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.
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.
To use the die I'm using a one ton arbor press. That's not enough force to push a die of that size through in one go, but after the first press I can move the die and the leather around the outline and finish the cutting with a few light presses all around.
- The Amazon product catalog is essentially AliExpress at this point. Endless WIXUBI product slop.
- Free shipping thresholds went up
- Amazon shipping times became longer
- AliExpress managed to drastically speed up their shipping
If they don't ship much faster, cost three times as much (especially once you add the shipping cost), can't guarantee higher quality - why would I buy from them rather than going to the source?
If I need reliable quality (e.g. stuff that comes into contact with food) or want it fast, I'm paying the retail premium (which isn't as bad nowadays as it used to be).
I cancelled Prime because I wasn't getting any value anymore. Non-Prime customers are treated like second class citizens. Amazon has really gone downhill lately. Customer service is terrible. Not just the counterfeiting, but the website UX has become steadily worse. Archive order was recently removed without warning as was the ability to view itemized invoices. Yes, really. Before anyone says otherwise, "View Invoice" now redirects to your Order Details page, absent any additional detail.
I switched most of my shopping to Walmart. I get free next day or two-day shipping for orders of $35 or more, where Amazon will ship the same in 5-6 days now that I am non-Prime scum.
Not disagreeing, but the Amazon web UX has been famously terrible since like 1998. They basically invented the whole trend of building via A/B test result instead of via user-centric design. Nothing on the site has ever made any sense. Every item title is a paragraph description. The categories are basically useless. The filters are a mess of bad and incomplete data to the point of being useless. Many items have 2-3 duplicate listings that somehow have different shipping dates and descriptions, and you never know if you have found the "real" listing. But they sure sell a lot of stuff.
Regardless I've considered it to be intentional.
Once bought an entire store out of patch cables, ha.
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?
Amazon is the poster child for the exact opposite of what you claim. They spent two decades plowing every cent into land acquisition, warehouse construction, expanding their labor force, and developing software and hardware.
It was thought impossible to compete with Walmart and others with established logistics networks. Now, they eclipse Walmart because Walmart was focused on the short term, while Amazon was playing to where the ball would be in 20+ years.
Due to a lack of a presence by name brands, Amazon has been devolving into a platform for selling drop-shipped no-name Chinese products. Whether this scared them because of long-term sustainability, tariffs, or just practical business sense is unknown.
Health insurance companies would like a word
Commingling must have been someone's big, successful project, with all the benefits, probably faster shipping, lower cost, etc.
Once a big project got launched with all these benefits materialized, it is really hard to undo it. When a problem is identified, higher-ups usually ask to address it, rather than undoing the whole project. Anyone pushing to undo a project would be claiming the entire team up to whatever level making that original decision made a huge mistake. In other words, committing a political suicide.
It may take some mix of the following to trigger such drastic changes:
- Some fundamental assumptions changed (for example, one may claim that the logistics got so much better that the original benefits on the delivery speed can be achieved now without commingling).
- Multiple attempts at addressing the problems without killing the project proved unsuccessful.
- The ppl who original launched the project moved, to other domains or other companies.
- Some external triggers (new regulation, a large chunk of partners / stakeholders complaining, the company literally dying, etc.)
In all, there has to be someone for whom the incentive to undo it overcomes the hurdle, political or otherwise to reverse course on a huge project. After that, there need to be the usual logistics, including convincing, budgeting, prioritization, and a million other things you do at a big company to get a thing done. Now, 10 years have passed and it is finally making news.
Or, I can be totally wrong and it's just a bunch of privileged dumbasses who don't give a fork and randomly making one project after another, while pointing at some graphs and numbers claiming successes regardless of what really happens. ;)
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?
But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!
The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!
They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.
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.
They’d be better stewards of the industry, but aren’t the odds that everything they’ve done for the past decade has improved their bottom line?
This is the company whose policies have effectively forced their drivers to use plastic bottles as toilets.
Something which may or may not decrease their bottom line but definitely significantly reduces counterfeit items ending up in customers hands is going to be considered reasonable even if it’s not profit maximizing.
Buying option 1: Company X glue from store A. Buying option 2: Company X glue from store B. Buying option 3: Company X glue from store C. ...etc.
But then Amazon says, "actually, these are all the exact same bottles of glue, so we'll thrown them all into the same bin, and no matter what "store" the people buy them from, we'll just grab them out and send them to the customer.
Now even without counterfeits, this is weird. What exactly is the point of store A, B, C, etc.? Company X sends the bottles to Amazon, they get put in one big pile, you buy them on Amazon, and Amazon takes them out of that one big pile and sends them to you.
The only thing purpose of the "stores" when you co-mingle inventory seems to be:
1. Plausible deniability for counterfeits. Hey, they told us they bought it from company X, we had no way of knowing they didn't.
2. Getting money from people trying to get rich quick in the marketplace. Some people will try all sorts of cuts to boost their Amazon sales in the hope that it will pay off later.
Amazon has an interest in allowing these resellers of legitimate products to exist because it pushes down prices from the primary vendors, lowering prices for the customer. The primary vendors end up competing against themselves indirectly but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is the milieu in which counterfeit products exist.
If the producers of these products were consistently competent at managing their supply chains it would be much less of an issue because it would clear the field of resellers arbitraging the mismanagement, leaving only Company X and the counterfeiters which is a much easier problem to solve because you don’t have to worry about banning legitimate resellers. But that isn’t where we are.
