That’s a pretty damn far cry from the current situation.
It’s precisely because of commingling that, just because you buy a book “Shipped From and Sold By Amazon” you have no guarantee that the book they ship to you was actually bought and entered into their inventory by them. Their books and every other “fulfilled by Amazon” sellers’ are treated as completely fungible by their fulfilment centres.
“Ships From and Sold by Amazon” doesn’t really mean anything re: the actual book you receive, which could easily be one that came into their system from Bob’s Big Store of Counterfeit Bullshit.
This is not a matter of some other seller providing Amazon with inventory. These are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory.
There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.
No, it's not.
Even if it says "Shipped and sold by Amazon", it does not mean that the item originated from Amazon's purchase. Amazon considers co-mingled inventory as fungible.
Let's say Amazon has 10 warehouses, and every month, they order 100 copies of a book, and put 10 in each warehouse. Now, a third party seller comes onto the scene, and wants to sell the same book, fulfilled by Amazon, with co-mingling to reduce costs. To further reduce costs, he also only wants to send his inventory to the closest warehouse so shipping is cheaper. Let's say he has 100 copies of this book, and he sends them to warehouse 10. Amazon, seeing that there are 100 additional copies of this book in this warehouse, and knowing that demand is likely to stay relatively the same, knows that for the next 10 months, they do not have ship those 10 books a month to it. Now, Amazon has run through the stock they stored at warehouse 10, but they have an order from someone who lives down the street. They don't have any copies of the book that they purchased, but they have the co-mingled copy that should, in theory, be an exact copy of the original product. They then send it to the customer so that they have a shorter delivery time. If they were to ship all of the copies of the book that were sent to them by that seller, and had not replenished, when a customer ordered from that seller they could ship a copy from warehouse 3, but it would take an extra day to arrive. Or, someone who lives next door to warehouse 1 could order from the third party seller, but still get same day delivery because Amazon has a copy of the book there, even though it is their copy and not the seller.
This is what co-mingled inventory means. That all inventory is fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item, as long as it is properly accounted for on the ledgers. That is fundamentally the point - you save significant costs and introduce real benefits to customers when you can ignore where the item was sourced from. The problems arise when not all of the sources for the items are good actors.
Looking at the No Starch Press Serious Python book, there are 41 sellers. I don't know how many co-mingle inventory or are FBA, but that means that any book sold that from any seller that co-mingles inventory (and items sold by Amazon directly are) can be fulfilled by items physically sourced from any other seller that also co-mingles inventory.
These are counterfeit copies. They're not coming from legitimate suppliers. Frankly we don't care who resells our books as long as they're selling legitimate copies. These are not.
I've been dealing with this issue with Amazon since 2017. It's not that what you're describing doesn't happen but if this is like previous cases this is something different.
In this and other recent cases as has been shared online, Amazon replaced our legitimate inventory entirely with counterfeit copies that it was sourcing directly from a printer that it works with for print-on-demand. That printer supplies Createspace. We receive absolutely no revenue from the sale of these copies because we're not the ones printing them. They're produced from stolen files.
Once again, Amazon is stealing from authors and leaving it to vendors like us to police them. Why should we have to police Amazon?
In this case the copies that I received appear to be from that same printer. They look just like the other counterfeits that we've seen over the years.
As with other instances we receive NO revenue from these sales and as a consequence neither do our authors.
In this case and in previous cases Amazon stopped ordering directly from authorized resellers. They fulfilled orders only with counterfeit books.
This is not the case of commingling as you describe. This has nothing to do with FBA or other resellers. This is Amazon's supply chain sourcing counterfeit copies directly from a printer that they work with and selling them in place of our legitimate inventory.
Love your books. FWIW, I almost entirely stopped buying from Amazon 2 years ago in part because of issues like this. Canceling prime was scary and then liberating.
This is such a bullshit rationalisation.
If the product is treated as fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item then of course Amazon is responsible for selling / fulfilling the counterfeit product because, as you say, it doesn’t matter physically who sourced the product.
Amazon is aware of this issue, but fixing it breaks their enabling-crime business-model.
I do think it's unfair to say Amazon isn't attempting to fight this - someone linked a website in here that shows them as employing thousands of people and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in fighting it. It just seems like they're not currently winning the arms race.
