[Shekelphile]

Probably chinese sellers on all those sites. I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon or from more traditional retail channels.

[vineyardmike]

There’s definitely a problem with my grandma or some less-technically educated person buying “alphabet soup” fakes, BUT Amazon does commingle inventory. This means that lots of people can end up with fakes sold by 3rd parties when buying from a reputable brand.

There were even stories of those crazy coupon people reselling on Amazon, and some cases of returned retail products ending up as “new” on Amazon. Which gets problematic with certain things like consumables (the WSJ did an article on toothpastes iirc).

[alias_neo]

> alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon

Does this actually make a difference? I remember the issue was that Amazon would bin devices together regardless if they're from some random third-party or direct sale, so you could have fakes mixed in with genuine and it was basically a lucky dip.

Is this not still the case?

Ultimately, I'd be weary of buying things like this from Amazon and as you suggest go to a more traditional retail channel instead.

[Shekelphile]

Amazon only comingles inventory among FBA sellers, and gives each an option to opt-out from it if they want to. They never comingle 'sold by amazon.com' items. In cases where I've bought amazon.com items and not from FBA sellers I never received bad products, and I've easily bought dozens of SD cards, flash drives, SSDs, etc.

[traceroute66]

> I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon

AMEN to that !

And the most annoying thing is that those of us who know to avoid FBA is that Amazon have removed the "sold by Amazon" search filter tick-box.

So whilst in the past you could tick a box and be presented with a list of products which are direct-sold rather than FBA, you cannot do that anymore.

According to some Reddit posts, you can still do it if you hack the URL and add an "emi=$obscure_value" GET-param. But I'm guessing sooner or later Amazon will kill this work-around too.

[JonChesterfield]

Sold by amazon means "taken out of a box containing fakes and maybe real products". If that's your gamble, may as well buy the fake directly at lower cost.