It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
This is one of many exploitative habits of Amazon. Others include not ensuring products follow regulation, eg on hazardous substances (lead, etc), or on electrical safety. They also make your local {book, game, hobby, ...} shop go bankrupt.
You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller. Even if they are slower, less things on offer, etc. You probably already know some small local stores you would be sad to see shut down. Support them! (if you don't already)
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.
> and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use
Actually make sure with a incognito window that this review is actually visible. I've noticed that some reviews of mine have been "shadow-banned" and while it looks like they're still there when I'm logged in, once I try in a incognito window the review doesn't show up publicly anymore. My reviews were just basically facts about the products themselves, and received no word from Amazon about breaking any rules.
I posted a legitimate negative review once and it got immediately memory-holed. I laugh every time they send an email begging for reviews. I'm not wasting my time if you're going to hide the truth.
I've noticed this too. Vine Gold Amazon program member, but sometimes my reviews are rejected or shadow banned for no discernible reason. I think there may be some corruption in the review moderation process (as well as in the commingling process, which I've also had problems with).
> 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 CE mark.
The CE mark signifies compliance with European Union standards and regulations. Why would you expect Amazon Canada to care about that?
IIUC Chinese manufacturers often put the "CE" mark on things that haven't been certified, and rationalize it as the mark meaning "China Export"
I have never heard of a case of a homeowner's insurance claim being denied based on imrpoper DIY work. One of the main points of insurance is to protect you against your own negligence.
Still, I would make the same decision and steer clear of such lighting fixtures!
CE conformity is a self-declaration by the manufacturer, so essentially the honor system, not an actual certification program like TüV. Items without a CE mark cannot legally be imported or sold in the EU, but there is little enforcement.
Ah yes, I'd looked this up before but then forgotten it. My original comment would be better stated as "Chinese manufacturers often put the 'CE' mark on things they haven't designed to conform to the guidelines, and have no intention of standing behind the liability for ..."
The replacement ones that the electrician selected were only slightly more expensive and I was able to clean up the look of them with 3d printed shrouds:
I've really got to get back into 3D printing. I was building a Voron back when it would have been like serial number 20. Got it to the point where I was printing its own parts (using stub parts made of plywood and whatnot). Life happened, I disassembled it to move, and I've still got the frame sitting around plastic-wrapped for the past ten years.
I wasn't even thinking LED fixtures. For LED fixtures with built in power electronics, I would definitely want the product to be NRTL recognized.
I was late to the 3d printing game and in part that was just not wanting it to become a junk factory of disposable toys and fidgets. I've definitely printed a bit of that kind of thing but overall I've been pleased with the number of small household fixups that it's been possible to do using it.
Just last night for example my microwave oven stopped registering that the door was closed, and within a few tries I was able to print a replacement for the latch bracket that had broken off. At any previous time in my life that would have been either a whole new door or replacing the entire unit.
For sure, I've got a list of "household fixups" to print when I finally do get around to rebuilding the thing.
Just a note of caution about the microwave though. I don't know what bracket broke off your microwave, but usually the door switch is a safety mechanism to make sure the door cannot be open while the magnetron is on.. Make sure a new 3D printed bracket isn't able to break off and cause the safety switch to remain on!
Oh yeah, I'm well aware. The PLA bracket is non-structural and only supports the original latch piece.
That said, I was alarmed to see online lots of people who were also replacing the latch itself with printed parts. That sketches me out a lot more, though I guess it could be fine with PETG or ABS.
I couldn't think of something worse than demanding Amazon decide what is counterfeit or violates regulations and policing that rule. The law on both those points is far too complex for the result to be anything but Amazon blocks what the big brands tell them to and protect them from competition.
Amazon is essentially a logistics company with a search engine. It doesn't really make sense to have them enforce regulations or counterfeiting rules than it would to make UPS and google. It's not like they hide who the seller is on any item (it's listed as sold by).
What your complaining about is a fundamental consequence of anything that lowers the barriers to selling goods. You once needed to buy a storefront to sell retail goods, later you at least needed sufficient name recognition for people to visit your website -- that investment gave anyone whose goods were counterfeit as well as regulators assets to seize.
But just like making it easy for every citizen to publish their thoughts means we see lots of hate and dumb shit online -- anything that lowers the barriers to selling retail goods (in general a good thing) will make it easy to sell counterfeit or defective crap.
In the long run, I suspect tech will make reputable 3rd party evaluations easier to access but let's not blame Amazon for not becoming an arm of the state and judging what is and isn't legal.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
Possibly the reason the OEM price is so high is because it is backed by huge liability insurance (e.g., you get into a Jacuzzi and get electrocuted). I'd pay for that assurance. By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things:
1. They use more expensive processes and materials.
2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts.
3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
There's also
4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
>> I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The part goes from $30 to $280 due to 5 or 6 factors, which you've outlined well. Insurance is one of many factors. Insurance isnt high because they expect things to go wrong -- insurance forces better QA/QC and overall processes so there isnt a payout -- all those precautions raise the price. It aligns everyone to focus on quality outcomes to prevent payouts.
>>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
> They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications. Also, insurance companies will not payout (and hence bankrupt the company) in cases of fraud or gross negligence.
The system is not perfect, but it exists to align interests.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications.
Those certifications aren't worth as much as I thought they were. I just took apart a UL-certified power strip with scorched plastic, which is a significant fire hazard. It had an LED that was fed from the 120V line through a 15K 0.5-watt resistor.
a UL certification will hardly be the only one in place for a commercial insurance firm to guarantee a jacuzzi. Just imagine the risk of electrocution.
Just look at it from a retail standpoint -- perhaps you have car insurance.
- (where I live) You are forced to have a driver's license
- (where I live) Even if your spouse claims not to drive, they wont insure me unless all other adults in my household have licenses
- i'm forced to pay more if i drive an unsafe car vs a safe one
- I can pay less if I have a LoJack or other safety device
- I can pay further less if I take a driver's safety course which runs 5hrs long
- I can pay further less if I install a OBD-2 device sharing my driver behavior
- I risk having my insurance cancelled If I do something bad (DUI)
- I risk having no payout if I do something illegal
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.
So long as the description stays it's not actually OEM - I see zero problem with this.
The title is not misleading in this case - it's how you discover the item to being with, but if the description says "Samsung" as manufacturer I'd send it back.
