Amazon to end commingling after years of complaints from brands and sellers | Hacker News Reader

Amazon to end commingling after years of complaints from brands and sellers

modernretail.co

421 pointsblindriver156 comments

I received counterfeit goods multiple times due to this. I set up a subscribe and save order and they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products. Amazon collected the money and just did not care, they need to be held accountable for these things.

> they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products

What made this all particularly insidious is that Amazon not only commingled inventory, but actively refused to track where inventory came from.

This meant you only needed one fraudulent seller to poison the entire inventory pool and there was no way know where the bad product came from because Amazon actively avoided being able to track it.

That's the aspect of it that always felt particularly malicious to me.

The bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in.

Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items.

You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical.

If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.

> Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.

Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?

These things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up.

But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!

I thought Walmart has been doing this with their vendors for many years

I read it as "For items in the ten to twenty dollar range, its not worth adding a vendor label" and I don't suppose its the cost of the sticker, but how much longer does it take the warehouse worker to take it from a shelf and put it in a box if they add a sticker to every item? +5% ? +10% ? +100% ? (It takes very little time to put an item in a box, I could see adding a sticker doubling this...)

> or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical.

The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!

My understanding is every individual item is tracked in an Amazon warehouse - so Amazon knows that the 67th item in a box from supplier X was shipped to user Y.

They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.

They didn’t need to actually track things internally, add a sticker or even have someone stamp the vender code to the item listing the vendor when you’re adding the item to the bins and if the customer complains you can likely use that sticker to track who added the item after the fact. Critically you don’t need some 6 digit number for vender code, every new vender for a given item gets a number for that item, software can remember the relevant mapping.

If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out.

Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.

That’s a really clever and simple plan but doing anything like applying stickers, correctly, by hand or robot, can add cost ranging from $<surprising> to $<shocking>.

Maybe they have a variation of your idea where they inkjet a serial number onto a conveyor belt of incoming items or add a super-cheap chip of some kind.

>Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud.

They’d be better stewards of the industry, but aren’t the odds that everything they’ve done for the past decade has improved their bottom line?

This is the company whose policies have effectively forced their drivers to use plastic bottles as toilets.

There’s many illegal things which can boost a companies bottom line. Quite often the law cares about what’s a reasonable effort which is a very different standard than what maximizes profits.

Something which may or may not decrease their bottom line but definitely significantly reduces counterfeit items ending up in customers hands is going to be considered reasonable even if it’s not profit maximizing.

This always confused me. You have a bottle of glue sold by company X. Then you have 87 different people "buying" the glue in bulk, having it sent to Amazon, and selling it on Amazon as if it comes from their store:

Buying option 1: Company X glue from store A. Buying option 2: Company X glue from store B. Buying option 3: Company X glue from store C. ...etc.

But then Amazon says, "actually, these are all the exact same bottles of glue, so we'll thrown them all into the same bin, and no matter what "store" the people buy them from, we'll just grab them out and send them to the customer.

Now even without counterfeits, this is weird. What exactly is the point of store A, B, C, etc.? Company X sends the bottles to Amazon, they get put in one big pile, you buy them on Amazon, and Amazon takes them out of that one big pile and sends them to you.

The only thing purpose of the "stores" when you co-mingle inventory seems to be:

1. Plausible deniability for counterfeits. Hey, they told us they bought it from company X, we had no way of knowing they didn't.

2. Getting money from people trying to get rich quick in the marketplace. Some people will try all sorts of cuts to boost their Amazon sales in the hope that it will pay off later.

The reality is more complicated than you are assuming. A shockingly large number of vendors grossly mismanage their supply chains such that Company X can actually be legitimately undercut by reseller Company A on Amazon even though Company X produces the product! The mechanics of it are convoluted but legit, and there is a huge ecosystem of companies that arbitrage the legions of producers that are bad at managing their global supply chains.

Amazon has an interest in allowing these resellers of legitimate products to exist because it pushes down prices from the primary vendors, lowering prices for the customer. The primary vendors end up competing against themselves indirectly but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is the milieu in which counterfeit products exist.

If the producers of these products were consistently competent at managing their supply chains it would be much less of an issue because it would clear the field of resellers arbitraging the mismanagement, leaving only Company X and the counterfeiters which is a much easier problem to solve because you don’t have to worry about banning legitimate resellers. But that isn’t where we are.

Is the arbitrage you are describing just "buy in another country and ship more cheaply"?

That’s one way but far from the only one. Producers like to do things like make random deals through their myriad divisions to offload inventory to a random reseller very cheaply that ultimately finds its way onto Amazon at a price that undercuts cost of the original producer’s contract on Amazon. The cost of sales are not the same on Amazon even if you are selling the same product, so they can legit undercut you. You also have different divisions of the same company around the world all selling on Amazon under different contracts competing with each other (which Amazon tacitly encourages AFAICT).

