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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to just turn third party offers off?

I don't think so. Filtering for Prime or Free Shipping by Amazon helps a lot though. You still get third-party sellers, but they're at least fulfilled by Amazon so the chances of trouble are quite a bit lower.

Oh that's clever, thank you for that idea. If I ever go back to ordering stuff on Amazon I'll definitely use it. I got burned twice with one order from two different sellers and I'm kind of done with them for a while (both out of print biology texts).

Except for comingling of SKUs. If a supplier ships knock-off producrs to a particular product code it all gets mixed in the warehouse and you get product roulette.

They don't prefix with the vendor? So they mix the stock of all their suppliers? That's pretty unbelievably sloppy, is there some public proof of this?

Proof? Amazon terms of service for vendors is a hood place to start.

I doubt that is true, and I haven't seen any proof of it either.

What I can tell you though, is that Amazon is incredibly lenient on enforcing EANs. So even though there is that identifier that should be able to uniquely identify a product, often times third-party replacements for the product, or even completely unrelated items are listed under the EAN, and Amazon doesn't give a shit.

This has been widely reported, is ongoing for years, and is the source of frequent complaints from both users and manufacturers.

Here are a few examples, starting with Amazon's own website explaining commingling:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

https://cblr.columbia.edu/amazons-war-on-counterfeits/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-op...

Thank you for digging that up. Amazon should really not do this, it opens them up to all kinds of scams and has the potential to harm their brand in ways that will not be easy to repair.

When you search for an item, you can filter it to only items sold by Amazon directly. It's under the "Seller" category. I do this quite a bit.

When I try it, the Seller category is only available if I first pick a department. If I search within "All" then for some reason it doesn't appear. Weird stuff.

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