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Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

> 8. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the box company!

So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out. One could tell them this, but there will probably always be more small companies making this mistake.

Probably what should happen is for Amazon to mark this item (the box of boxes) as requiring special handling when scanning on entry into the warehouse, verifying that it actually is a box of boxes (right weight, no other barcode, etc), and explaining why. And audit all the ones currently in the warehouse.

I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this. Like the author, I'd give up and start buying my boxes elsewhere.

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> I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this

Funny enough, I do. I know and work with a lot of the people who would be involved in that. My org in Amazon is all about ensuring everything is ready to be used for customer orders. (We're hiring; Toronto, Seattle and Nashville).

We call this the "multiple scannable barcodes" problem. In terms of inventory tracking, we trust that there's only one barcode on the item that maps to a valid product because that's nearly always the case. It's also really hard to notice/catch when it happens.

I'm going to send this to a few friends today. I definitely know someone on the operations side who would know what to do about it (and would laugh at the absurdity).

Couldn't you add your own barcode on the boxes? It can even be a new barcode standard to make sure it never mistaken with another one.

If someone reuses one of these boxes to sell their items back to Amazon, Amazon will now have two Amazon barcodes on the box. We're back to square one here.

I ran into this once..I ordered an empty box for storing a card game with several hundred cards. Instead I got the box I wanted but it was full of 600 Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

The seller of the boxes could fix this by putting an outer wrapping on the boxes to which they affix the label so that there was no way for the label to stay on the box.

I think the error mostly benefits the seller of the boxes, or at least doesn’t hurt them, so they won’t have much incentive to fix it.

They are losing a whole lot of valuable sales through this channel, not to mention seeing a higher than average return/refund rate that could flag some risk alerts. So there's plenty of incentive to fix it - although this sort of thing could presumably be pretty hard for them to detect, troubleshoot and rectify.

The item that's being scanned in and out of the Amazon warehouse is the box of boxes, not the granola.

This will lead to the inventory of granola to be out of sync with the actual amount at the warehouse, but in that case I'm assuming Amazon would eat the cost since they're the ones that "lost" the missing inventory. Think about a physical store. If they lose some of their inventory, it's the store's problem, not the product's.

I agree that if things were working right this would all be on the granola company, but evidently things aren't working right :)

To me it seems... far from certain that Amazon would attribute the inventory errors and customer complaints correctly.

From the perspective of Amazon's system they're mailing out The Packaging Wholesalers' sealed box, customers are saying it has the wrong item in, therefore The Packaging Wholesalers must be unreliable chumps that can't pack a box correctly.

I used to sell stuff on amazon--they do specifically tell you to remove or cover any other barcodes on the box when doing fulfillment by Amazon.

Sadly that leaves me to believe the sellers will have to eat the cost in these cases, which leaves relatively little incentive for Amazon to improve vetting.

Or maybe they just didn't read the fine print :).

Maybe it's only every 25th box that has a barcode sticker.. so they've just assumed it was package theft.

I would imagine this is hard to debug as a seller.

Ding ding ding. When I order boxes they come strapped in a bale of the 25, and the box on top has the shipping label etc.

> Maybe it's only every 25th box that has a barcode sticker

In that case the OP should consider themselves the (un)lucky one since they several times happened upon box no25!

> In that case the OP should consider themselves the (un)lucky one since they several times happened upon box no25!

It may happens only every 25th box, but he specifically order that specific barcode, so it happens on every box he order.

I guess in his closest warehouse, there's less people that require theses boxes and more that require granola bar or Harry Potter coaster, thus that's always what he gets.

Weight or volume is also another metric that could possibly be employed, i.e. save the weight and rough volume of each item being scanned...when there's a significant deviation for an product that's shown no or litte deviation in the past, flag it for manual inspection?

Probably too costly for such an edge case problem though

> So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out.

So the idea seems to be that amazon.ca is collecting goods in boxes from various suppliers, and those boxes have no shipping labels on them, only product labels, which it trusts the suppliers to produce correctly. Amazon then fills the original downstream order, matching it by type, which is indicated by the product label.

So is the Granola company buying boxes from Amazon? Are they receiving their own product when they go to order more boxes?

They probably do not buy these individually, but in larger shipments which are not subject to the mixup: big crates containing boxes of boxes.

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