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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

At least with eBay you know the product you’re getting is actually from the seller you bought it from.

Wait, how is this different with eBay compared to Amazon?

On Amazon, you don't know which seller's goods are being shipped to you, if it's "fulfilled by Amazon" or from Amazon directly.

So if two sellers are selling the same item, with the same exact SKU, and both send their inventory to Amazon to be warehoused and shipped, Amazon will happily send you either seller's item, depending on which is more convenient to send. (Perhaps seller A's stuff is in a warehouse closer to you.) This sounds good in theory, because all those products are identical, right? What if seller B's products are all counterfeit? So you buy from seller A who you think is legit (and for the example is), but you get seller B's fake crap, and seller A was powerless to stop it.

> seller A was powerless to stop it

They could select the "Amazon barcode" option (instead of the default "Manufacturer barcode") under "Barcode preference" which prevents commingling (but requires the seller to apply seller-specific barcode labels to all units).

Had no idea this was possible. I wonder if some more judicious process to make it easier for sellers to use this could stamp out the issue at the source.

Yeah, I’ve never understood why companies aren’t doing this. Not commingling inventory seems like an easy fix to the increasingly widespread fraud issue.

I was under the impression amazon does not commingle it’s own inventory with FBA inventory. Is that false?

This is false based on my impressions which were based on twitter / medium outcries for help type messages confirming this.

I am unable to parse that sentence.

He's saying it isn't true based on customer complaints on Twitter.

So I've seen several folks say that they do.

If nothing else, the UX makes it hard to keep it straight. eBay has always been more consistent with this, since they're solely the broker.

On eBay, purchase and shipping is in the context of the seller, their name is prominent, etc. with a little eBay branding around the edges.

Amazon's checkout process is 99.99% in the Amazon context, only showing a "sold by" on the order page itself in a 12px font. There is no mention of the seller at all in Amazon's order notification emails.

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