Family sues Amazon after hoverboard fire destroys $1M house

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/10/27/family-sues-amazon-after-hoverboard-fire-destroys-1m-house/92866460/

by eth0up • 10 years ago

58 84 10 years ago

usatoday.com

dev_throw• 10 years ago

Interesting news. The result of this verdict may set a precedent to further curtail online sales of electronic goods from questionable manufacturers (read relatively cheap).

The only question is whether this will lead to a more booming underground economy for folks who are more risk friendly.

Scoundreller• 10 years ago

It doesn't even need to go underground. Just purchase off Ebay with direct shipping from China.

markdown• 10 years ago

https://www.aliexpress.com/ and https://www.dx.com/ fit the bill better.

swozey4• 10 years ago

"We've spent months investigating it and to this day I don't know who manufactured this product, and it doesn't appear that Amazon does," Anderson said. He said Amazon charged and shipped the hoverboard.

The amount of fake product complaints I see in reviews on Amazon now is pretty incredible. They really need to figure something out with regard to controlling their inventory.

Uh, also, why is this article playing a 53 second jazzy soundtrack? Is this a new method of fighting off adblockers? You're gonna throw me nice jams instead of your video? I'm down.

www.gannett-cdn.com/360player/comscore/streamsense.5.1.1.160316.min.js:8 getClip() is deprecated. Use getPlaylist().getClip() instead.

dpflan• 10 years ago

Your browser is getting "jammed." Queue the Spaceballs scene!

SomewhatLikely• 10 years ago

http://fakespot.com/ can help in the fight against questionable products.

samstave2• 10 years ago

I watched a vid some time ago about "who exactly invented the hoverboard" - it was really interesting... I can't find it right now, but if I find it - ill post it.

hansjorg• 10 years ago

Planet Money on NPR did an episode on that:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episo...

strathmeyer• 10 years ago

What's funny is that if you are not a registered reseller of certain products, they product's manufacturer will flag your account as a 'copyright violation' claiming you don't have permission to sell their intellectual property (because you are selling it at less than the MSRP and hurting their bottom line by advertising one item at below their decided price,) and as a seller you have no choice but to comply or have your seller account suspended. The whole system seems automatic and though you reply to every message indicating there is no intellectual property violation as your products are genuine they are ignored. I have definitely bought a knock-off iPod from China on Amazon, too.

codedokode2• 10 years ago

Read with JS disabled, heard no music.

solvedit• 10 years ago

I sincerely hope they win.

Amazon is known to be a disgusting swampy wasteland of intentionally deceptive knockoff garbage. Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice, and they know it, and they do nothing about it.

But that's not the interesting part. Consumer public need assurance that what they're being sold, NOT what they're buying, is safe. The difference is perspective. Regardless of provenance, it should never be the buyer's responsibility to gamble correctly on product safety.

chx7• 10 years ago

You can buy a power strip with a two prong "figure 8" connector providing three grounded outlets. Try to sell that in a brick and mortar store, it would be closed, razed and the ground salted so they won't even try it next time.

brandonwamboldt• 10 years ago

Genuinely curious, can you expand on why that power strip is bad, and who exactly would shut down the brick and mortar store?

wlesieutre• 10 years ago

What's the difference between that and something like this? https://www.walmart.com/ip/Axis-45086-3-Prong-to-2-Prong-Ele...

Is it that plugging multiple 3-prong devices into one power strip would connect their grounds together, and if one has a short they all go hot?

scoot• 10 years ago

"Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice"

There isn't a "warehouse policy" per se. As a seller, you can choose "Stickerless commingled inventory" as an alternative to individually barcode labelling each item before you ship it to the Amazon warehouse (or paying Amazon a handsome premium to label them for you).

The risk as a seller is that your items are commingled with counterfeit equivalents, and that your seller reputation could be affected as a result.

CPLX2• 10 years ago

Amazon has completely lost control of their own marketplace for electronics and accessories, as I suspect nearly every HN reader has noticed.

Perhaps being held accountable for it will cause a change in policy. It's about time.

chx7• 10 years ago

We absolutely noticed. An Ethernet cable is being sold as 45000+ different products because it is uploaded as "Ethernet cable for HP X" "Ethernet cable for IBM Y" and so forth. It's incredible. I won't link the company but their name is like the "run command as root" command with the first vowel changed to be the same as the last. There are other cases, this is the most egregious I am aware of.

Nition• 10 years ago

I just looked them up. Searched ethernet in their product listing. Five pages of results all with the same image!

