You want to be careful when shopping on Amazon. New reports suggest that Amazon is selling products that are unsafe, banned or mislabelled. Apparently, Amazon has been carrying over 4,000 of such items on the online store. Apparently, the store sells these products without carrying out adequate checks. These products include medications that lacked child safety warnings.

Amazon also faced accusations of having illegally imported prescription drugs, harmful toys, electronics with false safety ratings, among other things. The products also reportedly have the Amazon Choice Label.

This is despite Amazon saying it had explicitly banned about 157 of the items. The worst part is that it is hard for buyers to differentiate between items sold by Amazon directly from those by a third-party. Apparently, a small line of text that is almost invisible is the only thing that shows who the seller is.

Unsafe Amazon products

However, Amazon has some clauses that exonerate it. The online marketplace does not take any legal responsibility for unsafe products. If a buyer has an issue with a product, they would need to sort it out with the third-party seller. Amazon was forced to put this policy in place as its marketplace grew over the years. They were unable to do proper checks because of the huge volume of products they were selling.

Amazon has since responded to this report. They shared more information on how they approve third-party sellers. Amazon shared some of the tools they use to remove problematic products.

In their response, they said,

“We invest significant resources to protect our customers and have built robust programs designed to ensure products offered for sale in our store are safe and compliant.”

In all of this, it seems customers need to treat Amazon the same way they would any other online marketplace. For example, you probably need to put in as much investigation as you would on untrusted online marketplaces like Aliexpress.