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Amazon to end commingling after years of complaints from brands and sellers
- paulryanrogers 1y agoAmazing they weren't prosecuted for it.
- Someone1234 1y agoYeah, "shipped and sold by Amazon.com" was essentially selling and shipping millions of dollars of fully counterfeit products under this program for years. If a small vendor does something like this, they'd have the fed kicking down their door after tens of thousands. I personally received counterfeit and tampered products "shipped and sold by Amazon.com" on half a dozen occasions. Even as recently as the last two months.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI have and I quit Amazon years ago. Probably have not used my account in nearly a decade.
- Barbing 1y ago>[…] Jeff Bezos received your email and asked me to respond on his behalf. […] >If an item is shipped and sold by Amazon[dot]com it will not be commingled with any other inventory. >Best regards, […] >Executive Customer Relations -Amazon, 2015 Was this a lie or did it change?
- GauntletWizard 1y agoYes.
- consumer451 1y agoI had always thought they must be the biggest distributor of counterfeit products in the history of the country. It was one of those things that I couldn’t explain, and just wrote off before it broke my brain.
- dataflow 1y ago> During Wednesday’s presentation in Seattle, Amazon executives said the economics of commingling no longer worked. With the company’s logistics network now capable of storing products closer to customers, the speed advantage of pooled inventory has diminished. Sounds more like they were losing market to other retailers.
- redserk 1y agoI don’t think I’ve had a counterfeit good come in, but the number of times I’ve heard about it led me to start going to other retailers for things I wanted guarantees on: cleaning products, personal hygiene items, and expensive electronics/accessories. Amusingly after that, I saw I could get nearly everything else off AliExpress for cheaper. My usage of Amazon practically evaporated.
- e40 1y agoI started buying hard drives from b&h photo. Just couldn’t trust Amazon anymore.
- typpilol 1y agoDon't you just have the same issue but with shady ali express sellers now?
- zargon 1y agoNo. 1) AliExpress sellers control their own store listing and have their own reviews. This is leagues ahead of Amazon. 2) I only buy products from AliExpress where safety and quality aren’t of any concern. 3) I have never actually had a "shady seller" experience on AliExpress.
- Freak_NL 1y agoEven quality can be fine on AliExpress for all sorts of parts and even custom work. Small screws in a specific size, wood routing bits, drill bits, magnets, crafting stuff… I had a cutting die for leather made there in a shape specified by me, and the process, while clunky with their spammy message box, was pretty much as pleasant as you could expect, and the workmanship excellent. Just don't buy clothing or end-user electronics there. For makers, crafters, and tinkerers AliExpress is a great resource while it lasts¹. 1: The US obviously has its tariffs thing going on. The EU is considering a fixed €2 surcharge for packages from China.
- kylec 1y agoI’m astounded, this has been a problem for 10+ years and I just assumed they didn’t care and would never change it. Better late than never, but why the sudden change?
- notatoad 1y agoyeah, this has been obviously a bad thing for so long, and they've been so stubborn, it's hard to believe anything has actually changed in the "economics" of it. it smells like the sort of policy change that happens when an exec gets personally impacted by it.
- mbreese 1y agoIt smells to me like the sort of policy change that happens when Amazon starts to worry about it affecting their bottom line and relationships with suppliers. It used to be enough to solve the problem with support/email. I do wonder what changed…
- thepryz 1y agoThis. Amazon made a number of changes to the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program related to lost and damaged inventory among other things. The changes risked increasing the costs and also required Amazon to be provided information that they really shouldn’t need, such as as the cost to source that inventory. My assumption is that the decision to stop commingling is more to support these changes to the FBA program and allow them to extract more money via fees. https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/12/22/amazon-drops-bombshell-on-fba-sellers/ https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/12/22/amazon-drops-bombs...
- SoftTalker 1y agoI guess it's one thing to say you are going to do it and another thing to actually do it. Is anyone going to be verifying this? How would you? Mark your products and ask customers to check for the mark?