There are certain times you want an OEM part for good reason (e.g. safety critical/expensive items) but most of the time aftermarket is perfectly fine and sometimes even desirable. Most wear items in cheap appliances and the like are made in china anyways and typically are low quality to start with.
When I see "replacement for x" I assume it's a third party part. Might be good, might not. If I'm worried about quality I look for "genuine OEM" or similar.
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.
Good point. I’ve also seen where there are completely different products as different SKUs of the same product listing. Just yesterday I was looking at some chopsticks, and when I went down to the reviews, everyone was talking about a wok. Sure enough, I could buy a wok from the chopstick listing. Insanity.
I actually created a review to warn people that most of the reviews were for a different product (even provided photos, showing the old/new; showing the huge downgrade), and Amazon nuked my review because:
> After carefully reviewing your submission, your review could not be posted to the website. It appears your review had feedback on the seller.
Yeah, so Amazon won't let you post reviews warning others about this either. The review itself was about the LISTING not the SELLER.
Not to mention the problem of bad reviews for one product not getting transferred to a "new" product that is just the same product again with a different listing.
It seems like it is easy to get good reviews on some product then just switch the product completely different. Do they not have ways to prevent that??
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.
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.
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..
You listed common items you think may be counterfeits, and all your effort in checking, but fail to mention av single time you _actually_ ran into a counterfeit. I'm sure if it occurred you'd happily mention it since it would do wonders in reinforcing the paranoia.
What do you mean? They specifically say they received a counterfeit water bottle in their post.
Signed, someone who has received a counterfeit Canon DSLR camera battery, fridge water filter, and "official" Nintendo Switch case from Amazon. (Albeit some years back for all of them, as I rarely buy there any longer.)
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.
Secularism, changes in 'christianity' in the US. I'm not some christian nationalist but I do believe changes in values allowed Amazon to do this. Maybe I'm wrong and people will end up going against this in the long term. The 'christian' view of this behaviour didn't come from a vacuum. My biggest worry is the passivity/docile nature of people nowadays can't bring such change.
Looking at it through a religious lens is pretty narrow-minded. Secular people have values too. You're limiting your ability to understand the world around you.
Some secular people have values, I don't think religious people are saints. Secular people however don't have a framework to 'force' others with supposed values to adhere to them. I don't believe it's narrow minded to believes changes in religion might have an effect on things, the way people follow their religion is influenced by external factors, don't see why it wouldn't be the other way around as well. Atheists are quite new we'll see what happens.
You are deeply mistaken as to roots of this culture difference. There many highly religious cultures which absolutely lack the "social agreement" framework. The real reason why "social agreement" countries exist is feudalism. Feudal structure of power was the second on this planet (after ancient Greece, but that culture had been exterminated) to allow bidirectional agreements between kings and wealthy nobles. The only countries which managed to preserve this tradition unbroken were European ones, NA colonized by the Europeans and Japan which had societal structure close enough to adopt this culture without big changes and who later transferred them to its own colonies in Korea and Taiwan. And that about all countries valuing "social agreement". This is not because of religion or lack of it, it because of the accident - not being conquered by a despotic empire in the middle ages.
Gallup polling says 1% of people in the US didn't believe in god in 1967, 17% in 2022. Of those 17% i'd imagine many believed at some point (or went to church/temple/...), these people don't really behave like a 'pure' atheist would. They're very much still influenced by the religious ideas they grew up in. So yes it's a rather new thing if you're thinking about society.
I think your problem is you don't seem to be aware of history before 1967 or society outside of the US. Your local community college might offer some courses in history and sociology.
I agree with some of their sentiment but disagree that it is secularism specifically.
If anything, my observation has been that social media provides better avenues for exploitation by bad actors and, for lack of a better term, people unwilling to do 'self work'.
It used to be a lot harder to 'grift'; historically, a community would eventually suss out bad actors which leads to shunning/etc.
But, when your 'community' is an entire country or a large area of the planet, the signal/noise ratio changes along with the behavior of the bad actors.
As an example not directly related to Amazon, I've worked with more than one person who would be a decent programmer if they worked on their job skills as much as they worked on their job hopping skills; online job posting (at least for a while) made it way easier for someone to just hop from job to job collecting a paycheck before the 'well now they should be onboarded and productive' red line is crossed and they are found out.
I've seen it with more than one person that is happy to screw over multiple 'friends' because they just use the internet to find the right groups to make new friends [0].
I've seen it with acquaintances where they just keep burning through 'matches' on dating sites without any introspection as to their own toxic behavior[1].
And sure, in all these cases people bad actors can still get 'outed'. However the bad actors are also happy to be dishonest in their own messaging, which again messes with the SNR. They'll just try to drag you through the mud and drain your endurance fighting their lies if you try to speak up, and unless you've really got time to burn... everyone stays quiet.
And, well, society is worse as a result.
[0] - They'll even pick up new interests in the process, once they've sufficiently burned themselves in a given community.
[1] - My favorite example was two narcissists that -both- were looking to replace the other before they broke up with each other...
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.
After years of scamming customers, amazon has finally seen the light and won't be prioritizing shareholder returns (which they're legally required to do). In reality hey're just trying to tone down the scamming they've been doing ever so slightly because it's hurting revenue. 100% sure it will just end up at 2019 or 2021 amazon scam levels, Some sort of 'scamming optimum' for amazon.
If you think it never started try going to some third world country and compare, their people are used to the bargaining/scamming but nobody cares. Things will end up the same here at some point.
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.
No it's not fraud, it's a growth hack. And it's not lying, it's advertising, it's not spam, it's a cold email, it's not patent trolling, it's IP protection.
Fraud is good, these companies need their revenue so they can create an all powerful AGI. If you don't allow them to scam they'll lose against the chinese
Yeah. He got banned from Amazon eventually (selling counterfeits). Wife divorced him. Lived in his car for awhile (he called me begging for a job). He got his life back together, eventually.
Honestly Amazon deserved it for engaging in commingling in the first place. The happy ending would have been them discontinuing the practice 10 years ago.
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.
I worked on Prime and Delivery Experience until 2013 and commingling was considered relatively taboo due to the destruction of customer trust that would likely result. It was an obvious optimization. There was already an issue with return fraud and resellers listing fraudulent items that weren’t commingled under the same product listing. I was pretty shocked when it launched after I left.
It turned out pretty much the way we figured it would.
Commingling really only makes sense in a weird world where Amazon is the final retailer for various distributors selling the same exact product in which case why doesn’t Amazon cut out the middle men and buy it directly?