Smart companies put contracts globally that have Amazon implications under a single person who can see across every deal. If they sell to someone with a restriction on Amazon resale, they will mark those goods so that they can track it if it shows up on Amazon. However, there are so many fly-by-night resellers that this is a losing proposition, so many don’t bother with those resellers anymore because enforcement yields nothing.

The vast majority of companies are naive and not very smart about any of this. People that know how to systematically set up a sales program that is profitable and resistant to arbitrage on Amazon get paid a lot of money in industry. It isn’t that hard but most companies can’t seem to figure it out.

That's one approach. There is also "buy it at a discount, resell it without much markup" and "buy it earlier, store it until prices rise", and plenty of other ways to perform this arbitrage.

> What exactly is the point of store A, B, C, etc.?

To externalize risk away from Amazon.

Amazon has many requirements for vendors. Having them tag SKUs with a vendor id would be minor.

I stopped buying from "fullfilled by Amazon" as the level of fraud was just insane.

Russia has a working system that tracks retail sales of individual cans of beer, bottles of milk and such. Initially it was introduced to track things like shoes and furs that were massively counterfeited, but then expanded to include other goods. So now in a grocery store you use it, for example, for all milk products (milk, cheese, ice cream, etc.), vegetable oil, beer, mineral water. Technically you just scan a different barcode (QR code). There's also an app you can use to scan the thing and get more information, such as the exact producer. The general idea was to fight counterfeit goods, but as a side effect it also enforces shelf life rules or may help to find a drugstore that has a specific drug.

So it is possible and not that expensive even as a country-wide system for goods that cost around $1 (a typical can of beer).

And yes, it does have additional codes for larger-scale packages. So a pack of cigarettes gets its own code, a carton gets its own code, a box of cartons gets its own code. A wholesaler can just scan the box and the system updates the status of every pack inside.

What am I missing about this? Couldn't the scammer just replicate the QR code of a legit shop? I thought the point of counterfeit goods was to fool you into buying them instead of the real thing. I guess part of the process would have to be verifying that every shipment of goods received was accurately tracked from a valid "ship from" address, but I have to imagine there's a lot of common warehousing in use for bulk goods. I'm not understanding how the QR code helps solve that.

Maybe a unique bar code per-item that includes some private hash information that makes it unique to the producer? Sort of an electronic signature for physical goods? Then if there's a centralized database, copying the QR codes wouldn't do much good. You might be able to slip in one if it is sold before the real version. But each subsequent copy could be caught.

Fwiw this was the original vision of upc

This is fascinating in the context how they use and abuse intermediaries to buy and smuggle western tech into Russia. If every chip were that well tracked, it would be a lot easier to clamp down on it..

How much do you think printing a barcode costs???

> Amazon actively avoided being able to track it.

Is that real? I find it hard to believe that Amazon effectively accepted stock from third parties "as is" and lost track of where it came from. It's more likely that they don't tell you than they don't track.

We know that they would not provide such tracking for those conducting fraud investigations. You can believe they intentionally didn't track the source or that they intentionally refused to share the information to root out fraud; either one is a very bad look for Amazon.

I'm glad to see this change.

That’s a worse situation then because Amazon would then be intentionally withholding data in counterfeiting investigations.

It wouldn't surprise me. Amazon knows where every item is in its FC and knows the motions of every item's placement, from the grand scheme of things.

It's not that hard to then track back from an order exactly what bin or tote or shelf the item was pulled from, then look at what shipment(s) that bin's items came from to figure out what supplier it came from.

They know the counterfeit goods came in and were stowed to bin XYZ and they know that someone pulled from XYZ...

No, it is not true, just a common myth.

In the seller documentation they say they can track the source of commingled inventory - they achieve this by never putting them on the same physical shelf location.

Also mentioned by Amazon spokesman in e.g. this article: https://archive.is/ra6RT

> Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit

A fair point and important distinction, but so is the difference between "we CAN" and "we WILL/DO". That "myth" didn't come out of thin air. It's a result of of amazon not doing that unless they felt it financially prudent to do so/until enough people bitched about it.

The OP article is exhibit A for how common of an issue this was.

Amazon don't check returns either. It's a nightmare if you use their FOB service. We've had product returned, not checked and then shipped to another customer who then pputs in a claim because they didn't get what they ordered - because Amazon didn't check the return. Amazon then claim you're selling counterfeit goods.

Entirely why we no longer use their service and ship direct for amazon orders. Some people still try the trick but we always put a claim in and amazon after they automatically give a refund to the buyer, and Amazon pay it. So Amazon pay twice. Maybe the cost of just accepting that loss is less than having someone check the return.

They know where every item is- if not, how do FBA folks get their stuff back?

Its co-mingled, so you may not your stuff back, you just get similar stuff back. That is if you pay to get it back. It’s usually cheaper to let them flog it off cheap on prime day

It’s weird, every time I’ve talked to Amazon support they’ve always done well. Did they refuse to refund you or let you return it?