But actually that's nothing. Searching "cable" gives me 40 pages of results all with the same basic jug plug image.

spacehacker• 10 years ago

I've also been annoyed by Amazon lately. I am not sure it has gotten worse over the time, but I am sure that there is a lot of potential for improvement. The product sites are horribly cluttered and often even load slowly (on a 5 year old laptop). The home page is 6 MB in size! The product descriptions are also typically bad and it is often surprisingly difficult to find what you want (e.g. a laptop with specific specs). I always have the feeling there is some dark matter/inventory of things that no one considers, and hence no one writes reviews for, simply because the inventory is so poorly structured and the items have poor descriptions.

swozey4• 10 years ago

You missed the part where sellers misrepresent sizes on their products, so you expect to order a human sized rack shelf (usually due to misrepresentative pictures) but it's the size of your foot.

user59944614• 10 years ago

IMO. Amazon marketplace is a disaster.

What brought me to use Amazon a long time ago was that they were selling themselves. It was one of the first reputable seller on the internet, that soon sold all kind of stuff. It was much better than buying from a dozen of unknown weird sites (depending on the product) for which I didn't have an account.

Now it's mayhem. There is no guarantee who is selling the thing, where it's coming from or what is the product I'm buying BUT everything is advertised as AMAZON.com.

I might as well buy stuff on eBay. At least it's clear who's selling.

M_Grey• 10 years ago

Sue the pants off of them... maybe it will get Amazon to crack down on what they're willing to sell (or host the sale of) before it's a completely lost cause.

I used to really appreciate Amazon, but in the last couple of years it's become a bad joke.

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

I am finding it increasingly difficult to know how much to trust items to buy on Amazon.

It used to be fairly obvious which was a "third party seller" and which was Amazon (as in one company that sourced manufacturer products, bought them and shipped them). These days I basically click through to purchase and try to guess from the amount of P&P if they are Amazon, fulfilled by Amazon or some guy in his garage.

And why can't fulfilled by Amazon actually be on the product description !

This is another example of Internet enabling business models that law and society have not quite kept up with. Amazon probably don't have a strategy of confuse the shit out of the customer, but they can twist their business model so many times that's what has happened.

pja2• 10 years ago

And why can't fulfilled by Amazon actually be on the product description !

That’s weird. In the UK it absolutely is: you can tell on the product page whether you’re buying something sold by Amazon themselves or "fulfilled by Amazon". Items sold by Amazon have the text "Dispatched from and sold by Amazon" in the product description whereas an item from another seller will contain the text "Sold by <seller name> and Fulfilled by Amazon" or "Dispatched from and sold by <seller name>".

EU consumer regulation is notoriously stricter than in the US, so maybe it’s a legal requirement?

totalZero4• 10 years ago

It's the same here in the US. People just don't always know to look for "Ships from and sold by Amazon" under the item's initial description.

darklajid5• 10 years ago

I'd be glad to see Amazon (or anyone selling faulty products) pay for the damages.

I don't understand how 'destroyed a 1mil house' turns into 30mil. This "pay for the immaterial damage you've done" (assuming that the 1mil contains most of the furniture etc. and that the rest of their belongings don't come close to 29mil dollars) attitude is strange, hard to grasp here.

mancerayder2• 10 years ago

If you don't fully grasp the American legal system it does seem silly. Basically, the idea is that this falls in the civil court system. I.e. you're wronged, so you sue for damages. However, one of the main reasons why you can sue for 30M and not for the price of the loss is the concept of punitive damages. If Amazon loses 30 and not 1M,they're less likely to allow the wrong to happen so easily again.

In places like France, you can't sue for 30M, but you can maybe sue for what you lost. At the same time, the criminal laws are more likely to affect corporations via regulations and even legal action. Thus, the philosophy in the US is, less government regulation, more emphasis on non governmental interference in private entities working out their differences with the government only as impartial judge.

Hence it's very important for individual consumers that we be able to sue for these ridiculous sums. It's the only disincentive for the Amazons and other powerhouse corporations from getting away with such things as a fire caused by negligence, and their writing it off as a business expense. The expense needs to be high.

darklajid5• 10 years ago

Thanks a lot for the explanation. I think what I mostly don't get is

a) isn't "replace 1mil+ for a product that costs 100" (pulled that number from thin air, no clue what these things cost) already punitive? The replacement cost eats the profit for a HUGE number of sales already, no?

b) the arguments for the _specific_ number seem completely arbitrary and scaling in ways I cannot understand. It's not "our home was destroyed, pay to replace it and pay for another house on top, because we have to replace all the stuff inside and the experience was crazy". It's "our home was destroyed, pay us enough to buy 2 dozen of these homes with a lot of room to make every single one of these 24 homes look nice as well".

That scales in ways that are utterly alien to me. If you can somehow defend your request for 30mil, why not 50? 100? As soon as you enter 'emotional damage' (hard to quantify) or punitive damages (the more the better, right?) I fail to see how you come up with these numbers.

