FBA products cause big trouble! Amazon was found responsible

Let’s start today’s main text.

We sellers will inevitably encounter some customer complaints about product quality, some of which are even very serious. As a platform, whether Amazon should be responsible for these product quality issues on the platform has always been a controversial issue.

Just this Thursday, a California state court ruled on a case involving the quality of third-party sellers' products. Amazon lost the case again and was held responsible for problems caused by defects in third-party products.

In this case, a female consumer purchased a laptop battery from a third-party store (Lenoge Technology HK Ltd.) on Amazon, and the battery spontaneously combusted, causing the consumer to suffer third-degree burns. After the court ruling on Thursday, Amazon needs to bear liability for the consumer's injuries and property losses.

Amazon has been sued many times in the past few years, but it has successfully won every time, even in some particularly serious cases. For example, the electric skateboard explosion in 2018. Old sellers may still have some impression of this incident. The explosion burned down the buyer's home.

In the end, Amazon won the skateboard incident, using the reason that "Amazon, as a platform, is only a communication channel between buyers and sellers and does not participate in the procurement and distribution of products sold by third-party sellers." This reason has helped Amazon win dozens of similar lawsuits.

In the lawsuit that Amazon lost on Thursday, the court ruled that "Amazon was involved in the distribution chain of defective batteries." Its specific participation was to store the defective products in its own warehouses, and to transport and collect the goods . It also charged high service fees to third-party sellers, which should be regarded as one of the distribution links of the problematic products.

Amazon never thought that its proud FBA business would become the reason for its defeat. Amazon has not yet responded to the verdict, but this incident has defeated the excuse Amazon has always used to exonerate itself, and the brother-in-law will no longer be able to use this excuse.

Moreover, Amazon currently has more than a dozen similar product quality disputes under trial across the United States. The verdict of this case will greatly help resolve these disputes and will cause more trouble to Amazon than we imagined.

Although the verdict is directed at Amazon, it will be disadvantageous to us third-party sellers if this trend continues.

It doesn’t mean that losing a case and paying a fine is the end of the matter. Generally, in disputes between ordinary people and large companies, if a large company loses a case, the compensation and fines are often sky-high. Even a giant like Amazon cannot afford countless compensations for defective products. So Amazon will definitely try every means to stop this from happening at the source.

In other words, Amazon has to take responsibility for the products on its platform. This will lead to higher barriers to entry for sellers and stricter product audits. This is especially true for the FBA products that have screwed Amazon over this time. If all FBA products are counted as distributed by Amazon in the future, the relevant audits will definitely be sky-high.

It is predicted that Amazon will not only have stricter review and requirements for products in the future, but will also further improve the confirmation of sellers' identities to prevent sellers from being blamed for quality problems.

This year, Prime Day and Black Friday are only separated by more than a month. This peak season effect brings more orders, but also increases the chance of quality problems. The closer we get to the year-end peak season, the more we need to be careful about such incidents. We need to be more strict with the quality control of holiday inventory, otherwise a large number of negative reviews about quality after the big sale may bring down the product.

Under the premise of ensuring product quality, this year's Prime Day and Black Friday double peak season traffic will definitely be a great opportunity for sellers to increase sales.