Sounds more like they were losing market to other retailers.
Amusingly after that, I saw I could get nearly everything else off AliExpress for cheaper. My usage of Amazon practically evaporated.
it smells like the sort of policy change that happens when an exec gets personally impacted by it.
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-bombs...
Tariffs maybe?
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.
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.
Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?
The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!
If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out.
Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.
Maybe they have a variation of your idea where they inkjet a serial number onto a conveyor belt of incoming items or add a super-cheap chip of some kind.
Amazon regularly commingling legitimate and counterfeit goods, means that customers are left with the job of trying to verify that the goods they ordered are legitimate. For every customer that complaints & refunds, there might be three or more who don't.
Some of these counterfeit products have legitimate safety concerns, for example lead paint usage, battery fire risks, PPE that misstates its effectiveness, or USB chargers with poor AC DC electrical isolation.
This is a huge trust problem, and "the customer needs to detect counterfeits and refund," isn't actually a solution to THAT problem.
In the US, when Subscribe & Save is set up, it is set by default to receive orders from "Amazon.com and other top rated sellers". If you want to change it, you need to go into the Subscribe & Save page and change it to "Amazon.com only".
I've had an order where I initially placed a new subscription sold by Amazon.com, but a 3rd party seller would lower their price by a few cents, and Amazon would change the seller and I would receive grey market goods.
I haven't found a way to change the default for new subscriptions to always use the same seller that I set up the subscription with, so I need to manually change it for every single new subscription.
They really don't make it obvious where to change it, either...
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.)
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.
paulryanrogers•1h ago
Someone1234•1h ago
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•48m ago
Barbing•8m ago
>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•1m ago
consumer451•1h ago
It was one of those things that I couldn’t explain, and just wrote off before it broke my brain.