This happens because Amazon allows inventory commingling. For example Amazon has their own, legitimate inventory in a West Coast warehouse, and a third party seller has the same inventory with the original UPC manufacturer bar code on it, sitting in an East Coast warehouse. Amazon considers this 1:1 inventory. Amazon will debit their inventory on the West Coast, and credit the inventory that belongs to the third party seller on the East Coast but they will send the inventory from the East Coast to the customer since it's closer to them.
Now in theory this seems like a reasonable approach to deliver products to customers faster, the catch 22 is that third party vendors have clearly taken advantage of Amazon's complete lack of quality control. Third party sellers can sign up for a Seller Central account, and send in counterfeit products with fake bar codes because Amazon doesn't check at all.
I could sit here and talk for hours about mess that is Seller Central. I've dabbled with Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), and I would never recommend any company use AMZN for third party logistics.
This is probably old news to seasoned Seller Central users, but I was surprised how easy it was to "take over" product pages from already existing products.
Our sales figures definitely weren't high. I think it may have been related to how much stock we had for all the sizes of the product.
Soon the product images and descriptions we provided became the canonical version and overrode whatever was there before. Even previous customer reviews from other sellers would continue to be shown on was what now basically our product page.
We've had a very similar experience. On more than one book our product pages were replaced with images from the counterfeit. In a certain way it was quite funny. Ultimately it was very frustrating
There seems to be a scam where product pages are sold off to host a completely different item. They usually have lots of 5 star reviews and high search rank but the reviews are all talking about something different than what's now being sold.
I thought it was a bug at first but I've seen this too often. I don't understand how Amazon doesn't know this is happening, or why it even lets it happen in the first place. Product pages should be immutable.
I found some old Saran wrap when I moved in to a new place from like the 70s and that stuff was the bomb. Anyway, I ban brands that do this, and I never buy them again. Kingston and PNY, you've lost me forever.
I seriously doubt many people are catching it otherwise the scam wouldn't be so popular. People probably stop reading after the second or third review and don't check that entire pages are talking about a different product.
Haven’t taken over images but have sold into oem equipment on ebike stuff before. It’s pretty cool because you get sales you can’t from an independent listing of the same product.
When I’ve done it, it is legit the same thing and verify it, but I can easily see scale or greed causing people to do the wrong thing with this.
But without Amazon doing their own QC there is no way to say it is the same product. You should at least be able to see reviews based on the supplier and pick the supplier you will be fulfilled by. But I suspect that would ruin their whole 2-day/1-day shipping bit.
> I suspect that would ruin their whole 2-day/1-day shipping bit.
They are no longer offering 1-day shipping. When I signed up for prime, one of the benefits was discounted 1-day shipping on items for which the free 2-day shipping wasn't fast enough. I recently had need of that, and learned that the options are now (1) "prime shipping", with no particular service guarantee. There is no second option. I contacted customer service multiple times asking why I couldn't choose 1-day shipping and was told "because the item is out of stock. There is only one item left in stock, that means the item is out of stock".
I've seen 1-day and even same-day shipping on a variety of items, so I suspect it's determined by some arcane combination of user location and item logistics.
They used to offer guaranteed two-day shipping and a paid upgrade to one-day shipping; now they just have "Prime Shipping" as the parent said, and what "Prime Shipping" means varies from item to item and time to time. It can mean one-day. I don't think I've ever seen same-day shipping, but I'd imagine I just don't live close enough to a fulfillment center.
Are you sure about that? I thought part of the whole incentive for commingled inventory was that Amazon no longer kept track of it separately per vendor and just lumped it all into the same bin without a unique serial number.
Even for non-counterfeit books, Amazon defines "product" too broadly -- reviews for a book tend to combine both the printed and Kindle versions and you'll see people complaining about the formatting of the Kindle version on the page for the printed copy.
The one thing that really frustrates me is how poorly they curate editions. This is especially bad with translated works. Like - you're on the hardcopy version of a nice, modern translation, then you click over to the e-book version and it's some random bowlderdized public domain version from 150 years ago.
This is a problem with everything being sold on amazon. I read reviews for a stamp (dates for ISO8601) and very few of the reviews are relevant to the product I was looking at. Almost none of them made sense for the product I was viewing, actually.
