this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024

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Amazon could soon be on the hook for safety of third-party products it sells and ships — Government order could classify it as a distributor, potentially exposing it to more legal claims (www.wsj.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Amazon could soon be on the hook for safety of third-party products it sells and ships — Government order could classify it as a distributor, potentially exposing it to more legal claims::undefined

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[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 139 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean, how is it not a distributor? Honest question, all those trucks sure do look like they are distributing products.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 62 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Typically a distributor deals to stores that deal to end users.

Amazon call themselves a store, but at their scale and volume they're pretty much a distributor.

[–] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not even pretty much, they really are a distributor

They have many different businesses all selling on their shelves and then Amazon ships you the product

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 18 points 9 months ago

Nooo the businesses are truly totally independent!

Amazon just handles:

marketing (choosing who gets the “buy box”)
warehousing
fulfillment in their own trucks
some customer service
transaction processing / disbursement

Am I forgetting anything? Besides the disclaimer that sellers don’t have to use Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) and could ship themselves.

I could be more sympathetic if they just changed the user interface to put seller names front and center. Even keeping FBA. Even if eBay handled warehousing and fulfillment, we’d still think of it as more of a platform than Amazon - right?

Hidden too deep.

(Interesting, eBay announced “Managed Delivery in 2019, but pulled the plug before launch. They do still help you ship internationally.)

[–] watson387@sopuli.xyz 17 points 9 months ago

Amazon is the American Aliexpress.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 9 months ago

So section 802(?) but for e-commerce not social media.

[–] kittenzrulz123@lemmy.world 47 points 9 months ago (27 children)

Maybe then they'll stop selling male to male extension cords

[–] Xavier@lemmy.ca 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What‽ Why would such a thing exist ??? 🤔

Testing your electrical panel? and how fast the firefighters are to get to your house?

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Ob it's far stupider and more deadly: hooking up your personal little generator so you can backfeed electricity to your house during a power outage.

It's even more stupid and deadly than it sounds.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 11 points 9 months ago

RIP power company linemen who’ve checked the power’s cut off, ‘til somebody pulls that stunt

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago

this is sadly actually one of the largest use cases, it's called a dead-mans cable (for good reason) but it's how many northern residents run generators in the winter during power outages. Cheaper then running a bypass switch (which can easily be 300-500$ to buy plus install cost) by a huge margin. They just throw the main breaker prior to running the generator. It shouldn't be done but it happens more frequently then you would expect especially in the antiqued houses that may not even be up to code in the first place

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago

"I ran my Christmas lights without paying attention, and now the plug is on the wrong end. Can I just have a male to male so I can feed them the wrong way?"

[–] EtherWhack@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Or adapters to plug a 30A device into a 15A receptacle

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[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 36 points 9 months ago

About fucking time. They've known about the massive problems for years and haven't acted.

[–] _sideffect@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hahaha good, fuck bezos and fuck amazon.

When they first started, Amazon really did have great products, but now it's just overpriced reverse engineered low QA crap.

[–] Masamune@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hey, low QA crap isn't a fair assessment. I recently bought something that had absolutely NO QA behind it.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How in the name of God are they not a distributor?

[–] grayman@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

Well all they do is take in bulk shipments of, categorize, store, individually package, ship, and deliver products. I just really don't see how you could call that "distributing" goods. /s

[–] blackfire@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think distributor normally sends to other business rather than gen pop. I might be wrong though.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

They do VAT receipts in my country, that's B2B

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Wait Amazon isn't classified as a distributor? wtf that's litterally it's entire buisness model

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 30 points 9 months ago

Finally. They sell ship loads of dangerous and faulty wares

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 24 points 9 months ago

Good.

If you're taking a whacking great percentage of everything you sell, you need to be held accountable for the fraudulent, fake and outright dangerous shit that you can buy from it. It's literally just AliExpress with better delivery times.

Like, I know that 2TB USB stick for £21 is fake, but the poor grandma backing up all her photos to it doesn't until it goes over the amount of storage that's actually in it and the whole thing corrupts.