Thousands of unsafe and forbidden products are sold through Amazon
Web store Amazon sells thousands of products that are incorrectly labeled, prohibited or unsafe. This is evident from research of The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper writes that there were 4152 products available that meet one of those criteria.
The complete list of products is shocking. There are ‘approved’ products that have never been tested, medicines without a safety warning for children, forbidden sleeping wedges for babies, illegally imported medicines for which you normally need a prescription, electronics with incorrect safety ratings, toys with unsafe amounts of lead and so on . The most poignant: there are 157 items on the list that are explicitly prohibited.
External sellers
Quite a lot of the goods on the list had the so-called “Amazon Choice label”. So that is something the consumer should automatically rely on. This is mainly due to the problem of a huge network of external sellers. In some cases, they even ship their goods through the company’s warehouses because they are participants in ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’.
In addition, the product pages of external sellers within the platform are almost indistinguishable from the pages of the company itself. The only thing you can see is a small line of text that states who the actual seller of the product is.
Disputes
The strong growth of Amazon has made some changes to the company’s policies and services. This is mainly because the enormous volume of products offered is simply not 100% verifiable.
Through a blog post the company responds to the problems found: “We invest considerable resources to protect our customers and have built robust programs designed to ensure that products that are for sale in our store offered, be safe and comply with the law. ”