I was trying to buy a Grimm's Stories book for my kids and it was basically impossible. They had 5 different translations and selections of stories under the same entry.
Perhaps people who write product reviews should get into the habit of starting their review with a description of what they are reviewing, who they ordered it from, and how much they paid for it. That last bit of information is definitely very relevant if you're going to comment in your review on whether the product was good value for money.
Perhaps also put the date in the review itself and state that you do not give permission for the review to be edited.
Unfortunately, I think that some sites don't allow reviews to mention prices.
Even if the T&Cs say you give up all your rights in the review you perhaps still have a right not to be misrepresented so they shouldn't edit your review if the review is still going to be attributed or attributable to you.
If the product is a "Philips Boilermaster 3000" kettle then this is true (if we ignore counterfeits).
But not all Amazon products work that way. The "t-shirt with eagle print" could be made by a number of companies with wildly varying quality, all fitting this product description. Similarly there are lots of 10m Cat 7 S/FTP lan cables.
If you buy a generic product with no brand name and no intellectual property, then all you have is the pictures. If they all look the same, they could technically be different quality but there's no reason to expect a certain level of quality without a brand name.
Reviews can still be important. If you have a lot of positive reviews and don't need a brand name, it could be worth the risk to save money. But you don't want to be the first to test out.
It might be the result of a clever trick by Amazon, but it makes Amazon directly responsible for selling fakes. Even without this, Amazon should be taking more responsibility to fight counterfeit products, but with this, they're making themselves directly responsible, and I don't see how they're not criminally liable now.
Instead of hoping for Amazon to make this slightly less bad, I think legal action is called for at this point.
> I don't see how they're not criminally liable now.
Amazon's protection against state action has always been that it offers a good enough return experience that people will turn to it rather than public authorities with problems. It's not a legal shield so much as a practical one, though.
What is a "good enough" return experience? When I've tried to use it, I have to pay money and my own time to organise and ship things back to them. I only get that money back if they decide I was right to return the item. I can only return the item in a very short window after it is purchased.
People seem to talk about amazon as if it has some unprecedented customer service and that is why it's so successful. But this is the bare minimum for pretty much any shop. Is it different in America?
> What is a "good enough" return experience? When I've tried to use it, I have to pay money and my own time to organise and ship things back to them. I only get that money back if they decide I was right to return the item. I can only return the item in a very short window after it is purchased.
I feel like you didn't returns something with Amazon, but a third party seller instead.
Amazon will ship you the replacement as soon as you confirm and give you a return shipping label to print and stick on the package, which you can bring to your local post office. The process is quite painless.
> I can only return the item in a very short window after it is purchased.
Their return windows is 30 days for most stuff, which is good enough.
I went from 90% of my online orders at amazon to maybe 35%. Some things have always sucked, liked clothes.
Thanks to software like Shopify, ordering from other e-commerce sites is pretty painless now. When you factor in finding the product, many sites are now more convenient to order from than Amazon.
It must be becoming more and more common. I ordered some bluetooth headphones a few weeks ago and received a counterfeit product. I was able to return the item, but by the time I had the product page no longer existed and the seller had vanished. It was a "fulfilled by amazon" situation including Prime shipping.
Months back I ordered some Miele vacuum bags and they too were counterfeit.
My family gets several Amazon packages every week and I don't think we've received a single counterfeit or gray market item. We have had other problems with our orders but Amazon has always fixed the problem very quickly.
Some problems they seem unable to fix. I have a Nespresso machine and a few times now I've ordered a decaff selection and every single time they send me the caffeinated version of whatever I order. I call them and they refund the order. They've probably sent 16 sleeves of coffee for free (worth around $150) and have never sent the product I've actually ordered. It feels a little wrong to take advantage of their incompetence like this, but hey, free coffee!
Grey market items may say things like "not for sale in [your country]" on the box. They may contain labeling that's not consistent with the standard labeling for your country. They might not have certain disclosures that your country requires for certain types of products. Certain features may not work. Stuff like that. They aren't always identifiable though.
At some point I was using Amazon for almost all shopping. Obviously daily is an oxymoron, but it'd happen several times a month.