Yeah, same for me. I don't like commingling either, but I could always solve it with Amazon's support.

That's neither here nor there.

Amazon regularly commingling legitimate and counterfeit goods, means that customers are left with the job of trying to verify that the goods they ordered are legitimate. For every customer that complaints & refunds, there might be three or more who don't.

Some of these counterfeit products have legitimate safety concerns, for example lead paint usage, battery fire risks, PPE that misstates its effectiveness, or USB chargers with poor AC DC electrical isolation.

This is a huge trust problem, and "the customer needs to detect counterfeits and refund," isn't actually a solution to THAT problem.

The solution is a regulator who buys random goods, thoroughly checks them, then fines Amazon for products found to be unsafe/illegal.

Amazon could then persue the manufacturer for sending bad goods.

Or... Amazon could say "this is a third party seller on our platform, so blame THEM",then the third party seller gets held responsible for the fraudulent goods despite having no ability to control it. Not a very sane system but apparently the one we chose to use (at least until now, when Amazon decides to eliminate commingling).

I bought an electronic item brand new, sold by Amazon, and they sent me a used one that already had its digital bundle redeemed by someone else and 5 out of 12 manufacturer warranty months used. I contacted Amazon support about this within a week and they told me replacement is not possible in my situation, I can return it but a full refund is not guaranteed

That seems like illegal fraud on the part of Amazon. They sold something they claimed was new and it wasn't. They have to give you a full refund if you return it.

And what is their recourse if Amazon just says "nope, deal with it"?

Sue them? Even assuming that kind of time, money, and energy expenditure is within their resources, Amazon's legal department is likely to be able to stonewall until they run out of money.

Then multiply that by however many thousands or tens of thousands of customers Amazon has done this to. No more than a fraction will ever complain, no more than a fraction of those will ever sue.

Amazon has been allowed to get too big, and the usual methods of dealing with fraud at this level simply don't work reliably.

Did you escalate? I've found that sometimes CS first response is not always satisfactory but escalating and reminding them of the laws does work.

I tried, but they basically said we can't help anymore in this matter and disconnected me and I saw no further way to escalate. This was in the US. In the EU when I had another problem with Amazon and CS was unhelpful I was able to escalate via relevant authorities and it eventually got someone from Executive Customer Relations to send an actual human-written email apologizing for the whole ordeal and resolving my situation

If you still want to try to resolve this, send me an email (link in bio) and I'll give you the emails of the exec team.

What if the product causes harm? Fire for example or poisoning.

I don't think ending commingling will stop that from happening, since Subscribe & Save is set to switch to a different seller with a lower price by default.

In the US, when Subscribe & Save is set up, it is set by default to receive orders from "Amazon.com and other top rated sellers". If you want to change it, you need to go into the Subscribe & Save page and change it to "Amazon.com only".

I've had an order where I initially placed a new subscription sold by Amazon.com, but a 3rd party seller would lower their price by a few cents, and Amazon would change the seller and I would receive grey market goods.

I haven't found a way to change the default for new subscriptions to always use the same seller that I set up the subscription with, so I need to manually change it for every single new subscription.

Thanks for this. I had no idea this was even a thing, and it explains some discrepancies I've seen with my one subscription.

They really don't make it obvious where to change it, either...

> Amazon collected the money and just did not care, they need to be held accountable for these things.

Whenever this happened with me, Amazon was pretty quick to offer a refund/replacement.

When you noticed it, you mean

They are very quick to refund/replace and I wonder if it’s because they have no way to track an item’s origin to a specific seller so they just treat the refund as a small cost in an otherwise very profitable system for them.

They are quick to refund/replace because most of the items sold are returnable and "replace" is just a second order. Basically you have the ability to self service this. So it's a quick way for a CSR to satisfy a customer without doing anything special.

Not just counterfeit good, but numerous stolen goods as well[1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...

> a subscribe and save order

Yeah. This is a joke. They give us a 5-10% discount to do this. But when the time for the next delivery came, they had doubled the prices instead of locking in the price I had subscribed at. I had to cancel the order.

If I had been informed during subscription that fulfillment will be done at the price prevailing at that time, I would never have subscribed in the first place.

Instead of Subscribe and Save, which is almost useless for the reason you give, I wish I could place a standing limit order to buy up to X of something every Y months, but only if it's price Z or better.

I've been ordering on Amazon in Germany for a good 20 years now and I've never received a counterfeit item. Is it not a thing here? Does it primarily affect certain countries? Am I insanely lucky?

I also haven't received any counterfeit ever. I have 400+ orders a year...

I think what a lot of people qualify of counterfeit (not saying OP does here) is people buying cheap no-brand Chinese garbage and receiving cheap no-brand Chinese garbage and not being happy with it.

Or buying, for example, electric toothbrush heads at half the cost they are in the supermarket and then being surprised when they turn out to be counterfeit.

