What Apple gets from selling its stuff on Amazon

For one thing, it gets Amazon to stop selling counterfeit Apple stuff.

From Hilary Milnes’ hot take, What Apple’s partnership with Amazon means, posted Friday on DigiDay:

Already, Amazon is a certified seller of refurbished Apple products, meaning customers can buy used Macs and iPhones on the site. But Amazon shoppers up until now had to wade through a sea of third-party sellers on Amazon in the hopes of finding authentic, new Apple products, and counterfeits and knockoffs are rampant.

Now, Apple will get in front of Amazon’s loyal customer base — including its more than 100 million Prime members — while Amazon gets first-party access to Apple’s high-end, covetable electronics, an area it’s already saturated in more accessible categories like speakers, cables, e-readers and headphones.

“Apple’s killing two birds with one stone. It struggles to control third-party vendors, so this will help rein that in. And they’re better positioning themselves from a global consumer standpoint,” said Oweise Khazi, associate director at Gartner L2. “For Amazon, it helps extend its reach into pricier, more sought-after electronics.” The biggest loser in this deal is probably Best Buy, Khazi added, which can no longer say, ‘We sell the Apple products that Amazon doesn’t.’

The backstory: Amazon got busted two years ago for trafficking in bogus Apple products. From the lawsuit:

Over the last nine months, Apple, as part of its ongoing brand protection efforts, has purchased well over 100 iPhone devices, Apple power products, and Lightning cables sold as genuine by sellers on Amazon.com and delivered through Amazon’s ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ program. Apple’s internal examination and testing for these products revealed almost 90 percent of these products are counterfeit.

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