Amazon recently came under fire when it was discovered that the e-commerce site was willingly selling and redirecting searches of popular products to counterfeit models of the same thing.
The issue was brought to light by a company called Elevation Lab. Its founder, Casey Hopkins, began airing his grievances with the e-commerce site when he noticed that the latter was ‘willingly selling’ a knock-off of the Anchor; a headphone holder made from silicone and is designed to hang from underneath a desk.
The counterfeit seller, known on the site as ‘Suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd’, had effectively stolen all of its sales, and to make matters worse, Elevation Lab had apparently paid Amazon a lot of money to advertise the product that it had “built, invested in, and shipped.”
“The current counterfeit seller, Suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd (yeah they sound legit), has been on there for the past 5 days and taken all the sales,” Hopkins wrote.
Amazon has reported taken off the Suiningdongjanjiaju listing from its database and redirected all searches back to Elevation Lab’s original product, but suffice to say, the issue of Amazon’s fake product listing isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
As an example; it’s a known fact that Amazon doesn’t list Google’s Chromecast on its site (for very obvious reasons). However, if you were to type out ‘Chromecast’ in the search bar, the page gives you a list of all the fake version of the products.
(Source: CNet, Hot Hardware, Engadget, Elevation Lab)