Commingling ten distributors sets of Energizer batteries makes sense, but not as much sense as just buying direct from Energizer. They don’t lack the volume.
Amazon doesn’t just fulfill Amazon.com orders. Anyone can send inventory to Amazon and use them for fulfillment on their own e-commerce platform. The distributors don’t know Amazon is going to be fulfilling orders from several of their retailers.
Even on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find several new listings for an item fulfilled by Amazon from different sellers (including Amazon). That’s beneficial for Amazon because they don’t need to own all of the inventory and the sellers get a listing with good reputation to leverage if Amazon goes out of stock. In the perfect scenario everyone wins - Amazon makes money, the seller makes money, and the product is still available to the customer. You get all that without commingling, but with it, you also save physical storage volume.
FBA gives them an economy of scale that you can't get with just internal staff--every retail inventory requires account managers and oversight, whereas with FBA you just set up a platform and let the economy sort itself out (while skimming your cut). It is not that different from Apple's app store being a better business model than commissioning all the apps themselves. Anyway the distribution world is much messier than you might think. Allowing everybody to individually optimize whatever they way (say, finding a cheap wholesaler and then reselling via FBA) is hugely advantageous for them. Although I would guess that in the last decade the efficiencies have largely been exploited now.
also, you're probably aware of all the made-up brands which sell like, thousands of versions of staples like HDMI cables on Amazon... all of that exists because FBA made it possible for people to start random business in consumer goods, basically by (my understanding) using Alibaba to find manufacturers and FBA to find customers and connecting the two. It's all exhausting now because the fake brands have crowded out the real ones, but for a long time that was what the economy becoming more efficient looked like (at least in one sense... maybe not the sort of efficiency that actually benefits the customer, though, since in practice a lot of the gains were found by capitalizing on Amazon's reputation to sell cheap stuff for more than it was worth).
I see the point you are trying to make, but Energizer batteries are a bad exemplar for it. Even if all of the batteries are the exact same SKU, some of them may be 10 years old and some of them may be fresh from the factory. I've had this happen with several (perishable) products from Amazon.
That's an entirely separate but related issue - stock rotation has to be managed, and commingling (in theory) helps alleviate the issue. Removing it means that you may find quite old product sold alongside brand new.
(I suspect but have not proven that Walmart actually rotates UPCs/SKUs on identical product so they can remainder it out).
> 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...
Or the mountain of returns they have to deal with on a daily basis. I signed up for Xmas, bought some things. ALL of them returned. This isn't a counterfeit issue on my end, but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage.
>but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage
No, the simple fact is everything you bought was garbage. They sell plenty of standard, known brand items that are just as good as bought from anyone else.
I order a lot from Amazon and it’s never happened to me (to my knowledge), and yet other commenters report 100% fraud rate across multiple items in the same order.
Might depend on what sort of things people buy. Expensive makeup or skincare products, you're gonna get scammed 50% of time. Has been the case since 2015 or so.
Not sure what Amazon could do about the products being trash though? If you feel unsure about it, why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person, instead of guessing and buying it by delivery?
Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.
Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.
Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.
Not the person you're replying to, but for me, everything I buy on Amazon is bought because I have no B&M retailers that sell it. Even my local B&M stores usually have vastly reduced stock compared to what they have online (looking at you, Old Navy, Eddie Bauer and similar, who only carry petite sizes online).
Something I've seen a lot is a product that looks like it has good reviews, but if you read the actual reviews it is clear they were reviewing something other than the listed product. I think what happens is they swap out a quality product for trash on the same listing so that the trash a bunch of good reviews that it didn't earn. If Amazon cracked down on that, it would help a lot.
> why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person
Because a lot of times, there isn't a local store that sells it. And honestly, a lot of the stuff at local stores is trash too, sold in packaging that makes it difficult to tell before you buy it.
I used to be like you. But overall the return culture changed drastically - "no fault" returns where stores have zero care to hear about how their items are defective. And then Amazon's constant games with pricing has pushed me into "buying" (ie caching) something if it's a good deal, and then making the actual purchase decision of whether I want it sometime later. Much better than "I'll think about this tonight", and then going to buy it and the price has jumped 30%, making me feel like a sucker.
If I've already got pending Amazon returns to do, adding something to the queue costs me very little. If the queue is empty, then I'm a little more deliberate. But this time of year Nov-Jan is great for this, as the return dates are further out and all on the same day Jan 31 so it doesn't catch me by surprise.
The slow spiteful shipping also pushes me into this behavior when I'm in the middle of a project. Order a few different types of a thing, decide exactly what I need when I'm in the middle of doing, and then when I'm done with the project, return the pile of leftovers.
It's felt like something enabling this dynamic has been waiting to break for years now, but so far it hasn't. The only time I've gotten pushback from Amazon is a nastygram interstitial for a while after I returned a motherboard that I opened and tested (the manufacturer could have avoided this return by documenting the IOMMU groups, but once again... return culture). I have no idea if the problem there was the opening (seemed to be fine under their published policies), or whether something else happened to the item after I handed it to their return agent and they blamed me.
I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.
This makes the same classic mistake about social media about social media that my boomer dad makes.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
> They have effectively traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
Also total warehouse capacity and warehouse-warehouse freight capacity. +X% inventory duplication (to achieve regional inventory) at Amazon-scale, along a long tail distribution of products, must be non-negligible.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Great news? It’s great news that nobody really knew that we were buying items but not receiving them from the person that we bought them from? It’s a logistical advantage to defraud customers? Because this is what Amazon was doing all along, defrauding customers. I never knew that I was receiving an item from someone who I didn’t purchase it from how is that even legal?
Amazon's assumption was that every box of "Apple AirPods 4" is the same, so it doesn't matter if you got the one sold directly from Apple or from some random reseller. They would just put them in the same bin, after all they are all the same product. Great for logistics because it doesn't matter if the closest fulfillment center has AirPods sold by Apple or "Office Partner Inc", they just ship you whatever is closest. Obviously this fails spectacularly if a seller ever lies about their product, but who would ever do such a thing
It also fails when someone receives the product, and then returns it (bonus points if it was ‘not what I ordered/fraud’) with the contents replaced with something bogus, if Amazon puts it back in stock.
I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).
I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.
It is not my job to be the regulator, that is the regulators jobs. I do nopt have the time of capacity in my bipolar affected mind to cram in the detail of this corrupt capitalist world we all let happen.
And I cannot read that article because it is behind a paywall and I am too poor and homless to afford a subscription.
