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.
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.
Occasionally the knockoffs are better than the "real" thing.
I once had a fleet of HP servers that had storage parts constantly failing. HP techs couldn't do anything useful about it, they just kept replacing the parts with authentic HP replacements.
Then HP ran out of the parts, probably due to the failure rates. Out of desperation we bought some cheap knockoffs to keep things running until the HP parts came back into stock. Those cheap knockoffs worked perfectly and were reliable, zero issues. Much better than the HP parts. We ended up buying enough of those parts to replace all the HP parts.
Many times the expensive official parts are literally the cheap knockoffs with more steps. And sometimes high-quality knockoffs are competing with the low-quality branded versions.
There would be enormous value in being able to trace the true provenance and supply chain for everything you can buy. It would be extremely challenging due to the incentives to misrepresent this information.
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)
This one bit me recently when I bought a package of budget light fixtures (in Canada, from amazon.ca) and then my licensed electrician informed me that he wouldn't be able to install them as they didn't have a CSA or UL mark. (edit: originally I had mis-recalled and said CE here)
To their credit, Amazon did allow me to return them without penalty, and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use and even then you are risking your home's insurance coverage.
> 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
That is assuming the component is even available locally or from a responsible seller. I live in a small city (half a million people). It is often impossible to find parts locally even for popular products that were purchased locally. Then there are parts where it is impossible to find official replacements, either because it is outside of the product's support windows, or because the replacement parts were never available to start with.
This is a great first step but the review system needs to stop commingling too. I get a bad produce can be bad from all sellers but then you would see that when you try to buy from someone else.
The thing, though is, as you discovered with the water bottle, "items that are often counterfeit" is pretty much everything nowadays, not just SD cards.
Just last week I got a fake Tony Moly skin lotion from Amazon. So frustrating. It had 1200 positive reviews, which I read and looked good so I ordered. Only when I got it and the bottle different than my last order and the lotion smelled weird I went into the reviews and actually keyword searched "fake' did 18 new reviews come up talking about how it is not the actual branded product. Initially I searched in the "ask Rufus" AI bot field and got some gaslighting slop about how there are no fake products on Amazon as the response!
> Have gotten fake products twice
> First things first, I love this moisturizer. I’ve used this as my primary since the product line was released. I use a lot of skin care and the chok chok cream is the best. They used to have a gel version for summer and a thick version for winter. I loved those too.
> Problem: Twice now I have ordered and have gotten fakes. How do I know? Packaging not correct, texture of cream not correct and no correct date stamp on bottom. The container was actually strangely big next to my authentic version. You can see in the photo that the stamp on the container is not similar. The one on the left is the real deal and the one on the right is the fake I have gotten twice.
Let's be clear, the reason they are doing this is because by now the majority of listings on Amazon for any even remotely generic item are from made-up brands with a bunch of fake 5 star reviews. The commingling just happens at the source..
The time of retailers being 'honest' is over. Scamming, bargaining and the likes were a big part of business. Bargaining was normal before certain religious beliefs (like the quakers and calvinists, similar religious beliefs were found with catholics), The fact it was more efficient with the industrial revolution not to do so helped it.
When you lose both those factors it's bound to come up again. People don't 'really' believe anymore in the west, doesn't bother me so much besides the fact that nothing better really replaced it. Better operation research/management/computers now allow for the bargaining to be done 'efficiently'.
Nobody in the US cares about this anyway, who cares if Zuckerberg makes billions scamming people. People were brought into passivity by the same culture industry and the politicians gain from these guys, they're cash cows for the US. I don't see how things could get better.
In "non-secular times" people as a whole were far less mobile, so they grew up and built connections around the same people, and any connections to the wider world were very low-bandwidth if they existed at all. So they trusted the people they were near because they were around them constantly, and also tended to resist change.
I think you are conflating religious values with how things were when people mostly lived among the same people for most of their lives and didn't have modern communication methods that brought the whole world (or an appearance thereof which is what modern social media is) to their face.
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.
There was some overhead to commingling once it got extended to FBA, because in order to increase commingling they did attempt to track inventory provenance information even on commingled inventory.
My first job out of college in 2013 was working at Amazon on one of the teams that was implementing inventory commingling at the warehouse level, and my first big project was implementing this process into the receiving software, which is when inventory arrives at warehouses from vendor/seller trucks and employees scan everything to make database records that lead to paying for the goods. Note: in Amazon lingo "vendor" means a provider of goods that are legally purchased and owned by Amazon in the warehouse, while "sellers" are FBA sellers that maintain ownership of their goods and basically rent Amazon's warehouse services.
