The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.
This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.
Worked with a guy that used this to his advantage. He sold CD's and DVD's through FBA. He would get them "new enough" looking via buffing them out (often making them unplayable), shrinkwrapping them, and then hope whomever got them wasn't him that got the commission for that sale and instead the person who bought "from him" got one of the actual new ones. He made a killing off of this since "used" inventory was incredibly cheap for a whole pallet of them.
Or also signal that they've learnt about exactly how many of us stopped using Amazon because we got tired of receiving counterfeit products because of the commingling...
I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.
This makes the same classic mistake about social media about social media that my boomer dad makes.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
> They have effectively traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
Also total warehouse capacity and warehouse-warehouse freight capacity. +X% inventory duplication (to achieve regional inventory) at Amazon-scale, along a long tail distribution of products, must be non-negligible.
It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
This is one of many exploitative habits of Amazon. Others include not ensuring products follow regulation, eg on hazardous substances (lead, etc), or on electrical safety. They also make your local {book, game, hobby, ...} shop go bankrupt.
You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller. Even if they are slower, less things on offer, etc. You probably already know some small local stores you would be sad to see shut down. Support them! (if you don't already)
Another counterfeit issue they have that will not be solved by this is the “REPLACEMENT PART FOR OEM FOOBAR-123” listings.
I’ve had quite a few repairs over the last few years for household appliances and pool pumps and such. It’s very common to find a listing for a heating element for a Samsung dryer or a Heyward filter diverter being listed with a misleading title and often further listing the manufacturer as, say, Samsung itself.
I got screwed after buying a dryer heating element for $80 recommended via a reputable YouTube DIY channel. Silly me neglected to check the comments and lo and behold 50%+ are complaints that this heating element dies after 6-8 weeks, just past the 30 day refund window…
This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.
Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.
In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.
The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.
A friend that used to be high up at Amazon fulfillment told me inventory commingling was the reason he was unwilling to buy anything from Amazon to put in or on his body. Huge indictment for the brand and clearly a bad long-term strategy in the age of fake internet everything.
This will hopefully be a huge improvement for the reduction of fraud on the platform. Hopefully, they give the ability to only buy from verified vendors. This is why only buy CPGs on Walmart.
That's great news. From April onwards buying from a reliable vendor with fulfillment by Amazon will mean you get the parts from that vendor, not some random parts from a random provider that claim to have the same SKU.
Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages
> Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages.
The cynical perspective is that they are facing a serious financial penalty either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products, or both.
That wouldn’t be cynical at all! It would mean that the system works, albeit slowly.
The best we can hope for is a world where Amazon faces real financial pressure to prevent counterfeits. Thus far I haven’t seen much evidence this was happening, but this is a welcome sign.
> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products
While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.
I suspect this one is death by 1000 cuts as Amazon has distribution facilities everywhere and will be subject to state and even local laws concerning warranty, product safety, and trademark. You can't contract your way out of it, and defective and counterfeit product can even carry criminal liability depending on jurisdiction. Good move Amazon.
This is amazing!! I get what I paid for. Gonna miss the massive amount of garbage that I got instead of the product I wanted to have. What time to be alive.
It's pretty optimistic. They certainly cannot "uncommingle" existing stock, so you may be able to buy new product with better source assurance, but for existing products...
Great news? It’s great news that nobody really knew that we were buying items but not receiving them from the person that we bought them from? It’s a logistical advantage to defraud customers? Because this is what Amazon was doing all along, defrauding customers. I never knew that I was receiving an item from someone who I didn’t purchase it from how is that even legal?
Amazon's assumption was that every box of "Apple AirPods 4" is the same, so it doesn't matter if you got the one sold directly from Apple or from some random reseller. They would just put them in the same bin, after all they are all the same product. Great for logistics because it doesn't matter if the closest fulfillment center has AirPods sold by Apple or "Office Partner Inc", they just ship you whatever is closest. Obviously this fails spectacularly if a seller ever lies about their product, but who would ever do such a thing
It also fails when someone receives the product, and then returns it (bonus points if it was ‘not what I ordered/fraud’) with the contents replaced with something bogus, if Amazon puts it back in stock.
I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).
I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.
That fact that they ever did this is kinda crazy. Did they not imagine that someone would try to sell counterfeit products? Commingling means that a seller could be hit by a refund and bad review for a product that was never theirs.
they dont care. it never stopped sales in a meaningful way and only punished the sellers. same way visa/mastercard dont care about identity fraud.. it's the seller's problem.