And how many people even come to HN (not just thinking about myself).
And now I have no option but to buy from amazon since I am homeless and do not have a fixed address where I can has stuff shipped to.
All of your point are fine if you are well off and capable, but putting this on me, and people like me, is just wrong.
If you want to organize a boycott against amazon, I will be right there with you. Until then all you have are words.
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...
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.
Because if they take Amazon to court, they no longer have a business. Amazon effectively is a large part of American retail, which they cannot afford to not be on.
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.
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.
The arugula issue a few years back revealed that whilst they’re technically labeled it wasn’t in any customer-identifiable way (serial number shenanigans).
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.
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?
The other issue I have is when you go to a local store they don’t stock items, they say “we can order it”.
I needed a gasket for my Kamado Joe grill. I went to my local dealer. They didn’t have one and proceeded to order one for me - the salesman was looking on the Amazon site! Why would I buy it from them? I haven’t been back since.
> 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)..
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.
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.
Note that inventory already in Amazon fulfillment centers as of March 31, 2026 is still commingled
"Also what happens after March 31st with the leftover commingled inventory that’s already there?
No action is required for stickerless inventory currently in-transit to or stored in our fulfillment centers. These products will continue to sell under their original SKUs.
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.
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?
Disagree. The returns process for AliExpress couldn't be simpler: Open trash can, insert product, buy a different one (still having spent less than you would have on Amazon).
Surprisingly, the number of products that needed such a return was extremely low.
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.
You think it will only take 2 months to rotate through everything that is currently filled with fakes?
Although actually upon reflection, it doesn't say that they won't send out co-mingled products, this isn't a notice to customers that they won't send out fakes after that date. Just that they won't co-mingle anymore.
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.
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.
I might be wrong, but, wouldn't the recommendation to avoid Amazon if you want to be sure come from the massive amount of training data pulled from internet conversations? The kind that would already have been discussing the issue of counterfeit products on Amazon being mixed in with legitimate products from the original manufacturer, since this is a problem that's been going on for, what, at least a decade at this point, right?
The LLM is inherently distrustful of Amazon due to having consumed and trained on a bunch of text that's about how one should be distrustful of Amazon.
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.
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.
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
--
Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
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.
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've chosen that, and it still breaks the order into multiple shipments, because they still want to deliver some stuff first. I'm totally happy to wait for the things to come a bit slowly in one delivery, but they have no nuclear option to insist on this.
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?
I never accepted it, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this specific issue long ago. Unfortunately I am not an Attorney General, so I can't bring criminal charges.
This information has been widely available for around a decade, if not longer, and is nothing new. It's been shared all over the internet by myself and countless people for years and years and years. I've even seen it show up on local news stations over the years.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is a big deal. There are lots of goods I wont even think about buying from amazon because counterfeit goods are common and unpunished and untraceable by amazon.
The very fact that Amazon was letting people receive items from someone who they did not purchase the item from is incredible and frightening and maddening news to me.
Is this really what we want capitalism to look like?
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.
That's overdue, but I shall continue to make my purchases from European alternatives — Amazon donated millions of dollars to Trump, so share some responsibility for his actions around Greenland, tariffs and so on.
Why 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?
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.
I didn't need it that same day - if I had, I would have driven 5 miles to the nearest retailer that carried it and Amazon wouldn't have even been considered.
I was seriously impressed that they made that promise, thought I had nothing to lose. And I re-learned a lesson, if something's too good to be true then it probably isn't. I certainly won't be putting any faith in same-day service in the future. They proved their "superior delivery service" is just an illusion.
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.
This is about how inventory is pulled once a purchase from a seller has already been made. "Other sellers on Amazon" doesn't care how the item gets pulled, it just cares there are multiple sellers for the same product (which doesn't require the sellers inventories be commingled to do).
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.
It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
This is one of many exploitative habits of Amazon. Others include not ensuring products follow regulation, eg on hazardous substances (lead, etc), or on electrical safety. They also make your local {book, game, hobby, ...} shop go bankrupt.
You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller. Even if they are slower, less things on offer, etc. You probably already know some small local stores you would be sad to see shut down. Support them! (if you don't already)
> 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.
> and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use
Actually make sure with a incognito window that this review is actually visible. I've noticed that some reviews of mine have been "shadow-banned" and while it looks like they're still there when I'm logged in, once I try in a incognito window the review doesn't show up publicly anymore. My reviews were just basically facts about the products themselves, and received no word from Amazon about breaking any rules.
I posted a legitimate negative review once and it got immediately memory-holed. I laugh every time they send an email begging for reviews. I'm not wasting my time if you're going to hide the truth.
The few times I've tried leaving a negative review, Amazon has either taken it down or it has disappeared like this. The game is rigged.
Huh, that's interesting; I can see one negative review on the logged-out page, but clicking "more" or any of the star ratings prompts me to log in.
Once logged in, there are multiple 1-star reviews present, including some others referencing the missing certs.
In any case, the listing is here for anyone else interested: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CRGMS1Q5
I've noticed this too. Vine Gold Amazon program member, but sometimes my reviews are rejected or shadow banned for no discernible reason. I think there may be some corruption in the review moderation process (as well as in the commingling process, which I've also had problems with).
> 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 CE mark.
The CE mark signifies compliance with European Union standards and regulations. Why would you expect Amazon Canada to care about that?
Yes, sorry, I've updated my comment; the fixture actually does have CE, it's CSA/UL that were missing. My apologies.
IIUC Chinese manufacturers often put the "CE" mark on things that haven't been certified, and rationalize it as the mark meaning "China Export"
I have never heard of a case of a homeowner's insurance claim being denied based on imrpoper DIY work. One of the main points of insurance is to protect you against your own negligence.
Still, I would make the same decision and steer clear of such lighting fixtures!
CE conformity is a self-declaration by the manufacturer, so essentially the honor system, not an actual certification program like TüV. Items without a CE mark cannot legally be imported or sold in the EU, but there is little enforcement.
CSA and UL are definitely 3rd party assessments though.
Ah yes, I'd looked this up before but then forgotten it. My original comment would be better stated as "Chinese manufacturers often put the 'CE' mark on things they haven't designed to conform to the guidelines, and have no intention of standing behind the liability for ..."
The replacement ones that the electrician selected were only slightly more expensive and I was able to clean up the look of them with 3d printed shrouds:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7165347
I've really got to get back into 3D printing. I was building a Voron back when it would have been like serial number 20. Got it to the point where I was printing its own parts (using stub parts made of plywood and whatnot). Life happened, I disassembled it to move, and I've still got the frame sitting around plastic-wrapped for the past ten years.