Then again, I'm not saying it's silly. It's just completely confusing for me and I DO feel better about the local system. It is an entirely different culture and I'm trying to point this out in a thread that so far is full of "Yeah, makes sense" posts. Internationally it might not be that one sided.

anindha2• 10 years ago

Its hard to imagine how traumatic almost dieing or almost having your kids die would be to the individual.

thehigherlife• 10 years ago

This doesn't surprise me at all, I've completely stopped shopping at Amazon since it is impossible to determine the quality of a lot of the goods on their site. It seems to take longer to research what is worth buying versus going to the store and finding something that looks like it is good quality.

sofaofthedamned4• 10 years ago

I've always thought Amazon were very exposed with their handling of the 'fulfilled by Amazon' stock.

AFAICT - with these items, a seller can send them in bulk to an Amazon warehouse and they'll all be put into the same box. So, a (for example) set of Sennheiser headphones sold by Amazon themselves can be in the same box as a fake set sold by a third-party seller, as long as the EAN is the same.

I've had this previously with Sennheiser headphones - sold by Amazon, on their site, and I got the fakes. I just didn't think about the idea of it including items where the fakes were unsafe.

totalZero4• 10 years ago

Wait, what? Do you have a source for this? I am bewildered by the thought that Amazon dumps third-party stock into their own inventory.

swozey4• 10 years ago

You can easily send products to Amazon to have them fulfill the sales with their shipping/warehouse network.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...

sofaofthedamned4• 10 years ago

Can't find the original source I found last year, but this is near enough http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2014/05/commingling-amazon-f...

anindha2• 10 years ago

How did you know they were fake? Could it have been someone returned fake headphones and kept the real ones?

sofaofthedamned4• 10 years ago

Could have been, but I know they were fake by comparing the ones I received from Amazon with those in a local store - packaging was suspect compared to these, as were the headphones themselves.

x0x02• 10 years ago

You know whats really amazing? I bought an aukey charger from amazon that ships with an ETL mark -- similar to UL, a claim that the product is safe and follows generally accepted practices -- that ETL didn't grant. ETL says on their website that it isn't a valid mark! I even told amazon and, while they did refund my money, they continue to sell it.

amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY/ref=oh_aui_sear...

etl warning mark is fake: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...

Unbelievable.

Don't buy anything that converts ac/dc, anything you eat, or any cosmetics from amazon.

totalZero4• 10 years ago

There should be some kind of legality issue with selling something that you have reason to believe is falsely marked with safety approvals, no?

x0x02• 10 years ago

I would certainly think so/wish so/assume so.

chx7• 10 years ago

On the follow-up mail you got, click "no" for the problem begin solved and call back.

You should mention that it's a safety issue and use this verbiage: "Could you pull the Andon cord for this ASIN?"

hakcermani• 10 years ago

While is tragic they had to rescue their kids from a burning house .. this is funny .. " It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon"

user59944614• 10 years ago

Well, the fire is proof that it was a genuine latest generation Samsung battery. /s

curiousgal• 10 years ago

Did they not have insurance? The law attempts to compensate someone for a loss, it doesn't allow someone to profit from losses.

cygned• 10 years ago

Suddenly music starts playing on that site. The internet is so broken.

randyrand• 10 years ago

is it possible to be a blind marketplace for products without liability? like ebay? but without the auction part?

if it is, I wonder how amazon can transition into having ebay levels of liability, and what that would entail.

ars3• 10 years ago

They bought the board on Nov 3, 2015.

Amazon banned Hoverboards from their site on Dec 12, 2015.

The family kept using the board despite this.

The house fire was on Jan 9, 2016.

Amazon announced full refunds on Jan 21, 2016.

The CPSC put out a warning on Jul 6, 2016.

The legal claim makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of Dec 12, 2015, and why the family kept using the board.

Amazon did not notify customers on Dec 12, 2015, only Jan 21, 2016. But this was all over the media - it was the lead story on the nightly news.

I get that this is pretty horrible for them, but I'm not convinced Amazon acted negligently here.

Amazon acted pretty quickly. How could they know ahead of time the boards would be dangerous? In between Dec 12 and Jan 21 it seemed they were trying to find good boards and get information - it doesn't seem like an excessive amount of time to do that.

DrScump2• 10 years ago

"Amazon did not notify customers on Dec 12, 2015, only Jan 21, 2016. But this was all over the media"

But would it have been that difficult to generate a warning email (if not also surface mail to the ship-to address) to every buyer of an affected product after the 12/12 ban, given that they had all needed data immediately handy?

ars3• 10 years ago

I don't disagree, but I'm not convinced it's worth $30 mil when at that time they were not sure it was necessary to warn people.

At that time it seemed like they felt they could find the good hoverboards among the bad (hence their program of asking for certification). Only later did they realize all of them were bad.

dogma1138• 10 years ago

Something being all over the media doesn't mean they knew about this.

Stop 10 random people on the street 5-8 won't know about the Samsung note exploding....

tajen• 10 years ago

instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon

Plot twist: It was the genuine Samsung product...

Family sues Amazon after hoverboard fire destroys $1M house

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