[MichaelApproved]

> What's more, the product was found to contain 751 times the amount of lead Health Canada considers acceptable in cosmetics.

How long are we going to let companies hide behind their "platform" bullshit?

They know this happens but, because they're not the actual seller, they get to offload the liabilities to some fly-by-night company that'll close down and reopen under a different name.

Lead in products is dangerous and people should be going to jail but nothing ever happens.

Get caught, close the company, open a new one, pay some fees to open the reseller account and continue hurting people.

[rswskg]

My previous role was scraping and automating the removal of offending items from auction sites. eBay sort of cared, the rest didn't give a shit. Amazon especially.

[jsjddbbwj]

If you buy any health product, makeup, etc from AliExpress we should call this natural selection. Only half joking.

I don't want to see AliExpress closed down just because some girl decided it was a good idea to buy lipstick there at an unbelievably low price.

[friendly_fren]

People are downvoting this but it is true. Consumers have the responsibility to pay attention to where their goods come from. If you are buying something directly from China for an extremely cheap price, you shouldn't expect it to be genuine (not fake) or safe for bodily contact.

[dfxm12]

What if it is a counterfeit not coming directly from China? You can still be duped when the seller is stealing the pricing, ads and marketing materials of the genuine product.

Each product listing seemed legitimate, with some prices that compared to retail stores and official-looking advertisements.

This is what we're talking about here, not the marketing obvious knockoffs with comically misspelled brand names. Even the article talks about only authenticating the products after they were purchased and received.

[FireBeyond]

And if it comes from an Amazon seller that lists their location as California, but all of their stuff comes from China?

[MichaelApproved]

Who is asking for AliExpress to close down?

You think they have to sell products containing 700+ times the safe lead level to stay open?

Im fine with platforms but there have to be criminal penalties for selling harmful products. Start throwing people in jail.

[matthewowen]

i don't understand how you can hold these two beliefs at once.

if you believe that it is fundamentally unsafe to buy health products and makeup from aliexpress, then isn't it also reasonable to believe that aliexpress shouldn't sell it? there's a "people should be free to make bad decisions" counterargument, but as a society we've decided against that: it's the reason we have consumer protection laws.

put another way: if you made marketplaces accountable for selling dangerous items like this, you would push them out of the segments that are most dangerous.

[jsjddbbwj]

Having AliExpress check the safety of all of their products would increase the price of all of them substantially. That would me bad for me.

To make matters worse, the kind of girl who buys lipstick on AliExpress doesn't buy cheap Z80 clones or radios there, so she wouldn't come back to that site again once they take the lipstick down; only informed buyers would suffer the consequences. How's that fair?

[shadowgovt]

Ideally, this sort of market abuse would be translated into mistrust by the consumer.

But I think a case can be made that it already is. Most consumers understand buyer-beware on online merchant websites (especially since eBay was rampant with this issue at its inception and has gotten better over the years). Perhaps it is the responsibility of the consumer to self-educate, not the responsibility of the market broker to exhaustively police the vendors that use it? To spin the story around a bit: Amazon, eBay, et. al. don't background-check buyers to make sure they're not buying a product to build a bomb or something with it. Why are they obligated to background-check the other half of the transaction?

[jonathanstrange]

Without easy access to the relevant information? I mean how would the average customer know from the Amazon page or from even using the product that there is 751 times more lead than allowed in it?

If the distributor was required to test the product and put a large red banner "might induce lead poisoning" on the product page, then of course the consumer could choose. Alas, that's not the case.

[shadowgovt]

Why should that responsibility rest on the distributor's shoulders and not the original manufacturers?

If people were deeply concerned about lead, shouldn't we expect that products that can offer such a guarantee have a market advantage? Amazon et. al. make product attribute comparison pretty straightforward.

[Spivak]

This frustration seems like it's just being directed at the closest entity you can shake your fist at rather than the actual cause.

Suppose all those fly-by-night companies set up merchant accounts on Shopify or just bought cheap Wordpress template and hosted it themselves and did the exact same thing. The world of boutique men's watches is absolutely rampant with this. Would you be demanding that Shopify or Tim Berners Lee vet all the products before they're sold. Would you demand that Visa/Mastercard do it? What about UPS/FedEx?

If you want to require businesses to get licenses and submit themselves to regular safety audits then just say that. Don't try to offload the responsibility of law and public policy to random corporations.

[freeone3000]

If you're buying off of a Shopify site, the only endorsement is from the seller. And you know who you're buying from. Amazon is allowing these companies to sell in Amazon's name. I'm not charged by YouCantBelieveItsNotNike, my CC bill says Amazon. I return these products to Amazon. Amazon is the seller.

[dsfyu404ed]

>If you're buying off of a Shopify site, the only endorsement is from the seller.

Isn't that basically the same as on eBay and Alibaba?

Ebay has a curated front page but it never shows stuff sold from a jurisdiction distant enough to not be accountable for shady practices. It seems like amazon is the odd one out here since they hold inventory, ship it and sell a lot of things themselves.

[dfxm12]

FYI, as an official policy, eBay doesn't allow counterfeit goods to be sold: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

It's reasonable for shoppers to see this as an endorsement and assume eBay actually enforces this policy.

[lochlan]

Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.

[jfengel]

If they set up their own shops, then they'd be far less visible, and they wouldn't benefit from the reputations that fairer dealers get.

Those "random corporations" are a few very large players who have won the network effect lottery. Most people will go to the place that everybody knows, especially if it's cheap. There's only room in the public brain space for a small number of these. It's very hard to set up a new one, especially if its tag line is "More expensive but at least it won't kill you".

Such natural monopolies are frequently subject to regulation if they won't do it themselves, simply out of self-protection. They're not just the "closest entity"; they're a bottleneck where regulation is feasible. But such regulation is going to be more cumbersome if it comes from an outside entity, so they should take calls like this as a sign that it will be worse for them one way or the other. Today, they've got some flexibility in their solution.

[meritt]

Amazon ships products from their warehouses, in their packaging, charges credit cards as "Amazon.com", provides customer support, and accepts product returns. This makes it generally indistinguishable to the consumer if they're purchasing from Amazon or a sketchy third party vendor, as simply the "best" deal gets populated into the buy box. Unless a consumer drills down into the full offer list, the specific 3rd party merchant and the corresponding ratings are completely hidden.

That's significantly different from someone running their own ecommerce site where they are very clearly the merchant of record.

[dd36]

They should have to buy liability insurance and if the insurer won’t insure them, they can’t list.

[Spivak]

Offloading the work of law to insurance companies rather than retailers doesn't really sound like we're making any progress.

Sidebar: this is super common btw, had more than one law professor go on a rant about how all the CS people in their courses just want to push everything to the actuaries and create a de-facto court system within insurance.

[dd36]

Insurers already do this... They don’t insure risky companies or they have to charge such a high premium that constantly failing and restarting is not cost effective. I think most complaints here are from people trying to buy legitimate products.

[MichaelApproved]

Nah, fines are just a cost of doing business.

Anyone selling harmful products, like lead lipstick, should be thrown in jail.

[dd36]

I agree. How do you jail a foreigner? You can’t even class action against sellers nowadays to protect the other buyers because of forced arbitration agreements. But if they had to be insured, the insurance available would be non-existent.