What Shopify did wrong was that it wasn’t fast enough to respond with transparency. However, I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. Amazon is so rife with fake products that it’s no better than eBay now. I can no longer impulse buy on Amazon. Depending on the product, I will check if there are 3rd party sellers using Amazon warehousing. If there’s any evidence of commingling, I just buy it elsewhere. We’ve been slowly using Target more and more since they have limits on inventory commingling.
I’m not entirely convinced that Shopify should be involved in IP enforcement. Amazon, despite all their claims to the contrary, acts as a retailer. When shopping at Amazon, Amazon is helping you find products and even makes it look like Amazon is selling them.
Shopify, in contrast, stays in the background. For the most part, unless I recognize the checkout flow or see the shoppay option, I, as a customer, don’t even know that Shopify is involved in a transaction. I’m not buying, in any material sense, from Shopify.
It's MC/Visa that's forcing Stripe and therefore Shopify to "police" for trademarked goods. MC/Visa are effectively determining what people can and cannot sell online. If the US accused you of selling trademarked goods, the burden of proof is on them. With MC/Visa, good luck getting a chance to even provide proof.
The unholy duopoly MC/Visa has absurd amounts of power. Just look at how bad anything in the adult sector has it with them - instead of the card networks requiring multi-factor authentication to combat PII theft and "post-nut regret" fraud, they rather raised fees on merchants or cut them off entirely. Or how they acted as police, jury and executioner in the Pornhub case - the allegations were indeed severe, but they should have been dealt with by the courts and not a payment processor.
It’s not antitrust because it’s not (as far as I know) against the law. That being said, I think that VISA and MasterCard should be required to act as common carriers and to serve any lawful business (where lawfulness is determined by courts, not by VISA and MC).
Exactly this. The Financial Times just had a good exposé on this recently about Visa and MC and the adult industry. The processors shut a huge amount of sites down because they refused to process their payments any more because some hedge fund bro who was anti-porn knew the MC CEO. They completely control commerce online.
I wanna bet Shopify’s legal department, and their budget for lawsuits, may disagree with your opinion. I have to imagine running a huge online store backend or payment processing system has huge fraud departments. If their platform allows fraudulent activity to run rampant (i.e. no checks on intellectual property, etc.) then many companies will go after them for diluting their brand and other types of legal matters. They can get money out of Shopify but they’re not going to get anything out of someone selling fraudulent product.
I agree with others in this thread - they should provide a layer of actual humans to help shop owners. And have a process for dealing with AI/ML gone rogue - like the address verification system in this example - where a set of humans can override and make sure a shop owner can continue to operate. Heck send someone to PR to help validate addresses every month.
An actual sensible legal regime could be a bit like the CDA safe harbor, or at least more like what CDA safe harbor should be. If an intermediary like Shopify provides services to its clients, does not help users choose which of its clients to work with, declines to exercise discretion as to which clients to work with, and cooperates with court orders, then it should be immune to claims that it chose the wrong clients.
I just was about to buy P100 filters on Amazon but all the listings say they are fake. Amazon combines the inventory of all the “same” product together and it lets fakes get through. For me, it’s not worth the risk of getting a faulty filter so I’m just going to Ace. As you said Amazon needs to crack down on these counterfeits.
>I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books.
lets say a bookstore goes out of business and I buy their stock and sell it in my own store. Do I need proof that I have legal right to sell those books? First sale doctrine is established law - your discomfort with 'fake' books has nothing to do with anything - no one said anything about counterfeit goods. They're asking them to get some 'proof' they can sell merchandise they bought to sell.
Shopify doesn’t want potential fakes, and many customers like myself are sick of them. My discomfort with shady 3rd party sellers has a lot to do with it because I will take my business elsewhere, or eat up customer support hours and ramp up costs related to returns and exchanges.
It’s a free market. There are plenty of other online platforms to choose from that don’t care whether or not they sell fake garbage. You can also create your own online store if needed.
Even if there are no 3rd party sellers currently, it's possible they were active before and the current stock is still commingled. The only thing I use Amazon these days is for white-labeled Chinese goods. For everything else I prefer retailers with an end to end supply chain.
Buying from Amazon can be really frustrating to buy from. I was looking for wool the other day. 100% Australian wool. But it’s spun in China. 100% Canadian cotton yarn!!! Spun in China… it’s hard to find something not made in China even if you’re willing to pay for it.
I'm afraid the EU Digital Services Act (which states that platforms are not "liable for hosting content unless they know it is illegal") will lead to more problems like this.
Platforms will want to be safe, and will content block up-front, meaning it's the user who has to prove the legality of what they are selling. Good luck with that (as the Twitter thread demonstrates).
