Closest I got was a bottle that was slightly off color and the label had a different texture.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!
They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.
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.
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.
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.
To externalize risk away from Amazon.
I stopped buying from "fullfilled by Amazon" as the level of fraud was just insane.
Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?
But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!
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.
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
The OP article is exhibit A for how common of an issue this was.
I'm glad to see this change.
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...
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.
They really don't make it obvious where to change it, either...
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.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...
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 left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.
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 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.
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.
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.
Amazon could then persue the manufacturer for sending bad goods.
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.
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.
Whenever this happened with me, Amazon was pretty quick to offer a refund/replacement.