Because your livelihood depends on Amazon not kicking you off of the platform, and suing them will 100% lead to the situation where they kick you out of the platform.
This holiday season, I wouldn’t buy high priced high quality items from Amazon due to concerns about counterfeit. I probably still won’t even after they’ve made this change. DTC from quality producers now have decent websites, free shipping, and good customer service. If I’m going to buy a premium expensive product, why risk it.
> They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.
Exactly. From the modern perspective, it's a function purpose-built to abet counterfeiters.
However, look at their origins as a used book seller. When my sister went off to college, I got most of her books off Amazon for a third the price of the university bookstore, and they were all from third-party sellers promising they had a particular edition and printing of a given book. All the same ISBN regardless of where they came from. It made sense in that context, to consider all sources of a given item to be the same item.
However, at that time (2005), all the books shipped from their individual sellers, there was no opportunity for stock commingling. If one had turned up counterfeit, blame would've been trivial.
So I don't think "3rd-party sellers" is necessarily the cutoff point. I don't think they should've allowed multiple suppliers for the same ASIN to all have their stock *in Amazon warehouses* until individual supplier tracking was in place.
Just on a related note for anyone in college in this thread. Forgo the book fees or technology fees or whatever bullshit they wrap up in your tuition and go to dealoz.com. Buy the books you want to keep and rent the ones you don't. Save yourself.
Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.
I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?
I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.
The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.
If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.
It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.
I've made that decision before without the help of LLMs so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It feels vaguely insulting to our intelligence.
Military had a similar problem, so they created the stock number and manufacturer codes. Pretty much every part in stock is known by its manufacturer and part number combination.
Gopro subreddit daily has people posting issues with their camera complaining about the SD card. In all instances they've bought a "genuine" card on Amazon from the official seller, but probably received a fake one due to commingling.
The brand hit from this must be massive, with the amount of people now avoiding Amazon. But perhaps it won't matter with their size, most people won't have any other options anyways. For me, it was counterfeit dental stuff that made me quit buying from Amazon. A faulty SD card is annoying, stuff I put in my body is no-go.
This has been my one wish from Amazon as a consumer for years. I wonder what’s finally driving the decision? In the end the increased trust will be good for business, but one has to imagine there’ll be teething pains from the policy change.
Finally.
I remember buing "genuine" Samsung HDMI adapter and receiving counterfeit products all the time (technically inferior with bad shielding and failing quickly)
Might have been a good idea on paper, but reality proved otherwise. Actually I'm surprised it took them so long.
HDMI adapters are a dime a dozen. Pick some random crap and save yourself the money, as long as they reasonably work they'll "disappear" faster than a crate of beer...
You don't want to risk damaging an expensive phone/laptop/TV by plugging in the absolute cheapest unbranded cables/adaptors etc if there's a trustworthy brand available.
And with some electrical stuff, such as power strips and chargers, there might be safety issues/fire hazards too.
I never accepted it, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this specific issue long ago. Unfortunately I am not an Attorney General, so I can't bring criminal charges.
This information has been widely available for around a decade, if not longer, and is nothing new. It's been shared all over the internet by myself and countless people for years and years and years. I've even seen it show up on local news stations over the years.
Happy to see this. Maybe I'll consider buying toner cartridges again. Every time I've tried in the past, what has shown up has been unusable, sketchy junk. I now go to a neighborhood Staples where I can put actual eyes on the box.
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
--
Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
That's overdue, but I shall continue to make my purchases from European alternatives — Amazon donated millions of dollars to Trump, so share some responsibility for his actions around Greenland, tariffs and so on.
This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”
You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.
To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.
But not same-day. But even that's a bit iffy - I made a purchase from Amazon recently where they promised same-day delivery, on a Sunday no less! But it didn't actually arrive until Wednesday.
Why now, and not 15 years ago when their reputation started tanking for this reason? And when are they going to ban the re-use of listings for unrelated products?
Agreed. Doing something about this should have been well over a decade ago, not now. Considering how long it took, this isn't going to bring me back from ordering from Amazon.
Their reputation actually dropped for many more reasons.
Prime was one reason - I always hated it and I felt that when Prime came out, the general service elsewhere declined. I could not accept to be a second class citizen now. Either I'd have to also use Prime - or stop using Amazon. I opted for the latter.
