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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Yes, once you have products in the program you can't recall those specific products - this should be obvious, because Amazon may have already shipped some or all of the actual products you sent in for someone else's sales.

However, that does not mean Amazon hasn't been keeping track. They explicitly say that they keep track of which seller originally shipped each item.

See https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...

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Too many instances of this happening for this to be the case. Plenty of reports on this site and others stating they bought from the proper Amazon seller and still getting counterfeit product. I bought a SpyderCo knife "Ship and Sold by Amazon" that was an obvious fake. I just think Amazon doesn't care, they shipped a free replacement that happened to be legitimate.

>Plenty of reports on this site and others stating they bought from the proper Amazon seller and still getting counterfeit product.

That's entirely consistent with them tracking it. If you report that, they'll know who actually shipped it in and will punish them.

What sort of punishment are we talking about? They can't take back money they've already paid out. Do they throw away the rest of the products?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

Two things. First, your link describes various punishments suffered by "good guys": legitimate sellers who've built up a brand and product set over time, whose thin margins are destroyed by those punishments. The bad guys don't have to spend near as much money on their fake goods, so their margins aren't thin and these punishments are simply a cost of doing business. They also structure their Amazon relationship differently, with lots of different accounts and brands and products, so that any particular adverse event won't kill them.

Second, I don't see anywhere in that link where they're talking about commingling and its related issues. I think that was already a well-publicized issue back in December when this link was published, so I assume that they didn't mention it in order to curry favor with either Amazon or with the various entrepreneurs in the Amazon ecosystem who agreed to be quoted. This link certainly doesn't establish that malignant comminglers are ever punished in any way.

It's a lot harder to open multiple accounts than it used to be. They now require ID verification on every account.

You just asked me how Amazon punishes sellers, so I provided some examples. You can find many more by searching.

Obviously the sellers that were actually selling counterfeits aren't going to be doing interviews.

I believe they know how many units you've sent, and how many sold units to attribute to your listing. So they can calculate how many units they owe you. But I don't believe they know where to find them. If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you, and they wouldn't need to replace barcodes to stop commingling.

1. You're wrong, and I linked to an Amazon page that explicitly says that. "For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit." from the link above.

2. " If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you" no, because they may have sold already. If I ship 100 units in, sell 50 myself, then someone else sells 50 and Amazon ships my units for their sales, then Amazon can't return my units for me, even though they know exactly which 100 orders my units were shipped for.

They say they can, but they don't act like they believe it. If I had to guess, I'd say new inventory might now be on separate shelves but some existing inventory is permanently in doubt.

On what basis are you saying they aren't acting like it?

And they've been saying that for years, and basically nobody keeps inventory for years because Amazon charges huge fees for doing so. If your position is they switched over years ago then it's not an issue now.

You don't know whose units were used to fill an order for your listing. You can't blacklist scammers. You don't know how many of your units remain in stock, and you can't get just those back.

If every lot of units were individually tracked, why would barcodes even matter?

Who's you? If you mean Amazon, then they know. Individual sellers don't know, correct.

If you as a seller want to be able to get the same units shipped back, then don't use the manufacturer barcode program.

Barcodes matter so the warehouse can scan and know which product has been shipped in. Every product in the system requires a barcode of some sort.

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