> As a result, if you venture into niche product spaces, beware that you're looking at much higher odds of a counterfeit.
Yes, very good point. Stating by views is tricky. What percentage of listings? Huge numbers of items there are in the long tail, that's one of the claimed advantages of amazon, availability of weird things, and it's great. Is it 90% of all listings are in the long tail? And presumably nearly all fakes are there since high profile fakes would be discovered quickly. If 1% of views are rare long tail items and all fakes are there and .1% of views are fakes, then perhaps around 10% of long tail items are fakes. Of course these numbers are speculative, but amazon could answer many questions by disclosing more stats than % of views.
Yes, very good point. Stating by views is tricky. What percentage of listings? Huge numbers of items there are in the long tail, that's one of the claimed advantages of amazon, availability of weird things, and it's great. Is it 90% of all listings are in the long tail? And presumably nearly all fakes are there since high profile fakes would be discovered quickly. If 1% of views are rare long tail items and all fakes are there and .1% of views are fakes, then perhaps around 10% of long tail items are fakes. Of course these numbers are speculative, but amazon could answer many questions by disclosing more stats than % of views.