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Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. The article mentions that they basically take all the same products and put them together. So seller B's fake item may be sold as seller A's real item and seller A gets blamed for their fake stuff.

It's gotten so bad with certain groups of items I don't even try. Sunglasses, handbags, all the usual stuff you'd expect.

My anecdote: I like gold colored Ray-Ban aviators with a brown or dark polarized lens. The two stores near me didn't have them in stock, I couldn't find my old pair and I was leaving for a week long motorcycle ride in two days. I ordered them up and immediately knew they were fake. They were too light, the nose pads weren't right, all the usual tells. I returned them 3 different times until I just cancelled.

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Amazon keeps track of which seller's inventory it originally came from, so the right person will get in trouble if a fake is sent.

Actually not if the item is in commingled inventory. When the item is commingled, the seller does not place any identifying markings, such as their unique asin bar code, on the product. Nor does Amazon place seller identifying information on commingled items. They rely on the UPC at that point for automation.

No identifying labels does not mean Amazon doesn't know whose it is.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

>Although products sent to Amazon as commingled inventory may be virtually pooled with those of other sellers, we track which seller shipped the units to our fulfillment centers from the time they enter our warehouse until they are shipped to the customer. This allows us to know who sourced the item that the customer received.

The other possibility is that they weren't fake, just the result of Ray-Ban moving production to China. You could return them 300 times and you'd still get the same cost-reduced crap.

They're not, I was worried about it being me on the third try and compared them to ones in the store. They were quite different for supposedly the same model.

Additionally I wasn't ordering ones that were too cheap to be real, this was full retail price- if they were significantly cheaper I would've expected fakes.

The Wayfarers and Aviators are all produced exclusively in Italy. It is not hard to tell fake Luxotticas.

No longer true; earlier this year I ordered a pair of aviators[1] from Ray-Ban directly (to avoid precisely what this entire thread is about), and they were made in China.

[1]: http://www.ray-ban.com/usa/sunglasses/RB8307%20MALE%20011-av...

Ray-Ban auto-redirects away from the US site because I am not in the US. Swell...

I understand the frustration, you can easily end up buying from a chinese seller if you aren't playing attention. But I have a hard time understanding how you were fooled three times.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000EYP57K/ref=dp_ol...

Buy from Amazon - the second choice. Pretty sure that is the default purchase option on the main page as well.

Nope - sadly that's not always sufficient. "Star Eyewear" and "Wow Facktor" are "Fulfilled by Amazon" so there's a good chance their stock is co-mingled with Amazon's own stock in the same bin. I'm not sure exactly how you can tell which products this happens for and which it doesn't.

Amazon considers all stock of the same product to be identical and exchangeable.

If you order from Seller A on "Fulfilled by Amazon", then Amazon will ship you from the nearest warehouse that has the same product, even if it's technically stock of Seller B.

And Seller B might have handed a crate of counterfeits to Amazon. Angering both the customer and Seller A who has no way to actually enforce the quality of what they sell on Amazon.

Sellers can turn off comingling when sending items in.

Is there an additional cost to do this? I would assume there is if most sellers aren't doing it.

There are pros and cons.

Pros to comingling:

1. Makes customers happier to get their item sooner

2. You don't need to label your items, which either saves you time or saves you the 20 cents per item fee Amazon charges

3. Your items get processed quicker. If your items are in between warehouses, they can still be "shipped" to the customer.

Cons:

1. Counterfeit possibility. This varies by item. Amazon claims to track which seller inventory was sold from.

2. Bad returns, may hurt your account or require time to deal with.

Basically sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. I use a prep center which labels for me, and when I send in items myself I have Amazon label them.

Clearly you do not understand how Amazon Warehouses work

Just because you buy someing from Seller A, even if Seller A is Amazon LLC, you may not be getting stock from Seller A

If I am A retailer selling SuperWidget 55, and I ship Amazon 100 Genuine SuperWidget's to store in their warehouse for amazon to ship to my customers (aka Amazon Fulfillment Service) . Then another competitor ship 100 Fake SuperWidgets to amazons warehouse. All Amazon records is they have 200 SuperWidgets.

When a Customer orders a SuperWidget, they will get what ever SuperWidget is closest to their location, and a random one from that location, it may not be my SuperWidget but one of the 100 fake ones, even though the customer selected to order from me.

So then the next question is why would a retailer use Amazon Fulfillment, well if you want to get any Prime buyers you must, as if you do not use Amazon Fulfillment your orders are not "Prime Eligible" which eliminates a huge number of consumers.

You can choose whether to turn on comingling when using FBA.

That only matters if you can choose to exclude comingling when buying.

"So then the next question is why would a retailer use Amazon Fulfillment"

You implied that sellers are required to use it.

Edit: it's a different user that replied to me, my mistake.

Also, Amazon tracks which order came from whose inventory, so if it's reported as fake they can punish the right seller. Any system of that size is going to have some slip through, but Amazon does a lot to vet sellers for specific products, categories, and so on. Just recently certain iPads were restricted, and I couldn't get approved with retail receipts, they wanted invoices from authorized distributors, for example.

As a buyer you can't do much about comingling, but that shouldn't be relevant except for products with an abnormally high counterfeit rate. And you will get your money back with very little hassle when buying FBA (they refund you immediately and then require you to return it), and it helps hurt the bad seller. The fact is the vast majority of purchases on Amazon are legitimate. I agree Amazon needs to do something about their image, but it doesn't seem to be hurting their sales. And who else are you going to go to? eBay is even worse, and retailers are more expensive most if the time.

Also, generally commingled is a bad option. We've never sent in commingled inventory and alot of products commingled is not allowed.

It really depends on what items you're selling and how many.

I wasn't fooled, I returned them saying they were counterfeit and they shipped out a new pair. Three different times they were fakes and then I cancelled my order. The seller was Amazon, not some weird 3rd party- but because of the co-mingling of stock you can't be sure what you're getting or where it came from.

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