The big software undertaking was determining, at inventory receive time, whether we trusted the seller enough to allow their inventory to be commingled with others. If yes we would be "virtually track" the provenance: store in the database a record of the vendor, but if the item became commingled (according to UPC scans as it moves around the warehouse) with other sellers' inventory, blur the information so as to not falsely attribute provenance when it was no longer known. The whole project was based off the cost:benefit analysis that the efficiency and customer experience benefits outweighed the cost of not being able to attribute damage to the correct vendors (particularly the fact that you could ship a customer a product from the closest warehouse that it had it, instead of transshipping it from the warehouse that had the one owned by the person they bought it from).
In cases where sellers were not trusted enough to commingle there were alternate processes that were supposed to track their items individually; the most granular was "LPN" receive, license-plate-number, where every product got an individual UPC to distinguish it from all others. This was borrowed from Zappos, whose one warehouse in Vegas was initially the only one who used this process; I was told that was because the online shoe business heavily relied on letting customers do loads of returns and so it was implemented out of necessity early on. One of our projects was rolling LPN out to more of the North American network. But it was a lot more expensive (in the stickers, labor, data management, and picking inefficiency) so it was dispreferred whenever possible.
At the time the whole commingling initiative was regarded to be a big win for both Amazon and customers. It was fairly janky from the beginning, though, and I'm not at all surprised that sellers (and to a lesser extent vendors) began taking advantage of it as soon as they began to realize how it worked. There were a lot of initiatives around the time I left to provide better accountability in the whole process, but it is ultimately an arms race between Amazon and the merchants and my impression is that for many years Amazon was losing.
It is amusing that they're ending it. I never heard how things were going after I left, but had the impression externally that it was ending up being a disaster, and knowing how it works on the inside it's not a surprise. In hindsight trusting FBA sellers to not become essentially malevolent actors seems comically naive.
> 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.
I don't see why that required commingling. When I click on a Foo in my Amazon search results show me the Foo from whichever of A or B is close enough to meet the 2-day shipping guarantee. If I care which of A or B it actually comes from I can click the option to see other sellers and decide if giving up 2-day shipping is worth getting my preferred seller.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Of course. Businesses only change when you complain and vote with your money.
That’s not cynical, that’s the system working. And if you keep bringing your money, you are signaling it’s a little annoying but not it’s ultimately ok.
Or alternatively: they have reduced the expectations of "two day shipping" so much that they no longer need to try that hard (by commingling inventory) to actually meet them.
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.
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.
"Commingling" is such a great euphemism for fraudulent counterfeiting.
I can't count the number of times I've ordered a book from Amazon (1st party, Amazon as the seller) and received an obvious counterfeit, with fuzzy text and a poorly printed cover. On one occasion, the scanning/OCR process had missed most of one chapter, so there were just section headers, page numbers and blank pages.
Unfortunately publishers and manufacturers don't have a lot of leverage with Amazon. If there's pressure coming from somewhere, it must be coming from a regulatory body.
Amazon apparently credit full declared cost for the seller who delivered items to be comingled, and all responsibilities for the item are offloaded to whoever seller that would appear on customer invoices.
This means malicious sellers can deliver literal counterfeits to warehouses and externalize the consequences, down to angry 1-star reviews and disposal of returned counterfeit examples, to somebody else.
Good point. The screenshot says the new requirements are for inventory shipped to Amazon by sellers on or after March 31. So they're not cleaning up existing inventory, just changing the requirements for new stock. It'll probably take some time after that for older commingled inventory to all get sold off.
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'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.
If my grocery store held themselves out as a banana marketplace, carried boxes from a variety of different banana companies and told me to do my own research on which ones are good, sold me a box labeled Chiquita bananas that I couldn't open until I got home, and then after I purchased it, got home, and opened it, it was full of bananas from Shitty Rotten Banana Farms LLC with fake Chiquita stickers on them, that would be pretty crazy yeah.
I can't show up at the grocery store with a pick-up truck full of lettuce and say, "This is Dole lettuce, just put this on the Dole pile and give me the money".
Grocery stores have distribution trains from trusted vendors, with QC and regulatory oversight to defend them against the liability they are subject to if they sell a harmful product.
There is no way your grocery store has lettuce from two different vendors and isn’t labeling the difference.
You could wonder if the distributor is commingling. Milk production, probably. They’re taking responsibility for the quality of the final product, though.
Come on, even if that's true, it's obviously a very different situation.
For one thing, the grocery store is deciding what produce to stock and what suppliers to get it from. They can choose suppliers that have at least a minimum standard of quality. They don't just let anyone on the world slap a barcode on anything at all, claim it's a grapefruit, and put it into their stores.