But that's the other aspect to commingling, I guess - you might pay full price for the real deal and get a fake, due to bad actors' stock being commingled, but on the flipside a punter who's paid an unrealistically low obviously-fake price might actually get the real deal, adding an air of legitimacy to the bad actor.

There’s definitely counterfeit stuff, but it’s much more common in some categories than others. USB cables and chargers, SD cards, USB flash drives for example are commonly counterfeited (e.g advertised as made by Apple or SanDisk but actually being ‘cheap no brand Chinese garbage’). Many wouldn’t even realize it because the products usually still work, but have major defects like less capacity than advertised or being built much worse.

No, I know loads of people having bought SD cards from reputable brands at full price, only to receive a fake one in the mail. You don't notice until you're using the card and your gopro writes too fast to it. I don't like the victim blaming of your post.

I haven’t it happen to me either (Spain) but if you sort comments by negative you see it happen relatively frequently, and it’s credible reviews with pictures.

I don't mean to say that I don't believe it happens. It seems quite plausible to me. I'm just wondering whether it's a regional issue.

Been ordering since January 2000 (> 1,000 orders) from Amazon Germany and never received anything counterfeit as far as I can tell.

I think I'm pretty good at spotting fakes, because I'm sensitive to tiny typographical or material-wise quirks. In the same period, I've received multiple fakes on eBay, including a genuine phone that came with a counterfeit charger.

I can imagine that commingling introduces a very low-percentage risk of receiving a counterfeit product but due to the immense scale, it still affects a huge absolute number of orders.

I have had it happen in Germany on Gillette blades.

Yep. The number of times I've received garbage while paying full price is wild. I finally asked the rep what I need to be looking for before purchasing to avoid this. They didn't really have an answer.

I did get a refund most of the time. Amazon's service is still quite good even today. Already don't feel great about ordering from Amazon but this really made me cut back over the last year or two.

I ordered a quantity of o’reilly books from Amazon because that was the only outlet offered by them.

I received some real books, and several counterfeit copies. The same books weren’t even the same size, some also had thin pages, some yellow pages, and several with printing errors the others didn’t have.

Sadly I tried to contact the publisher and let them know about the counterfeit books in their listings and tried to warn them about what was going on, but their support people only wanted me to take it up with Amazon, and couldn’t understand how to escalate my concerns internally and just kept asking me if they could close the ticket.

Also Amazon refunds aren’t as smooth when you don’t live in the US and already paid customs duties on the counterfeit products, and the return shipping costs make returns prohibitively expensive.

I wouldn’t have even ordered from them in the first place if I could have avoided it.

I’m glad they are solving this problem, but I also kind of don’t want them to succeed because of their terrible legacy.

Can you give some examples? I order massive amounts from Amazon and I don't think I have received any counterfeit items. Most of it is made in China.

I received counterfeit toothpaste from Amazon during COVID. I got asthma from using it and never had asthma before or symptoms like that. I purchased tubes from Costco to compare and the Amazon ones were clearly fake.

I left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.

How do you tell?

Closest I got was a bottle that was slightly off color and the label had a different texture.

I’m astounded, this has been a problem for 10+ years and I just assumed they didn’t care and would never change it. Better late than never, but why the sudden change?

yeah, this has been obviously a bad thing for so long, and they've been so stubborn, it's hard to believe anything has actually changed in the "economics" of it.

it smells like the sort of policy change that happens when an exec gets personally impacted by it.

It smells to me like the sort of policy change that happens when Amazon starts to worry about it affecting their bottom line and relationships with suppliers. It used to be enough to solve the problem with support/email. I do wonder what changed…

This. Amazon made a number of changes to the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program related to lost and damaged inventory among other things. The changes risked increasing the costs and also required Amazon to be provided information that they really shouldn’t need, such as as the cost to source that inventory.

My assumption is that the decision to stop commingling is more to support these changes to the FBA program and allow them to extract more money via fees.

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/12/22/amazon-drops-bombs...

I guess it's one thing to say you are going to do it and another thing to actually do it. Is anyone going to be verifying this? How would you? Mark your products and ask customers to check for the mark?

This has already been happening with a lot of vendors using the Transparency app.

>but why the sudden change?

Tariffs maybe?

I feel like this is one of the things where the most parsimonious explanation by far is to take their stated explanation at face value. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would insist on commingling when it's necessary to achieve fast shipping speeds, and end it if their logistics network is so good that it's no longer necessary. (Anecdotally, I just got an Amazon order to my doorstep in four hours yesterday - their logistics really are mindbogglingly fast now.)

The issue is that saying "the economics no longer work" isn't correct because the economics never worked. They traded longterm real value for short term shareholder gains and they're running out of real value runway. It would be more accurate if they said "we can no longer bare the cashing in of our reputation because there is nothing left to cash in".

“Short term shareholder gains” covers a time period of 20+ years?

