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I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory be

by topaz0 4y ago

I suspect they save money not just from saving some effort/complication of tracking the supplier, but also from being able to distribute the larger inventory better across their warehouses. If someone in Tennessee buys the item from a supplier whose stock is in Idaho, they have to ship across the country, but if they can substitute with stock form another supplier that is in Georgia they save a lot of shipping.

paulmd 4y ago
Nobody disagrees with commingling in theory, but, the problem is you have some bad actors who will pollute the communal product bins. It is not obvious who they are because there is no tracking of individual items, only by ASIN. Tracking by (ASIN,UUID) pair would at least allow them to figure out who the bad actors are and flag/pull those items. There are lots of things they could do to try and help. The problem really is, there is no incentive for Amazon to do any of them.