Caveat Emptor! - Amazon Marketplace starting to suffer more and more eBay-like problems

As a fairly regular Internet shopper, there are I suppose 3 considerations which feature high in every shopper’s mind:

1. Fear of compromised data - are your just posted credit card details safe?
2. Fear of not getting the right product - exactly what will turn up?
3. Uncertainty about delivery - when will parcel be despatched? When will it arrive?

The number 2 concern has always been quite prevalent for eBay customers, as a little-policed marketplace, this is awash with counterfeits and cheap knock-offs. What of Amazon’s Marketplace? This used to be fairly reliable and obviously had some checks and balances in place which made this work well to start off with.

Comrz is in part an eCommerce specialist, and we are very aware - by way of integration projects, as to how these Google, eBay and Amazon catalogs work. They tend to try to centralise on as few product categories / SKU numbers as possible - which allows some unscrupulous independent retailers to use a picture from a set category item to sell their counterfeit or knock-off product. Usually the hint is in the much discounted price, for instance the vast majority of iPad Smart Covers sold on Amazon are not the official Apple ones - but they are sold using the official Apple pictures! Anyway, there is an obvious hint there in the much lower pricing.

However, what is far more galling is when the knock-off products are being sold at the proper full recommended retail price for the actual official product, but are in fact inferior knock-off goods. In the last 18 months or so, I have on 2 occasions been misled by Amazon into buying something that was not of the appropriate quality, but was sold at the full retail price and with the official product name, details and photograph.

I have just recently trawled through a number of the Amazon customer forums, and I can see that this is a growing issue which only used to be inflicted upon eBay customers, but is now affecting more and more Amazon customers too. Amazon will need to move quickly in order to stave off damage to its repetition. In both cases, the suspect products I bought were officially fulfilled by Amazon.

There is no really easy way to contact Amazon to report a mis-sold product either, and I believe Amazon makes the whole returns procedure more difficult than it needs to be too. Several retailers include pre-filled returns forms and stickers - enabling you to return wrong items almost immediately. The really clever retailers also utilise re-usable packaging which can be refolded, stickered and returned to base directly.

I can certainly understand why a number of traditional shoppers still remain wary and sceptical about shopping online, and there are still some final steps to go for my liking, to make the entire online consumer experience fully enjoyable. For too many retailers, their job is over once the package is despatched, in truth is though that the job is not over until the customer is fully satified that they got what they paid for!