Amazon is the poster child for the exact opposite of what you claim. They spent two decades plowing every cent into land acquisition, warehouse construction, expanding their labor force, and developing software and hardware.

It was thought impossible to compete with Walmart and others with established logistics networks. Now, they eclipse Walmart because Walmart was focused on the short term, while Amazon was playing to where the ball would be in 20+ years.

They could have lost enough brand name vendors who decided not to deal with amazon because customers get counterfeit or expired products. Nike and Johnson and Johnson are mentioned in the article, but there are also smaller brands like ThermoWorks who were staunchly anti-Amazon because of co-mingling until very recently. I suspect it was due to a promise to end the process which brought brands back.

Due to a lack of a presence by name brands, Amazon has been devolving into a platform for selling drop-shipped no-name Chinese products. Whether this scared them because of long-term sustainability, tariffs, or just practical business sense is unknown.

> During Wednesday’s presentation in Seattle, Amazon executives said the economics of commingling no longer worked. With the company’s logistics network now capable of storing products closer to customers, the speed advantage of pooled inventory has diminished. At the same time, Amazon estimated brand owners spent $600 million in the past year alone through re-stickering products, the process of placing new labels or barcodes over existing ones on products.

Sounds like they're ditching it now because it doesn't benefit them any more, rather than because they care about counterfeits.

Brands have started getting into ecommerce/d2c directly where earlier they left it up to distributors and third parties. Amazon needs to attract them because co-mingling is a strict no-no for them.

Amazon has turned racketeering brands into a profit center. Brands now pay Amazon to block unauthorized sellers. Only Amazon would have the gall to turn their willful negligence into an opportunity.

> Only Amazon

Health insurance companies would like a word

Or Credit Bureaus.

It is totally possible that on the second day of launch someone realized the problem, truly thought this being wrong, and deeply cared about all the impact on consumer and seller. Yet, it took them 10+ years for the circumstances to be right to get this fixed.

Commingling must have been someone's big, successful project, with all the benefits, probably faster shipping, lower cost, etc.

Once a big project got launched with all these benefits materialized, it is really hard to undo it. When a problem is identified, higher-ups usually ask to address it, rather than undoing the whole project. Anyone pushing to undo a project would be claiming the entire team up to whatever level making that original decision made a huge mistake. In other words, committing a political suicide.

It may take some mix of the following to trigger such drastic changes:

- Some fundamental assumptions changed (for example, one may claim that the logistics got so much better that the original benefits on the delivery speed can be achieved now without commingling).

- Multiple attempts at addressing the problems without killing the project proved unsuccessful.

- The ppl who original launched the project moved, to other domains or other companies.

- Some external triggers (new regulation, a large chunk of partners / stakeholders complaining, the company literally dying, etc.)

In all, there has to be someone for whom the incentive to undo it overcomes the hurdle, political or otherwise to reverse course on a huge project. After that, there need to be the usual logistics, including convincing, budgeting, prioritization, and a million other things you do at a big company to get a thing done. Now, 10 years have passed and it is finally making news.

Or, I can be totally wrong and it's just a bunch of privileged dumbasses who don't give a fork and randomly making one project after another, while pointing at some graphs and numbers claiming successes regardless of what really happens. ;)

There have been a lot of boycotts and blackouts so maybe they're trying to win back some of the customers they've lost after repeatedly selling them fake garbage.

did any Amazon boycott ever achieved anything? (ie. did any of them ever reach the threshold of a statistically significant impact on their bottom line?)

I’m not sure that it’s possible to track this. Personally I went from probably thousands of dollars a year in 2017-ish to “only after I’ve checked every other store and never a large purchase” today (probably about $150/yr). I never explicitly participated in any boycott, but I’m sure the messages resonated with me and helped me realize I was routinely getting fleeced by Amazon and not the sellers.

It is tricky to boycott Amazon because when I search for a product using Google, I get lots of links to Amazon, and not much else. So I look at the Amazon pages to get search terms and then type those in to other search engines, such as Bing, Brave, or Yandex, and keep going to find online shops. Since Yandex is Russian, I add my country code to my search terms. I also try adding my city name and sometimes find a bricks-and-mortar shop close enough.

Sounds more like they were losing market to other retailers.

I don’t think I’ve had a counterfeit good come in, but the number of times I’ve heard about it led me to start going to other retailers for things I wanted guarantees on: cleaning products, personal hygiene items, and expensive electronics/accessories.

Amusingly after that, I saw I could get nearly everything else off AliExpress for cheaper. My usage of Amazon practically evaporated.

Don't you just have the same issue but with shady ali express sellers now?

No. 1) AliExpress sellers control their own store listing and have their own reviews. This is leagues ahead of Amazon. 2) I only buy products from AliExpress where safety and quality aren’t of any concern. 3) I have never actually had a "shady seller" experience on AliExpress.