But there were also more complaints that people made online, which was different before Prime. The opinion of others does influence me a little bit; I try to not let it influence me, but truthfully when there are many negative comments, one becomes suspicious too. Perhaps one reason Google disabled downvotes on videos, as this was a quality control step by some users, which helped a bit; I would not waste my time on horrible videos. And for the most part, users voting was working ok-ish.
This is a big deal. There are lots of goods I wont even think about buying from amazon because counterfeit goods are common and unpunished and untraceable by amazon.
The very fact that Amazon was letting people receive items from someone who they did not purchase the item from is incredible and frightening and maddening news to me.
Is this really what we want capitalism to look like?
The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.
This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.
Worked with a guy that used this to his advantage. He sold CD's and DVD's through FBA. He would get them "new enough" looking via buffing them out (often making them unplayable), shrinkwrapping them, and then hope whomever got them wasn't him that got the commission for that sale and instead the person who bought "from him" got one of the actual new ones. He made a killing off of this since "used" inventory was incredibly cheap for a whole pallet of them.
By "used this to his advantage", it sounds like he was just a fraudster?
Or a signal that Amazon has reached the required level of incumbency that it doesn't need to worry about speed any more.
Or also signal that they've learnt about exactly how many of us stopped using Amazon because we got tired of receiving counterfeit products because of the commingling...
I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.
This makes the same classic mistake about social media about social media that my boomer dad makes.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
Here in Germany, Prime delivery increased from one day to two days. Makes it also easier.
> They have effectively traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
Also total warehouse capacity and warehouse-warehouse freight capacity. +X% inventory duplication (to achieve regional inventory) at Amazon-scale, along a long tail distribution of products, must be non-negligible.
It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
This is one of many exploitative habits of Amazon. Others include not ensuring products follow regulation, eg on hazardous substances (lead, etc), or on electrical safety. They also make your local {book, game, hobby, ...} shop go bankrupt.
You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller. Even if they are slower, less things on offer, etc. You probably already know some small local stores you would be sad to see shut down. Support them! (if you don't already)
Another counterfeit issue they have that will not be solved by this is the “REPLACEMENT PART FOR OEM FOOBAR-123” listings.
I’ve had quite a few repairs over the last few years for household appliances and pool pumps and such. It’s very common to find a listing for a heating element for a Samsung dryer or a Heyward filter diverter being listed with a misleading title and often further listing the manufacturer as, say, Samsung itself.
I got screwed after buying a dryer heating element for $80 recommended via a reputable YouTube DIY channel. Silly me neglected to check the comments and lo and behold 50%+ are complaints that this heating element dies after 6-8 weeks, just past the 30 day refund window…
This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.
Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.
In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.
The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.
A friend that used to be high up at Amazon fulfillment told me inventory commingling was the reason he was unwilling to buy anything from Amazon to put in or on his body. Huge indictment for the brand and clearly a bad long-term strategy in the age of fake internet everything.
This will hopefully be a huge improvement for the reduction of fraud on the platform. Hopefully, they give the ability to only buy from verified vendors. This is why only buy CPGs on Walmart.
That's great news. From April onwards buying from a reliable vendor with fulfillment by Amazon will mean you get the parts from that vendor, not some random parts from a random provider that claim to have the same SKU.
Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages
> Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages.
The cynical perspective is that they are facing a serious financial penalty either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products, or both.
That wouldn’t be cynical at all! It would mean that the system works, albeit slowly.
The best we can hope for is a world where Amazon faces real financial pressure to prevent counterfeits. Thus far I haven’t seen much evidence this was happening, but this is a welcome sign.
> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products
While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.
I suspect this one is death by 1000 cuts as Amazon has distribution facilities everywhere and will be subject to state and even local laws concerning warranty, product safety, and trademark. You can't contract your way out of it, and defective and counterfeit product can even carry criminal liability depending on jurisdiction. Good move Amazon.
I bought an LG monitor, by part number, three times and always received the similar looking but half the price counterpart.
We only realized the issue after using it for a few days and needing to use an advance feature.
So, it’s not just one sellers product mingled with another, but also sellers combining similar looking products together as well.
[delayed]
This is amazing!! I get what I paid for. Gonna miss the massive amount of garbage that I got instead of the product I wanted to have. What time to be alive.
It's pretty optimistic. They certainly cannot "uncommingle" existing stock, so you may be able to buy new product with better source assurance, but for existing products...