I can identify grey market items easily. Buy an item in Amazon UK of product X and get version packed to be sold in Italy (with all labels in Italian) or Russian (with all labels in Russian), instead of the UK version. This is because some smart supplier is doing arbitrage.
I've noticed that a significant number of my recent TV/film purchases from Amazon UK looked new on the packaging but had some sort of mark on at least one of the discs, suggesting that something had been handled previously. This seems to be a clear trend over the past 1-2 years that I had never previously encountered. In some cases, it's been obvious enough that I've returned the product, though I also have lingering doubts about whether others with just a small mark might have been me when opening the packet but might have been something else.
I already basically gave up buying anything important and/or fragile from Amazon and now avoid them for almost everything around holiday seasons. Far too many instances a few years ago of things like different sizes of items thrown into a box with obviously inadequate packaging, resulting in damaged electrical items, would-be Christmas presents turning up unfit to give as gifts, and so on. They're pretty good about accepting returns without quibbling much these days, but it's still a huge hassle when things go wrong so often and so avoidably.
It's a shame, because for a while Amazon was a convenient alternative to bricks and mortar stores and carried a wider range of books and TV/film/music than any physical store. I'm glad I supported the better local stores now, and that some of them are still there so I can buy from them instead today.
Unfortunately, Walmart has integrated a 3rd party marketplace onto their site too; so who knows when they will start fulfilled by Walmart and comingling. There's also persistent stories of Walmart demanding lower priced items and being ok with the lower quality, not always with different UPCs.
The funny thing about Walmart 3rd party, is it always seems to be drop shipped by a competitor, and comes in a clearly branded box. I've gotten boxes from Newegg, Target, Wayfair, and even Sam's Club.
Still a better option than Amazon (for now, at least).
This is the legacy Wal-Mart took over by acquiring Jet.com in 2016. They were a brand new site with millions of products in their catalog, yet didn't actually stock a huge portion of them. When I bought a wifi router from Jet, they simply ordered it for me from the Newegg website, and paid Newegg more than I paid Jet. It arrived in the Newegg box with the Newegg invoice.
I can buy Sam's Club brands and/or sizes first party through Walmart.com, and I could do so before the Jet.com-ification of the Walmart website... it just wasn't well known until recently.
I know... that's part of what makes it so interesting.
There are still 3rd party sellers somehow selling Walmarts own product cheaper via Sam's Club. Or sometimes for products that aren't available on both public facing sites. (Sam's and Walmart)
Which is probably why Walmart made the effort to better integrate the brands.
It's not like shopping at Wal-Mart isn't without its own kinds of bait and switch practices.
There was a time when I went to Wal-Mart to buy a new package of cheap cotton ankle socks every month or so, incrementally replenishing my cache, over the period of about a year.
The exact same brand, make, and size of socks, what were ostensibly identical, would vary in their constituent materials at what seemed to be random. One month they'd be ~80% cotton. The next month ~80% polyester. For what appeared to be the same damn product.
I don't know if this is something the big brands do in cooperation with Wal-Mart, or if it's entirely out of Wal-Mart's control and something Hanes/FTL has started doing independently. But next time you see packages for socks, check out the contents. In Wal-Mart the contents are printed on an adhesive-backed sticker. They use a sticker because it gets switched all the time, presumably to whatever was the cheapest recipe/supplier at the time. There's basically no persistence to what the SKU actually represents.
The Wal-Mart advantage, in my opinion, is that I have the opportunity to actually scrutinize the instance I will take home of the thing I'm purchasing, before doing so.
With Amazon I can't possibly know if they'll send me the 80% cotton or 80% polyester variant of the same SKU.
I've noticed similar practices with canned fish. Depending on what day of the week it is, the same canned fish e.g. beachcliff sardines in water, will have salt or won't have salt in the ingredients list. It seems to correlate with the country of origin. Same SKU, different ingredients. You have to look really closely at the package to notice it, but you definitely notice it when eating the stuff.
There's quite a good book I read a while ago about store-brand supply chains called Where the Underpants Come From [1]. It's a travelogue where the author travels through Asia tracing the entire logistical chain for a pair of underpants. It's a fun read and covers a lot of this stuff.
> There's basically no persistence to what the SKU actually represents.
I disagree. The SKU represents generic ankle socks. They're a commodity.
