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Comment by phreeza | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age, for items which do not operate on razor thin margins (like I imagine Birkenstocks are) I don't understand why there isn't a technical solution to this. Slap a unique qr code on every item leaving your plant, and have vendors check that code against your database every time they get new stock. Seems to me everybody wins? Which player is incentivised against this?

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Look at Amazon warehouse photos[0] and try to imagine how long it would take to scan every single item out there. Also, what happens when 1000 items have the same QR code? Do you inspect every of them individually to determine which one is genuine? Or do you discard everything, genuine products included?

0. http://thefrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/enhanced-buzz...

Surely they scan the SKU on every item at some point anyway?

I'm not familiar with Amazon internals enough, but I doubt they keep SKU for every individual item, maybe for categories or types, so i.e. all the headphones of the same model has the same SKU. Then it's enough to scan a single code on crate/bin/pallet which makes things far easier, but it's not sufficient to track down individual counterfeits.

You're assuming that vendors are selling these counterfeit products unintentionally. There are fat margins to be had for counterfeit merchants on Amazon / eBay / Aliexpress.

Yes for the merchants, but not for Amazon (I assume). They could do this for FBA items. Maybe even add a logo for items that are verified to be authentic this way.

The lower the price, the higher Amazon's sales volume, which is their top level metric.

That is true in the first order, but in the long term, don't they run a huge risk of customer dissatisfaction shipping lots of counterfeit goods?

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