[tfinniga]

Another issue of letting sellers glom on to the main product SKU listing is that the reviews are all over the map, and there's no way for a customer to tell which review came from which seller.

I bought some tripod mounts for a VR rig - some of the reviews said they were plastic, some said metal, some said the quality was good or bad, etc. I rolled the dice, and got metal ones that smelled so badly of gasoline that I couldn't keep them in the house. Ended up buying some name brand, that at least had predictable quality.

There are lots of things that Amazon could do to counter these issues. Just look at what they are doing for Prime and 'sold by Amazon' - there is a big checkbox when searching to only show prime-eligible items, and when looking at the list of sellers, amazon is shown prominently with different graphics. They could easily do the same things for verified owners of products, so that OEMs could sell on Amazon and customers could be sure they're buying a genuine article.

If it were truly an insoluble problem, why are there no 'Amazon Basics' counterfeits on the market?