Or the standards on commodity exchanges, like Kansas City Hard Red Winter Wheat Futures, which come in 5,000 bushel lots and require a deliverable grade of "No. 2 at contract price with a maximum of 10 IDK per 100 grams; No. 1 at a 1 1/2-cent premium. Deliverable grades of HRW shall contain a minimum 11% protein level. However, protein levels of less than 11%, but equal to or greater than 10.5% are deliverable at a ten cent (10¢) discount to contract price. Protein levels of less than 10.5% are not deliverable." -- from https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/files/fact-car...
Real-world commodities have exacting standards precisely to prevent this kind of nonsense.
Yes, they certainly have their own supply chain issues, but at least they still tightly control it.
Even if product quality might vary (or even different items under the same upc), the product is never (ime) misrepresented, and I've never had any concern about getting a counterfeit.
Expecting 100% consistency.... Thats probably going to be a disappointment.
Walmart has ... issues ... with their supply chain for their physical stores. Part of the problem is that they're big enough to enable Walmart-specific versions of products.
As someone who buys 90% Kroger-brand stuff I'm wondering what you have against store-brands?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm with you that co-branded products like "Only at Target" KitchenAid are pretty much trash but store-brand stuff doesn't really seem that different to me than any other brand on the shelf. Kroger brand pretzels are dope, their Oreo clone is garbage, c'est la vie.
I think you kinda answered it yourself. For an unknown product, the store brand is a crapshoot.
The store has an incentive to stock it's own brand product beyond what the incentive for competitors is. Ie, they are going to carry a competitor either because it's a good product that sells, or the competitor has paid for shelf space (and is betting it's own money that it's product is good).
Neither of these necessarily applies to a store brand. So even if it's between store brand and unknown 3rd party competitor, I'll go 3rd party first.
That said, there are some store brand products that, having tested, I enjoy. It's just usually not worth the 25¢ to me for the gamble.
Hmmm, interesting. My philosophy has pretty much always been to work my way up on price until it's acceptable. If store brand cookies turn out bad then I've only been hurt once and go back to the brand name -- but if I find a gem it means I'm saving money for a long while.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Target here. It’s not quite as broad as Amazon or Walmart, but for what they carry I’m under the impression their inventory control is superior to the other two. It’s not a marketplace, and AFAIK they don’t drop-ship or commingle inventory.
Unfortunately this case may be a bit different. When you order this book by pressing just the Buy button, as in shipped and sold by Amazon, you get the counterfeit.
I know because I ordered two copies last week. Both came and both were counterfeit.
No this is classic inventory commingling, for brevity let's say that Amazon has 100 fulfillment centers (FCs). When you ship in 10,000 units, Amazon will then take those 10,000 units and spread them to the FCs closest to the top of the bell curve of the normal distribution of your orders. And the same goes for any third party sending inventory to be sold on your listing. When you use a "manufacturers barcode" ie. UPC / ISBN as the only identifier on the product, that's the only way Amazon can identify what it is unless you use an Amazon barcode.
If people didn't sell counterfeit products, we would enjoy the amazing logistics network that Amazon has built.
My recommendation is that you become Brand Registered on Amazon, you get a hell of a lot more weight to throw around on your listing, ie. kicking off sellers who are not authorized to sell your products. Go look at any Anker product, you will see that "AnkerDirect" is the only seller on any of their listings because they are Brand Registered.
You could also go the Seller Fulfilled Prime route for full quality control, which allows you to keep access to the Amazon marketplace but you are responsible for logistics end of the bill which is a tall order but there are 3PLs that can help with that sort of ask.
Do we know that Amazon doesn't comingle their "sold by amazon" stock with FBA third-party sellers? I can't see anywhere that they say they don't on some research, and it would seem to be an obvious thing to do.
Yep. They commingle because they use the UPC code as the identifying barcode for the item. If any party wants to avoid commingling, they either need to manufacture with a different barcode, or cover over the barcode with a different, vendor specific one.
Indeed - and there have been cases of dangerous goods being shipped, e.g. counterfeit chargers.
I've stopped buying things from Amazon and instead gone back to using bricks and mortar stores with online presences and do click and collect, there's just too much crap to sift through these days.