I wasn't even thinking LED fixtures. For LED fixtures with built in power electronics, I would definitely want the product to be NRTL recognized.
I was late to the 3d printing game and in part that was just not wanting it to become a junk factory of disposable toys and fidgets. I've definitely printed a bit of that kind of thing but overall I've been pleased with the number of small household fixups that it's been possible to do using it.
Just last night for example my microwave oven stopped registering that the door was closed, and within a few tries I was able to print a replacement for the latch bracket that had broken off. At any previous time in my life that would have been either a whole new door or replacing the entire unit.
For sure, I've got a list of "household fixups" to print when I finally do get around to rebuilding the thing.
Just a note of caution about the microwave though. I don't know what bracket broke off your microwave, but usually the door switch is a safety mechanism to make sure the door cannot be open while the magnetron is on.. Make sure a new 3D printed bracket isn't able to break off and cause the safety switch to remain on!
Oh yeah, I'm well aware. The PLA bracket is non-structural and only supports the original latch piece.
That said, I was alarmed to see online lots of people who were also replacing the latch itself with printed parts. That sketches me out a lot more, though I guess it could be fine with PETG or ABS.
I couldn't think of something worse than demanding Amazon decide what is counterfeit or violates regulations and policing that rule. The law on both those points is far too complex for the result to be anything but Amazon blocks what the big brands tell them to and protect them from competition.
Amazon is essentially a logistics company with a search engine. It doesn't really make sense to have them enforce regulations or counterfeiting rules than it would to make UPS and google. It's not like they hide who the seller is on any item (it's listed as sold by).
What your complaining about is a fundamental consequence of anything that lowers the barriers to selling goods. You once needed to buy a storefront to sell retail goods, later you at least needed sufficient name recognition for people to visit your website -- that investment gave anyone whose goods were counterfeit as well as regulators assets to seize.
But just like making it easy for every citizen to publish their thoughts means we see lots of hate and dumb shit online -- anything that lowers the barriers to selling retail goods (in general a good thing) will make it easy to sell counterfeit or defective crap.
In the long run, I suspect tech will make reputable 3rd party evaluations easier to access but let's not blame Amazon for not becoming an arm of the state and judging what is and isn't legal.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
Possibly the reason the OEM price is so high is because it is backed by huge liability insurance (e.g., you get into a Jacuzzi and get electrocuted). I'd pay for that assurance. By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things: 1. They use more expensive processes and materials. 2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts. 3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
There's also 4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
>> I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The part goes from $30 to $280 due to 5 or 6 factors, which you've outlined well. Insurance is one of many factors. Insurance isnt high because they expect things to go wrong -- insurance forces better QA/QC and overall processes so there isnt a payout -- all those precautions raise the price. It aligns everyone to focus on quality outcomes to prevent payouts.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/apple-cables...
>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.
>>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout. > They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications. Also, insurance companies will not payout (and hence bankrupt the company) in cases of fraud or gross negligence.
The system is not perfect, but it exists to align interests.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications.
Those certifications aren't worth as much as I thought they were. I just took apart a UL-certified power strip with scorched plastic, which is a significant fire hazard. It had an LED that was fed from the 120V line through a 15K 0.5-watt resistor.
a UL certification will hardly be the only one in place for a commercial insurance firm to guarantee a jacuzzi. Just imagine the risk of electrocution.
Just look at it from a retail standpoint -- perhaps you have car insurance.
- (where I live) You are forced to have a driver's license
- (where I live) Even if your spouse claims not to drive, they wont insure me unless all other adults in my household have licenses
- i'm forced to pay more if i drive an unsafe car vs a safe one
- I can pay less if I have a LoJack or other safety device
- I can pay further less if I take a driver's safety course which runs 5hrs long
- I can pay further less if I install a OBD-2 device sharing my driver behavior
- I risk having my insurance cancelled If I do something bad (DUI)
- I risk having no payout if I do something illegal
Mislabeled parts is in fact always a bad thing.
Being able to source a non OEM replacement is different than that.
OEM replacement bins for my refrigerator door are > $100, i'll take the stronger knockoffs from Amazon for $20 any day.
Yeah, and when you buy the knockoff, buy two.
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.
So long as the description stays it's not actually OEM - I see zero problem with this.
The title is not misleading in this case - it's how you discover the item to being with, but if the description says "Samsung" as manufacturer I'd send it back.
There are certain times you want an OEM part for good reason (e.g. safety critical/expensive items) but most of the time aftermarket is perfectly fine and sometimes even desirable. Most wear items in cheap appliances and the like are made in china anyways and typically are low quality to start with.
When I see "replacement for x" I assume it's a third party part. Might be good, might not. If I'm worried about quality I look for "genuine OEM" or similar.
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.
Good point. I’ve also seen where there are completely different products as different SKUs of the same product listing. Just yesterday I was looking at some chopsticks, and when I went down to the reviews, everyone was talking about a wok. Sure enough, I could buy a wok from the chopstick listing. Insanity.
They also need to fix the problem of (good) reviews for one product getting transferred to another (lower quality) product.
I actually created a review to warn people that most of the reviews were for a different product (even provided photos, showing the old/new; showing the huge downgrade), and Amazon nuked my review because:
> After carefully reviewing your submission, your review could not be posted to the website. It appears your review had feedback on the seller.
Yeah, so Amazon won't let you post reviews warning others about this either. The review itself was about the LISTING not the SELLER.
Not to mention the problem of bad reviews for one product not getting transferred to a "new" product that is just the same product again with a different listing.
They do try. seems like it’s a bit less lately. Still sometimes see a review talking about it being a soft towel and you are buying a toaster.
It seems like it is easy to get good reviews on some product then just switch the product completely different. Do they not have ways to prevent that??
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.
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.
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.
I've gotten a counterfeit SD card from Amazon before, so it's likely a pervasive issue. Glad they're finally doing something about it.
Is this also a problem when buying and the seller is amazon.com or only affects third party sellers?
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..
You listed common items you think may be counterfeits, and all your effort in checking, but fail to mention av single time you _actually_ ran into a counterfeit. I'm sure if it occurred you'd happily mention it since it would do wonders in reinforcing the paranoia.
What do you mean? They specifically say they received a counterfeit water bottle in their post.