Smart companies put contracts globally that have Amazon implications under a single person who can see across every deal. If they sell to someone with a restriction on Amazon resale, they will mark those goods so that they can track it if it shows up on Amazon. However, there are so many fly-by-night resellers that this is a losing proposition, so many don’t bother with those resellers anymore because enforcement yields nothing.
The vast majority of companies are naive and not very smart about any of this. People that know how to systematically set up a sales program that is profitable and resistant to arbitrage on Amazon get paid a lot of money in industry. It isn’t that hard but most companies can’t seem to figure it out.
To externalize risk away from Amazon.
I stopped buying from "fullfilled by Amazon" as the level of fraud was just insane.
So it is possible and not that expensive even as a country-wide system for goods that cost around $1 (a typical can of beer).
Maybe a unique bar code per-item that includes some private hash information that makes it unique to the producer? Sort of an electronic signature for physical goods? Then if there's a centralized database, copying the QR codes wouldn't do much good. You might be able to slip in one if it is sold before the real version. But each subsequent copy could be caught.
Is that real? I find it hard to believe that Amazon effectively accepted stock from third parties "as is" and lost track of where it came from. It's more likely that they don't tell you than they don't track.
I'm glad to see this change.
It's not that hard to then track back from an order exactly what bin or tote or shelf the item was pulled from, then look at what shipment(s) that bin's items came from to figure out what supplier it came from.
They know the counterfeit goods came in and were stowed to bin XYZ and they know that someone pulled from XYZ...
In the seller documentation they say they can track the source of commingled inventory - they achieve this by never putting them on the same physical shelf location.
Also mentioned by Amazon spokesman in e.g. this article: https://archive.is/ra6RT
> Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit
The OP article is exhibit A for how common of an issue this was.
Entirely why we no longer use their service and ship direct for amazon orders. Some people still try the trick but we always put a claim in and amazon after they automatically give a refund to the buyer, and Amazon pay it. So Amazon pay twice. Maybe the cost of just accepting that loss is less than having someone check the return.
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.
Amazon could then persue the manufacturer for sending bad goods.
Sue them? Even assuming that kind of time, money, and energy expenditure is within their resources, Amazon's legal department is likely to be able to stonewall until they run out of money.
Then multiply that by however many thousands or tens of thousands of customers Amazon has done this to. No more than a fraction will ever complain, no more than a fraction of those will ever sue.
Amazon has been allowed to get too big, and the usual methods of dealing with fraud at this level simply don't work reliably.
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...
Whenever this happened with me, Amazon was pretty quick to offer a refund/replacement.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...
Yeah. This is a joke. They give us a 5-10% discount to do this. But when the time for the next delivery came, they had doubled the prices instead of locking in the price I had subscribed at. I had to cancel the order.
If I had been informed during subscription that fulfillment will be done at the price prevailing at that time, I would never have subscribed in the first place.
I think what a lot of people qualify of counterfeit (not saying OP does here) is people buying cheap no-brand Chinese garbage and receiving cheap no-brand Chinese garbage and not being happy with it.
But that's the other aspect to commingling, I guess - you might pay full price for the real deal and get a fake, due to bad actors' stock being commingled, but on the flipside a punter who's paid an unrealistically low obviously-fake price might actually get the real deal, adding an air of legitimacy to the bad actor.
I think I'm pretty good at spotting fakes, because I'm sensitive to tiny typographical or material-wise quirks. In the same period, I've received multiple fakes on eBay, including a genuine phone that came with a counterfeit charger.
I can imagine that commingling introduces a very low-percentage risk of receiving a counterfeit product but due to the immense scale, it still affects a huge absolute number of orders.
I did get a refund most of the time. Amazon's service is still quite good even today. Already don't feel great about ordering from Amazon but this really made me cut back over the last year or two.
I received some real books, and several counterfeit copies. The same books weren’t even the same size, some also had thin pages, some yellow pages, and several with printing errors the others didn’t have.
Sadly I tried to contact the publisher and let them know about the counterfeit books in their listings and tried to warn them about what was going on, but their support people only wanted me to take it up with Amazon, and couldn’t understand how to escalate my concerns internally and just kept asking me if they could close the ticket.
Also Amazon refunds aren’t as smooth when you don’t live in the US and already paid customs duties on the counterfeit products, and the return shipping costs make returns prohibitively expensive.
I wouldn’t have even ordered from them in the first place if I could have avoided it.
I’m glad they are solving this problem, but I also kind of don’t want them to succeed because of their terrible legacy.
I left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.
Closest I got was a bottle that was slightly off color and the label had a different texture.
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.
Seeing more and more AI generated illustrations on products too.
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.)
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).
Charcoal pencils - 30% cheaper on Amazon compared to other sites. More than 2 times cheaper compared to local art stores and the local store only has one crappy brand in stock.
My watch - $40 plus shipping (2 weeks) directly from the manufacturer. Amazon has it at $28 and it'll get here tomorrow.
Pen nibs from Jetpen - $10 + $5.95 shipping. Once again >1week for delivery. $16 from amazon and it gets here tomorrow
I really feel like an idiot trying to boycott this company, but I'm still trying where I can.
But it's one of the things I guess you can't be too sure about. Maybe if we see name-brand prices increase after commingling ends, that can be proof that prices were low due to counterfeits
But for lots of "normal" stuff I use Walmart/Target to source it if possible.
So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?
This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.
Stop rewarding bad behavior!
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.
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.
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.
Pushed me to bookshop.org for most normal stuff. I go to the publisher for everything else.
paulryanrogers•4mo ago
Someone1234•4mo 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•4mo ago
Barbing•4mo 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•4mo ago
consumer451•4mo ago
It was one of those things that I couldn’t explain, and just wrote off before it broke my brain.