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I'm extra confused, as I'd interpreted "Ships from and sold by Amazon" as "Amazon supplied the goods and will vouch for their validity", whereas "Sold by ISL" w

• pstrateman 5y ago
  Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon seem to come out of the same box at the warehouse. Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
  • dannyw 5y ago
    To be specific, Amazon co-mingles inventory between Amazon, Sold by Amazon, and its third party sellers that are Fulfilled by Amazon. It doesn't matter who you buy from. The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box, the actual product could come from any seller, even if it's "Sold by Amazon". Who you purchase from is purely an accounting thing, unless they manage their own stock and is not part of Prime. If you would like assurance that the goods you purchased actually us genuine, you have to shop from other retailers.
    • addaon 5y ago
      They don't co-mingle inventory on everything, it varies from product to product (although the majority are indeed co-mingled). While there's no visible way to tell if a product is co-mingled, Amazon support is able to look it up. Whenever I'm buying an item that I would be unhappy with a counterfeit (so anything expensive, electronic, or that goes in my mouth or body) I contact Amazon support by live chat and ask them about that particular item. It generally takes about one minute of my time, spread over half an hour as they chase things down and escalate -- probably ends up costing them a heck of a lot more in support costs than they make on the item, but perhaps if it costs them enough they'll just expose the info?
      • altcognito 5y ago
        I bet they just don’t allow you to investigate this via customer service anymore. This would be a great area for regulation as well. If Amazon did it, someone else is bound to do it in the future as well.
        • errcorrectcode 5y ago
          "Investigate" what? Amazon would never disclose or discuss proprietary bizops.
      • Melatonic 5y ago
        Ive also heard that they no longer comingle products multiple times so I am not sure what to believe anymore. Lots of people have told me that this is old data (in regards to Ships and Sold by Amazon). I have noticed less counterfeits these days
      • snowwrestler 5y ago
        Why not just buy from somewhere else? I don’t understand why you would put this level of effort into shopping at a place you don’t trust.
        • addaon 5y ago
          It takes a minute, they often have the best price, and vetting a new vendor -- with their own unknown challenges -- is non-trivial.
          • colanderman 5y ago
            B&H and Adorama are increasingly my go-tos for anything with microchips. They've both branched out from photography to A/V gear to tech goods generally.
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    • AnssiH 5y ago
      > The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box That's not true. Commingled inventory is stored in separate bins so that the original source of the unit can always be determined. This is explicitly said on the Amazon seller help pages for commingling ( https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/200141480 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/20014148... , https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GEFKUGES6NSE7CBP https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G... ) There is also this Financial Times article from 2019: https://archive.md/kfABj https://archive.md/kfABj - quote from Amazon spokesman: > The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit. I guess the confusion came from the name "commingled inventory" - Amazon seems to have recognized this recently and is now referencing this feature as "virtual tracking" instead (quote from the above help pages): > Commingling is a term that was sometimes used to refer to virtual tracking. However, virtual tracking is a more accurate term, because we trace the source of eligible products throughout the fulfillment process. Identical items from different suppliers are not stored together.
      • AlanYx 5y ago
        I may be misunderstanding the links you're providing, but to me they only appear to say that Amazon is aware of the original source of each unit sold. They don't appear to say that a consumer has any control over which bin a product is pulled from. i.e., A consumer may choose to buy a product "sold and shipped by Amazon" and it may get fulfilled from a bin supplied by a third-party. The Financial Times article you linked to seems to confirm this.
        • AnssiH 5y ago
          Your understanding is correct. My point was only that the claim "picker picks from the same box" is incorrect.
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  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    > Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore. That is a very generalized statement. I have bought hundreds products shipped and sold by Amazon and never had an issue with authenticity. I'm sure it happens, but I'm willing to guess it is pretty rare and Amazon has always been quick to refund products that are shipped and sold by Amazon.
    • tkojames 5y ago
      And I used to buy SD cards and Mac adapters from Amazon for work and it was about half of them products were fake until I finally stopped and got them from cdw. They would fight me every time I brought it up. It is well know issue glad you never dealt with it.
    • quintushoratius 5y ago
      My own experience of counterfeits includes, of all things, water filters. The packaging was perfect, but the filters literally wouldn't fit without modification. I gave up after the third time and went back to buying from brick-and-mortar, and haven't had a problem since. Between my experience and reports from others, I'd say that you've been extraordinarily lucky.
      • bb88 5y ago
        There's a philips respironics CPAP face mask shipped in a ziploc bag with a philips respironics sticker on it. Other gear (filters, nose cusions, tubing) looks more or less authentically packaged correctly.
