Question Regarding Spare Parts

Interesting that one of the larger local auto salvage yards transitioning to partial pic-a-part. Noticed only one G2 Prius, asked about the CHS overflow tank, $40, one of the guys even helped me remove bumper to get at it since the wheels were off the Prius. Finally got the tank removed and ended up with the pump as well. Going back to get the 3 way pump, inverter pump, ABS actuator, rubber halogen rubber covers to convert my HiD, HV battery fan etc etc. May as well have OEM for backup parts for cheap. They quoted $400 for the HV battery, I passed.

On the lookout for Gen4 batteries, saw a couple, a 2016 with 45K miles for $600US and a 2018 with 100K miles for $800US. Only problem is the 2016 has been sitting for 3 years.

Also another local full service salvage wanted $100 for the CHS tank, $75 for the pump.

 

Some references:

"Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on the company’s platform to develop competing products, a practice at odds with the company’s stated policies. The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary." Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products - WSJ

NEW DELHI, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations. But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company's largest growth markets. Special Report: Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show | Reuters

The 3 references below are from: Amazon Puts Its Own “Brands” First Above Better-Rated Products – The Markup

"Williams Sonoma settled a lawsuit that included the claim that Amazon was copying West Elm furniture and selling it under the Amazon house brand Rivet. Allbirds co-CEO Joey Zwillinger wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos when Amazon’s 206 Collective brand copied his company’s wool sneaker, urging Amazon to adopt Allbirds’ sustainability practices in addition to its design. It wasn’t like they took some styling cues from it. This was a knockoff,” CEO Peter Dering said in an interview."

"Gomez, founder of Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands, said he obsessively refined his photos and description, amassed reviews from happy customers, and paid Amazon $40,000 a month on advertising to boost sales, one of the elements Amazon tells sellers will increase search ranking. Then Amazon introduced a competitor from house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills. “They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.” An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors—even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews."

"In March, Amazon Basics started selling the Everyday Sling, a camera bag with a similar design, the same name but a much lower price than a product from Peak Design. Using public records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Amazon’s own statements, we identified more than 150 brands registered by or owned by Amazon. These include both brands with an obvious connection, such as Amazon Basics and Amazon Commercial, and those that are generally known to be owned by the company, including Kindle and Zappos. But they also include dozens more, such as Happy Belly, Daily Ritual, and Society New York, where the connection to the company is not obvious. Those are in addition to the estimated hundreds of third-party brands that are exclusive to the site."

 

You obviously aren't following all the litigation and investigation as to what Amazon is doing... The most egregious anti-trust crimes that Amazon is committing when it comes to making their own counterfeit copies of other sellers products is that they are accessing the sellers private data to manufacture their counterfeit products. This would be like Harbor Freight accessing all the sales data, all the customer complaints and all the marketing strategies of Daytona branded floor jacks. And beacuase Amazon Web Services (AWS) controls 1/3 of all the world's consumer vendor markets they unlawfully use this data to act as its own defacto government taxing and punishing by lowering search rank status any vendor that doesn't put Amazon profits ahead of their own business profits. This is why we created anti-trust laws in the first place and for you to use "perfectly legal" claims to what they're doing makes a stench so foul that I won't ever see the name @Georgina Rudkus again and not think of this.

 

That is the one reason that I would never sell on Amazon. My dad's friend learned his lesso when he filed and was granted two patents 20 or so years, ago. The ideas were stolen and used without compensation. Now, everything he makes and sells in not protected by patents or trademarks of any kind.

The law does not provide for fairness. It only provides for the parameters and algorithms written by those who write the law. Those are the politicians lobbied and influenced by the big business with the money, My dad and his friend were members

Patents and trademarks are worthless without the means and wherewithal to defend them. This happens often in the idustry with knock-offs made in china.

Now, what my dad makes and sells are moving targets in design and utility. As soon as someone makes an exact knock-off, they come out with a better superseding model made with an improved process that they keep as a trade secret.

They can't steal ideas that one ha

Walmart beats Amazon with large quantity purchases and sells their own knock-off item for less than Amazon.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hyper-Tough-2-Ton-Trolley-Jack-Red-Black-T82011W/33348135

A year ago, Walmart's Hyper Tough sold for $28.99. The same model in Amazon Basics sold for $34,99.

Today, the Amazon Basics jack is nowhere to be seen.

 

Well, that's not nice.

Still, competing products ≠ counterfeits, unless they are selling their version as the original brand that they used the data about.

Do you have any reference for them developing counterfeits?

 

Right, Chap. A generic or store brand is not a counterfeit and perfectly legal.