You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers, but most customers don't care and prefer cheaper over more reliable. That effect is not enough to help "enormously".
Huuuuge citation needed.
It’s precisely because of comingling that they don’t have the ability to do this: they put multiple sellers goods, including their own, in the same storage bins, provided they have the same UPC. By what means do you suggest they can distinguish Seller A’s widget in Bin 37624 from Seller B’s? They do not appear to attach any additional tracking stickers to their goods.
And they do not have a formal system for complaining about counterfeit goods. They don’t even offer it as a distinct option on returns — probably quite purposefully. All you can do is request a return for some vaguely-related reason and manually add a note about it being counterfeit. They’re clearly not attempting to automate identification of bad goods, let alone removal of bad actors.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...
"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."
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549623, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952939, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12062856
This is the biggest misconception about Amazon I've seen, and has been for years, at least on HN.
And it may work to benefit Amazon in finding problematic sellers, and it may scare most legit sellers to never supply fake products.
But it doesn't seem to do anything to actually benefit sellers or buyers, at this point.
For one, I suspect resold returned items to be a major weakness of this policy. Or orders of multiple quantity with different sources, which are picked, boxed, then returned to inventory for whatever reason.
I see the other side: I was suspended after false counterfeit complaints from tp-link, and was forced to sue them in federal court. In my case, Amazon suspended me despite having provided extensive proof of authenticity, simply because the brand didn't want me to legally resell their product and was willing to lie about it.
I agree that returns are a weakness, where counterfeits can enter the supply chain. But returns are a low percentage of sales, and counterfeit returns (fraud) are a low percentage of returns. Seems like a relatively small problem.
Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined. If they're in the same warehouse they would just ship from the same seller. I don't know for sure how Amazon handles it but again, doesn't seem like a huge problem.
And you kinda make my point. The practice is for the benefit of Amazon, not us.
(It still benefits Amazon to sell fakes already within their inventory.)
>Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined
Yet it's happening. I don't claim to know all the whys, but I've ordered enough to know that it's happening. And a lot.
Re multiple quantity: have you gotten counterfeit and authentic product in the same box?
Some problematic products, I've ordered a couple dozen times and never gotten a genuine product.
>in the same box?
Yes, multiple times, although probably less than 10. And a couple were supposed single seller items. Didn't matter.
(One case initially got my account flagged and couldn't buy anything else until I sent pictures for proof. One of the only times I've ever had Amazon call me.)
However, the much more common occurrence is variance over separate orders.
With this in place, it seems vendors get to choose if they want commingling or not. Would be nice to provide a checkout option to buyers as well, like choose a slower shipping but guarantee your getting the item from the vendor. Or even if it asked you... getting item from alternate vendor will ship faster? Is that okay? And mentioned the alternate vendor.
Amazon is either ignoring the preference when it suits them, or has significant flaws in how they're implementing the policy.
Either way, they're destroying their brand reputation.
Knowing how Seller Performance works, they aren't about to close off a listing that is doing $nn-K revenue per month because of a couple of copyright reports. The economics simply don't make sense for Amazon to poison the inventory of a seller because of a couple of reports, to fix this problem Amazon truly needs to figure out a way to verify the validity of inventory sent in to their warehouses.
That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I do hope that someone from Amazon is really working on it. Inventory commingling and a myriad of other issues present in the processes of selling on Amazon are the reason that I decided to not pursue FBA further.
Regarding your points:
1. Amazon takes action when a brand complains, even with only a single complaint. Sellers have to prove the complaint is wrong to be allowed to continue to sell the product, or in some cases to be reinstated. Usually this is done by providing an invoice which Amazon verifies.
2. The enforcement is usually at the seller level, not the listing level.
The owner of No Starch Press shows up at a lot of CS shows and other shows. Next time you are at one, seek him out for a chat. Tell him Anazon takes action after a single complaint. Be prepared for him to disabuse you of your misconceptions.
Source: I heard his story first-hand at PyCon.
I very much doubt Amazon is rejecting DMCA notices, and suspect the story is more complicated than that. I've heard from many sellers that it's easy to file complaints, and I know many sellers who have gotten false complaints, which is also what you'd expect if it's super easy to file complaints.