I've found that (at least when it comes to lower-end electronics) even brick and mortars appear to have supply chain problems that allow counterfeit items into stores en masse. In the USA, I've encountered things like counterfeit Microsoft mice at Microcenter, and counterfeit Audio Technica earbuds at Fry's Electronics (both confirmed as fakes by the manufacturer). I'm starting to suspect there are other cases of this that I simply haven't noticed.
Can people who know they got a knock-off return the item for a legit copy? Don’t know if the counterfeit volume is high enough to force Amazon to care...
You can return the book, but (having been through this myself) tellingly when you select a reason for the return they do not give you an option for “Counterfeit Good”.
You have to pick a vaguely related reason like “Item Not As Described” and then you can optionally leave a comment noting that it is counterfeit. There is no indication that anyone ever looks at that comment, or takes any action about it.
> Can people who know they got a knock-off return the item for a legit copy?
I have with a camera lens, but Amazon didn't honor the original price. I had to pay the difference for the 'real' version. In my case though, it was not a knock off or grey market, but the seller was selling the cheap version of the same lens as the more expensive version.
That was my last time buying anything camera related on Amazon since it was impossible to ever get the right thing on the first try. I only use Adorama or B&H now.
Most of the time I've only been offered a refund for a counterfeit complaint.
I suspect they're aware enough of the problem to know who's likely to get a 2nd counterfeit shipped after receiving a 1st, and realized it's cheaper for them to abandon the sale than continue to possibly send counterfeits to a customer who's now more likely to notice.
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.
Thank you for your comment but with all due respect I'm afraid that this is a unique case.
These are counterfeit copies. They're not coming from legitimate suppliers. Frankly we don't care who resells our books as long as they're selling legitimate copies. These are not.
I've been dealing with this issue with Amazon since 2017. It's not that what you're describing doesn't happen but if this is like previous cases this is something different.
In this and other recent cases as has been shared online, Amazon replaced our legitimate inventory entirely with counterfeit copies that it was sourcing directly from a printer that it works with for print-on-demand. That printer supplies Createspace. We receive absolutely no revenue from the sale of these copies because we're not the ones printing them. They're produced from stolen files.
Once again, Amazon is stealing from authors and leaving it to vendors like us to police them. Why should we have to police Amazon?
In this case the copies that I received appear to be from that same printer. They look just like the other counterfeits that we've seen over the years.
As with other instances we receive NO revenue from these sales and as a consequence neither do our authors.
In this case and in previous cases Amazon stopped ordering directly from authorized resellers. They fulfilled orders only with counterfeit books.
This is not the case of commingling as you describe. This has nothing to do with FBA or other resellers. This is Amazon's supply chain sourcing counterfeit copies directly from a printer that they work with and selling them in place of our legitimate inventory.
Could one if your authors file a copyright claim against them? I assume you don’t want to yourself for strategic reasons, but you could help as third party do so. Or would the expense far outweigh the benefit?
Love your books. FWIW, I almost entirely stopped buying from Amazon 2 years ago in part because of issues like this. Canceling prime was scary and then liberating.
Can you please explain what evidence you have that this is no co-mingling? You have a ton of people selling copies of your books - how do you know that the counterfeit copies you are receiving come from the Amazon supply chain and are not co-mingled inventory?
Putting aside the strong allegations made by No Starch Press for a moment.
This is such a bullshit rationalisation.
If the product is treated as fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item then of course Amazon is responsible for selling / fulfilling the counterfeit product because, as you say, it doesn’t matter physically who sourced the product.
Amazon is aware of this issue, but fixing it breaks their enabling-crime business-model.
I'm explaining how it works in theory, not rationalizing the current situation as okay.
I do think it's unfair to say Amazon isn't attempting to fight this - someone linked a website in here that shows them as employing thousands of people and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in fighting it. It just seems like they're not currently winning the arms race.
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.
The exact thresholds aren't known, but they're pretty low: https://www.awesomedynamic.com/amazon-prime-wardrobe/ mentions thresholds of 30 PPM (and 500 PPM for just Materially Different Complaint Rate) to get into some seller program. Presumably the threshold rate for suspension is an order of magnitude or so higher than that. 500 PPM would be one complaint every 2,000 orders.
