Amazon.com has been all the rage for many years. Notorious for burning through investor money and venture capital for a period of over ten years, Amazon.com dominates most every consumer market there is, and it has increasingly established itself as The Top Address for online shopping.

That this has been achieved largely by killing off any kind of “competition” — and also at a high cost to Main Street, to the overall employment situation, and to small business in general — is not meant to be a matter of concern in this article. Though regrettable, it could also be argued that this is “a normal development” in the market (at least, and unlike Obama’s “achievements” through TARP and all the QE-s, it has been done without government money or similar subsidies) and it even comes with some limited amount of advantages for average buyers: the not-to-be-underestimated convenience of shopping from home and saving the time and gas expense for a trip to the local mall or garden center. Killing off only slightly-frequented but still area-consuming unsuccessful and unprofitable branches of certain big-box stores may also seem advantageous both from an efficiency and environmental point of view. Let us some day re-forest these extra acres and make our urban and even rural surroundings a bit greener again!

Still, there are huge drawbacks even for the supposedly better-off buyer when it comes to using Amazon.com.

In an attempt to grow their business even further, Amazon.com has discovered third-party sales and that opening their platform to small and large outsiders means more money for Amazon.com. While this is a good thing from a selection point of view and combines lots of eBay-style attractions with hassle-free Amazon.com fulfillment, it also means eBay-style dishonesty and all sorts of scams have now long entered the apparently controlled Amazon.com environment.

Just as eBay used to be notorious for stolen goods or scrap of no value hyped up and presented as the latest must-have at some “bargain price”, Amazon.com’s marketplace is also heavily contaminated with forgeries, low-quality copies and pirated brand items of all sorts.

At least eBay has improved measurably over the last years, and the platform can be seen as some sort of a useful product finder for the internet again.

Amazon.com cannot, or does not want to, do anything to effectively police the situation in order to protect their unsuspecting customers. This is particularly despicable when it comes to food, nutritional, and general health items that can pose significant dangers of bodily harm to victims of these less-than-wonderful “marketplace” sellers. A court case is now pending in the U. S. where certified organic foods (originally) meticulously checked for heavy-metal contamination and other toxins and then sold under a trusted label (if test passed and if authentic), have been commercially re-produced by a New Jersey pirate outfit and are sold via Amazon Marketplace under a forged label of that widely-respected organic brand. The pirated items are diluted down using cheap glucose syrup fillers instead of the actual wild berries intended and paid for by the customer; or they are made of cheap imported raw materials from China, highly contaminated with cadmium and other heavy metals, instead of the laboratory-checked ones the buyer is willing to pay extra for.

As Amazon.com, obviously keen to not touch their commission-generating business model, stipulates that these forged items are not illegal by themselves (because there are, curiously, no established USDA or FDA limits for heavy metals in those particular types of food indeed), it is apparent that Amazon.com does not really care about item quality the way any good merchant should.

There are also  other examples in different areas of the Marketplace platform where it has become equally and painfully clear that Amazon.com does not care about what you and I might take for granted, but only look at their self-interest and revenue stream instead.

Therefore, Amazon.com should not even be considered for sourcing certain goods, particularly “important” ones or something you are going to put in your body, and that the company might well be in the process of ruining their own revenue model after all, albeit in a different way.

This all means that it still pays to not blindly click through Amazon.com for “other items” after ordering that book or computer parts, but use a trusted and proven smaller vendor instead.