Edit: Well it could, but it would be from the actual seller you bought it from.
Products that have expiration dates or best by dates don't get commingled for example.
Here's a non exhaustive list of the product categories that aren't allowed to be commingled by sellers:
OTC Medication
Medical Supplies and Equipment
Dietary Supplements
Feminine Hygiene
Contraceptives
Industrial Supplies
Professional Medical Devices
Baby Food and Formula
Baby Topicals
Baby Stroller and Carrier
Topicals
Infant Toys
Baby Feeding
Kid and Baby Furniture
Sports Equipment
Baby Activity Gear
Baby Diapering
Baby Car Seats
Toy Models and Kits
Toy Building Blocks
Learning Toys
Outdoor and Sports Toys
Laptop Batteries
Phone Batteries & Chargers
Fidget Spinners
Solar eclipse glasses
Source: The policies on sellercentral.amazon.com and online forums where sellers complain about why they can't commingle certain products.
Amazon is too entrenched.
Edit: Interestingly, against Amazon's retail business, even a small boycott would have an effect because their individual products are cut to extremely low margins. AWS is their cash cow with fat margins.
Things got seriously ugly when her products started to get to the top of the search results. This took time and a ton of money and effort. That's when the attacks started.
Two forms of attacks prevailed: Fake reviews and click fraud.
Competitors would post completely fake reviews about her products. They would claim things such as having had to go to the hospital or having diarrhea for three days straight. All false, unverified. The other way you could tell the reviews were fake was when the review posted before the product shipped out of the Amazon warehouse. I could not believe Amazon didn't have just a little bit of common-sense code to automatically reject such obviously false reviews.
Sellers can advertise on Amazon. We did. Once her products started to show up at the top of search results her ad budget would be consumed in its entirety by 4 or 5 AM every day. You could look at the analytics and see, plain as day, that all the clicks happened during the span of an hour between 3 and 4 AM eastern US time. Thousands of clicks every day. This meant that our ads did not show by the time people got up.
Oh, yes, the other method competitors used was to contact Amazon and make false claims about her products. They'd claim we were not disclosing true ingredients; fake copyright violations, etc.
It was all-out war against her in the worst possible way. At the time I remember thinking that this experience had to be an approximation of what it would be like to deal with the mafia. I had never seen such dishonest, criminal behavior in my life.
I captured analytics and put together analysis to show Amazon what was going on. Her business was being destroyed at a rapid rate. It was relentless. Amazon could not care less. It was impossible to deal with them. I persisted. It took them about six months to finally admit our data showed a coordinated effort on the part of competitors to destroy her business. They also claimed they identified who did it but refused to give us the information. They issued a refund that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales, nobody paid for that.
In the end we decided we had zero interest in dealing with the mafia and quit, which, ironically, was probably exactly what these criminals wanted. We make more than enough money with our day jobs and tech business, no need to complicate our lives in that kind of an environment.
My experience with Amazon, in this regard, was an eye opener. Today I do not buy anything on Amazon that isn't marked as "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I want nothing whatsoever to do with their third party sellers. That entire ecosystem is permeated with people you just can't trust, even if all you are buying from them is a spoon.
I still have friends I met along the way who sell on Amazon. The stories, years later, remain the same: Amazon does not seem to care about criminal behavior on their platform so long as they are making money.
What do you think would have helped?
Yes, it's expensive and carries its own risk of corruption and insider fraud, but either Amazon polices itself or others will police it, and they will be less kind on the organisation as a whole.
If Amazon manages to get a reputation among the public for fakes (rather than just us, a specialised audience), it will be extremely expensive and hard to shift.
The next level would be no reviews until the product is actually delivered.
One more level up, no reviews until a reasonable amount of time post-delivery.
Yet one more level: Require contacting the seller with grievances before posting a review.
I would also add a finite impulse response filter to reviews in order to control rate of change.
Rapid negative review posting rates should red flag and rate-limit these review.
Also, the star rating math has to change. If you get just a few negative star ratings it can absolutely sink your listing. Unless you have thousands of positive ratings the math is such that a handful of one star reviews will destroy you; requiring hundreds of 5-star reviews to counteract.
The battles being fought behind the scenes on Amazon are beyond what anyone would believe.
Someone can take out any competitor instantly by making a few fake quality reports to Amazon. It’s insane, really.
After this experience, why do you buy anything at all from Amazon? They surely deserve not a single penny of your money.
They figured out which products are manipulated.
As long as Amazon are offering other products and services that are worth purchasing makes no sense to not use those.
It is excellent advice and worth keeping in mind.
That'll show them!
They are sharing valuable insights into which range of products are manipulated.
Thanks OP, the writeup was quite valuable.
After all you and your wife went through, this is the measure you've chosen to put into place? You state that Amazon cares more about making money than about "criminal behavior on their platform", so why* would you continue to support Amazon at all? Not to mention the fact that "Sold and shipped by Amazon" is meaningless given that they comingle their own inventory with that of third-party sellers. If you're buying supplements via Amazon, it's entirely plausible you're still directly supporting the sellers that drove your wife to shut down her business!
