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.
>The se 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.
No, it's not.
Even if it says "Shipped and sold by Amazon", it does not mean that the item originated from Amazon's purchase. Amazon considers co-mingled inventory as fungible.
Let's say Amazon has 10 warehouses, and every month, they order 100 copies of a book, and put 10 in each warehouse. Now, a third party seller comes onto the scene, and wants to sell the same book, fulfilled by Amazon, with co-mingling to reduce costs. To further reduce costs, he also only wants to send his inventory to the closest warehouse so shipping is cheaper. Let's say he has 100 copies of this book, and he sends them to warehouse 10. Amazon, seeing that there are 100 additional copies of this book in this warehouse, and knowing that demand is likely to stay relatively the same, knows that for the next 10 months, they do not have ship those 10 books a month to it. Now, Amazon has run through the stock they stored at warehouse 10, but they have an order from someone who lives down the street. They don't have any copies of the book that they purchased, but they have the co-mingled copy that should, in theory, be an exact copy of the original product. They then send it to the customer so that they have a shorter delivery time. If they were to ship all of the copies of the book that were sent to them by that seller, and had not replenished, when a customer ordered from that seller they could ship a copy from warehouse 3, but it would take an extra day to arrive. Or, someone who lives next door to warehouse 1 could order from the third party seller, but still get same day delivery because Amazon has a copy of the book there, even though it is their copy and not the seller.
This is what co-mingled inventory means. That all inventory is fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item, as long as it is properly accounted for on the ledgers. That is fundamentally the point - you save significant costs and introduce real benefits to customers when you can ignore where the item was sourced from. The problems arise when not all of the sources for the items are good actors.
Looking at the No Starch Press Serious Python book, there are 41 sellers. I don't know how many co-mingle inventory or are FBA, but that means that any book sold that from any seller that co-mingles inventory (and items sold by Amazon directly are) can be fulfilled by items physically sourced from any other seller that also co-mingles inventory.
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."
It's not a misconception - they claim to track inventory source, but I don't believe it for a second. There are warnings all over seller blogs and forums not to commingle inventory because you'll be held responsible if Amazon sends another seller's counterfeit product to a buyer on your behalf. People have experienced this en mass - including myself, I was dinged for selling a "generic" item instead of the name brand item while I actually sent in the correct name brand item. It was a Ninja blender. It seems to happen to every seller who commingles eventually.
On top of that I once sent in a box of items that was checked in twice several weeks apart. Amazon sold double the inventory I sent them on my behalf and paid me for the sales of products I never sent them. Stories of phantom inventory are common. It can get crazy - someone [1] sent in a shipment of four items and 72 were added to their inventory, which Amazon happily sold for them after checking with the fulfillment center and insisting that the inventory was correct. This sort of thing shouldn't happen if you're actually tracking inventory. Also, their system shouldn't allow a shipment to be checked in twice.
I know they claim that, and it may be their official policy, but it obviously is not working in practice. Either that, or it's become direct fraud in their part.
And it may work to benefit Amazon in finding problematic sellers, and it may scare most legit sellers to never supply fake products.
But it doesn't seem to do anything to actually benefit sellers or buyers, at this point.
For one, I suspect resold returned items to be a major weakness of this policy. Or orders of multiple quantity with different sources, which are picked, boxed, then returned to inventory for whatever reason.
This is true, except it doesn't help the problem at hand. The problem at hand being that people are still receiving counterfeit products in the meantime.
Knowing how Seller Performance works, they aren't about to close off a listing that is doing $nn-K revenue per month because of a couple of copyright reports. The economics simply don't make sense for Amazon to poison the inventory of a seller because of a couple of reports, to fix this problem Amazon truly needs to figure out a way to verify the validity of inventory sent in to their warehouses.
That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I do hope that someone from Amazon is really working on it. Inventory commingling and a myriad of other issues present in the processes of selling on Amazon are the reason that I decided to not pursue FBA further.
Wow, HN is really turning into a hive mind. First time I see someone post this. Thanks for this data point.
With this in place, it seems vendors get to choose if they want commingling or not. Would be nice to provide a checkout option to buyers as well, like choose a slower shipping but guarantee your getting the item from the vendor. Or even if it asked you... getting item from alternate vendor will ship faster? Is that okay? And mentioned the alternate vendor.
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.