Amazon Failed to Inform Consumers and Consumers about Safety and Safety Concerns: A U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Study of an E-Commerce Giant
Amazon failed to adequately alert more than 300,000 customers to serious risks—including death and electrocution—that US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testing found with more than 400,000 products that third parties sold on its platform.
If the [products] remain in consumers’ possession, children will continue to wear sleepwear garments that could ignite and result in injury or death; consumers will unwittingly rely on defective [carbon monoxide] detectors that will never alert them to the presence of deadly carbon monoxide in their homes; and consumers will use the hair dryers they purchased, which lack immersion protection, in the bathroom near water, leaving them vulnerable to electrocution.
Normally a distributor would use the word “re call” in a subject line, but Amazon didn’t use that language. Instead, Amazon opted to use much less alarming subject lines that said, “Attention: Important safety notice about your past Amazon order” or “Important safety notice about your past Amazon order.”
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Amazon then left it up to customers to destroy products and explicitly discouraged them from making returns. Every affected customer of the e-commerce giant received a gift card without having to provide proof of destruction or give public notice or inform customers of actual danger, as is required by law.
The consumer product safety commission in the US said on Tuesday that retail giants like Walmart are “distributors” and that they have a responsibility to inform customers and the public.
A spokesperson for Amazon, where independent sellers account for more than 60% of the platform’s sales, said the company plans to appeal. The spokesman said that they were disappointed by the decision.
The Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program, also called Fulfillment by Amazon, allows third-party retailers to list products for sale on amazon.com and store them at Amazon fulfillment centers. Once an order is placed, Amazon processes customer payments, ships orders and serves as the point of contact for customer service issues.