Signed, someone who has received a counterfeit Canon DSLR camera battery, fridge water filter, and "official" Nintendo Switch case from Amazon. (Albeit some years back for all of them, as I rarely buy there any longer.)
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.
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?
Secularism, changes in 'christianity' in the US. I'm not some christian nationalist but I do believe changes in values allowed Amazon to do this. Maybe I'm wrong and people will end up going against this in the long term. The 'christian' view of this behaviour didn't come from a vacuum. My biggest worry is the passivity/docile nature of people nowadays can't bring such change.
Looking at it through a religious lens is pretty narrow-minded. Secular people have values too. You're limiting your ability to understand the world around you.
I would reckon looking at these kinds of things through religious lenses is actually VERY useful.
I don't follow sportsball, but there are masses of population and massive institutions that are built upon for and on sportsball.
So, seeing large changes or shifts within sportsball can be useful in gleaning some sort of trend.
While, I don't fully follow the gp comment, I can see the other side of yours.
It's more like following astrology - entirely irrelevant to reality.
Your comment is entirely irrelevant to most of the human beings on this planet.
And yet, you took the time to type it out. And will even spend some time defending it, proposing it.
Narrow worldviews have utility to one, but don't encompass "reality" as such.
Some secular people have values, I don't think religious people are saints. Secular people however don't have a framework to 'force' others with supposed values to adhere to them. I don't believe it's narrow minded to believes changes in religion might have an effect on things, the way people follow their religion is influenced by external factors, don't see why it wouldn't be the other way around as well. Atheists are quite new we'll see what happens.
You are deeply mistaken as to roots of this culture difference. There many highly religious cultures which absolutely lack the "social agreement" framework. The real reason why "social agreement" countries exist is feudalism. Feudal structure of power was the second on this planet (after ancient Greece, but that culture had been exterminated) to allow bidirectional agreements between kings and wealthy nobles. The only countries which managed to preserve this tradition unbroken were European ones, NA colonized by the Europeans and Japan which had societal structure close enough to adopt this culture without big changes and who later transferred them to its own colonies in Korea and Taiwan. And that about all countries valuing "social agreement". This is not because of religion or lack of it, it because of the accident - not being conquered by a despotic empire in the middle ages.
> Atheists are quite new
What ever you're smoking, I'd like to try. A break from reality sounds nice right now.
Gallup polling says 1% of people in the US didn't believe in god in 1967, 17% in 2022. Of those 17% i'd imagine many believed at some point (or went to church/temple/...), these people don't really behave like a 'pure' atheist would. They're very much still influenced by the religious ideas they grew up in. So yes it's a rather new thing if you're thinking about society.
I think your problem is you don't seem to be aware of history before 1967 or society outside of the US. Your local community college might offer some courses in history and sociology.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (John Adams)
I agree with some of their sentiment but disagree that it is secularism specifically.
If anything, my observation has been that social media provides better avenues for exploitation by bad actors and, for lack of a better term, people unwilling to do 'self work'.
It used to be a lot harder to 'grift'; historically, a community would eventually suss out bad actors which leads to shunning/etc.
But, when your 'community' is an entire country or a large area of the planet, the signal/noise ratio changes along with the behavior of the bad actors.
As an example not directly related to Amazon, I've worked with more than one person who would be a decent programmer if they worked on their job skills as much as they worked on their job hopping skills; online job posting (at least for a while) made it way easier for someone to just hop from job to job collecting a paycheck before the 'well now they should be onboarded and productive' red line is crossed and they are found out.
I've seen it with more than one person that is happy to screw over multiple 'friends' because they just use the internet to find the right groups to make new friends [0].
I've seen it with acquaintances where they just keep burning through 'matches' on dating sites without any introspection as to their own toxic behavior[1].
And sure, in all these cases people bad actors can still get 'outed'. However the bad actors are also happy to be dishonest in their own messaging, which again messes with the SNR. They'll just try to drag you through the mud and drain your endurance fighting their lies if you try to speak up, and unless you've really got time to burn... everyone stays quiet.
And, well, society is worse as a result.
[0] - They'll even pick up new interests in the process, once they've sufficiently burned themselves in a given community.
[1] - My favorite example was two narcissists that -both- were looking to replace the other before they broke up with each other...
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.
> The time of retailers being 'honest' is over.
First, I'm not sure it ever started. Second, this article is about moving towards honesty.
After years of scamming customers, amazon has finally seen the light and won't be prioritizing shareholder returns (which they're legally required to do). In reality hey're just trying to tone down the scamming they've been doing ever so slightly because it's hurting revenue. 100% sure it will just end up at 2019 or 2021 amazon scam levels, Some sort of 'scamming optimum' for amazon.
If you think it never started try going to some third world country and compare, their people are used to the bargaining/scamming but nobody cares. Things will end up the same here at some point.
The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.
This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.
Worked with a guy that used this to his advantage. He sold CD's and DVD's through FBA. He would get them "new enough" looking via buffing them out (often making them unplayable), shrinkwrapping them, and then hope whomever got them wasn't him that got the commission for that sale and instead the person who bought "from him" got one of the actual new ones. He made a killing off of this since "used" inventory was incredibly cheap for a whole pallet of them.
By "used this to his advantage", it sounds like he was just a fraudster?
He called it "arbitrage". But yeah, I agree.
No it's not fraud, it's a growth hack. And it's not lying, it's advertising, it's not spam, it's a cold email, it's not patent trolling, it's IP protection.
But maybe it's maybelline.
Fraud is legal now. In the USA, at least.
Fraud is good, these companies need their revenue so they can create an all powerful AGI. If you don't allow them to scam they'll lose against the chinese
You got downvoted but this bizarre logic is really what passes in SV.
Does this story have a happy ending such as a conviction for fraud?
Yeah. He got banned from Amazon eventually (selling counterfeits). Wife divorced him. Lived in his car for awhile (he called me begging for a job). He got his life back together, eventually.
Honestly Amazon deserved it for engaging in commingling in the first place. The happy ending would have been them discontinuing the practice 10 years ago.
The vast majority of theft and fraud goes unpunished
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.
I worked on Prime and Delivery Experience until 2013 and commingling was considered relatively taboo due to the destruction of customer trust that would likely result. It was an obvious optimization. There was already an issue with return fraud and resellers listing fraudulent items that weren’t commingled under the same product listing. I was pretty shocked when it launched after I left.
It turned out pretty much the way we figured it would.
