Rose Mora-Laurie

So I purchased a brand name lip balm.

It was from road, which is Haley Bieber's beauty brand.

I bought it from Amazon from a third party seller and took that along with about 12 other products I purchased in a similar way to a cosmetic chemist.

I bought two tubes, I should clarify.

The other tube of road lip balm that I bought, I bought from the brand's own website.

And this chemist noticed the one that I'd purchased third party was sort of puffier, bloatier.

If you felt it, it felt like it had been inflated.

Yeah, yeah.

Nothing that I had noticed with my naked eye, but it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it.

So she was like, this could be indicative of basically there's bacteria growing inside the package.

Okay, so a third-party seller you can broadly define as an independent entity that offers usually quite a big smorgasbord, from what I've found, of new or used or sometimes refurbished items.

Another way that you might refer to them is as an unauthorized retailer.

And they are really more common than I thought.

Close to 100%, about 95% of all products listed on Walmart.com are listed by third-party sellers.

So it's a really big component of the online shopping that's out there.

They totally can.

And there was a law passed, and I believe 2022.

And one of the goals was to make third-party sales a little bit more transparent, a little less murky.

And so one of the things that has to happen now with a third-party listing is...

The sellers need to make an address, purportedly a business address, available.