For another, a large fraction of produce (though not all) is bought in person, and customers can see if it's obviously bad quality before buying it, unlike Amazon where all you have to go by is the product listing for the SKU.
Hands-on plus visual inspection of your avacado to assess quality is obviously different than knowing if your thunderbolt cable will work at all just by looking at the site so what are you even talking about?
> 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.
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.
Hopefully this will really end commingling. I received a pair of bicycle tires as a gift (they bought on Amazon instead of locally) and even though everything looked identical, one tire was somewhat stiffer and weighed 100g more. I wouldn't have really known (at least) one was counterfeit if both had been or i only got one.. really messed up for certain products. Hopefully the flea and tick or worm medicine for my pets is authentic (tractor supply or similar is too far)..
I always took the product rating as rating the particular item (regardless of where it was manufactured) and the seller rating as rating interactions regarding the sales/support/return process. I'm not sure what good having both ratings be the seller rating would be, or why one would look at the ratings of a single product to judge a seller's rep and vice versa.
The main problem I have with the way Amazon product ratings are structured is the grouping of products under a single rating. Particularly with electronics, e.g. the 32" variant of a monitor might as well be a completely different product from another manufacturer when compared to a 27" variant from the same product family - yet there can be a dozen variants under a single rating.
I cancelled my Amazon account years ago after receiving counterfeit items several times. I've since learned to live free from Amazon and it's quite nice. I won't be opening another account.
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.
Just as Youtube finally "cracked down" on piracy after riding it to massive market share, Amazon has done the same with counterfeit goods. Does this business model have a name?
Change My Mind: At this point, Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping and higher prices.
The product is going to be coming from a Chinese manufacturer anyways, the minimal level of quality control that used to be implied by buying from companies with an European presence is gone.
My experience on AliExpress is that there are few outright scams and more of a "buyer beware to the extreme" (e.g. fine print saying that a 20mm item has 5mm tolerance -> you're getting 15mm, part not saying original BRANDNAME -> you're getting a "compatible" part). They seem to have a "Brand+/Certified Original" program - any idea how trustworthy that is? Probably more than Amazon with commingling, but in absolute terms?
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've never really had issues of counterfeit products, but I often buy 2-3 of a thing (I hate thinking about re-ordering) and frequently, when I buy 2 of a given item, they come in separate deliveries on separate days. I wish there was a way to request that they come from the same distribution center, on the same day, in the same delivery.
I live in a slightly out of band area, so getting things from Amazon that are hard to buy elsewhere is great, but the "order 5 items and get 4 separate shipments" thing isn't ideal.
I have had a few issues with what I suspect were counterfeit clothes, either that or the brands I bought had lesser quality versions they sold on Amazon.
Amazon is quickly losing its value to me. Between price gouging, lower quality service, and the question of counterfeit goods, it just isn’t as good of a value prop.
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.
Yes, it is common knowledge, but you need to get that information from somewhere in the first place, and why not a LLM?
And sometimes, common knowledge may be wrong, so it doesn't hurt to use LLMs, search engines and other sources to confirm that. Maybe you could discover that Best Buy has a problem with just the product you want, or any other reason. It doesn't hurt to spend a couple of minutes to double check and avoid losing $70.
I've made that decision before without LLMs too. If I had been Googling to find possibly relevant material instead of using LLMs to find possibly relevant material, I probably would have bought from Amazon.
With Googling the "figure out what is going wrong" part of solving the problem is more decoupled from the "figure out where to buy this thing" part. The first part involves Googling, looking at a bunch of results, finding a lot are not relevant, trying to refine the search, and repeating probably many times. After that time consuming process when I have finally decided that I needed a new cable I'd probably just go to Amazon without thinking about it.
I always have a little doubt when buying from Amazon because of commingling, but usually not enough to look deeper into it unless the product is something with a high risk of it.
With the LLM instead of Google I upfront described to it a lot of details of my equipment, how I was using it, what symptoms I was seeing, what diagnostic steps I'd taken and the results of those, and why I believe certain things that could cause such problems would not be applicable in my case.
It then finds all the stuff I would have found by Googling, but because it also has way more information from what I told it at the start it can eliminate a whole bunch of the irrelevant results, so I'm starting out way ahead of where I would be after a first Google. A little back and forth and I know what I need to buy.
At that point I'm still at the LLM screen. Since it is right there tossing in a final question about buying from Amazon vs Best Buy is trivial.
I'm not a frequent LLM user. I have yet to pay for any LLM. (I did have a year of free Perplexity Pro that Xfinity gave to its customers a little over a year ago, but when that expired I did not subscribe.
