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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

i have had issues with clothing I think is inferior quality and likely counterfeit from amazon -- including when buying from what looks like "official" brand stores on Amazon. One example is Gold Toe socks.

I have wondered if even when buying from what looks like an official amazon brand store, you can still get product from multiple suppliers/locations, including some that have counterfeits? Anyone know if this is feasible?

It doesn't seem likely to me that (eg) Levi's or Gold Toe are doing this on purpose. It would also mean it would be hard to 'test' because you might get different things on different orders, it's not that the entire amazon supply is counterfeit, but that counterfeit stuff is in there somehow.

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I've made two big purchases from Amazon in the last year and had to return both because the supposedly new item was obviously a return (one had missing pieces, the other had visible damage). It really is at the point where you can't trust Amazon to ship you what you actually purchased due to how they manage inventory.

> I have wondered if even when buying from what looks like an official amazon brand store, you can still get product from multiple suppliers/locations, including some that have counterfeits? Anyone know if this is feasible?

Yes, it's called inventory commingling, there are plenty explanations online. The TL;DR is that if two sellers claim to have the same item, amazon will ship the item from the closest warehouse rather than from the seller you bought from.

Even when I'm ordering from what looks like an official brand store? eg https://www.amazon.com/stores/GOLDTOE/page/9736A557-DAD9-4EB...

Yeah, I guess that doesn't mean anything but marketing, it still all comes from the same place.

The OP article doesn't discuss this, but it seems to me a likely explanation for someone getting crap levi's ordered on amazon?

AFAIK for items shipped by Amazon the only way to rule out commingling is after delivery: If the barcode starts with an X that's an FNSKU (specific to a seller), meaning the item did not come from commingled stock. Items sold by Amazon itself never start with an X, so...

To be fulfilled by Amazon it has to go to Amazon's warehouse where they don't differentiate sellers. If seller A sends in "widget Z" and seller B sends in counterfeit "widget Z", Amazon puts them both in a box for widget Z and pulls from it randomly.

The only pair of Darn Tough socks I've had trouble with, I bought on Amazon. I'd bought others on there, and they were fine, but these looked and felt odd and developed holes in strange places after like five wears. That'd have been poor performance for a $2 pair of cotton socks, let alone a $20ish pair of supposedly tough-wearing socks. Normally, Darn Tough wear well for so long that the high prices aren't actually high on a per-wear basis, but these? Yeah, I stopped buying stuff on Amazon in general after that (I still buy Darn Tough, but straight from their site)

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