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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Reading the comments here, I wonder if folks have read the article? The problem seems to be not that Amazon has recalled counterfeit items but rather they have recalled legitimate product, blaming the legitimate seller for the fact that Amazon can't keep straight where their safety-critical inventory came from. It is as if they have a bin for "Viagra" in the warehouse into which they put shipments from Pfizer, along with whatever comes in from their eBay-grade sellers. Then they blame Pfizer for the eBay drugs not being properly traceable and tested.

Source: I received the emails, read the article, and at least one of the products I received is certainly not counterfeit.

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Amazon wanted the savings of commingling without the expense and investment in proper systems for it. For accurate accounting of the source of a piece of commingled inventory, you need sku-level inventories with unit-level accounting. This is expensive, because it means each unit needs to be individually marked (e.g. a sticker with a unique ID number) upon receipt, which is more labor intensive than just counting them and sticking them on a shelf.

Amazon's sku and bin level accounting works perfectly fine for items that have a single origin. Shoehorning commingled inventory into that same system doesn't work. It was reckless, and they should bear the punative cost for its results.

Well, what amazes me is that it seems to have be done this way for a long time, no?

If so, it has a very low amount of problems and complains, since they could grow so big. If bad suppliers were a constant, they would be bad-mouthed enough and wouldn't have grown that big.

Or their inner working is better than this article implies...

With the current system there's no way to know which supplier is a bad supplier: there's just a bucket of mixed legitimate & counterfeit inventory.

It's been a huge problem for a long time with items like cologne and clothing.

Or they're a big enough seller that their (basically) monopoly position allows them to generally ignore bad feedback.

I've heard of retailers complaining of the same thing over the past few years. I don't know what really goes on, but certainly mixing multiple suppliers of stock in the same bin is a huge headache when counterfeit products get mixed in. Legitimate retailers get bad reviews and customers don't get what they pay for.

I have received a counterfeit product from Amazon and I thought they were going to handle it excellently, but then they dropped the ball asking me to return a dangerous item to the seller for them to pass it on to the next person. I refused and fortunately got a refund, but all the effort was on me.

The article does not say Amazon commingled glasses from multiple sources.

Before I purchased eclipse glasses from Amazon, I first checked with NASA for approved brands, purchased an approved brand, and have not received a recall email from Amazon.

The fact is that we don't know what happened at Amazon, whether they commingled inventory or incorrectly included legitimate suppliers in the recall or if there were real issues with the products provided by the supplier in the article.

Short of an elaborate test apparatus, there is actually no way for a consumer to independently confirm they have safe glasses.

It's easy to make fakes that look exactly like the real thing. So a printed ISO code or brand name is only sufficient if the supply chain is secure.

And unfortunately, there have been plenty of stories lately about seeming lax stock management at Amazon that makes it hard to know exactly what you're going to get.

True, but we know that inventory commingling is an issue in general for Amazon so it seems reasonable to assume they have done so in this case given that there are two vendors cited who provided strong claims to have been selling proper product, but were still subject to the recall.

I ordered a variety of different products and so I can see which were recalled and which were not. Based on that sample my guess is that they recalled anything with the text "solar eclipse" in the description that they could not conclusively prove complied with the relevant human-eye exposure standards which include manufacturing, documentation and tractability requirements. This would have caught : truly unsafe product; safe product that lacked the necessary paper trail; safe product that wasn't manufactured in the approved facility; product that was never marketed for human eye protection; compliant product that couldn't be separated from the above categories due to Amazon inventory commingling.

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