Amazon listings being hijacked by Chinese scammers
Well, after 9 years of selling on Amazon I have a new problem: Chinese scammers listing competing offers for my items with cheap, homemade knock-offs that aren't identical. These cretins will also misrepresent their ship-from location. Negative feedback has already brought down a couple of accounts, but they keep registering new ones and even claim to ship from Austria (yeah, right) and now one says it's in Texas but has the same inventory as a suspended one in China.
People will get inferior product and the ship[ping will take much longer than expected and some will write negatives, but it might take 2-3 weeks, and I don't know whow many sales I'm losing.
Lately they seem to have targeted my highest selling items (making some kind of knock-off junk) and I KNOW they don't have identical product because the sourcing was obscure and also far away from China.
Of course when accounts get suspended, they just re-register. Amazon may have even put a block on competing offers for my items from China (I say upfromt that none of my product is made there), but they just reappear claiming to be from Austria or wherever.
These scum are exploiting all the weaknesses in Amazon's system and I'm afraid the next shoe to drop is years' worth of favorable product reviews if people write those based on knock-offs. My listings empasize speed and packaging as unique selling points (shipping damage is a big problem), so they create expectations that lead to negatives on the bogus sellers, but that process is slow, it's too easy to get a new account, and way too easy to list competing offers even though it's not the same product. Amazon even gives them the buy box if they get the slightest positive feedback.
What to do?
I cringe at the idea of going through Amazon because of unpredictable results, burden of proof and all that. But lately a few listings have as many as 3 foreign competing offers, all likely from the same source. If this keeps up I may have to put the listings on ice and concentrate efforts in other marketplaces, just like I had to do with eBay in 2007. Only one site can be the alpha male.
Has this happened to anyone else? Any suggestions?
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