A facetious/serious question: If "Sold by Amazon" had too high a rate of reported counterfeits, could it be kicked off the Amazon platform?
But seriously, my point is that "Sold by Amazon" should have a counterfeit rate of near zero. I'm willing to help QC third-party sellers. But "Sold by Amazon" should do its own QC. Just as "Sold by Walmart" does (for now).
Sold by Amazon probably does have a very low rate. They're many times bigger than any third party seller, so the absolute number of counterfeits is probably higher.
> 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.
There's lots of warnings about that, and virtually no one actually experiencing it.
Generic complaints typically come from customer complaints. Customers complain even when the product is authentic. There's nothing in your story to suggest commingling is the issue.
Phantom inventory is an issue, usually arising when someone else's units were checked into your inventory. There's always a record of that, and you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
By "virtually no one" you mean "virtually everyone." Because what I described is very common. I've experienced it and I sell very little on Amazon - less than 100 sales a year. Less than 50 items a year in the past several years.
>you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
How about you actually pay attention to people's experiences before discounting them? The author of the blog post I linked to literally reported the issue to Amazon and Amazon insisted the massive amount of inventory was theirs. It would be easy to see that it wasn't merely by looking at the weight of what was shipped (among other very obvious things...). Since they can't get their heads out of their ass enough to do that (or simply not check in the same shipment twice and double count that inventory), I'm not believing they have much inventory source tracking going on.
Amazon may think they are doing a great job tracking inventory but the facts say otherwise.
What exactly have you experienced that makes you so confident that Amazon is lying about tracking the original source of manufacturer barcode products?
I've sold millions on Amazon and am friends with many sellers who've collectively sold at least hundreds of millions. I've heard many people with issues with inauthentic complaints. I've never heard of one that can be traced back to commingling.
I've dealt with phantom inventory many times. The correct thing to do is report it. It doesn't always get fixed. The fact that they occasionally have stranded inventory and assign it to a seller doesn't mean they don't generally track transfers of manufacturer barcode inventory, like they say they do. They never claim inventory receiving is perfect. They do claim they track the original source of sales, and there's no reason to think it's not true.
Okay, so lets assume that you're correct, and they track the original source of sales. How? I have never once received a mass-produced media item (like a book or DVD) with any additional sticker, label, or other indicating device. Without that label, when a packer scans an item just before they place it in a shipping box for the customer, how do they know which seller's inventory to decrement?
Alternately, how does the picker know which item on the shelf to select to ensure they have selected the right seller's unit? Look at how amazon stores books in their warehouses:
Without a label on the book, how do they know which copy to pull from the shelf and put in the box?
I know Amazon says they track inventory, but prime shipped and sold-by-amazon.com boardgames arrive as counterfeits pretty regularly in the board game industry. You can find plenty of reports, with detailed pictures and manufacturer confirmation on BGG. There has to be something going on here, even if it may be more complicated than Amazon is commingling counterfeit and genuine articles.
>Without that label, when a packer scans an item just before they place it in a shipping box for the customer, how do they know which seller's inventory to decrement?
It's very simple: they're stored in different locations. If seller A is on shelf B, and seller C is on shelf D, then even though the individual items are identical, if you pick up a unit on shelf D you know it's from seller B.
They don't store identical products from different sellers next to each other.
I agree there's a counterfeit issue. Amazon agrees there's an issue, and actually has it as a risk factor in their financial reports. But commingling isn't a significant contributor to it.
That could work, but it's fairly brittle. If an item comes out of its location, you have no idea which seller it comes from. If an item is pulled incorrectly, and then set on the return-to-stock pile, you have no idea where to put it. Perhaps that is the issue; there are two copies, the counterfeit one gets pulled incorrectly, then when put back, they put it in the amazon.com location.
>If an item comes out of its location, you have no idea which seller it comes from.
You can check if the location it was supposed to be in is empty. From my understanding, the main issues happen during receiving; if it's received to the wrong shipment it'll be incorrectly marked in the system and unlikely to be fixed. Once it's received to the correct system everything else is fairly robust.
>If an item is pulled incorrectly, and then set on the return-to-stock pile, you have no idea where to put it.
If it's pulled, then there'd be a record of where it was pulled from, and that place would be empty.
