US Agency Puts Onus on Amazon For Sale of Hazardous Third-Party Products (reuters.com) 56
Amazon is responsible for hazardous products sold by third-party sellers on its platform under the federal safety law and bears legal responsibility for their recall, the U.S. consumer protection authority said on Tuesday. From a report: The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said it has issued an order for the e-commerce giant to propose remediation plans to notify consumers about these products and to remove them from consumers' homes by encouraging returns or destruction. More than 400,000 products are subject to this order, the CPSC said, noting in particular faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hairdryers without electrocution protection, and children's sleepwear that violated flammability standards. The CPSC has determined that Amazon was a "distributor" of such defective products as they are listed on its website, even though they are sold by third-party sellers under the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program.
Flammability standards... (Score:3)
... were invented because of heavy lobbying by the tobacco industry after cigarettes caused some headline making fires
Many "fire retardant" chemicals are toxic and exposure to them causes more harm than the rare instance of fire
Re:Flammability standards... (Score:5, Funny)
well that's on you, you should be a better parent and tell your kids to quit smoking in bed
It's not the cigarette smoking . . . (Score:2)
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. . . it's the crack. Have you seen the welding torches druggies use to smoke that shit?
(Crack Addict) "No it's not! It's those damn short welding hoses! How the hell am I supposed to smoke my crack in bed with the kids when the government wants me to store the damn tank in the garage?! Wife is already bitching I use the gas cylinder next to the bed as a clothes hanger.."
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Looks like I found an Amazon seller (Score:5, Insightful)
So when you're a dumbass buys a cheap lithium ion dildo on amazon.com and it catches fire and burns your house down that fire spreads over the my house and burns it down too.
As a result we all have a ton of protection against fires because otherwise you get entire city blocks or even entire cities burning down.
Seconded! It's why we HAVE regulations. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Amazon DOES warehouse many of the items it sells for third parties. Amazon DOES act as a middleman (Amazon tells sellers that the customers are Amazon's customers, and contractually prohibits sellers from contacting buyers directly.) Amazon DOES promote the items. Amazon DOES profit from the sales.
Amazon should be held responsible for the products sold on it's site. They are very much involved in the sale.
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So when you're a dumbass buys a cheap lithium ion dildo on amazon.com and it catches fire and burns your house down that fire spreads over the my house and burns it down too.
Actually, lithium ion batteries are more prone to blowing up when they're in larger packs because the cell balancing or overcharge protection on the BMS fails and then things get all explodey. Individual loose unprotected cells (which people use in vape devices and flashlights) can also be dangerous because they can be accidentally shorted.
Your average cheap Chinese consumer electronic junk with a single 18650 cell and some sort of BMS integrated into the product, though? Five Below is full of things like
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So when you're a dumbass buys a cheap lithium ion dildo on amazon.com and it catches fire and burns your house down that fire spreads over the my house and burns it down too.
This is why I always send new neighbors a starter-pack of high-quality dildos with a "Welcome To The Neighborhood!" greeting card.
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Exactly. Flame retardants are life-savers. Do not like toxic ones being used? There are enough nonproblematic ones. Maybe make it a political issue to outlaw these? Naa, that would limit greed and hence would be un-American!
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Outlaw the dangerous ones, I mean.
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About time. I have long been complaining to Amazon about selling products without UL safety certification or worse - fake UL safety certification. This is very simple to enforce, if it has an AC plug it has to have UL certification. UL is a safety inspection. They inspect the products for fire and shock hazards.
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About time. I have long been complaining to Amazon about selling products without UL safety certification or worse - fake UL safety certification. This is very simple to enforce, if it has an AC plug it has to have UL certification. UL is a safety inspection. They inspect the products for fire and shock hazards.
Sounds like you also read the reviews over at "ServeTheHome" regarding all the cheep-crap Chinese Ethernet switches that they test which lack UL (or any other) actual certification - or probably fake that stuff.
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More like the woman who was found dead in a hotel room a couple years ago because her unsafe USB charger failed. When it failed it sent AC into the phone and electrocuted her. A simple UL inspection would never have let that product be sold. https://au.news.yahoo.com/chea... [yahoo.com]
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if it has an AC plug it has to have UL certification.