Even quality can be fine on AliExpress for all sorts of parts and even custom work. Small screws in a specific size, wood routing bits, drill bits, magnets, crafting stuff…

I had a cutting die for leather made there in a shape specified by me, and the process, while clunky with their spammy message box, was pretty much as pleasant as you could expect, and the workmanship excellent.

Just don't buy clothing or end-user electronics there. For makers, crafters, and tinkerers AliExpress is a great resource while it lasts¹.

1: The US obviously has its tariffs thing going on. The EU is considering a fixed €2 surcharge for packages from China.

I know that's extremely off -topic, but could you please tell me the name of the shop? I'm currently getting into leather stamping, and the quality of dies has been rather hit or miss, so I was to cautious to buy a custom one until now.

Not at all, I ordered at the LiSaDuPu Store (https://www.aliexpress.com/store/912251155). I had a 60 mm outline of a water lily leaf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeblatt) made, and the die seems alright. I've done around twenty of those now in 7-8 oz leather, so no idea about its longevity, but it's cheap enough to warrant experimenting. The die itself accurately reproduces the PNG I sent in the chat to the store.

To use the die I'm using a one ton arbor press. That's not enough force to push a die of that size through in one go, but after the first press I can move the die and the leather around the outline and finish the cutting with a few light presses all around.

Thank you. So far I'm not using a press and relying on mallets instead, with all the limitations that result from that. But it feels more fun to me this way :) But as I could just attach such a die to a handle myself, I'll probably give it a go anyway.

I'm surprised just how much luck I've had with AliExpress. Packages arrive quickly and as described.

My usage of Amazon evaporated as it lost its benefits over AliExpress:

- The Amazon product catalog is essentially AliExpress at this point. Endless WIXUBI product slop.

- Free shipping thresholds went up

- Amazon shipping times became longer

- AliExpress managed to drastically speed up their shipping

If they don't ship much faster, cost three times as much (especially once you add the shipping cost), can't guarantee higher quality - why would I buy from them rather than going to the source?

If I need reliable quality (e.g. stuff that comes into contact with food) or want it fast, I'm paying the retail premium (which isn't as bad nowadays as it used to be).

I started buying hard drives from b&h photo. Just couldn’t trust Amazon anymore.

This. Amazon buyer metrics have been tanking for a while. In general if I don't care about the quality I have better and cheaper places to shop. When I know the brand I want, and want predictable quality, I order from the company directly. Price, service, quality, and delivery time are equal or better than Amazon.

They are getting steadily eroded by Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba. Also in-person retail is surging for specific items - places like Best Buy have had a nice resurgence since the 2010s (stock is down compared to the pandemic, but that's a retail thing, not BBY problem).

Temu and the Alis are eating them alive on one side, and Walmart, Target, Best Buy (and even Home Depot) are destroying them on the other.

Happy to say I walked into a Best Buy last week because I needed a replacement mouse right now. I am really glad they survived.

I cancelled Prime because I wasn't getting any value anymore. Non-Prime customers are treated like second class citizens. Amazon has really gone downhill lately. Customer service is terrible. Not just the counterfeiting, but the website UX has become steadily worse. Archive order was recently removed without warning as was the ability to view itemized invoices. Yes, really. Before anyone says otherwise, "View Invoice" now redirects to your Order Details page, absent any additional detail.

I switched most of my shopping to Walmart. I get free next day or two-day shipping for orders of $35 or more, where Amazon will ship the same in 5-6 days now that I am non-Prime scum.

I still have a view invoice on the Android app, I just checked

> the website UX has become steadily worse

Not disagreeing, but the Amazon web UX has been famously terrible since like 1998. They basically invented the whole trend of building via A/B test result instead of via user-centric design. Nothing on the site has ever made any sense. Every item title is a paragraph description. The categories are basically useless. The filters are a mess of bad and incomplete data to the point of being useless. Many items have 2-3 duplicate listings that somehow have different shipping dates and descriptions, and you never know if you have found the "real" listing. But they sure sell a lot of stuff.

I've always assumed the issues you described were meant to disarm users but also maybe to set expectations. When you see 3 similar items, you don't know if you're getting the "real thing". So you spend that money and expect the worst. Terrible listings make it hard to find what you need exactly but also make it seem like they have more selection when they might not.

Regardless I've considered it to be intentional.

Best Buy has been a big one for me when I need things like USB sticks or SD cards. (Bad enough with the occasional duds from the reputable sources without mixing in counterfeits on top of that.)

Price matching on most of their stuff and their budget line of cabling is actually quite competitive. When I have to do buildouts sometimes we need to buy a lot of Ethernet cable and their pricing is not terrible in a pinch.

Once bought an entire store out of patch cables, ha.

It's the old Blockbuster problem. You can screw over the customer for years in order to squeeze out a few more bucks. And it can work, because many times the customer has few alternatives. But you're eroding support the entire time, and when the shift changes, it can be sudden and irreversible.

