Comment by TazeTSchnitzel
5 years ago
Considering Amazon's comingling of the “same” item from multiple sellers with no way to distinguish them, it is the only link in the chain you could really hold accountable, and therefore it must be.
Though this case wasn't about that. I think it is clear however that Amazon is not just an eBay-like site. They choose for you who to buy from by default.
Each individual unit needs a chain of ownership history back to where it was produced; and presumably from there at least a date or serial or batch number, the thing a consumer from that company needs to identify correlated issues.
That history must include returns, refurbishments, etc.
If anyone has a problem with a product that arrived at a consumer's house the chain of handling and ownership should exist.
Is the product official?
Did a second party seller buy a product they believe is official and ship it?
Did someone buy something and then return it (and was it really the same something)?
If a bad batch of that product got shipped out, can Amazon recall it without manually sending a human to look in every bin that might have it (and what if there are 500 middle-men selling slightly cosmetically altered versions of the same cheap crap from across the sea)?
I guarantee this kills the Fulfilled-by-Amazon. Amazon works under the pretense of physical cache-as-a-service. If they have to start binning things based on sellers, they'll have to completely rearchitect their space management. They have to do this in a limited sense anyway with some products, but if it has to be done for everything, the space requirements would explode, as would picking time in the transition period to get a particular seller's product.
They can't just use APC/UPC anymore, because they'd have to accomodate the potential of sellers with a wide variety of products independently stored, even when not in use. This changes the FBA workability to only favor big actors, which admittedly, is exactly what people seem to expect.
Amazon works as well as it does because all the hoops everyone else has to jump through just haven't been held against them. It's no wonder they were an investor's darling.
Note: This is how I'd have started approaching building Amazon's logistics/FBA branch. Basically a library of physical goods. There's no way to know if they had started out that way whether they'd be in the position they are in now, but it is clear to me the direction many consumers want them to go.
FBA can still work, it's just that the illusion of having a choice of seller in an area wouldn't. Instead there would be a pool of sellers for any (claims to be) fungible item. It would also make it easier to get deceptive actors kicked from the system.