 

The only difference between traditional counterfeits and Amazon counterfeits is an office building full of well paid Amazon lawyers who's full time job is to figure out a way to counterfeit all the best selling products on their website and get away with it simply by changing the label to one they have trademark rights to. It's just a matter of time till this whole house of cards of egregious anti-trust violations collapses on the biggest counterfeit product manufacturing operation that's ever happened. #breakupbigtech

 

It depends on how you go about it... Amazon has cut so many corners in this criminal racket that their belief that it is just barely legal enough is going to fail them in the long run!

Monopolies are incredibly destructive to the advancement of society and a whole new raft of anti-trust laws will inevitably be enacted to patch all the holes that's sinking our formerly know as the "free market economy" right now!

 

That satement does not all hold true. It all depends on the particular situation. Some are bad, but no all.

Some projects are so big that they must be done with a regulated monopoly. The Transcontinental Rairoad and the telephone and telegraph systems coud not have been built with a regulated monopoly.

A public utility is another example. Most are state or co-op run monopolies. Remember what happened in Texas with a competitive electricity market a few yeras ago.

The current situation with baby formula is the result of the renegotiated USMCA trade agreement to buy American and exclude Canadian and Mexican imports. Only four manufacturers including Abbot negotiated themselves as allowed to manufacture and distribite formula in the US. The rest is current history.

 

Every example you just offered as to why it is a benefit to have a monopoly are all examples of why its harmful not beneficial.

It's like you're arguing that if you build a better widget and get all the exclusive rights to it, it's perfectly acceptable for a major corporation to wipe your business off the map simply because they have a more robust distribution system.

Furthermore this entire conversation started because of paranoia about counterfeit parts on Ebay, which is a two-bit minor player in the greater scheme of why for many centuries the basic rights of Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the individual depends on government preventing monopolies that profit off of denying us our basic rights.

But go ahead keep telling me about all the benefits of a "regulated monopoly" like the transcontinental railroad that gave away every other square mile of land from the midwest all the way to the Pacific ocean for nothing more than a total of $50K in bribes to members of congress, what we now call today "re-election campaign contributions."

 

No, the difference between counterfeit and not-counterfeit is whether the product is being sold falsely as somebody else's legitimate product. Counterfeiting is a specific crime, and that's what the crime is. You've said Amazon is committing it. Are they, or not?

 

Every action is like a "double edge sword." with unintended consequences. It cuts both ways.

Like Benjamin Franklin's "Poor" Richard Saunders said, "Nothing ventured; nothing gained."

Ancients did not stop growing grain, because some of it was spoiled by dot and some was pilfiltered by vermin.

Noy even two legged vermin has deterred farmers over the ages.

 

Why don't you go tell that hair splitting meaninglessness to the thousands of hard working entrepreneurs who had their entire business ruined when Amazon decided their sales numbers were so impressive that they made the exact same product and sold it for a way lower price as the #1 search option, which wasn't honestly earned for a counterfeited product that used to be the entrepreneur's number one success of their selling efforts.

Seriously, all your pro-corporate crimes dogma is incredibly harmful to the entire economy and no amount of being an apologist for why it's ok that those people had their businesses ruined because Amazon is too big to fail in legal proceedings.

Seriously, @ChapmanF if you ever confide in us about how your personal business was ruined by a hostile corporate attack on it I'll be the first to remind you that your unethical dogma dug your own grave and you need to accept it in the same way as thousands of Amazon sellers who "didn't get counterfeited" and had no choice but to accept lack of anti-trust laws and lay down into it to get buried too.

 

Fair, ethical, like it or not, that is the nature of business and competition.

My dad and his friend knew Robert Kerns, the inventor of the intermittant windshield wiper. Ford, GM and Chrysler used his patetent systems without paying licensing royalties. In 1994, I met Mr. Kerns when I was a child. It took him years of work to win his jawsuit.

How many here have heard of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television? David Sarnoff and RCA used and stole his patented ideals and used them without paying royalties.

 

The problem in Texas is the state government which decided the Texas grid did not have to be tied to other state or national grids. Louisiana and Arkansas went through the same Feb 2021 storm but did not have a week of grid failure because of their interstate grid arrangements.

The other 47 continental states operate and share two power grids, Texas has its own and does not follow federal rules on handling the grid. The "freak" ice storm of 2021 was repeated in 2022 but luckily was much shorter in duration.

 

It's not the nature of democracy and the bill of rights, it's the nature of corruption that hates equality and equal protection under the law... I run into this often in activism often where the activist has a blind spot for the corruption that tries to ruin their parents because deep down all of us have issues with the authority our parents had over us still bothers us and we want justice. I have similar issues. But right and wrong needs to go higher than that.

 

The Constitution, laws and ordinances annd rules can be likened to the Bible, the Quran, and New Years resolutions.

They are attempts at ideals tht individuals would like to achieve.

Like New Years resolutions, they don't last, and are nearly often broken.

Just look at the current political situation and the 2020 election and how many individuals still think it's OK to lie, if one can get away with it.

