with 5 star reviews, or a third-party seller with 1 star reviews.” Furthermore, the user claims that they’ve noticed complaints about counterfeits are appearing on a significant proportion of product listings on Amazon – including claims that users are posting reviews with photos of “fake products, items with needle-punctures in the safety seals, etc”. Of course, the issue of commingling has been covered on WTR before, while Amazon continues to expand its anti-counterfeiting offerings. However, the issue of fakes continues to blight Amazon and viral threads like this only spread awareness of the problem for the e-retail giant. (TJL)