(There's a funny story there--when it expired and they tried to convince me to subscribe, I asked Perplexity if a subscription would be worth it. It told me that considering my usage patterns the free plan was perfectly fine for me and I should stick with that).
A lot of people now are using LLMs instead of or before traditional Google-style searches when they want information. Not just techies or early adopters. The are or are quickly becoming mainstream.
If they are recommending not buying from Amazon that might be something Amazon would want to address.
And right there it is where you will get ads in LLM responses. Or opinion manipulation like we have seen with Cambridge Analytica. Next time ChatGPT might always recommend Amazon.
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.
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.
I have been burned multiple times receiving counterfeit SD cards and USB thumb drives from Amazon. I now only buy those locally at a reputable electronics store. This change by Amazon won’t bring me back, but it’s the right decision nonetheless.
Definitely good for customers. A bit more stressful for CPT chasers and PPQA. Missing PAD time and delayed shipment is a daily issue because of 0 inventory. I wonder how they gonna change workflows for stow and pick dpts.
It's ridiculous that they ever did this in the first place! Just assume that things sent to you from a random seller / middleman were good products in a fully automated system.
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 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.
From the article it says the change is implemented by telling brands they don’t need an amazon barcode if they have a product barcode, while resellers need an amazon barcode. What happens if resellers decide to just not add the amazon barcode and appear as brands?
Holy smokes that explains so much. Amazon’s review/feedback mechanism is completely worthless with commingled inventory. No wonder it seemed ineffective.
This is great. I do wonder if eventually we’ll see brand names return. I basically only order things that I don’t care about quality with now. It feels like Temu.
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 try to avoid Amazon, but I still don't know where to buy basic commodity items otherwise. Where would I buy a plunger, a decent set of coasters, a good pair of scissors, a soap holder? Target? Their products manage to be thrice the price and just as garbage as temu. Costco is the only retailer I trust anymore, but they don't sell everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've rarely experienced issues, Amazon has always been happy to correct any issues, and I strongly suspect prices are going to jump significantly. I can't find any other notes of skepticism and I'm heavily doubting as I write these words, but it's surprising to me how much scorn and disdain people have for commingling.
It's wild to me that everyone's happy product makers have full price control now.
Why now? Is it that commingling somehow boosted Amazon’s business but now they’re sort of a monopoly for online shopping so they can afford to not take these shortcuts that hurt consumers?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Occasionally the knockoffs are better than the "real" thing.
I once had a fleet of HP servers that had storage parts constantly failing. HP techs couldn't do anything useful about it, they just kept replacing the parts with authentic HP replacements.
Then HP ran out of the parts, probably due to the failure rates. Out of desperation we bought some cheap knockoffs to keep things running until the HP parts came back into stock. Those cheap knockoffs worked perfectly and were reliable, zero issues. Much better than the HP parts. We ended up buying enough of those parts to replace all the HP parts.
Many times the expensive official parts are literally the cheap knockoffs with more steps. And sometimes high-quality knockoffs are competing with the low-quality branded versions.
There would be enormous value in being able to trace the true provenance and supply chain for everything you can buy. It would be extremely challenging due to the incentives to misrepresent this information.
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)
> follow regulation
This one bit me recently when I bought a package of budget light fixtures (in Canada, from amazon.ca) and then my licensed electrician informed me that he wouldn't be able to install them as they didn't have a CSA or UL mark. (edit: originally I had mis-recalled and said CE here)
To their credit, Amazon did allow me to return them without penalty, and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use and even then you are risking your home's insurance coverage.
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> 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
That is assuming the component is even available locally or from a responsible seller. I live in a small city (half a million people). It is often impossible to find parts locally even for popular products that were purchased locally. Then there are parts where it is impossible to find official replacements, either because it is outside of the product's support windows, or because the replacement parts were never available to start with.
For some kinds of things, I don't have a local store that sells it. Maybe that's less of an issue if you live in big city, but not everyone does.
This is a great first step but the review system needs to stop commingling too. I get a bad produce can be bad from all sellers but then you would see that when you try to buy from someone else.
They also need to fix the problem of (good) reviews for one product getting transferred to another (lower quality) product.
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I have had similar issues.
I no longer buy anything over $50 from them, but I have had "Fulfilled by Amazon," from the sellers' [actual] sites, and haven't had a problem.
I don't trust the sellers' "stores" on Amazon, though. You will get things like gray market Chinese versions, from "official" stores.
Is this also a problem when buying and the seller is amazon.com or only affects third party sellers?
Same here, I'd buy from B&H instead.
The thing, though is, as you discovered with the water bottle, "items that are often counterfeit" is pretty much everything nowadays, not just SD cards.