Great news? It’s great news that nobody really knew that we were buying items but not receiving them from the person that we bought them from? It’s a logistical advantage to defraud customers? Because this is what Amazon was doing all along, defrauding customers. I never knew that I was receiving an item from someone who I didn’t purchase it from how is that even legal?
Amazon's assumption was that every box of "Apple AirPods 4" is the same, so it doesn't matter if you got the one sold directly from Apple or from some random reseller. They would just put them in the same bin, after all they are all the same product. Great for logistics because it doesn't matter if the closest fulfillment center has AirPods sold by Apple or "Office Partner Inc", they just ship you whatever is closest. Obviously this fails spectacularly if a seller ever lies about their product, but who would ever do such a thing
It also fails when someone receives the product, and then returns it (bonus points if it was ‘not what I ordered/fraud’) with the contents replaced with something bogus, if Amazon puts it back in stock.
I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).
I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...
That fact that they ever did this is kinda crazy. Did they not imagine that someone would try to sell counterfeit products? Commingling means that a seller could be hit by a refund and bad review for a product that was never theirs.
they dont care. it never stopped sales in a meaningful way and only punished the sellers. same way visa/mastercard dont care about identity fraud.. it's the seller's problem.
Sounds like sellers should sue Amazon for this. I wonder why I never heard of such a lawsuit
Because your livelihood depends on Amazon not kicking you off of the platform, and suing them will 100% lead to the situation where they kick you out of the platform.
A common complaint coming from many Amazon sellers.
This holiday season, I wouldn’t buy high priced high quality items from Amazon due to concerns about counterfeit. I probably still won’t even after they’ve made this change. DTC from quality producers now have decent websites, free shipping, and good customer service. If I’m going to buy a premium expensive product, why risk it.
It's about time! They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.
I've been saying for years, Sandisk makes the best Flash cards but never buy them from Amazon, just for this reason. Too many counterfeits out there.
I started buying my flash cards direct from the Sandisk web store. They are more expensive but at least they are genuine products.
> They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.
Exactly. From the modern perspective, it's a function purpose-built to abet counterfeiters.
However, look at their origins as a used book seller. When my sister went off to college, I got most of her books off Amazon for a third the price of the university bookstore, and they were all from third-party sellers promising they had a particular edition and printing of a given book. All the same ISBN regardless of where they came from. It made sense in that context, to consider all sources of a given item to be the same item.
However, at that time (2005), all the books shipped from their individual sellers, there was no opportunity for stock commingling. If one had turned up counterfeit, blame would've been trivial.
So I don't think "3rd-party sellers" is necessarily the cutoff point. I don't think they should've allowed multiple suppliers for the same ASIN to all have their stock *in Amazon warehouses* until individual supplier tracking was in place.
Just on a related note for anyone in college in this thread. Forgo the book fees or technology fees or whatever bullshit they wrap up in your tuition and go to dealoz.com. Buy the books you want to keep and rent the ones you don't. Save yourself.
Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.
I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?
I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.
The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.
If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.
It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.
I bought from Best Buy.
I've made that decision before without the help of LLMs so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It feels vaguely insulting to our intelligence.
I don’t think you needed ChatGPT for any of that
> This change is important for safely buying genuine products, such as 3M respirators.
Personally funny example to me, because, at our anti-counterfeiting tech startup, 3M respirators was the prospective customer I championed.
(Right before Covid hit, we'd launched our first MVP factory deployment, and there was soon news of counterfeit N95 masks. Which is just evil.)
Military had a similar problem, so they created the stock number and manufacturer codes. Pretty much every part in stock is known by its manufacturer and part number combination.
Official press release: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
Gopro subreddit daily has people posting issues with their camera complaining about the SD card. In all instances they've bought a "genuine" card on Amazon from the official seller, but probably received a fake one due to commingling.
The brand hit from this must be massive, with the amount of people now avoiding Amazon. But perhaps it won't matter with their size, most people won't have any other options anyways. For me, it was counterfeit dental stuff that made me quit buying from Amazon. A faulty SD card is annoying, stuff I put in my body is no-go.
This has been my one wish from Amazon as a consumer for years. I wonder what’s finally driving the decision? In the end the increased trust will be good for business, but one has to imagine there’ll be teething pains from the policy change.
I wonder how they are planning on de-mingling existing products that don't have the required Amazon barcodes that should or vice versa.
Maybe that's why it will take 2 months, they need to clear out the old inventory so they don't have a de-mingling problem.
Probably just sell off their existing stock.