This. I switched to buying from online retailers rather than marketplaces because of the level of fraud and counterfit in the latter.

As a consumer, this is great.

If Amazon can also ensure that every "Sold by Amazon" unit is legitimate (that they aren't sometimes sourcing badly), then it's 10x great.

(That I didn't feel comfortable enough trusting Amazon for some kinds of items is usually the only reason I've been buying direct-to-consumer from the brands' Web sites. I've had even Samsung and Crucial do DTC poorly in the last couple years.)

(Also, if I felt I could trust Amazon for genuine brand-name monthly OTC allergy products, that would mean no more hassling with the pharmacy chains. And maybe no more Walmart, though I don't recall a recent problem in their execution, and have been trusting them a little more than Amazon recently.)

Literally dealing with this right now. My wife got what appears to be a (very expensive) counterfeit item that is technically non-returnable (not laying down without a fight). Kind of cathartic to see this pop up.

The hassle of returning fraudulent or broken products has already driven me back to brick and mortar retail stores for items of any real value.

This never happened to me for an actually valuable item, but I've received stuff like flimsy chinese nail clippers rather than the one I ordered.

Not even knocks off, just completely different items. A proper knock off would've probably been just as good as the original...

The idea likely was that nobody is going to bother making much of a fuss over a 20 dollar nail clipper.

A lot of brick and mortar stores are turning into Alibaba / Tenu / Shine resellers as well lately.

Seeing more and more AI generated illustrations on products too.

You're exchanging a 50% chance (?) of having to fill in a form with a 100% chance of having to drive to the store, finding parking, going home and having a 50% it doesn't work when plugged in anyway.

A serious question for the people in this thread who have bitten by this: why do you keep giving Amazon your business? Is it worth it despite these experiences?

I largely stopped buying from Amazon after receiving three counterfeit or defective products in one month. The only reason I buy from them now is due to a particularly low sale price or things I can’t easily source elsewhere. Otherwise, if ai can buy local or buy elsewhere I do.

I once was the victim of an empty box scam when I purchased an expensive item off Amazon a few years ago (luckily I got a refund), and since then I've used Amazon much less, and only for inexpensive things. Maybe enough people have reduced their spending such that Amazon has been forced to take notice.

I more or less stopped completely. I spent nearly $10,000 on Amazon in 2016 (Multiple computers, clothes, games, foodstuffs - Just everything); It was down to $2000 by 2018 after I stopped trusting it for anything but big-ticket items that were unlikely to be counterfeit. It picked up again in the pandemic, but after a series of bad purchases in 2023 I've spent less than $1000 in the last year, and over half of that is a CPU that I really feared buying because of fraud/counterfeit concerns, and immediately inspected and installed to assuage those fears.

I use Amazon to find a product but will then look for another channel to make the purchase, such as the product’s own site. I try to buy from Amazon as little as possible, and if I can only buy a product from Amazon, I’ll ask the product seller to give me a way to buy direct.

I would never buy a food or similar product that I would eat or use on my body from them. They simply don’t care about their supply chain integrity (aside from this bone they’re finally throwing to sellers and customers).

I tried making a serious effort of avoiding amazon lately. What I found was _generally_ prices are much higher everywhere else.

Charcoal pencils - 30% cheaper on Amazon compared to other sites. More than 2 times cheaper compared to local art stores and the local store only has one crappy brand in stock.

My watch - $40 plus shipping (2 weeks) directly from the manufacturer. Amazon has it at $28 and it'll get here tomorrow.

Pen nibs from Jetpen - $10 + $5.95 shipping. Once again >1week for delivery. $16 from amazon and it gets here tomorrow

I really feel like an idiot trying to boycott this company, but I'm still trying where I can.

Did you ever wonder if it's cheaper because it's counterfeit? The counterfeit industry is huge in contract manufacturing. Designs are easily leaked and near lookalikes manufactured at whatever price point you seek. Sometimes they even claim they're manufacturing it in the same facility as the original brand. These goods have flooded the market for damn near every product out there and unless you can trace the entire supply chain you don't know what you're getting.

That's a fair point. I try to stick to name brands on Amazon to try to minimize the chance of fakes (Generals, Casio, Zebra for my examples previously) - and the packaging does look like the one I get directly from the manufacturer. I bought two of the same Casios at different times - once from Casio and once from Amazon - and I'm sure the packaging was the same.

But it's one of the things I guess you can't be too sure about. Maybe if we see name-brand prices increase after commingling ends, that can be proof that prices were low due to counterfeits

Amazon has some things other sources don't, or has them at prices that make it worth the risk.

But for lots of "normal" stuff I use Walmart/Target to source it if possible.

I bought some expensive camera gear from Amazon and had a terrible experience. The delivery person obviously stole the gear and kept making fake "delivery attempted" notifications at exactly midnight while I was at home night after night. Amazon eventually refunded me, but they made me wait weeks to get my money back despite years of being a customer and spending many thousands with them and never requesting other refunds.