Just last week I got a fake Tony Moly skin lotion from Amazon. So frustrating. It had 1200 positive reviews, which I read and looked good so I ordered. Only when I got it and the bottle different than my last order and the lotion smelled weird I went into the reviews and actually keyword searched "fake' did 18 new reviews come up talking about how it is not the actual branded product. Initially I searched in the "ask Rufus" AI bot field and got some gaslighting slop about how there are no fake products on Amazon as the response!
> Have gotten fake products twice > First things first, I love this moisturizer. I’ve used this as my primary since the product line was released. I use a lot of skin care and the chok chok cream is the best. They used to have a gel version for summer and a thick version for winter. I loved those too.
> Problem: Twice now I have ordered and have gotten fakes. How do I know? Packaging not correct, texture of cream not correct and no correct date stamp on bottom. The container was actually strangely big next to my authentic version. You can see in the photo that the stamp on the container is not similar. The one on the left is the real deal and the one on the right is the fake I have gotten twice.
Let's be clear, the reason they are doing this is because by now the majority of listings on Amazon for any even remotely generic item are from made-up brands with a bunch of fake 5 star reviews. The commingling just happens at the source..
The time of retailers being 'honest' is over. Scamming, bargaining and the likes were a big part of business. Bargaining was normal before certain religious beliefs (like the quakers and calvinists, similar religious beliefs were found with catholics), The fact it was more efficient with the industrial revolution not to do so helped it.
When you lose both those factors it's bound to come up again. People don't 'really' believe anymore in the west, doesn't bother me so much besides the fact that nothing better really replaced it. Better operation research/management/computers now allow for the bargaining to be done 'efficiently'.
Nobody in the US cares about this anyway, who cares if Zuckerberg makes billions scamming people. People were brought into passivity by the same culture industry and the politicians gain from these guys, they're cash cows for the US. I don't see how things could get better.
Not seeing the connection.
In "non-secular times" people as a whole were far less mobile, so they grew up and built connections around the same people, and any connections to the wider world were very low-bandwidth if they existed at all. So they trusted the people they were near because they were around them constantly, and also tended to resist change.
I think you are conflating religious values with how things were when people mostly lived among the same people for most of their lives and didn't have modern communication methods that brought the whole world (or an appearance thereof which is what modern social media is) to their face.
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that secularism is the cause of counterfeit goods on Amazon? Or am I reading you wrong?
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> The time of retailers being 'honest' is over.
First, I'm not sure it ever started. Second, this article is about moving towards honesty.
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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.
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There was some overhead to commingling once it got extended to FBA, because in order to increase commingling they did attempt to track inventory provenance information even on commingled inventory.
My first job out of college in 2013 was working at Amazon on one of the teams that was implementing inventory commingling at the warehouse level, and my first big project was implementing this process into the receiving software, which is when inventory arrives at warehouses from vendor/seller trucks and employees scan everything to make database records that lead to paying for the goods. Note: in Amazon lingo "vendor" means a provider of goods that are legally purchased and owned by Amazon in the warehouse, while "sellers" are FBA sellers that maintain ownership of their goods and basically rent Amazon's warehouse services.
The big software undertaking was determining, at inventory receive time, whether we trusted the seller enough to allow their inventory to be commingled with others. If yes we would be "virtually track" the provenance: store in the database a record of the vendor, but if the item became commingled (according to UPC scans as it moves around the warehouse) with other sellers' inventory, blur the information so as to not falsely attribute provenance when it was no longer known. The whole project was based off the cost:benefit analysis that the efficiency and customer experience benefits outweighed the cost of not being able to attribute damage to the correct vendors (particularly the fact that you could ship a customer a product from the closest warehouse that it had it, instead of transshipping it from the warehouse that had the one owned by the person they bought it from).
In cases where sellers were not trusted enough to commingle there were alternate processes that were supposed to track their items individually; the most granular was "LPN" receive, license-plate-number, where every product got an individual UPC to distinguish it from all others. This was borrowed from Zappos, whose one warehouse in Vegas was initially the only one who used this process; I was told that was because the online shoe business heavily relied on letting customers do loads of returns and so it was implemented out of necessity early on. One of our projects was rolling LPN out to more of the North American network. But it was a lot more expensive (in the stickers, labor, data management, and picking inefficiency) so it was dispreferred whenever possible.
At the time the whole commingling initiative was regarded to be a big win for both Amazon and customers. It was fairly janky from the beginning, though, and I'm not at all surprised that sellers (and to a lesser extent vendors) began taking advantage of it as soon as they began to realize how it worked. There were a lot of initiatives around the time I left to provide better accountability in the whole process, but it is ultimately an arms race between Amazon and the merchants and my impression is that for many years Amazon was losing.
