[yazaddaruvala]

AMA, I led the eng team that built Project Zero (named in the article) and also designed or helped design most of Amazon's automated detection systems for Brands.

Disclaimer: I haven't worked at Amazon for 3 years - my info is likely stale.

[jlund-molfese]

If I'm ordering a particular product from Amazon, is there a way to know if commingling is done? Does Amazon commingle everything fulfilled by Amazon by default, or just high-volume items?

[yazaddaruvala]

I don't believe commingling is customer visible. That said, as I understand it, Sellers can opt-out.

FWIW, while "counterfeit", technically Amazon doesn't consider commingling to be Brand related abuse which is what I worked on. Abuse of commingling would be handled by other systems related to Seller fraud.

[tmoertel]

Did that Transparency thing with the code stickers and the verification app ever make an appreciable difference?

[yazaddaruvala]

Oh man.. buy me a G&T for the whole story :)

I would say Not enough for how many engineers they had. It had all of the promise, and was frankly mismanaged.

They kept promoting engineers who wanted it to become an AWS service (agnostic of Amazon) rather than solving the Amazon problems at hand.

For example they built a new product identifier… Amazon did not need yet another database of products. This stuff was constantly slowing them down to less than a crawl.

Last I heard all of that was canceled, and their focus brought back to Amazon Retail only problems. But tech debt and culture issues like that are really hard to unwind.

[tmoertel]

That's fascinating! I bought something recently, I think it was an Anker USB-C cable, and saw that little T logo on the packaging and wondered whether Transparency was still a thing. I tried the app on the logo/code, and the code seemed to check out. This, frankly, surprised me since I hadn't heard anything about Transparency in years.

Thanks for some of the backstory. I always thought they had an interesting idea but the trick would be fast, focused execution to reach critical mass with both suppliers and end users before it fizzled out.

[jodrellblank]

Do you buy from Amazon?

[yazaddaruvala]

lol, fair question.

Yes I do. In general, the convenience is too nice.

If you're specifically worried about health issues:

- The Pharmacy features are pretty locked down (but nothing is perfect). I wouldn't buy pills from a rando 3p seller, or even "Sold by Amazon" tho.

- For other health related products (like creams, kitchen stuff, clothes or other things that are on me), I just check that the Brand is the listed seller and no other sellers exist on the product.

- For non-health related products (shower curtains, garden hose, etc) I don't really care if it is "not perfect" in terms of quality, etc.

Meanwhile, if you're buying products where the Brand=ZFDSC or any other character salad - you should expect whatever you get. I still have purchased them (e.g. a sticker that makes my windows look like stained glass - I don't care that its cheap garbage from China - it looks good and unlikely to be bad enough to kill me at that distance), but certainly would not buy those Brands' expecting lasting quality.