Amazon was known for maintaining high quality of their catalogue. But since opening up their store front for third party sellers it’s resembling flee market by the day. For example they had a very strict policy of one product one page I.e Single Detail Page (SDP), indexed by ASIN. But now exact same product has multiple ASINs. You don’t know if it’s a fake or genuine.
Basically third party sellers add info about Asins, which in real time gets merged with existing Asin information. It’s all automated
Also, Amazon customer service continues to be amazing for me. Refund basically anytime for any reason, instantly and fast.
There was a sweet spot, in my recent memory, with Amazon years back where I just got the things I ordered, and it took 2 days at most. This was right before the Amazon button things theyd send with your fabric softener where you'd just press the button and more Snuggle would appear.
The first thing, in my case, was being sent the same items twice, one time it was an entire mattress, which was great, but it was a sign. Next came counterfeit items from known reputable sellers, a side effect of product being binned together, as someone explained to me. Buying from the correct amazon store was a crapshoot, because the counterfeits were in the same bin, allegedly. Essentially someone buying the knockoff could have received the genuine item I paid for.
The final straw was in the same week: receiving a completely different order of items than what I ordered, dog food and womens products when I ordered a keyboard, the price of prime going up, and the fact that everything in the catalog was obvious eastern origin products, misspellings, run-on sentence item titles and other hallmarks that Im about to be alibaba'd when the gear arrives.
The headache just wasn't worth it anymore. I never ordered from amazon again. I absolutely have more cost in finding certain items in town, but I feel better knowing there is a person whos face has pointed in the direction of mine while an item was being exchanged for money, hand to hand. There is a trust in that which Amazon is hopeless to ever capture. I hope this catches on.
The problem is they built it into the main UI with no care for distinction or customer appraisal of what is going on. And now they have this mess.
They also have a bunch of their own brands: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17728530011
That said though - this would clearly impact profits proportional to the level of strictness/barriers.
Amazon's whole business is being the fulfillment for 3rd party sellers, you take away that you take away the whole reason people use it. If Amazon was just online 1st party Walmart they would sell almost nothing.
Amazon made the decision to pivot to third party sellers because they realized how poorly being an actual online merchant scaled. Why get into that game when you can be the platform and vertically integrate everything from the listing to last mile delivery charging a fee every step of the way?
So you're saying this isn't a technical problem that can be solved by a technical solution?
> It’s all automated
Well I think you found the problem then.
Sears never had this issue because they have humans who do this. They also never had the scale that Amazon has achieved because of those humans.
This is Amazon's blindspot. I'm super bullish on $SHOP because of this.
They have to put some effort into deciding who they want to carry and not, it's a very regular part of doing business.
Amazon has money. If they cared about the integrity of their catalog, they'd pay people to maintain it instead of giving control over it to the people who most benefit from it being wrong.
https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency
It lets manufacturers print a unique secret code on their products, and Amazon validates it when it enters and leaves their fulfillment centers. As a user, you can also validate it yourself using the Transparency app you can download from Google Play or the AppStore.
That way you know you're not getting counterfeit.
I think it's relatively new, so not a lot of manufacturers use it yet. And I don't think you can filter on transparency enabled products in the search yet either.
- Some authorized resellers mix in counterfeits with real goods.
- Other authorized resellers are only authorized to distribute certain items, but get others through 'shady' channels.
- Some resellers will sell returned or repaired items.
- Most resellers don't actually have time-limited deals.
- Agreements lapse, and figuring out who is permitted to distribute what is complicated.
- None of these measures are actually verifiable by the concerned consumer.
Basically verifying your supply chain.
> https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency
Huh! This is pretty interesting, and it directly addresses the problem of inventory commingling that we've heard so much about.
The program doesn't seem to be in a very functional state yet, though, and I see a fundamental issue with it.
Products sold on Amazon do not indicate whether they are protected by the transparency program. (I checked for this by searching for the word "transparency" on the Cards Against Humanity product page - Cards Against Humanity is listed on the transparency program page as one of the brands enrolled in the program.[1]) This makes the program nearly useless to the customer. It could still be useful to the manufacturer, though, by preventing customers from receiving counterfeit products.
The fundamental problem is that the counterfeits-on-Amazon problem arose in the first place due to Amazon's method of not caring which individual item came from which vendor. Their system enabled them to not keep track of the provenance of an item. And this new system seems to require them to track genuine items. If they're going to do that, they can already do it entirely on their own end of things.
However, it does look like Amazon sees the transparency program as something to be implemented by manufacturers and not by vendors. On that model, they'd continue commingling everything like usual, and a vendor sending in a counterfeit item wouldn't be able to sell the item at all, as opposed to, say, selling it at a suspiciously low price and having their suspicious item reliably go to the same person who bought at the suspicious price. Amazon already tracks the identity of the item, so validity stamping by the manufacturer would fit into their system fairly seamlessly.
[1] This is itself entirely useless to the customer. No one will ever care if they get a "counterfeit" version of a card game, as long as the content of the cards is the same.
> The fundamental problem is that the counterfeits-on-Amazon problem arose in the first place due to Amazon's method of not caring which individual item came from which vendor. Their system enabled them to not keep track of the provenance of an item. And this new system seems to require them to track genuine items. If they're going to do that, they can already do it entirely on their own end of things.
I'm not so sure about that. If there was a time they couldn't track, that's long gone. Amazon can definitely trace back what product from who was eventually delivered even if it was commingled.
They don't even store inventory together anymore, they'll have them store per-vendor.
See: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200141480
I think the issue is that vendors are the ones that sell counterfeit, maybe willingly or sometimes unwillingly, their own supplier might be giving them counterfeit without them knowing.
Each vendor can opt-out of commingling, but then they have to print an Amazon barcode on their products to use FBA (fulfilled by Amazon).
For certain products, Amazon forces that anyways, like perishables and registered brands, unless you're approved by the brand. To be approved by the brand, you need to provide invoices from the brand to Amazon amongst other things.
If you don't want to put Amazon labels on each of your products, your options are to have Amazon track the existing manufacturer barcode, in which case commingling is also applied, but still Amazon can trace back your exact product based on the manufacturer barcode, they also won't physically mix your products with other products in the warehouse.
The other option is for you to ship it yourself and not use FBA, then you do what you want, you probably don't even need to have a barcode at all.
What Amazon then does is random product inspections and everytime someone returns an item with reason counterfeit or not as advertised, it gets inspected as well. And since they can trace it back to the exact vendor, they suspend that vendor if found selling counterfeit. Probably there's some level of like 3 strikes or appeals process, etc.
But that leaves open vendors selling counterfeit that fools the inspection or the customers. Or new vendors until they get inspected or have some customer return made. Since vendors are hard to trust, manufacturers can protect their authenticity of their products by signing up to transparency.
Anyways, that's what I gathered from reading their latest help and support, and from forums.
I'm still with you, as a buyer, I'd love to be able to see which vendor is selling commingled or not, which product have transparency or not, and even be able to filter for that in the search. I'd also love a country of origin for both product and vendor personally.
It seems that Shopify is kind of going in that direction.
Supply chain, logistics, retail and back office applications of each are very messy. Businesses are messy.
I hate the flea market Amazon has turned into, but I have to admit it's a brilliant end run.