4 Underreported Dark Secrets Of Buying Stuff Online

So an Etsy seller who was supposedly handcrafting beautiful furniture out of salvaged wood was actually buying from a company in Bali. And one of Etsy's most successful sellers was pulling in nearly a million dollars a year by reselling products they purchased wholesale from Indian manufacturers. Some of the products would be given minor alterations by her 15 employees, but she was still asking for 28 bucks for socks you could grab for $6 on Alibaba (the Amazon for people who are willing to risk lead poisoning).

That particular seller left Etsy to go solo after a controversy emerged, but the site is still "flooded" with purses, jewelry, clothes, and other products coming from factories rather than grandma's craft room. A sweatshop is sort of like a home for the workers who have to sleep in it between shifts, right? There are even guides on how to spot and avoid marked-up factory goods, because no one wants to pay 15 bucks for a plastic piece of shit and Etsy is supposed to be one of the few major marketplaces where independent artists don't have to compete with juggernauts. The average Etsy seller is already just trying to pick up some extra money on the side, but they can't make much of anything if "I cut the tags off this shirt made on a Guangzhou assembly line" counts as "homemade."

People who run Amazon storefronts can pay Amazon to store, pack, and ship their products, essentially making them your warehouse instead of having to do all of that work yourself. But you can also pay Amazon to fulfill orders from other sites, like eBay, for an up to 75% markup. A lot of sellers find it worthwhile to eat that spike, because it beats the hassle of having to personally handle order fulfillment while storing 10,000 plates with the Triforce on them in a garage. But if you try to recuperate even a little of the cost by charging more, your buyers are going to receive Amazon-branded boxes and wonder why they don't simply buy direct from Amazon instead. It's like a Trojan horse full of cheap water filters and toothpaste.

The price discrepancy between what Amazon charges its sellers and what it charges sellers at other storefronts has caught the eye of the FTC. But while that investigation proceeds, eBay is developing their own shipping service for sellers. Starting in 2020, the company will offer to handle fulfillment and take the financial hit for packages that are lost or damaged, although they admit that they'll never be able to compete with Amazon's "We'll have this roll of paper towels at your door in less than an hour, no matter how many birds it suffocates" guarantee. But while that might just mean yet more trucks flooding the roads, any options that cut into Amazon's all-devouring maw is probably for the best. After all ...

And we really do mean counterfeit, because this isn't just a case of generic products being sold to people who don't want to pay for a brand name. Names and packages are mimicked to the point where the real product and the knockoff look identical to all but the most discerning eye. And "discerning eye" is not a trait that most people hastily shopping for cheap shampoo have.

Amazon wants it to be easy to sell products, and even easier to compare them. You only need contact information, a credit card, and a bank account to start selling -- none of which offers proof that you're a legitimate company. Then the site's algorithms heavily prioritize displaying and suggesting the cheapest options to consumers, because you don't become a world-eating monolith by being inconvenient.

So you can, say, copy someone's T-shirt design, sell if for half the price of the original because you make it in an Eastern European sweatshop with material that disintegrates if you sneeze on it, and fool a significant number of shoppers who don't realize or care that a superior original exists. You'll probably get caught and shut down eventually, but that's OK, because then you can just move on to selling something else. If you're lucky, the bad reviews of your shitty product will end up hurting the competitor you stole from in the first place, as one clothing company experienced.

Amazon insists that they're vigilant about cracking down on these scams, but small businesses disagree. Dr. Frederick's Original, which sells health products like arch supports, says that counterfeits are costing them around $40,000 a month, and that attempts to defend their trademark from predatory Chinese manufacturers are ignored or even met with threats. So when your search for socks produces 870,000 different options, try to remember that at least half of them are total ripoffs.

Mark is on Twitter and is aware of the irony of selling his book on Amazon.

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