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- ddavis 1y agoLiterally dealing with this right now. My wife got what appears to be a (very expensive) counterfeit item that is technically non-returnable (not laying down without a fight). Kind of cathartic to see this pop up.
- codespin 1y agoI received counterfeit goods multiple times due to this. I set up a subscribe and save order and they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products. Amazon collected the money and just did not care, they need to be held accountable for these things.
- commandar 1y ago> they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products What made this all particularly insidious is that Amazon not only commingled inventory, but actively refused to track where inventory came from. This meant you only needed one fraudulent seller to poison the entire inventory pool and there was no way know where the bad product came from because Amazon actively avoided being able to track it. That's the aspect of it that always felt particularly malicious to me.
- FredPret 1y agoThe bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in. Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items. You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical. If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.
- josefx 1y ago> Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item. Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?
- FredPret 1y agoThese things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up. But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!
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- dboreham 1y agoRather suspicious this comes out a couple days after the articles about Walmart having issues with sellers shipping fake products.
- GeekyBear 1y agoThe hassle of returning fraudulent or broken products has already driven me back to brick and mortar retail stores for items of any real value.
- LunaSea 1y agoA lot of brick and mortar stores are turning into Alibaba / Tenu / Shine resellers as well lately. Seeing more and more AI generated illustrations on products too.
- chmod775 1y agoThis never happened to me for an actually valuable item, but I've received stuff like flimsy chinese nail clippers rather than the one I ordered. Not even knocks off, just completely different items. A proper knock off would've probably been just as good as the original... The idea likely was that nobody is going to bother making much of a fuss over a 20 dollar nail clipper.
- bapak 1y agoYou're exchanging a 50% chance (?) of having to fill in a form with a 100% chance of having to drive to the store, finding parking, going home and having a 50% it doesn't work when plugged in anyway.
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoJust got hit by a counterfeit good 2 days ago. Thank god it's finally ending.
- neilv 1y agoAs a consumer, this is great. If Amazon can also ensure that every "Sold by Amazon" unit is legitimate (that they aren't sometimes sourcing badly), then it's 10x great. (That I didn't feel comfortable enough trusting Amazon for some kinds of items is usually the only reason I've been buying direct-to-consumer from the brands' Web sites. I've had even Samsung and Crucial do DTC poorly in the last couple years.) (Also, if I felt I could trust Amazon for genuine brand-name monthly OTC allergy products, that would mean no more hassling with the pharmacy chains. And maybe no more Walmart, though I don't recall a recent problem in their execution, and have been trusting them a little more than Amazon recently.)
- buckle8017 1y agoI literally do not believe they will do this.
- notfast44 1y agoIt's definitely not going to be immediate. The last sentence of the article: "Amazon said commingling will be phased out across its supply chain later this year."
- woodruffw 1y agoA serious question for the people in this thread who have bitten by this: why do you keep giving Amazon your business? Is it worth it despite these experiences?
- thepryz 1y agoI largely stopped buying from Amazon after receiving three counterfeit or defective products in one month. The only reason I buy from them now is due to a particularly low sale price or things I can’t easily source elsewhere. Otherwise, if ai can buy local or buy elsewhere I do.
- akhleung 1y agoI once was the victim of an empty box scam when I purchased an expensive item off Amazon a few years ago (luckily I got a refund), and since then I've used Amazon much less, and only for inexpensive things. Maybe enough people have reduced their spending such that Amazon has been forced to take notice.
- GauntletWizard 1y agoI more or less stopped completely. I spent nearly $10,000 on Amazon in 2016 (Multiple computers, clothes, games, foodstuffs - Just everything); It was down to $2000 by 2018 after I stopped trusting it for anything but big-ticket items that were unlikely to be counterfeit. It picked up again in the pandemic, but after a series of bad purchases in 2023 I've spent less than $1000 in the last year, and over half of that is a CPU that I really feared buying because of fraud/counterfeit concerns, and immediately inspected and installed to assuage those fears.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI use Amazon to find a product but will then look for another channel to make the purchase, such as the product’s own site. I try to buy from Amazon as little as possible, and if I can only buy a product from Amazon, I’ll ask the product seller to give me a way to buy direct. I would never buy a food or similar product that I would eat or use on my body from them. They simply don’t care about their supply chain integrity (aside from this bone they’re finally throwing to sellers and customers).