Commingling really only makes sense in a weird world where Amazon is the final retailer for various distributors selling the same exact product in which case why doesn’t Amazon cut out the middle men and buy it directly?
Commingling ten distributors sets of Energizer batteries makes sense, but not as much sense as just buying direct from Energizer. They don’t lack the volume.
Amazon doesn’t just fulfill Amazon.com orders. Anyone can send inventory to Amazon and use them for fulfillment on their own e-commerce platform. The distributors don’t know Amazon is going to be fulfilling orders from several of their retailers.
Even on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find several new listings for an item fulfilled by Amazon from different sellers (including Amazon). That’s beneficial for Amazon because they don’t need to own all of the inventory and the sellers get a listing with good reputation to leverage if Amazon goes out of stock. In the perfect scenario everyone wins - Amazon makes money, the seller makes money, and the product is still available to the customer. You get all that without commingling, but with it, you also save physical storage volume.
FBA gives them an economy of scale that you can't get with just internal staff--every retail inventory requires account managers and oversight, whereas with FBA you just set up a platform and let the economy sort itself out (while skimming your cut). It is not that different from Apple's app store being a better business model than commissioning all the apps themselves. Anyway the distribution world is much messier than you might think. Allowing everybody to individually optimize whatever they way (say, finding a cheap wholesaler and then reselling via FBA) is hugely advantageous for them. Although I would guess that in the last decade the efficiencies have largely been exploited now.
also, you're probably aware of all the made-up brands which sell like, thousands of versions of staples like HDMI cables on Amazon... all of that exists because FBA made it possible for people to start random business in consumer goods, basically by (my understanding) using Alibaba to find manufacturers and FBA to find customers and connecting the two. It's all exhausting now because the fake brands have crowded out the real ones, but for a long time that was what the economy becoming more efficient looked like (at least in one sense... maybe not the sort of efficiency that actually benefits the customer, though, since in practice a lot of the gains were found by capitalizing on Amazon's reputation to sell cheap stuff for more than it was worth).
> Energizer batteries
I see the point you are trying to make, but Energizer batteries are a bad exemplar for it. Even if all of the batteries are the exact same SKU, some of them may be 10 years old and some of them may be fresh from the factory. I've had this happen with several (perishable) products from Amazon.
That's an entirely separate but related issue - stock rotation has to be managed, and commingling (in theory) helps alleviate the issue. Removing it means that you may find quite old product sold alongside brand new.
(I suspect but have not proven that Walmart actually rotates UPCs/SKUs on identical product so they can remainder it out).
In fact I can say that any time I've bought a battery on Amazon I've received a very old one that didn't last very long, if it worked at all.
Wow, lots of insiders contributing lore in this article's comments. I appreciate you all!
> 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...
Or the mountain of returns they have to deal with on a daily basis. I signed up for Xmas, bought some things. ALL of them returned. This isn't a counterfeit issue on my end, but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage.
>but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage
No, the simple fact is everything you bought was garbage. They sell plenty of standard, known brand items that are just as good as bought from anyone else.
If you buy known brands from amazon you're bound to get counterfeit at some point. Only buy disposable garbage on amazon.
I order a lot from Amazon and it’s never happened to me (to my knowledge), and yet other commenters report 100% fraud rate across multiple items in the same order.
Methinks one of us wrong.
Might depend on what sort of things people buy. Expensive makeup or skincare products, you're gonna get scammed 50% of time. Has been the case since 2015 or so.
Not sure what Amazon could do about the products being trash though? If you feel unsure about it, why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person, instead of guessing and buying it by delivery?
Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.
Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.
Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.
Not the person you're replying to, but for me, everything I buy on Amazon is bought because I have no B&M retailers that sell it. Even my local B&M stores usually have vastly reduced stock compared to what they have online (looking at you, Old Navy, Eddie Bauer and similar, who only carry petite sizes online).
Something I've seen a lot is a product that looks like it has good reviews, but if you read the actual reviews it is clear they were reviewing something other than the listed product. I think what happens is they swap out a quality product for trash on the same listing so that the trash a bunch of good reviews that it didn't earn. If Amazon cracked down on that, it would help a lot.
> why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person
Because a lot of times, there isn't a local store that sells it. And honestly, a lot of the stuff at local stores is trash too, sold in packaging that makes it difficult to tell before you buy it.
No physical store sells most of what’s on Amazon. That doesn’t imply it’s bad either.
That’s essentially their conclusion, right?
Amazon could manage QC; other large stores do. (Admittedly not as large as Amazon.)
The quality/price/speed you see at Amazon & Aliexpress are market segment choices.
[flagged]
I used to be like you. But overall the return culture changed drastically - "no fault" returns where stores have zero care to hear about how their items are defective. And then Amazon's constant games with pricing has pushed me into "buying" (ie caching) something if it's a good deal, and then making the actual purchase decision of whether I want it sometime later. Much better than "I'll think about this tonight", and then going to buy it and the price has jumped 30%, making me feel like a sucker.
If I've already got pending Amazon returns to do, adding something to the queue costs me very little. If the queue is empty, then I'm a little more deliberate. But this time of year Nov-Jan is great for this, as the return dates are further out and all on the same day Jan 31 so it doesn't catch me by surprise.
The slow spiteful shipping also pushes me into this behavior when I'm in the middle of a project. Order a few different types of a thing, decide exactly what I need when I'm in the middle of doing, and then when I'm done with the project, return the pile of leftovers.
It's felt like something enabling this dynamic has been waiting to break for years now, but so far it hasn't. The only time I've gotten pushback from Amazon is a nastygram interstitial for a while after I returned a motherboard that I opened and tested (the manufacturer could have avoided this return by documenting the IOMMU groups, but once again... return culture). I have no idea if the problem there was the opening (seemed to be fine under their published policies), or whether something else happened to the item after I handed it to their return agent and they blamed me.
I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.
This makes the same classic mistake about social media about social media that my boomer dad makes.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46679106
> 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.
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
Won't it also be an issue for products that have a best/use before date ?
A batch from one seller may have earlier date than from another seller.
It also fails when someone receives the product, and then returns it (bonus points if it was ‘not what I ordered/fraud’) with the contents replaced with something bogus, if Amazon puts it back in stock.
I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).
I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...
It is not my job to be the regulator, that is the regulators jobs. I do nopt have the time of capacity in my bipolar affected mind to cram in the detail of this corrupt capitalist world we all let happen.
And I cannot read that article because it is behind a paywall and I am too poor and homless to afford a subscription.
