Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

First step... add a "vendor sticker" to each item as it comes from a vendor into its' warehouse. At the very LEAST they could then filter out vendors selling counterfeits. The costs would be minimal and actually lead to rooting out counterfeits.

Amazon's responses on this are purely bullshit.

View on HN

They are rolling out something called "Transparency" that does just this, using 2D barcodes. Vendor pays, not Amazon. https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency

Nice.

1: create a problem that should not exist

2: sell a solution to the fake problem

3: profit!

That’s a good proposition I think.

In no way would adding an extra logistic step to every single package entering amazon’s warehouse something of ”minimal” cost, but it might be worth it.

Even if Amazon needs 10 billion stickers and it has to buy a sticker manufacturer, the profitability is what matters.

How much does adding one the sticker cost relative to the average Amazon product? 0.1%? How much does it cost relative to the cost of the counterfeiting problem?

I imagine the cost of actually placing the stickers on things would far outweigh the cost of the stickers themselves.

They could require the vendors attach the stickers to uniquely determine the shipment. Upon receipt, just scan to ensure the barcodes match/aren't duplicates. They already require vendors using Fullfillment by Amazon to have their shipment contain a shipping summary. Adding per item barcodes wouldn't be a huge change (and Amazon itself wouldn't bear the cost).

You're right. The items have to be scanned for inventory management anyway when they arrive and are put in the bins at Amazon. Might as well just scan a second bar code to note where it came from. Or do it as a combined QR code. Lots of room for extra data in there.

I believe the labeling obligation falls on the FBA seller today, not Amazon. So I don't think the cost of the extra sticker would impact Amazon at all beyond the process changes needed to ensure that two labels are scanned vs one.

I should say minimal cost per item. Even if it were $0.25USD per item, most wouldn't even notice, and if they took action against vendors with heavy return requests or counterfeit notifications, it could at least help.

There are already shipping labels placed on every outbound item, tiny little tags per item would be minimal by comparison.

Every item is already tagged with a unique sku (except for pre-approved commingled items). These numbers trace back to the vendor and Amazon is pretty quick to lick these vendors off the platform. But they just come right back under a different name.

The issue is expressly the commingling of items. There's no way to determine which seller shipped in the counterfeit items. Requiring a vendor sticker would do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com