* EDIT: I suspect the answer to this question is "convenience." So the follow-up question is: at what point does your convenience become trumped by your principles?
These are the things I buy locally... well I did buy the Amazon Elements which I believe is an Amazon original... but I will probably go with Costco next.
I think there is probably a greater risk with chargers and fire. I remember Amazon banned the lithium balance things...
That's what it will take for Congress to amend Section 230 in a way that exposes the tech industry to liability (other than for sex trafficking, which was only done because victims and their families advocated hard for it).
But at the end of the day, congress as a whole doesn't seem interested in fixing problems that affect actual people. They're only interested in making things easier for their corporate sponsors. They'll describe it as "we have to keep things in perspective" "don't want to stifle innovation" etc.
Yes maximal regulation would lead to much higher prices, fewer options and make it more difficult to find goods. I wouldn’t call that a hellscape but it’s not what we want. I do think the only way to dissincentivise Amazons behaviour is increased accountability. I am completely open to alternative suggestions on that though.
You say this, but if it were actually a problem for people, it's not like they don't have alternatives. I think the evidence of harm here is pretty minimal.
They could ditch Amazon, but there's no guarantee any other site would be better. Trying multiple different options and getting cheated each time until you find one that isn't cheating you (yet) isn't an acceptable state of affairs. Individual consumers don't have the resources to evaluate each option available to them and make an informed decision, especially when much of the information in the form of reviews that they do have access to is poisoned by fakes.
In these sorts of circumstances, offloading that task from individuals to a delegate that regulates the market and establishes basic standards is I think reasonable.
The argument that Amazon's suppliers are "retailers" to avoid any liability is disgusting. Imagine if Walmart did that in stores: "our shelves are just a vehicle for other retailers, take your health/counterfeit concerns to them". It's insane.
Food trucks. Why are there any regulations? Same for restaurants. What about automobiles? Why are their safety features over regulated? Doesn’t that just benefit incumbents? I shop for prescription drugs at a pharmacy. Why are pharmacists regulated? Isn’t it a gatekeeping scam? Shouldn’t I be able to buy Oxycodin at the corner-store if I want?
Citation very needed, because I seem to remember a lot of cops, support groups and sex workers saying it made their jobs harder. (And less safe for the trafficking victims, too)
If someone blindly criticizes Section 230 hit them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. I know it is hard - rolled up newspapers are hard to come by these days.
Supply chain definitely matters on anything you eat or ingest, though. Are you sure they co-mingle food and medicine?
I couldn't disagree more.
One of the big reasons co-mingling works well for Amazon is because many counterfeit items aren't detected by consumers. But just because they aren't detected doesn't mean they don't do harm.
If I buy an Apple USB charger, I expect to get an Apple USB charger. I don't have the equipment to check it for loaded voltage sag (check out some videos of knock off USB chargers for examples). However fast it charges is however fast it charges, but I'm still being harmed by an inferior product.
If I buy a SpyderCo knife with expensive steel, that's what I expect to get. I don't have the equipment to determine whether something is AUS6 or S110V, so I'll probably just use it and sharpen it as needed. But just because I don't realize I've been sold a counterfeit doesn't mean that I haven't been harmed by an inferior product.
There's a very good chance you could be harmed when it bursts into flames.
Actually, its No Starch Press's counterfeit book examples that have served as proof for why Comingling is bad.
https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202
At a minimum, it means that payment for counterfeit products go towards fake scammers instead of the actual publisher. You're basically paying for pirated goods.
Maybe you're fine with piracy, but paying good money for it is probably a step too far for most people. Especially if the pirated books have smudge-marks and low-quality paper.
> That in itself is not much of a problem... returns are free.
Are you able to tell the difference from a counterfeit book on bad paper and an official book? Are you going to blame Amazon for the fake, or are you going to blame the publisher?
You may, from the bad paper quality. But are you able to tell that the Canada Goose coat you just paid 1000$ for is fake? [1]
In Italy, for example, when you - the buyer - is caught with a fake brand product the fine is up to 7'000 Euro. France, with a range of strong brands, also takes a very dim view on fakes.
I wonder if they're more careful in fulfillment in Europe or if they hope that the same argument (we're only a platform, guvnor) will be acceptable to European courts.
I don't think it will wash and it would be nice to see criminal charges laid at them for being a distributer of fake goods.
What is clear to me is that they don't give a flying fuck, unless it gets expesnive for them or turns into a pr nighmare.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...
That's amusing. In the US the buyer is usually considered a victim.
There are more regulations and norms. However given the amount of fraud over Amazon, think of the CE sign for example, I'd thought the regulators would have prosecuted and fined them to hell already. I can't explain the inaction on that part.
There are theoretically fines for carrying counterfeit but hardly anybody care about that. Just don't try to cross the Andorra to French border with a trunk full of clothes and handbags.
Where the US and EU differ, the EU leave official agencies take care of it and distribute fines, it's slow and easily half a decade after the fact, whereas the US leave anybody to sue the perpetrator for punitive damages or a class action. Strangely, neither have happened so far.
>Have no expiration date Not be consumable or topical products such as skin creams, shampoos, or cosmetics
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...