It is amusing that they're ending it. I never heard how things were going after I left, but had the impression externally that it was ending up being a disaster, and knowing how it works on the inside it's not a surprise. In hindsight trusting FBA sellers to not become essentially malevolent actors seems comically naive.
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> 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.
I don't see why that required commingling. When I click on a Foo in my Amazon search results show me the Foo from whichever of A or B is close enough to meet the 2-day shipping guarantee. If I care which of A or B it actually comes from I can click the option to see other sellers and decide if giving up 2-day shipping is worth getting my preferred seller.
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...
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To the contrary. At least in my area, there are more items with 1-day shipping than ever before.
A few years ago, most stuff was 2-day. Now most stuff is 1-day. And it's constantly popping up options for same-day too.
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.
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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.
In my recent experience Prime is isn’t two day often enough for Amazon to be concerned about where they ship from.
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.
> 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.
Of course. Businesses only change when you complain and vote with your money.
That’s not cynical, that’s the system working. And if you keep bringing your money, you are signaling it’s a little annoying but not it’s ultimately ok.
Or alternatively: they have reduced the expectations of "two day shipping" so much that they no longer need to try that hard (by commingling inventory) to actually meet them.
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.
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.
"Commingling" is such a great euphemism for fraudulent counterfeiting.
I can't count the number of times I've ordered a book from Amazon (1st party, Amazon as the seller) and received an obvious counterfeit, with fuzzy text and a poorly printed cover. On one occasion, the scanning/OCR process had missed most of one chapter, so there were just section headers, page numbers and blank pages.
Unfortunately publishers and manufacturers don't have a lot of leverage with Amazon. If there's pressure coming from somewhere, it must be coming from a regulatory body.
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.
Amazon apparently credit full declared cost for the seller who delivered items to be comingled, and all responsibilities for the item are offloaded to whoever seller that would appear on customer invoices.
This means malicious sellers can deliver literal counterfeits to warehouses and externalize the consequences, down to angry 1-star reviews and disposal of returned counterfeit examples, to somebody else.
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> From April onwards
Very curious how they are going to clean up their commingled inventory in 2.5 months.
Or do they already know and it will take them that long to implement … whatever?
Good point. The screenshot says the new requirements are for inventory shipped to Amazon by sellers on or after March 31. So they're not cleaning up existing inventory, just changing the requirements for new stock. It'll probably take some time after that for older commingled inventory to all get sold off.
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
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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...
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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.
A common complaint coming from many Amazon sellers.
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.
I'd assume that Amazon's Sellers Contract includes a fair bit of "heads we win, tails you lose" language.
You go to the grocery store, and if it’s not Costco, your produce is co-mingled. Is that crazy?
If my grocery store held themselves out as a banana marketplace, carried boxes from a variety of different banana companies and told me to do my own research on which ones are good, sold me a box labeled Chiquita bananas that I couldn't open until I got home, and then after I purchased it, got home, and opened it, it was full of bananas from Shitty Rotten Banana Farms LLC with fake Chiquita stickers on them, that would be pretty crazy yeah.
I can't show up at the grocery store with a pick-up truck full of lettuce and say, "This is Dole lettuce, just put this on the Dole pile and give me the money".
Grocery stores have distribution trains from trusted vendors, with QC and regulatory oversight to defend them against the liability they are subject to if they sell a harmful product.
There is no way your grocery store has lettuce from two different vendors and isn’t labeling the difference.
You could wonder if the distributor is commingling. Milk production, probably. They’re taking responsibility for the quality of the final product, though.
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Come on, even if that's true, it's obviously a very different situation.
For one thing, the grocery store is deciding what produce to stock and what suppliers to get it from. They can choose suppliers that have at least a minimum standard of quality. They don't just let anyone on the world slap a barcode on anything at all, claim it's a grapefruit, and put it into their stores.
For another, a large fraction of produce (though not all) is bought in person, and customers can see if it's obviously bad quality before buying it, unlike Amazon where all you have to go by is the product listing for the SKU.
Hands-on plus visual inspection of your avacado to assess quality is obviously different than knowing if your thunderbolt cable will work at all just by looking at the site so what are you even talking about?
Why did nobody sue? Section 230?
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.
> 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.
Even then you’d buy the correct ISBN and receive an identical copy but clearly marked FOR SALE IN INDIA ONLY.
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 started buying my flash cards direct from the Sandisk web store. They are more expensive but at least they are genuine products.
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.
