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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing to implement.

Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.

Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.

This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.

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> This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve

Has chosen not to solve. They could trivially improve the situation by ending the practice of commingled inventory so a seller could be held accountable for counterfeit or stolen items but that would cost more so they don’t.

How do they handle it when you get your inventory sent back? I.e. you send them 100 pieces of X and after three months you tell them to send them back to you. Do they just take 100 pieces of X out of their general inventory, or do they know which ones were yours? Because otherwise it seems like an obvious scam where you could send in trash and get real items back.

I don’t know but based on the number of people I know who’ve gotten clearly counterfeit or repackaged items from official storefronts on Amazon, I would assume they just take 100 units out of that bin.

RFID is a possible solution. Tags are now about five cents, and likely to drop further in price with volume. Newer tag designs can be sewn in the seams of garments and shoes.

Commingling is optional to Amazon vendors, all they have to do is track each item with a plain individual sticker / QR tag. They opt not to do it and track using the generic product barcode since it's cheaper and simpler.

So if they can't be bothered to attach a zero cents sticker on the item, a 5cents rfid tag is out of the question.

The commingling thing is crazy overblown. One of those internet memes that just grows legs and the legend can never live up to its original source.

If it’s both fulfilled and sold by Amazon, I have yet to have anyone actually provide an actual first person story that their item came from commingled or forged stock.

Yes, I’m sure it has happened. It’s not a widespread thing. Amazon does not sell Tide detergent sourced from some random third party that sent in stock matching the SKU being sold because it happens to be in a closer warehouse.

Random listings on Amazon? Sure I’ve received fake stuff. That’s the risk of using a third party storefront.

I have also not heard or seen of a well sourced story recently where someone’s esoteric custom product SKU was being sent in by third parties as the same ASIN and comingled with the legit companies listing.

The shady listings seem to be where this all comes from to begin with. Amazon could cull those nearly overnight but chooses not to. This is where the main problem lies. The times you click the legit listing for the FBA/SBA Amazon item, and then there are 12 “options” like multi-packs that are random third parties trying to take advantage of the unaware type of dark pattern.

Commingling only happens at the frontend. For each item the vendor is tracked. Physically they are in different bins and more likely in different warehouses. So if you buy a product and it turns out fake, Amazon can trace back the vendor for the particular item you received.

It helps with inventory availability with the cost of risk of bad customer experience in case of fraud.

They can definitely solve some problems. There's a number of items that are well known to have common forgeries. Weirdly common is things like Lamy pens[0]. I've gotten legit ones from amazon but seem fake ones.

One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.

There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.

But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/q14p5w/are_la...

Ehhh, My experience is the opposite(perhaps it is what you buy) manufacturers hate dealing with the end customer directly, customer-service is huge pain and not part of their core competence. So the manufacturer always goes through resellers, distributors, middle-men.

Personally I hate it, I would love to buy directly from the manufacturer instead of playing roulette with the distributor.

I’ve bought a fair number of things that include specific notes inside the product with something to the effect of “if you have a problem with this product, please contact us directly rather than the seller”. (Presumably there’s no advantage to including that if you’re going to offer bad support when anyone contacts you.)

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