And how many people even come to HN (not just thinking about myself).
And now I have no option but to buy from amazon since I am homeless and do not have a fixed address where I can has stuff shipped to.
All of your point are fine if you are well off and capable, but putting this on me, and people like me, is just wrong.
If you want to organize a boycott against amazon, I will be right there with you. Until then all you have are words.
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...
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.
Because if they take Amazon to court, they no longer have a business. Amazon effectively is a large part of American retail, which they cannot afford to not be on.
Why did nobody sue? Section 230?
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.
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.
The arugula issue a few years back revealed that whilst they’re technically labeled it wasn’t in any customer-identifiable way (serial number shenanigans).
Now the location is clearly printed on each bag.
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.
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?
The other issue I have is when you go to a local store they don’t stock items, they say “we can order it”. I needed a gasket for my Kamado Joe grill. I went to my local dealer. They didn’t have one and proceeded to order one for me - the salesman was looking on the Amazon site! Why would I buy it from them? I haven’t been back since.
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.
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!
Is your username a Wheel of Time reference?
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)..
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.
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.
> 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.)
Note that inventory already in Amazon fulfillment centers as of March 31, 2026 is still commingled
"Also what happens after March 31st with the leftover commingled inventory that’s already there?
No action is required for stickerless inventory currently in-transit to or stored in our fulfillment centers. These products will continue to sell under their original SKUs.
However for a reseller, after March 31, 2026, all new inventory must use Amazon barcodes. Please review the FBA Barcode Choice and Labeling FAQ for additional information." -- https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
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.
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.
Disagree. The returns process for AliExpress couldn't be simpler: Open trash can, insert product, buy a different one (still having spent less than you would have on Amazon).
Surprisingly, the number of products that needed such a return was extremely low.
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.
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 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.
You think it will only take 2 months to rotate through everything that is currently filled with fakes?
Although actually upon reflection, it doesn't say that they won't send out co-mingled products, this isn't a notice to customers that they won't send out fakes after that date. Just that they won't co-mingle anymore.
That’s why they announce this on the sellers’ news page. To stop it on the input side.
Probably just sell off their existing stock.
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 bought from Best Buy.
I've made that decision before without the help of LLMs so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It feels vaguely insulting to our intelligence.
I'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.
I might be wrong, but, wouldn't the recommendation to avoid Amazon if you want to be sure come from the massive amount of training data pulled from internet conversations? The kind that would already have been discussing the issue of counterfeit products on Amazon being mixed in with legitimate products from the original manufacturer, since this is a problem that's been going on for, what, at least a decade at this point, right?
The LLM is inherently distrustful of Amazon due to having consumed and trained on a bunch of text that's about how one should be distrustful of Amazon.
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 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.
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
--
Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
--
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.
--
u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!
This is the original source, linked on HN a couple months ago: https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-declin...
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
If there were ratings, presumably the incentive would be to have your beans rated as higher quality.
Thus doesn’t feel particularly evil to me - though it treats beans as fungible.
Something similar is done with milk sales from individual farms in England.
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.
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've chosen that, and it still breaks the order into multiple shipments, because they still want to deliver some stuff first. I'm totally happy to wait for the things to come a bit slowly in one delivery, but they have no nuclear option to insist on this.
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
At least 10 years too late
And it should’ve been a criminal offense. Or fraud at least. But for some reason, we all accepted this?
I never accepted it, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this specific issue long ago. Unfortunately I am not an Attorney General, so I can't bring criminal charges.
We shouldn’t need to have smart consumers, we should have laws that protect the dumb consumers like me.
You may not be Attorney General, but you do have a computer access and the Internet, where you could have shared this more publicly.
This information has been widely available for around a decade, if not longer, and is nothing new. It's been shared all over the internet by myself and countless people for years and years and years. I've even seen it show up on local news stations over the years.
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.
I wonder what effect this will have on cost and delivery time. Will Amazon start telling us, “This is available sooner from seller XYZ”?
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.
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.
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.
for those that have X k-lined
just change it to "xcancel" for mirror
* https://xcancel.com/ghhughes/status/2012824754319753456
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.
Will this mean delivery timelines will be a lot more variable and "who you are buying this from" will matter / be a lot more visible?
What happened? Bezos ordered something and got a counterfeit?
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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?
Any word if this applies internationally? Looking forward to seeing commingling phased out in the UK as well
This is one of those things that's an amazing idea in a perfect world with no fraud or bad actors.
Wow, there'll be entire categories of product that it will be worth buying from Amazon again.
Their practice of comingling SKUs eroded so much trust I had over the years.
About time they fix that mess
I can’t believe they didn’t end this sooner
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.
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.
That's overdue, but I shall continue to make my purchases from European alternatives — Amazon donated millions of dollars to Trump, so share some responsibility for his actions around Greenland, tariffs and so on.
Why 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?
I don't like the market power of Amazon.
Nobody stops you from buying products directly from the company's website. You don't have to buy everything from Amazon.
I browse on Amazon, and then go to the company's website directly for the purchase. USPS, UPS, and FedEx will still deliver it just the same.
But not same-day. But even that's a bit iffy - I made a purchase from Amazon recently where they promised same-day delivery, on a Sunday no less! But it didn't actually arrive until Wednesday.
You’re saying that you still use Amazon because it offers a superior delivery service?
Then aren’t you glad that option exists when you need it?
I didn't need it that same day - if I had, I would have driven 5 miles to the nearest retailer that carried it and Amazon wouldn't have even been considered.
I was seriously impressed that they made that promise, thought I had nothing to lose. And I re-learned a lesson, if something's too good to be true then it probably isn't. I certainly won't be putting any faith in same-day service in the future. They proved their "superior delivery service" is just an illusion.
But it sounds like their superior delivery service is a lie too. Promise next day or 2 day service but delivery in 3-4 days.
It wasn't even next day, it was same day! But yes, it was a complete lie.
Despite that, this user is telling us that’s why they don’t want to order on a another site.
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.
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.
Next up they need to deal with fake reviews, or 5* reviews bought with coupons or other compensation.
Great, now I’ll have to find another source for used items as sold as new. Thanks a lot!
(/s)
[flagged]
Does this mean they won't have the option to buy from "Other sellers on Amazon"?
This is about how inventory is pulled once a purchase from a seller has already been made. "Other sellers on Amazon" doesn't care how the item gets pulled, it just cares there are multiple sellers for the same product (which doesn't require the sellers inventories be commingled to do).
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.