Comment by michaelmrose
7 years ago
It's actually trivial. If someone pretends to be from foo corp you call foo corps official listed number and inquire. If someone is an individual you ask for an identity document like a drivers license and keep that on file and associate that with all sales. You track who sends you widgets. This is trivial to do with increasingly cheap rfid tags.
For reference Walmart individually tags 10pks of cheap socks so it can via a wireless reader count how many Large foobrand packs of socks it has because it can differentiate between pack 5435454545 5435454546.
You can even give the user the ability to choose between getting shipments slightly faster by allowing you to fulfill their order via the closest item and send the info about fulfilling vendor along with the order OR get it slightly slower via the chosen vendor.
Amazon is technically excellent in a lot of ways its hard to imagine this would actually be hard for them they just don't want to.
Sorry, I meant for the customer. I agree that Amazon could both better validate and indicate to the customers which vendor are the official manufacturer, as well as allow you to opt out of comingling and actually say you want the item to have been from that vendor (even if at an extra cost)
But if there were no marketplace such as Etsy, Amazon or Ebay, I think it would be harder for the customer to trust a random website. At least with these marketplaces, you can trust the payment channels, the security of the data you give them, that the support contact will be responsive, that the item will be delivered properly and at all, etc.