<story><title>Third Party Sellers Need To Rethink The Amazon FBA Program</title><url>http://www.startupnation.com/start-your-business/plan-your-business/third-party-sellers-need-to-rethink-theamazon-fba-program/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s an interesting hypothetical.&lt;p&gt;Step 1:  User A purchases a shrinkwrapped DVD with excellent packaging from a counterfeiter in China.&lt;p&gt;Step 2:  User A sells the DVD to an FBA merchant, who forwards it on to Amazon.&lt;p&gt;Step 3:  User B buys the DVD from Amazon; due to commingling they get the counterfeit DVD.  Before they can open it they get hit by a bus.&lt;p&gt;Step 4:  User B&amp;#x27;s executors sell the DVD back to an FBA merchant, who forwards it on to Amazon without a second thought (since it&amp;#x27;s a shrinkwrapped DVD straight out of Amazon&amp;#x27;s warehouses.&lt;p&gt;Step 5:  User C purchases the DVD from the FBA merchant, opens it, and finds its counterfeit.&lt;p&gt;In short, the FBA&amp;#x2F;commingling stuff means that merchandise you buy directly from Amazon can be untrusted.  In turn that means that, as an FBA merchant, even merchandise that came directly from Amazon can be untrusted.  Any shrinkwrapped DVD that has passed through an Amazon fulfillment warehouse is actually of entirely unknown provenance; it could have been purchased at a stall in Shanghai for all you know.  And if your business relies on never selling a counterfeit DVD, then that means nothing you buy &lt;i&gt;or&lt;/i&gt; sell can ever touch an Amazon warehouse.&lt;p&gt;I doubt this is a real concern (this is the first I&amp;#x27;ve heard of any issues with counterfeiting and FBA), but it&amp;#x27;s still an interesting structural flaw.  Given Amazon&amp;#x27;s volume, they&amp;#x27;re probably shipping out multiple counterfeit DVDs right now, under their own shipping label as well as that of various FBA merchants.&lt;p&gt;Fascinating.</text></comment>
<story><title>Third Party Sellers Need To Rethink The Amazon FBA Program</title><url>http://www.startupnation.com/start-your-business/plan-your-business/third-party-sellers-need-to-rethink-theamazon-fba-program/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>droopyEyelids</author><text>Mysterious.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;80 companies were sued in the past 12 months&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Where did the new counterfeit items come from? Is someone making them and feeding them into these guy&amp;#x27;s pipeline? How does that happen?&lt;p&gt;How were there enough counterfeits to sue 10 companies a month? What did the purchase history look like for his last buyer of a new &amp;quot;the mentalist&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Did the author mean to imply that Amazon might have shipped a forged copy that Amazon procured?&lt;p&gt;Why is the tone of the article so glib? Why was it posted on a site like that, and where is the follow up, now that it&amp;#x27;s a year later? And whats with his next article about selling xbox games in June&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a cynic and conspiracy theorist, but I can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder if this tribe of amazon merchants found a source for &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; DVDs that was too good to be true, and looked the other way while passing them to amazon. A more outlandish theory would be that the rights holders set these guys up to destroy huge volumes of used merchandise.</text></comment>