Hopefully this will really end commingling. I received a pair of bicycle tires as a gift (they bought on Amazon instead of locally) and even though everything looked identical, one tire was somewhat stiffer and weighed 100g more. I wouldn't have really known (at least) one was counterfeit if both had been or i only got one.. really messed up for certain products. Hopefully the flea and tick or worm medicine for my pets is authentic (tractor supply or similar is too far)..
If inventory was commingled, and you might not even get the item from the seller you picked, what was the point of the 5-star rating system?
Was it meant to rate the product, not the seller? If so, that’s probably not how most people understand it.
I always took the product rating as rating the particular item (regardless of where it was manufactured) and the seller rating as rating interactions regarding the sales/support/return process. I'm not sure what good having both ratings be the seller rating would be, or why one would look at the ratings of a single product to judge a seller's rep and vice versa.
The main problem I have with the way Amazon product ratings are structured is the grouping of products under a single rating. Particularly with electronics, e.g. the 32" variant of a monitor might as well be a completely different product from another manufacturer when compared to a 27" variant from the same product family - yet there can be a dozen variants under a single rating.
Yes, in Amazon's world, the star rating is for the product. Which is especially confusing on product pages with vastly different variants.
Thank you! I've gotten definitely returned inventor when I thought I was buying new from a vendor. The equipment was defective.
Also buying anything returned from Amazon is a crap shot because there is so much return fraud going on.
Official press release: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
Thank you! I can't understand posting Twitter links when there's an actual source of information!
> 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.)
I cancelled my Amazon account years ago after receiving counterfeit items several times. I've since learned to live free from Amazon and it's quite nice. I won't be opening another account.
Same. Have not bought anything on Amazon in years.
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.
Just as Youtube finally "cracked down" on piracy after riding it to massive market share, Amazon has done the same with counterfeit goods. Does this business model have a name?
smells a lot like a "fake it 'til you make it" variant
Change My Mind: At this point, Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping and higher prices.
The product is going to be coming from a Chinese manufacturer anyways, the minimal level of quality control that used to be implied by buying from companies with an European presence is gone.
My experience on AliExpress is that there are few outright scams and more of a "buyer beware to the extreme" (e.g. fine print saying that a 20mm item has 5mm tolerance -> you're getting 15mm, part not saying original BRANDNAME -> you're getting a "compatible" part). They seem to have a "Brand+/Certified Original" program - any idea how trustworthy that is? Probably more than Amazon with commingling, but in absolute terms?
And a much easier returns process.
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've never really had issues of counterfeit products, but I often buy 2-3 of a thing (I hate thinking about re-ordering) and frequently, when I buy 2 of a given item, they come in separate deliveries on separate days. I wish there was a way to request that they come from the same distribution center, on the same day, in the same delivery.
I live in a slightly out of band area, so getting things from Amazon that are hard to buy elsewhere is great, but the "order 5 items and get 4 separate shipments" thing isn't ideal.
> I wish there was a way to request that they come from the same distribution center, on the same day, in the same delivery.
For me, there usually is. The one package option on the checkout page.
I have had a few issues with what I suspect were counterfeit clothes, either that or the brands I bought had lesser quality versions they sold on Amazon.
Amazon is quickly losing its value to me. Between price gouging, lower quality service, and the question of counterfeit goods, it just isn’t as good of a value prop.
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.
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.
Yes, it is common knowledge, but you need to get that information from somewhere in the first place, and why not a LLM?
And sometimes, common knowledge may be wrong, so it doesn't hurt to use LLMs, search engines and other sources to confirm that. Maybe you could discover that Best Buy has a problem with just the product you want, or any other reason. It doesn't hurt to spend a couple of minutes to double check and avoid losing $70.
I've made that decision before without LLMs too. If I had been Googling to find possibly relevant material instead of using LLMs to find possibly relevant material, I probably would have bought from Amazon.
With Googling the "figure out what is going wrong" part of solving the problem is more decoupled from the "figure out where to buy this thing" part. The first part involves Googling, looking at a bunch of results, finding a lot are not relevant, trying to refine the search, and repeating probably many times. After that time consuming process when I have finally decided that I needed a new cable I'd probably just go to Amazon without thinking about it.
I always have a little doubt when buying from Amazon because of commingling, but usually not enough to look deeper into it unless the product is something with a high risk of it.
With the LLM instead of Google I upfront described to it a lot of details of my equipment, how I was using it, what symptoms I was seeing, what diagnostic steps I'd taken and the results of those, and why I believe certain things that could cause such problems would not be applicable in my case.
It then finds all the stuff I would have found by Googling, but because it also has way more information from what I told it at the start it can eliminate a whole bunch of the irrelevant results, so I'm starting out way ahead of where I would be after a first Google. A little back and forth and I know what I need to buy.