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.
You don't see the counterfactual where Amazon didn't enforce much and counterfeiting was much more prevalent. Without knowing how much counterfeiting would take place without enforcement, you can't say enforcement is useless.
I see the other side: I was suspended after false counterfeit complaints from tp-link, and was forced to sue them in federal court. In my case, Amazon suspended me despite having provided extensive proof of authenticity, simply because the brand didn't want me to legally resell their product and was willing to lie about it.
I agree that returns are a weakness, where counterfeits can enter the supply chain. But returns are a low percentage of sales, and counterfeit returns (fraud) are a low percentage of returns. Seems like a relatively small problem.
Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined. If they're in the same warehouse they would just ship from the same seller. I don't know for sure how Amazon handles it but again, doesn't seem like a huge problem.
I agree, we may not know the extent of the problem. But if they are tracking sources as well as they claim to be, the problem wouldn't keep growing like it is. There's a major disconnect somewhere...
And you kinda make my point. The practice is for the benefit of Amazon, not us.
(It still benefits Amazon to sell fakes already within their inventory.)
>Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined
Yet it's happening. I don't claim to know all the whys, but I've ordered enough to know that it's happening. And a lot.
It's growing because it's happening in a higher and higher percentage of my orders. Plus based on public knowledge of the issue. 4 or 5 years ago, it took serious searching to find other people talking about it. The last 2 years, it's become fairly well known. And is now common.
Some problematic products, I've ordered a couple dozen times and never gotten a genuine product.
>in the same box?
Yes, multiple times, although probably less than 10. And a couple were supposed single seller items. Didn't matter.
(One case initially got my account flagged and couldn't buy anything else until I sent pictures for proof. One of the only times I've ever had Amazon call me.)
However, the much more common occurrence is variance over separate orders.
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.
Yes, but that's a problem with or without commingling. My point was that commingling doesn't contribute significantly to the counterfeit problem.
Regarding your points:
1. Amazon takes action when a brand complains, even with only a single complaint. Sellers have to prove the complaint is wrong to be allowed to continue to sell the product, or in some cases to be reinstated. Usually this is done by providing an invoice which Amazon verifies.
2. The enforcement is usually at the seller level, not the listing level.
>1. Amazon takes action when a brand complains, even with only a single complaint.
The owner of No Starch Press shows up at a lot of CS shows and other shows. Next time you are at one, seek him out for a chat. Tell him Anazon takes action after a single complaint. Be prepared for him to disabuse you of your misconceptions.
How are you submitting your claim? You can do both counterfeit and DMCA reports, but DMCA reports have a deadline of two weeks where it must be processed and delisted by then. I've never heard of anyone having a legitimate DMCA report rejected by Amazon.
I'd be fascinated to know why he didn't sue Amazon, if they're refusing to process DMCA takedowns. My experience is that if anything, it's too easy to file a case and brands abuse this to get rid of grey market sellers that are selling authentic products.
I've sued Amazon (privately in arbitration) and I have friends who've sued them in court. Nothing wrong with suing to prevent infringement. It'll just get them to fix the problem, and you'll get nice money out of it if it's as clear cut as you say.
I very much doubt Amazon is rejecting DMCA notices, and suspect the story is more complicated than that. I've heard from many sellers that it's easy to file complaints, and I know many sellers who have gotten false complaints, which is also what you'd expect if it's super easy to file complaints.
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.
Except go read the seller's forums. Sellers who (claim to) opt out are constantly complaining that their product still gets mixed in. Even sellers who do their own asin / personal barcodes have problems with it.
Amazon is either ignoring the preference when it suits them, or has significant flaws in how they're implementing the policy.
Either way, they're destroying their brand reputation.
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.
I don't see how it's an excuse. I don't care how they handle their processes internally. If they sell me counterfeit items I will report them to the police.
Now in theory this seems like a reasonable approach to deliver products to customers faster, the catch 22 is that third party vendors have clearly taken advantage of Amazon's complete lack of quality control. Third party sellers can sign up for a Seller Central account, and send in counterfeit products with fake bar codes because Amazon doesn't check at all.
I could sit here and talk for hours about mess that is Seller Central. I've dabbled with Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), and I would never recommend any company use AMZN for third party logistics.