Jon Fawcett wanted to build a cellphone cable that wouldn't fray. So he developed a charging cord wrapped in stainless steel sturdy enough to withstand an electric chainsaw.
It was a niche product that turned Fuse Chicken, Fawcett's company of half-a-dozen employees, into a quick success. Customers raved about Fawcett's durable designs - until he started selling them on Amazon. Fawcett's customer reviews plummeted without warning. In came a deluge of one-star pans.
Mixed in with Amazon's inventory of authentic merchandise were crude copycats. Some looked like the real thing, but didn't include Fuse Chicken's name. Others bore the name, but weren't made by his company, Fawcett said in an interview with The Times in his Ohio office.
Rather than come to Fawcett's defense, Amazon plunged the small-business owner into a Kafkaesque back-and-forth that has become something of a rite of passage for those who fall victim to intellectual property infringement on the world's biggest e-commerce site.
Pleas to audit Amazon's inventory and remove unfair reviews were dismissed. Attempts to garner help from Amazon to learn more about the origins of the knockoff goods went nowhere.
(excerpt: more at
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/extra-inventory-more-sales-lower-prices-how-counterfeits-benefit-amazon/ar-BBNGRqk?ocid=spartandhp )