Not true. There is no legal requirement for AC devices sold to consumers to have UL certification.
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if it has an AC plug it has to have UL certification.
If it has an AC plug it you probably shouldn't use it in the shower, hello?
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There are four deaths from AC chargers that I am aware of which have nothing to do with the bath or the shower. The charger failed in such a way that the AC was sent up the USB cable. This is part of UL inspection, UL will verify the design to ensure this can't happen. There are simple, basic things needed in an electronics design to ensure their safety, some of these small production houses are unaware or don't understand and they leave out important parts of the circuits. I suspect this is mainly an educa
Re:Flammability standards... (Score:4, Informative)
Correct it doesn't legally have to have UL. It would be Amazon enforcing "if it has an AC plug it has to have UL certification". This is common practice for retailers. Go into any Walmart or Best Buy and try to find something without UL. You can't, that is because they won't stock it without UL.
And it doesn't have to be UL, ETL is fine, Canadian CSA, etc all work. The point is that Amazon would require all AC products to have a third party safety certification.
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Amazon recently started requiring supplement sellers to get their products certified by an outside lab. Wanna take bets on how well that will actually work?
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This is a huge pet peeve of mine. I insist on UL/ETL/CSA marks on every mains-powered device I buy. Amazon makes it almost impossible to find them. Searching "UL" is pointless. "ETL" is about 30% actually-ETL, 70% lying.
Rule of thumb: any listing crowing about "FCC CE ROHS" certifications is just misleading people who don't understand the difference. If it DOES say UL/ETL/CSA in the description, I still have to go through the review photos to see if it's actually embossed on the back.
The average consum
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About time. I have long been complaining to Amazon about selling products without UL safety certification or worse - fake UL safety certification.
ETL is fine too. You're right though, I'm surprised how many electrical devices on Amazon have no safety certifications whatsoever. When my partner first got his Chevy Bolt about a year ago, the EVSE we got from Amazon (a Splitvolt, if you want to avoid them) turned out not to be certified. It didn't end up burning down the house or anything, but it did crap out after a few months of being outside. I suppose the water resistance rating was also a bit of a fib.
Amazon ultimately did give a refund, minus a
Now that we know that, we should act. (Score:2)
Deregulation of all industry standards based on fire retardancy should prove quite beneficial to our society. Who needs their kids sleeping in beds made of flame retardant materials? Who needs furniture which resists combustion? Who needs carpeting, home construction materials, or even clothing that resists burning at the blisteringly high temperatures which clearly only exist in the cherry of a burning cigarette?
And who needs a government that'll interfere in the simple execution of commerce and free e
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Or we could just not apply it to furniture, flooring, and clothing. The three areas most likely to cause issues for developing humans.
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... were invented because of heavy lobbying by the tobacco industry after cigarettes caused some headline making fires Many "fire retardant" chemicals are toxic and exposure to them causes more harm than the rare instance of fire
Heavy lobbying? The hell would they even need to do that fo..oh, wait don't tell me. Let me guess. Big Tobacco is also heavily invested in fire retardant chemical manufacturing too.
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Many "fire retardant" chemicals are toxic and exposure to them causes more harm than the rare instance of fire
Ironically, in order to ditch the "chemicals", some memory foam mattress manufacturers started using a fiberglass liner for fire resistance. That'd probably be fine if the fiberglass didn't start working its way out of the mattress, but it does. [youtube.com] Also, a few unfortunate people have accidentally opened their mattresses to wash the cover, and in the process created a rather difficult to clean mess from the fiberglass.
I've personally owned one of these abominations (bought it from Walmart, not Amazon though),
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Great, so now I can get silicosis from my mattress?
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About damn time (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon, like catalog sellers before them who handle the financial transactions, has a duty to make decisions about what appears in their catalog.
That they've chosen the automated or semi-automated approach to enrolling new items for listings from new sources is on them.
One of the worst "innovations" (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately with the current supreme Court I can almost guarantee this is just going to get struck down.
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We ever came up with is the idea that if you do it online on a computer it's a new legal framework and perfectly a-okay.