Finally. I remember buing "genuine" Samsung HDMI adapter and receiving counterfeit products all the time (technically inferior with bad shielding and failing quickly) Might have been a good idea on paper, but reality proved otherwise. Actually I'm surprised it took them so long.
HDMI adapters are a dime a dozen. Pick some random crap and save yourself the money, as long as they reasonably work they'll "disappear" faster than a crate of beer...
You don't want to risk damaging an expensive phone/laptop/TV by plugging in the absolute cheapest unbranded cables/adaptors etc if there's a trustworthy brand available.
And with some electrical stuff, such as power strips and chargers, there might be safety issues/fire hazards too.
At least 10 years too late
And it should’ve been a criminal offense. Or fraud at least. But for some reason, we all accepted this?
I never accepted it, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this specific issue long ago. Unfortunately I am not an Attorney General, so I can't bring criminal charges.
We shouldn’t need to have smart consumers, we should have laws that protect the dumb consumers like me.
You may not be Attorney General, but you do have a computer access and the Internet, where you could have shared this more publicly.
This information has been widely available for around a decade, if not longer, and is nothing new. It's been shared all over the internet by myself and countless people for years and years and years. I've even seen it show up on local news stations over the years.
Happy to see this. Maybe I'll consider buying toner cartridges again. Every time I've tried in the past, what has shown up has been unusable, sketchy junk. I now go to a neighborhood Staples where I can put actual eyes on the box.
I wonder what effect this will have on cost and delivery time. Will Amazon start telling us, “This is available sooner from seller XYZ”?
Does this mean they won't have the option to buy from "Other sellers on Amazon"?
Now that they’ve effectively destroyed their competition through predatory pricing and services, the ensh*ttification can accelerate.
Too late, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this. Now my shopping habits have changed.
Stuffed to the gills now with random 5 letter "brands" (SUNEG, TRSTF, KALINE) selling the same Chinesium products.
Prior to that it was stuffed with devices labeled only as "Apple iPhone Charger" so I'll take the million jibberish brands
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
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Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
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This org's page hits all the same points:
Kenya Coffee, Quality Decline & the Systemic Truth Behind the Cup https://kenyacoffeeschool.golearn.co.ke/kenya-coffee-quality...
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
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u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!
This is the original source, linked on HN a couple months ago: https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-declin...
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
If there were ratings, presumably the incentive would be to have your beans rated as higher quality.
Thus doesn’t feel particularly evil to me - though it treats beans as fungible.
Something similar is done with milk sales from individual farms in England.
About time they fix that mess
for those that have X k-lined
just change it to "xcancel" for mirror
* https://xcancel.com/ghhughes/status/2012824754319753456
That's overdue, but I shall continue to make my purchases from European alternatives — Amazon donated millions of dollars to Trump, so share some responsibility for his actions around Greenland, tariffs and so on.
Why wait so long? Do it now…
This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”
You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.
To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.
I don't like the market power of Amazon.
Nobody stops you from buying products directly from the company's website. You don't have to buy everything from Amazon.
I browse on Amazon, and then go to the company's website directly for the purchase. USPS, UPS, and FedEx will still deliver it just the same.
But not same-day. But even that's a bit iffy - I made a purchase from Amazon recently where they promised same-day delivery, on a Sunday no less! But it didn't actually arrive until Wednesday.
Why now, and not 15 years ago when their reputation started tanking for this reason? And when are they going to ban the re-use of listings for unrelated products?
Agreed. Doing something about this should have been well over a decade ago, not now. Considering how long it took, this isn't going to bring me back from ordering from Amazon.
Their reputation actually dropped for many more reasons.
Prime was one reason - I always hated it and I felt that when Prime came out, the general service elsewhere declined. I could not accept to be a second class citizen now. Either I'd have to also use Prime - or stop using Amazon. I opted for the latter.
But there were also more complaints that people made online, which was different before Prime. The opinion of others does influence me a little bit; I try to not let it influence me, but truthfully when there are many negative comments, one becomes suspicious too. Perhaps one reason Google disabled downvotes on videos, as this was a quality control step by some users, which helped a bit; I would not waste my time on horrible videos. And for the most part, users voting was working ok-ish.
This is a big deal. There are lots of goods I wont even think about buying from amazon because counterfeit goods are common and unpunished and untraceable by amazon.
The very fact that Amazon was letting people receive items from someone who they did not purchase the item from is incredible and frightening and maddening news to me.
Is this really what we want capitalism to look like?