- freshtake 1y agoA good move, even if many years late. It's a bilateral trustbuster when the same platform that allows commingling and knockoffs then begins tagging legit items as "frequently returned" in the feed. Can we also get the ability to filter by seller entity country of origin? Amazon also needs to offer far better tools for buyers to effectively find and attach to brands.
- tchbnl 1y agoThis is an incredibly welcomed change. When I buy a product from a specific seller amongst a dozen, it's for a good reason. I expect THEIR inventory.
- sangeeth96 1y agoI wonder if this is a global change or just US only?
- JCM9 1y agoWas burned by counterfeit goods multiple times with my Amazon purchases. Their return policy is good, but still it was really annoying when I’d order something and you get counterfeit product. They were cutting a lot of corners on quality control and it really started to show. Seems like this got to be a big enough issue they couldn’t just keep pretending like selling and shipping bogus junk wasn’t a real problem.
- sieve 1y agoI have had serious issues with Amazon these last two-three months which has resulted in my moving a majority of my purchases to a different online retailer. I bought some ASSIMIL language-learning books being sold by a (known) POD firm. But I got some random (or so I thought) POD crap instead of the books I had ordered. I returned them and tried it again a month later (after confirming with customer care that I will get what I see in the listing) to see that the exact same books were sent again. When I compared the ISBN numbers, I found that the books I had ordered were the older 978 series which can be reduced to the 10-digit version while the ones they were sending were the newer 979 series with only the check digit differing. I had to call them 15-20 times before I got my money back because they would repeatedly set up a return pickup, not do it and then claim that I have cancelled it. The books are still lying with me. They haven't bothered to collect. They have routinely sabotaged multiple other deliveries by not visiting my house and providing bogus "OTP not provided/unable to contact" updates. The absolute worst thing that happened was with some books I bought from a small publisher that they, unfortunately, sent by Amazon Shipping. One month and multiple calls/emails later to complain about Amazon's bogus delivery attempts, they completely ghosted me and the publisher had to RTO the books back. I talked to the publisher and they said they cannot afford to be out of pocket on shipping, so I paid them INR 1,000 to cover their expenses for the unnecessary two legs of shipping. I have now decided that I am dealing with absolute scoundrels who do not value their customer's time and plan my purchases accordingly.
- Havoc 1y agoThis is great, though at the same time I feel Amazon deserves no credit for fixing a fuckup they created. Congratulations on deciding to implement a non-broken system
- iLoveOncall 1y agoWhile better for sellers I think the experience will be terrible for buyers. You already have dozens of pages of very similar products at the moment coming from the same Chinese factory under a different brand name, if on top of that you split the ones that are currently comingled, it's going to be an absolute horrendous UX.
- lvl155 1y agoI used to order things from amazon.co.jp to avoid this issue until the clowns stopped de minimis. Amazon quality varies greatly across the globe. The worst, in my experience, is amazon.de. Quality really plummeted since the pandemic. I consistently received used products from them and this led me to think it’s a cultural thing in Europe where people routinely use products and simply return them after use.
- John23832 1y agoThis was a huge problem with books. I can't count the number of times I received copied, badly bound books from Amazon that were supposed to be new. Pushed me to bookshop.org for most normal stuff. I go to the publisher for everything else.
- stefap2 1y agoI’m more irritated by the comingling of small, fragile products with large, heavy ones in the same box, like a box of crackers shipped together with detergent. Because of this, I had to stop my Subscribe & Save orders. Every month they would do this nonsense.
- leifdreizler 1y agoI used to order vitamins and supplements from Amazon but started ordering direct because I read some stories about people getting fake items.