      • kyleee 5y ago
        lucky and/or possibly unaware
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      How do you know? Some of the fake stuff is pretty good. Would you notice if your energizer batteries were random Chinese fakes? The first fake I discovered on amazon was a mouse trap of all things.
  • errcorrectcode 5y ago
    > Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore. Untrue. Stick to SBA, and it's like any other retail store with customary supply chain integrity. FBA can be anything because Amazon didn't purchase the goods, they're only warehousing and delivering them. SBA and each FBA are separate bins by design. The commingling of different SBA/FBA sources at the same ASIN (item on the website the customer buys from) would be a different issue.
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    Bold of you to assume genuine products are coming in through any supply chain that isn't "walk up to the factory and buy wholesale."
    • eru 5y ago
      It's all a matter of probabilities.
      • shadowgovt 5y ago
        True, but the large volume of reporting on Amazon's issue doesn't imply their probability is higher; they're a larger target for investigation. https://bestlifeonline.com/walmart-amazon-counterfeit-news/ https://bestlifeonline.com/walmart-amazon-counterfeit-news/ The issue is that there's huge incentives for vendors to counterfeit and few incentives for stores to deeply spot-check their middle-layer resellers or the stories they're told from wholesale sources, many of whom are in another country (with all the associated barriers of communication, documentation, and even good ol' fashioned "playing the foreign sucker for their money"). When nobody is actually getting hurt, the incentives to make sure everyone is playing by the rules are very low (and the benefits for cheating, i.e. making win-win deals that bring costs down while bringing revenue up for the merchant and some counterfeit outfit at the cost of lost potential sales to the brand owner, are high). My recommendation would be to treat all stores with a long supply chain as sus until proven otherwise.
  • jb1991 5y ago
    I’ve been bitten by so much garbage bought on Amazon, including clear counterfeits that I had to charge back on the credit card, that we have a rule in our house to never ever buy anything in that site even if it’s the only site offering it.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    > Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore. For whatever reason, I have noticed this getting dramatically worse over the past couple of years. Almost all "5-star" reviewed products are filled with top reviews of 1-star reporting fake products. And because of Amazon's overly generous return policy, there's a lot of used products sold as well. Buying off of Amazon feels like there's a high probability you'll get a used or counterfeit/fake product or both. I have been reducing what I buy on Amazon because I just don't trust it.
    • arlcode 5y ago
      Maybe Amazon Germany is different or I've been extremely lucky so far because I've never received a fake (as far as I can tell). I wonder whether fakes are more prevalent in some product categories than in others.
      • sgerenser 5y ago
        Fakes are definitely more prevalent in certain categories, for sure. Batteries, power adapters, flash drives and SD cards are probably the biggest off the top of my head. Probably because they’re relatively simple devices that are easy to manufacture to a lower quality standard than the genuine item and will usually at least superficially appear to work when received by the average buyer.
  • throwawaylinux 5y ago
    I've used Amazon all of once so I don't know anything. What do you mean really need genuine? Let's say you wanted to buy an iPhone or a Canon SLR camera or a Lenovo laptop. You can't buy these from Amazon? What happens if you try? Will they ship you a block of wood in a box, or a myPhone? And won't refund it?
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    • vineyardmike 5y ago
      Consumable goods, eg. Toothpaste are things that you may want to be genuine. Sure it may say "Crest", but did it come from the Crest factory, or did a no-name company drop ship fake crest toothpaste to an amazon warehouse, and now their product is co-mingled with genuine crest? (this is an example, you can google for real stories) To add, there are stores of extreme coupons who will products (again, lets use toothpaste) from brick and mortar stores on discount, then sell them on amazon. Or buying returns/expired food products from brick and mortar stores, then selling into amazon. Again, the issue in all this is co-mingling because any genuine sourced products compete with these less reputable ones.
    • jonp888 5y ago
      We are not talking here about laptops or cameras. The usual targets for counterfeiting are things like USB cables or headphones. They might come without packaging, but then so do the geniune ones sometimes. They look normal to non-expert eye, but then when you use them they either break quickly, or whilst functiontal are not as effective as a genuine item(worse sound quality, slower charging, slower transfer speed etc.).
      • throwawaylinux 5y ago
        Okay I didn't realize that was implied with the context. So you can't use Amazon for buying genuine USB cables, headphones, or toothpaste. But laptops, cameras and phones are okay.
• JohnTHaller 5y ago
  Amazon's inventory is co-mingled. So, the warehouse has the widgets sourced by Amazon itself to sell, by the widget maker themselves on their own store on Amazon, by a small chain store in one state to sell, and by random dude who might possibly be importing counterfeits to sell on his fulfilled by Amazon store. All of those widgets are in a big pile and all have the same packaging and barcodes. Whether you buy from random dude or Amazon, you're getting a random one from the pile.