Yeah, "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.

I 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.

I 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.

This. Amazon buyer metrics have been tanking for a while. In general if I don't care about the quality I have better and cheaper places to shop. When I know the brand I want, and want predictable quality, I order from the company directly. Price, service, quality, and delivery time are equal or better than Amazon.

They are getting steadily eroded by Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba. Also in-person retail is surging for specific items - places like Best Buy have had a nice resurgence since the 2010s (stock is down compared to the pandemic, but that's a retail thing, not BBY problem).

yeah, 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.

I 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?

>but why the sudden change?

Tariffs maybe?

I feel like this is one of the things where the most parsimonious explanation by far is to take their stated explanation at face value. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would insist on commingling when it's necessary to achieve fast shipping speeds, and end it if their logistics network is so good that it's no longer necessary. (Anecdotally, I just got an Amazon order to my doorstep in four hours yesterday - their logistics really are mindbogglingly fast now.)

They could have lost enough brand name vendors who decided not to deal with amazon because customers get counterfeit or expired products. Nike and Johnson and Johnson are mentioned in the article, but there are also smaller brands like ThermoWorks who were staunchly anti-Amazon because of co-mingling until very recently. I suspect it was due to a promise to end the process which brought brands back.

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.

> 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.

It’s weird, every time I’ve talked to Amazon support they’ve always done well. Did they refuse to refund you or let you return it?

I don't think ending commingling will stop that from happening, since Subscribe & Save is set to switch to a different seller with a lower price by default.

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.

> Amazon collected the money and just did not care, they need to be held accountable for these things.

Whenever this happened with me, Amazon was pretty quick to offer a refund/replacement.

I 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I 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).

I tried making a serious effort of avoiding amazon lately. What I found was _generally_ prices are much higher everywhere else.

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.

Amazon has some things other sources don't, or has them at prices that make it worth the risk.

But for lots of "normal" stuff I use Walmart/Target to source it if possible.