 

Seriously?

Right here on PriusChat, regularly, we have to go through the same "hair splitting meaninglessness" in the other direction, every time people hear us warning them off counterfeit car parts, or counterfeit OBD dongles, etc., and they think that means we're against all the hard-working entrepreneurs who have their own competing brands. So we have to explain, over and over, that we're not saying you shouldn't buy an Autolite or Champion spark plug if you want; just be careful about buying what you think is an NGK or Denso that really somebody else shoddily made and slapped a copied logo on.

The reason it's not hairsplitting is that there's a huge difference between what a competing product developer and a counterfeiter are trying to do.

The competing developer needs to come up with a product that works well enough, and can be made economically enough, to win reputation and goodwill and sales in the marketplace. If you buy one of these, you're probably getting something that's decent, even if it makes some different trade of quality or longevity for price than the big guys do. Nobody's trying to hem in your right as a consumer to buy whatever brand makes that tradeoff in the way you prefer.

The counterfeiter is only looking to make sales because people already trust the brand he is counterfeiting. He only needs to make a product that looks convincing enough for the buyer not to spot it's a fake, before installing it, after which he doesn't have to care if the electrodes of his spark plug fall off in the cylinder and destroy it, or his pressed-grass brake pads catch fire while stopping the car. And we do want you to think twice when buying, before using your money to support that business model.

So far, you've only provided links showing that Amazon is engaged in competing product development, using "data" from sellers in their marketplace, which they contractually agreed not to use for that purpose. So what Amazon is doing there is wrong, and it's wrong in several different ways, including breach of contract and abuse of monopoly power. And you wouldn't be making such a spectacle of yourself if you just stuck to the ways what they're doing is actually wrong. But the ways that it's wrong simply don't include counterfeiting; that is a different, specific crime that just isn't any of the wrong things they are doing.

From your eagerness to call me "pro-corporate crimes" ( ) it sounds as if you like to see yourself as against corporate crimes. So next you might decide whether you mostly want to have that feeling, and write some rants, and not accomplish very much, or you would like to have more successes in your opposition to corporate crime. The latter might require being more careful to correctly pin down which corporate crimes you are and aren't accusing a corporation of, so you can focus on the ones they're really involved in. That'll make you more likely to come across as reasonable to other people who care about corporate crimes too, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

As far as what Amazon is doing, it seems like the "data" they are mining aren't likely to include how the product is made; I don't think sellers are required to provide their recipes and blueprints to sign up. The "data" probably do include things like how well the product sells, and which customer demographics are buying it, all stuff Amazon's platform would be able to collect. And if the original seller has a range of models with different features, then Amazon's also getting data on which of those feature combinations are most popular. So that's a huge goldmine of, essentially, market-research information that Amazon is illicitly able to get at their sellers' expense, which gives them a big and unfair leg up on deciding which competing products they should spend time developing, and which features they should include and which consumers they should target. All of that is bad, especially because they contracted not to do it. But not everything that is bad is specifically "counterfeiting". Why not just focus on what they're really doing that's bad, and explaining that to people?

 

Sounds like buying and selling poor quality knockoffs is ok with several in this group.

 

Can you unpack that a little? It's hard for me to tell which "several" you might even mean, comparing that to what anyone here actually said.

In a different recent thread, I compared some rear brake rotors for a Gen 3. Toyota sells some, for $78 list ($56 at some dealers).

There are other outfits (Brake Parts Inc., with the Raybestos brand, Altrom, Federated, etc.) selling other choices of rotor. The differences are mainly in what kind of corrosion protection they do (or don't even) have, ranging from paints, zinc and aluminum sprays, phosphates and "graphite guard", E-coats, UV-cured polymers, and some have 120 hour or 300 hour salt spray resistance specs. (We don't really know where the Toyota ones stack up on salt spray duration, because Toyota doesn't say.) Some of them also publish different specs for out-of-the-box runout, some down to 0.002", some a couple thou higher. And these products all range in price from well under half the Toyota list price to 50% above it.

Which of these would you say people should be forbidden to buy and sell because they are "poor quality knockoffs", and which of them would you allow people to buy and sell because Americans are into markets and choices?

Rather than just snarkily putting some words in other people's mouths, why not just say where you draw your line and, even more interesting, how do you decide to draw it where you do?

There's also another, different kind of thing that can happen, where somebody who isn't Brake Parts Inc. (say) makes some rotors out of lousy offshore castings at a tenth the price, slaps Raybestos logos on them and sells them at Raybestos prices. That's actual counterfeiting, which I think everyone in this thread has agreed is bad.

But the more interesting questions are the ones like: is there anything besides counterfeiting that is also bad? should everything that's bad be called counterfeiting? is there anything about markets and consumer choice that is good? where do you draw your lines?