THE MORNING RANT: Amazon’s Unconscionable Counterfeit Problem; Help is on the way thanks to (Trump’s) tariffs on de minimis Chinese imports

My wife got scammed by a counterfeit product sold through Amazon. Shame on her, I suppose, for being the kind of person who trusts prominent corporations not to be party to consumer fraud, but shame on Amazon for relying on the sale of counterfeit products as part of its business model.

If you look at headlines regarding the problem of counterfeit goods being sold online, Amazon has been engaged in a “war on counterfeiters” going back more than a decade. At this point it would appear that Amazon has little interest in actually wining this war. Like with the “war on homelessness,” there’s a great deal of money to be made in perpetuating the war on counterfeiting rather than putting an end to the problem.

Amazon makes a generous commission from products sold through its “Third Party Marketplace,” whether those products are counterfeit or not. Confusingly, the counterfeit products remain prominently displayed among non-counterfeit items on the main page of an Amazon search. Only by drilling in can you find the small print identifying it as a product being sold by a third-party seller. But Amazon allows you to add the product to your cart from its main page, without presenting any disclosure that it’s from a questionable third-party seller.

This is little different than if you went into a Whole Foods (owned by Amazon) to buy some avocado oil, but counterfeit avocado oil from a “third-party seller” was on the same shelf as the authentic product, and the phony product only had a small disclaimer in fine print on the back of the bottle.

Beyond the inherent consumer fraud of marketing counterfeit products, it puts consumers in danger, especially when it comes to products that are ingested or topically applied.

As documented in this Men’s Fitness piece from May 2025 titled “The Hidden Dangers of buying Supplements from this Popular Retailer”:

Fake supplements have been found to contain everything from harmless fillers like rice or flour to dangerous ingredients, including hidden pharmaceuticals, allergens, and heavy metals.

Brands like Now Foods and Fungi Perfecta have discovered multiple counterfeit versions of their supplements sold on Amazon, sometimes by dozens of different storefronts.

Even worse, counterfeit items sold by third-party sellers have found their way into the “Sold by Amazon” bins at distribution centers. Verifying that Amazon itself is the seller - not a third-party - still hasn’t been a reliable way to ensure that Amazon isn’t selling you a counterfeit product.

When you order a supplement on Amazon, you might assume it’s coming from the seller you picked. But with co-mingled inventory, Amazon ships the nearest unit in stock—even if it came from a different seller. Even items listed as “sold by Amazon” can be impacted if co-mingled inventory is involved.

Amazon recently made another promise to try to stop selling commingled counterfeits in its “Sold by Amazon” channel. Perhaps this time they finally mean it. But nothing about that promise changes the fact that counterfeits sold by third-party sellers are still abundant on Amazon’s website, and listed just as prominently as authentic(?) goods.

No one seems to know just how bad the problem of online counterfeiting is, but some recent tests indicate that the problem is extreme:

“Over 65% of Cosmetics Sold on Online Marketplaces Are Fake” [The Times – 7/24/2025]

More than two thirds (67 per cent) of products bought from online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, TikTok Shop and Vinted were likely to be imitations of the advertised brands, according to consumer rights company Which.

“I Hired a Lab to Counterfeit-Test a Dozen Suspicious Beauty Products I Bought Online; Every Single One Had a Problem” [NY Times 3/02/2026]

Through a combination of lab testing and expert assessment, we concluded that all 12 of the beauty products I’d purchased from third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay, Shein, and Walmart were either not what they claimed to be or questionable for reasons beyond their authenticity. Johnson went farther, explicitly stating that they were all “definitively identified as counterfeits.”

Amazon’s success in becoming the dominant online retailer was similar to how Google became the dominant search engine – both were the very best at what they did. Puzzlingly, both companies have decided to sabotage their success by not providing their customers the product they want. Google has degraded its search functionality such that oftentimes will not provide you the link you request and Amazon is prospering by hoodwinking customers into buying counterfeit products.

Of course, much of the counterfeit junk being sold on Amazon comes from China. Almost incomprehensibly, this junk has been exempted from duties if the cost was under $800.

The good news is that President Trump just won a battle at the U.S. Court of International Trade, and if Amazon wants to keep allowing itself to be a “marketplace” to sell counterfeit goods, those goods are going to be tariffed, making it less cost effective to undercut the genuine products being copied.

Circling back to the counterfeit product my household just bought on Amazon, my wife read about a product she wanted to try by the name of MoreLess Protein Gummies, so she bought a package online from Amazon. It came in this mailer from China.

My wife then contacted MoreLess and received this response: “Can you tell me where you ordered from? If it was Amazon (especially through a third-party seller rather than our official storefront), there’s a decent chance what showed up isn’t actually ours – counterfeits have been known to pop up there. If that’s the case, I’d steer clear of taking them.”

On Amazon, I checked the reviews of the product and seller we inadvertently bought from, and I screen-grabbed it (immediately below). Amazon subsequently removed this seller and these reviews:

This is what the actual product looks like from MoreLess’ own website:

Despite the specific third-party retailer that sold us a counterfeit product being removed, Amazon is still offering several obvious counterfeit versions of this product. Even the product on the right with almost identical packaging is likely a counterfeit, as it ships from “sichuanzhongchuangqifuxinxikejiyou xianongsi.”

Whenever I criticize a large corporation, I get accused of being a socialist or a “Bernie Bro” by the libertarian, “free-traders” who conflate corporatism with capitalism. They tell me if I don’t like a corporation engaging in consumer fraud or otherwise behaving unethically, I can take my business elsewhere. That’s true, taking my business elsewhere is excellent advice, and buying from brick-and-mortar retailers is good for communities. I’ll do more of that.

But when a major corporation winks at its platform being used for the counterfeit sale of legitimate small businesses’ products, there is not a “magic hand” of supply and demand at work. Rather, it is a form of theft from the legitimate small businesses.

For those of us who advocate for a free market in an economically sovereign United States, we see the threat that arises from corporations engaging in willful blindness to counterfeiting and consumer fraud, especially when it benefits foreign adversaries.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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