Easily fixable. Congress passes a law saying the FTC can regulate it. The supreme court rarely says that the government can't regulate something. It often says the executive branch can't regulate stuff the legislative branch didn't give it the power to regulate.
As it stands now, Congresses main goal to make money for themselves, or funnels money to their friends. If a law doesn't make themselves or their friends richer, it isn't going to be passed.
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the over turning of Chevron makes it a harder process.
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the over turning of Chevron makes it a harder process
No, that just means that agencies can't decide on their own that they have regulatory powers outside of what Congress granted them.
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We ever came up with is the idea that if you do it online on a computer it's a new legal framework and perfectly a-okay.
I dunno, it was pretty funny seeing someone eat shit going over a curb on a Bird scooter a few days ago, when my partner and I were downtown to see a concert.
Obviously because it's all done through an app, there's no need for consumer safety! /s
I wonder (Score:2)
I didn't read the article but I wonder if that's going to apply to eBay, Etsy, Alicadabra and all those other online sellers. Seems like it should.
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Amazon is just the middle man for those places now. You see a cheap item on Amazon and shipping takes two weeks? It's coming from Aliexpress with an Amazon surcharge.
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AliExpress sellers are in China, they don't care at all.
So are most of the Amazon sellers these days. Amazon has turned into Aliexpress with faster shipping (sometimes).
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Etsy and eBay, so far as I know, never take title ("sold") or delivery of the products sold through them, so they don't qualify. They also don't qualify as a "retailer" which has similar language
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A lot of the stuff from Amazon isn't actually ever 'owned' by Amazon either.
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Fulfilled by Amazon means it was in Amazon's warehouse and distributed by them.
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Good question. I think there may be a significant difference, however, because (to the best of my knowledge) Amazon handles the warehousing and shipping of this stuff and Ebay/Etsy doesn't, so Amazon has more ability to actually check the goods for compliance.
It's only logical (Score:2)
Every store with an Internet ordering system these days has a sprinkling of their own items you might find in a bricks & mortar location and then a flood of crap made in and shipped directly from China (and sometimes elsewhere).
None of that stuff is going through any QC process as far as I can tell, and in my opinion if a company decides to act as an importer, it's responsible for ensuring what is imported meets or exceeds local standards and that taxes and duties are handled.
If you can't do that... don
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The law is not written that way; it's written so you're only a distributor or a retailer if you take delivery or title of the item in question. The problem for Amazon is that for "Fulfilled by Amazon" stuff, they DO take delivery of the item in question. If you're just selling stuff that's shipped directly from someone else (e.g. a drop-shipping business), you're not covered under the law.
Pockets about to get lined (Score:2)
Deep pockets are sure to get lined in the coming months ensuring this is struck down at some point in the future.
Not a distributor? (Score:2)
"We're not a distributor! We merely let sellers store all their inventory in our warehouse, which we sell through our website, and then distribute to buyers via our private fleet of distribution vehicles"
It's should be no different from print (Score:2)
Humans for more than 200 years:
- Selling/delivering stuff from a brochure - you're liable
- Publishing classified ads - you're not
Humans in the last 30 years selling/delivering or publishing stuff on the internet:
- Oh! That's a completely different thing and absolutely not covered by law!
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"It's should be no different from print"
It is different from print, so it should be different.
"Publishing classified ads - you're not"
The whole point of Amazon marketplace is that it does not look like classified ads. On one end of the spectrum you have vendors with no sub-vendors, on the other end you have marketplaces Craigslist that don't sell anything themselves and only function as marketplaces. Very near the first group you have Amazon: Yes, they complete transactions for sub-vendors, but they also do
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Another point that I think should be significant:
Amazon tells sellers that the customers are Amazon's customers not the seller's customers. They go so far as to contractually require that sellers not directly contact customers.
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You seem to think I compared Amazon to classified ads. Just for clarification:
"Selling/delivering stuff from a brochure - you're liable"
Here is where I think Amazon lies, not classified ads. Which means that we don't disagree.
But wait! (Score:1)
How will I buy that rickety looking step stool rated for 500lbs now?