Amazon is responsible under federal safety law for hazardous products sold on its platform by third-party sellers and shipped by the company, a U.S. government agency ordered Tuesday.
In a unanimous vote, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said it determined that the e-commerce company was a “distributor” of faulty items sold on its site and packed and shipped through its fulfillment service.
That means the company is on the hook, legally, for the recalls of more than 400,000 products, including hairdryers and defective carbon monoxide detectors, the agency said. It ordered Amazon to come up with a system for notifying customers who purchased faulty items and to remove the products from circulation by offering incentives for their return or destruction.
Amazon said it planned to appeal the decision in court.
This really seems like a win that I hope we see more of. On a personal level, I’m so tired of trying to shop at a Walmart or a Target or a Bob’s Web Site and it turns out half the listings are just third party vendors selling on their eCommerce site. Sell the goods you sell. Let other sites like eBay handle third parties.
These big corps do these reseller models just to get a cut of the profits without any liability. Now the liability is coming to get them. Hopefully it will lead to a better Internet shopping experience. Probably not, but, one can hope.
I understand what you are saying and agree. You might already know this, but on some sites a workaround that works somewhat is to use the filter “in-store” and it will show you what these stores sell themselves. Now it might not capture all their products, as you are selecting only those they carry in store, but it will filter out the items you are speaking about.
You used to be able to filter the seller to InsertsitenameIactuallywentto.com, but increasingly sites have removed that option. Like fuck off, I went to your website to buy from you specifically so I don’t get wonky Chinese knockoffs. I want to give you my money. Fuckin let me ffs.
Oh yeah that is so frustrating as well. eRetailers: If you want to be a broker, stop selling products directly and just live the dream of being that grifty middle-man. You can’t have it both ways.
Thanks, I appreciate the advice! I’ve been pretty adept at filtering but it’s just so exhausting. It’s like going through a truth table before clicking buy.
Then vendors like Amazon have been doubling down on the ghoulish behavior doing things like changing filter options, example:
What’s worse, is for a year or so, this sorting worked correctly if you had Prime, and incorrectly if you did not have Prime. Then (probably when nobody noticed enough to complain) they made it so it was broken on both Prime and non-Prime.
Although, I’m trying to reproduce this issue both on Prime and private browsing non-Prime and it looks like for the first time since the pandemic, their product filter may finally be fixed. Probably all the legal heat on them right now is making them shape up and stop this dark pattern before it’s noticed by someone with power to do things.