[sarvind]

They are losing a whole lot of valuable sales through this channel, not to mention seeing a higher than average return/refund rate that could flag some risk alerts. So there's plenty of incentive to fix it - although this sort of thing could presumably be pretty hard for them to detect, troubleshoot and rectify.

[indecisive_user]

The item that's being scanned in and out of the Amazon warehouse is the box of boxes, not the granola.

This will lead to the inventory of granola to be out of sync with the actual amount at the warehouse, but in that case I'm assuming Amazon would eat the cost since they're the ones that "lost" the missing inventory. Think about a physical store. If they lose some of their inventory, it's the store's problem, not the product's.

[michaelt]

I agree that if things were working right this would all be on the granola company, but evidently things aren't working right :)

To me it seems... far from certain that Amazon would attribute the inventory errors and customer complaints correctly.

From the perspective of Amazon's system they're mailing out The Packaging Wholesalers' sealed box, customers are saying it has the wrong item in, therefore The Packaging Wholesalers must be unreliable chumps that can't pack a box correctly.