On top of that I once sent in a box of items that was checked in twice several weeks apart. Amazon sold double the inventory I sent them on my behalf and paid me for the sales of products I never sent them. Stories of phantom inventory are common. It can get crazy - someone [1] sent in a shipment of four items and 72 were added to their inventory, which Amazon happily sold for them after checking with the fulfillment center and insisting that the inventory was correct. This sort of thing shouldn't happen if you're actually tracking inventory. Also, their system shouldn't allow a shipment to be checked in twice.
[1] http://www.orensmoneysaver.com/2016/06/turnover-tuesdays-ama...
Generic complaints typically come from customer complaints. Customers complain even when the product is authentic. There's nothing in your story to suggest commingling is the issue.
Phantom inventory is an issue, usually arising when someone else's units were checked into your inventory. There's always a record of that, and you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
By "virtually no one" you mean "virtually everyone." Because what I described is very common. I've experienced it and I sell very little on Amazon - less than 100 sales a year. Less than 50 items a year in the past several years.
>you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
How about you actually pay attention to people's experiences before discounting them? The author of the blog post I linked to literally reported the issue to Amazon and Amazon insisted the massive amount of inventory was theirs. It would be easy to see that it wasn't merely by looking at the weight of what was shipped (among other very obvious things...). Since they can't get their heads out of their ass enough to do that (or simply not check in the same shipment twice and double count that inventory), I'm not believing they have much inventory source tracking going on.
Amazon may think they are doing a great job tracking inventory but the facts say otherwise.
I've sold millions on Amazon and am friends with many sellers who've collectively sold at least hundreds of millions. I've heard many people with issues with inauthentic complaints. I've never heard of one that can be traced back to commingling.
I've dealt with phantom inventory many times. The correct thing to do is report it. It doesn't always get fixed. The fact that they occasionally have stranded inventory and assign it to a seller doesn't mean they don't generally track transfers of manufacturer barcode inventory, like they say they do. They never claim inventory receiving is perfect. They do claim they track the original source of sales, and there's no reason to think it's not true.
Alternately, how does the picker know which item on the shelf to select to ensure they have selected the right seller's unit? Look at how amazon stores books in their warehouses:
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+warehouse+books&sourc...
Without a label on the book, how do they know which copy to pull from the shelf and put in the box?
I know Amazon says they track inventory, but prime shipped and sold-by-amazon.com boardgames arrive as counterfeits pretty regularly in the board game industry. You can find plenty of reports, with detailed pictures and manufacturer confirmation on BGG. There has to be something going on here, even if it may be more complicated than Amazon is commingling counterfeit and genuine articles.
It's very simple: they're stored in different locations. If seller A is on shelf B, and seller C is on shelf D, then even though the individual items are identical, if you pick up a unit on shelf D you know it's from seller B.
They don't store identical products from different sellers next to each other.
I agree there's a counterfeit issue. Amazon agrees there's an issue, and actually has it as a risk factor in their financial reports. But commingling isn't a significant contributor to it.
You can check if the location it was supposed to be in is empty. From my understanding, the main issues happen during receiving; if it's received to the wrong shipment it'll be incorrectly marked in the system and unlikely to be fixed. Once it's received to the correct system everything else is fairly robust.
>If an item is pulled incorrectly, and then set on the return-to-stock pile, you have no idea where to put it.
If it's pulled, then there'd be a record of where it was pulled from, and that place would be empty.
Since (according to others in this thread) the Amazon "Reason for return" menu does not provide the option "Item is counterfeit", it does not sound like Amazon is very interested in receiving these sorts of complaints. So I have to wonder how interested Amazon is in punishing the sellers of counterfeit items. If you close your ears to bad news, you won't hear any.
> You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers...
That's right. For items where genuineness really matters, I choose the seller "Sold by Walmart" at walmart.com. There are no reliable sellers at amazon.com, not even "Sold by Amazon". Which is a shame.
P.S. Reply to msbarnett, since I can't reply directly: Amazon does not literally put all identical items into a single physical bin, so it is at least feasible for them to keep track of which item came from which seller, if they choose to. I recommend that you (and other readers) take a tour of an Amazon fulfillment center: https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment-center-tours/ It's pretty interesting.
But seriously, my point is that "Sold by Amazon" should have a counterfeit rate of near zero. I'm willing to help QC third-party sellers. But "Sold by Amazon" should do its own QC. Just as "Sold by Walmart" does (for now).