[cookiecaper]

Amazon gets those reports all the time, and they have very low-skill people reviewing them. FBA sellers have many horror stories in the opposite direction: they're falsely reported as counterfeit and they don't commingle, but some Amazon lackey is just clicking through the cases and assuming that suspensions are justified, probably without even reading them.

The long and short is that Amazon is not popular with anyone these days. They're not responsive to complaints about products from either buyers or sellers. You have to learn how to play their game. They're acting very monopolistically despite the fact that there are many well-qualified and well-capitalized wolves looking to poach their marketshare.

FBA is just so obscenely profitable for Amazon (the fees alone are huge, usually ending up to be 35-50% of the sale price, depending on the product). I think they are trying to straddle and put off anything that will cut into that margin as long as they can.

Sellers are punished for returns, buyers are stuck with an inferior product and either never notice or send in a return, which hurts the seller, not Amazon. They obviously don't need to carefully tend their reputation as they're already the default for a huge number of people, as long as they do enough to prevent a mass exodus. There's not a lot of incentive for them to aggressively pursue counterfeit sellers or put an overnight stop to it, because they're profiting handsomely in the meantime.

[bambax]

I think the problem is, Amazon is still growing like crazy, so any attrition due to bad products is drowned in the sea of new customers.

Eventually that will change, but it could take a long time.