Is Amazon Turning Into a Flea Market for Lousy Chinese Goods?

Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) aggressive push to court Chinese merchants could be flooding its U.S. marketplace with low-quality goods, according to the Wall Street Journal. The report claims that between May and August, it found 10,870 items that "have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled, lacked federally required warnings, or are banned by federal regulators."

Based on Marketplace Pulse's estimates, as cited by the report, 38% of Amazon's 10,000 most-reviewed accounts were from China, up from 25% three years ago. The firm also claims that out of 1,934 merchants whose addresses could not be determined, 54% actually came from China.

Amazon claimed that the report's 38% figure was "a significant exaggeration" and that Marketplace's methodology was flawed. But is Amazon playing a dangerous game by opening its floodgates to Chinese sellers?

Source Fool.com