What? That would help enormously. If they stopped commingling it would be easy to quickly identify and eliminate bad sellers. Consumers would also have the option of sticking to a known-good seller like Amazon and be able to trust that they weren’t going to get some comingled bullshit copy.
That’s a pretty damn far cry from the current situation.
From the tweets by the authors, the current situation is the bad seller is amazon.com. This is apparently not a commingling problem. Amazon is sourcing illegal counterfeit products directly.
Link to the tweet that claims Amazon are themselves buying counterfeits from suppliers? Are you sure you’re not misunderstanding the situation re: comingling?
It’s precisely because of commingling that, just because you buy a book “Shipped From and Sold By Amazon” you have no guarantee that the book they ship to you was actually bought and entered into their inventory by them. Their books and every other “fulfilled by Amazon” sellers’ are treated as completely fungible by their fulfilment centres.
“Ships From and Sold by Amazon” doesn’t really mean anything re: the actual book you receive, which could easily be one that came into their system from Bob’s Big Store of Counterfeit Bullshit.
These books are counterfeits. Counterfeiting is illegal and intent doesn't matter.
This is not a matter of some other seller providing Amazon with inventory. These are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory.
There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.
Easy for who? Amazon knows which seller sent in the inventory for every order, so they know to punish the right seller when a complaint comes in.
You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers, but most customers don't care and prefer cheaper over more reliable. That effect is not enough to help "enormously".
> ...so they know to punish the right seller when a complaint comes in.
Since (according to others in this thread) the Amazon "Reason for return" menu does not provide the option "Item is counterfeit", it does not sound like Amazon is very interested in receiving these sorts of complaints. So I have to wonder how interested Amazon is in punishing the sellers of counterfeit items. If you close your ears to bad news, you won't hear any.
> You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers...
That's right. For items where genuineness really matters, I choose the seller "Sold by Walmart" at walmart.com. There are no reliable sellers at amazon.com, not even "Sold by Amazon". Which is a shame.
P.S. Reply to msbarnett, since I can't reply directly: Amazon does not literally put all identical items into a single physical bin, so it is at least feasible for them to keep track of which item came from which seller, if they choose to. I recommend that you (and other readers) take a tour of an Amazon fulfillment center: https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment-center-tours/
It's pretty interesting.
It has "not as described" as an option. You can put in text explaining what wasn't as described: if it has keywords like "counterfeit" or similar, it will go into that seller's CCR (counterfeit complaint rate), and sellers with a bad CCR get suspended.
> Amazon knows which seller sent in the inventory for every order, so they know to punish the right seller when a complaint comes in.
Huuuuge citation needed.
It’s precisely because of comingling that they don’t have the ability to do this: they put multiple sellers goods, including their own, in the same storage bins, provided they have the same UPC. By what means do you suggest they can distinguish Seller A’s widget in Bin 37624 from Seller B’s? They do not appear to attach any additional tracking stickers to their goods.
And they do not have a formal system for complaining about counterfeit goods. They don’t even offer it as a distinct option on returns — probably quite purposefully. All you can do is request a return for some vaguely-related reason and manually add a note about it being counterfeit. They’re clearly not attempting to automate identification of bad goods, let alone removal of bad actors.
"For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit."
Amazon should known which seller sent in the inventory. That they intentionally choose not to know that, is their own intentional mistake, and their abdication of responsibility that really should be theirs. They intentionally create a confusing situation that enables counterfeiters. They are absolutely, totally responsible for this mess and should have hurried to fix this a long time ago. That they haven't, means they knowingly enable and profit from counterfeiting.
If they were pushing for greater criminal penalties for distributing counterfeit goods, as a crime of negligence or strict liability, then I'd think they cared.
Or, if they just took tangible action to stop distributing counterfeits themselves, that would be even more convincing.