Holiday shopping in 2019: can Amazon be trusted?

Why online shoppers must be weary of rock bottom prices

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Americans record breaking amounts of money online this month

Holiday shopping has long been a boon for brick & mortar retailers in the United States. In recent years, however, online shopping has increasingly taken its share of holiday shopping dollars. In fact, in the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, online mega-retailer Amazon.com posted over $72 billion in revenue. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder Amazon puts so much time and effort into advertising its holiday shopping deals.

What many unsuspecting shoppers don’t yet understand, however, is that many of the holiday gifts they purchase on Amazon’s website are not sold by Amazon. Rather, they are sold by Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of third-party retailers. Sadly, Amazon does very little to police the products sold by these retailers and, oftentimes, those products turn out to be dangerous.

In fact, a 2019 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that over 4,000 products offered for sale on Amazon had been deemed unsafe by U.S. federal agencies. Once you understand the true practices behind the third-party retailer program, these numbers become less shocking.