At that point I'm still at the LLM screen. Since it is right there tossing in a final question about buying from Amazon vs Best Buy is trivial.
I'm not a frequent LLM user. I have yet to pay for any LLM. (I did have a year of free Perplexity Pro that Xfinity gave to its customers a little over a year ago, but when that expired I did not subscribe.
(There's a funny story there--when it expired and they tried to convince me to subscribe, I asked Perplexity if a subscription would be worth it. It told me that considering my usage patterns the free plan was perfectly fine for me and I should stick with that).
A lot of people now are using LLMs instead of or before traditional Google-style searches when they want information. Not just techies or early adopters. The are or are quickly becoming mainstream.
If they are recommending not buying from Amazon that might be something Amazon would want to address.
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I don’t think you needed ChatGPT for any of that
And right there it is where you will get ads in LLM responses. Or opinion manipulation like we have seen with Cambridge Analytica. Next time ChatGPT might always recommend Amazon.
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.
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.
I have been burned multiple times receiving counterfeit SD cards and USB thumb drives from Amazon. I now only buy those locally at a reputable electronics store. This change by Amazon won’t bring me back, but it’s the right decision nonetheless.
Definitely good for customers. A bit more stressful for CPT chasers and PPQA. Missing PAD time and delayed shipment is a daily issue because of 0 inventory. I wonder how they gonna change workflows for stow and pick dpts.
It's ridiculous that they ever did this in the first place! Just assume that things sent to you from a random seller / middleman were good products in a fully automated system.
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.
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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.
From the article it says the change is implemented by telling brands they don’t need an amazon barcode if they have a product barcode, while resellers need an amazon barcode. What happens if resellers decide to just not add the amazon barcode and appear as brands?
In an ideal world, the reseller’s shipment would be rejected.
Holy smokes that explains so much. Amazon’s review/feedback mechanism is completely worthless with commingled inventory. No wonder it seemed ineffective.
I wonder what effect this will have on cost and delivery time. Will Amazon start telling us, “This is available sooner from seller XYZ”?
> meaning you could order from a good seller but get counterfeit products sent in by a shady one
why allow shady sellers in the first place?
This is great. I do wonder if eventually we’ll see brand names return. I basically only order things that I don’t care about quality with now. It feels like Temu.
> you could order from a good seller but get counterfeit products sent in by a shady one, and Amazon wouldn't even tell you
Why does the word 'monopoly' come to mind?
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.
What happened? Bezos ordered something and got a counterfeit?
Any word if this applies internationally? Looking forward to seeing commingling phased out in the UK as well
Their practice of comingling SKUs eroded so much trust I had over the years.
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
I can’t believe they didn’t end this sooner
About time they fix that mess
I try to avoid Amazon, but I still don't know where to buy basic commodity items otherwise. Where would I buy a plunger, a decent set of coasters, a good pair of scissors, a soap holder? Target? Their products manage to be thrice the price and just as garbage as temu. Costco is the only retailer I trust anymore, but they don't sell everything.
Wow, there'll be entire categories of product that it will be worth buying from Amazon again.
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.
Next up they need to deal with fake reviews, or 5* reviews bought with coupons or other compensation.
This is one of those things that's an amazing idea in a perfect world with no fraud or bad actors.
for those that have X k-lined
just change it to "xcancel" for mirror
* https://xcancel.com/ghhughes/status/2012824754319753456
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.
Now that they’ve effectively destroyed their competition through predatory pricing and services, the ensh*ttification can accelerate.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've rarely experienced issues, Amazon has always been happy to correct any issues, and I strongly suspect prices are going to jump significantly. I can't find any other notes of skepticism and I'm heavily doubting as I write these words, but it's surprising to me how much scorn and disdain people have for commingling.
It's wild to me that everyone's happy product makers have full price control now.
Why now? Is it that commingling somehow boosted Amazon’s business but now they’re sort of a monopoly for online shopping so they can afford to not take these shortcuts that hurt consumers?
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.
Well sure. I mean their reputation for being able to deliver the thing I thought I was buying, rather than some counterfeit crap.
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?
Capitalism is also correcting the problem though?
20 years of known fraud and then a "ok ok, but we decided that it was necessary to maximize our profits" is not a respectable timeline.
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Great, now I’ll have to find another source for used items as sold as new. Thanks a lot!
(/s)
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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.
I tried to buy a cellphone case from the mfg. rather than Amazon.
Placed the order on their website, using their payment processing.
Delivered in an Amazon box by Amazon.
It was cheaper on Amazon as well. So I guess the joke is on me.
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.
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Does this mean they won't have the option to buy from "Other sellers on Amazon"?