So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?

This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.

Yeah, I don’t understand it either. When someone sells me a fake item, I stop giving them my money. It happened to me with Amazon almost a decade ago and I haven’t ordered from there since.

Stop rewarding bad behavior!

This was a huge problem with books. I can't count the number of times I received copied, badly bound books from Amazon that were supposed to be new.

Pushed me to bookshop.org for most normal stuff. I go to the publisher for everything else.

Was burned by counterfeit goods multiple times with my Amazon purchases. Their return policy is good, but still it was really annoying when I’d order something and you get counterfeit product.

They were cutting a lot of corners on quality control and it really started to show. Seems like this got to be a big enough issue they couldn’t just keep pretending like selling and shipping bogus junk wasn’t a real problem.

A good move, even if many years late. It's a bilateral trustbuster when the same platform that allows commingling and knockoffs then begins tagging legit items as "frequently returned" in the feed.

Can we also get the ability to filter by seller entity country of origin?

Amazon also needs to offer far better tools for buyers to effectively find and attach to brands.

I have had serious issues with Amazon these last two-three months which has resulted in my moving a majority of my purchases to a different online retailer.

I bought some ASSIMIL language-learning books being sold by a (known) POD firm. But I got some random (or so I thought) POD crap instead of the books I had ordered. I returned them and tried it again a month later (after confirming with customer care that I will get what I see in the listing) to see that the exact same books were sent again.

When I compared the ISBN numbers, I found that the books I had ordered were the older 978 series which can be reduced to the 10-digit version while the ones they were sending were the newer 979 series with only the check digit differing. I had to call them 15-20 times before I got my money back because they would repeatedly set up a return pickup, not do it and then claim that I have cancelled it. The books are still lying with me. They haven't bothered to collect.

They have routinely sabotaged multiple other deliveries by not visiting my house and providing bogus "OTP not provided/unable to contact" updates.

The absolute worst thing that happened was with some books I bought from a small publisher that they, unfortunately, sent by Amazon Shipping. One month and multiple calls/emails later to complain about Amazon's bogus delivery attempts, they completely ghosted me and the publisher had to RTO the books back. I talked to the publisher and they said they cannot afford to be out of pocket on shipping, so I paid them INR 1,000 to cover their expenses for the unnecessary two legs of shipping.

I have now decided that I am dealing with absolute scoundrels who do not value their customer's time and plan my purchases accordingly.

I wonder if this is a global change or just US only?

This is an incredibly welcomed change. When I buy a product from a specific seller amongst a dozen, it's for a good reason. I expect THEIR inventory.

I used to order vitamins and supplements from Amazon but started ordering direct because I read some stories about people getting fake items.

While better for sellers I think the experience will be terrible for buyers. You already have dozens of pages of very similar products at the moment coming from the same Chinese factory under a different brand name, if on top of that you split the ones that are currently comingled, it's going to be an absolute horrendous UX.

Rather suspicious this comes out a couple days after the articles about Walmart having issues with sellers shipping fake products.

I literally do not believe they will do this.

It's definitely not going to be immediate. The last sentence of the article: "Amazon said commingling will be phased out across its supply chain later this year."

Just got hit by a counterfeit good 2 days ago. Thank god it's finally ending.

Amazing they weren't prosecuted for it.

Yeah, "shipped and sold by Amazon.com" was essentially selling and shipping millions of dollars of fully counterfeit products under this program for years. If a small vendor does something like this, they'd have the fed kicking down their door after tens of thousands.

I personally received counterfeit and tampered products "shipped and sold by Amazon.com" on half a dozen occasions. Even as recently as the last two months.

I have and I quit Amazon years ago. Probably have not used my account in nearly a decade.

>[…] Jeff Bezos received your email and asked me to respond on his behalf. […]

>If an item is shipped and sold by Amazon[dot]com it will not be commingled with any other inventory.

>Best regards, […]

>Executive Customer Relations

-Amazon, 2015

Was this a lie or did it change?

Yes.

I had always thought they must be the biggest distributor of counterfeit products in the history of the country.

It was one of those things that I couldn’t explain, and just wrote off before it broke my brain.

I’m more irritated by the comingling of small, fragile products with large, heavy ones in the same box, like a box of crackers shipped together with detergent. Because of this, I had to stop my Subscribe & Save orders. Every month they would do this nonsense.

This is great, though at the same time I feel Amazon deserves no credit for fixing a fuckup they created. Congratulations on deciding to implement a non-broken system

I used to order things from amazon.co.jp to avoid this issue until the clowns stopped de minimis. Amazon quality varies greatly across the globe. The worst, in my experience, is amazon.de. Quality really plummeted since the pandemic. I consistently received used products from them and this led me to think it’s a cultural thing in Europe where people routinely use products and simply return them after use.

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