Doesn't matter - any brand goodwill that they had has been thoroughly burned. I ordered fuses by reputable brands and got what amounted to rolls of pennies from an alphabet soup company - they did...
Doesn't matter - any brand goodwill that they had has been thoroughly burned.
I ordered fuses by reputable brands and got what amounted to rolls of pennies from an alphabet soup company - they did not blow at the advertised load. That will burn a house down. It took me months to get a refund and the product stayed up.
They were happy to ship these for years to people. People that trusted the product that they ordered would be the one that they received. People that very well may have now lost their homes or loved ones because Amazon wanted to save a couple cents on shipping.
There is no scenario where they would ever be held accountable for it, either. The investigation would find a faulty fuse and that would be the end of it.
I read an article a few years back on Medium about "trust thermocline" that I think applies here. The concept is taken from how deep oceans slowly get colder until they reach an inflection point...
I read an article a few years back on Medium about "trust thermocline" that I think applies here. The concept is taken from how deep oceans slowly get colder until they reach an inflection point where the temperature drops sharply. A similar phenomenon happens when a business takes little shortcuts over time and then at some point the goodwill just drops off. In these cases there isn't a way to back up slowly and reverse the damage. That's mostly how I feel about Amazon at this point. I'm actively avoiding buying anything from Amazon wherever possible.
Yeah, it's pretty wild they can sell goods under "name brand" and then have no culpability if you get a knock off. Isn't that fraud? I have a hard time understanding how we're currently...
Yeah, it's pretty wild they can sell goods under "name brand" and then have no culpability if you get a knock off. Isn't that fraud? I have a hard time understanding how we're currently approaching domestic regulation.
It's possible to order name brand products from sellers that use Amazon programs like Transparency and guarantee you'll receive the expected item from the expected seller. Physical inventory...
It's possible to order name brand products from sellers that use Amazon programs like Transparency and guarantee you'll receive the expected item from the expected seller.
Physical inventory commingling has always been a compromise which sellers could opt out of. It only applied in cases where goods were fulfilled by Amazon and sold under the same common ASIN. Sellers have always had the option to sticker their products and sell under a unique ASIN to avoid commingling. Transparency is an additional program on top of that to avoid fraud for certain items like sex toys which have high counterfeit rates.
So, is the argument being made here that it's Samsung's fault ordering a microSD card was a total lottery? It got to the point that on the rare occasions I just go to a store and buy a card.
So, is the argument being made here that it's Samsung's fault ordering a microSD card was a total lottery? It got to the point that on the rare occasions I just go to a store and buy a card.
...i expected the cost of returns to motivate process improvements years ago, but likely a lot of customers were content to receive whatever cheap product lands on their doorstop, perhaps enough...
...i expected the cost of returns to motivate process improvements years ago, but likely a lot of customers were content to receive whatever cheap product lands on their doorstop, perhaps enough to water down that metric...
The metric of returns as a marker of quality is also watered down by how many people order several things to try and return all but one. All the products in that case may be good products, they...
The metric of returns as a marker of quality is also watered down by how many people order several things to try and return all but one. All the products in that case may be good products, they just didn't fit the customer's preference as well as the single non-returned item.
I would never buy anything my life depends on off Amazon. Or food. There is absolutely zero accountability from them, they’ll sell absolutely anything without any regards for authenticity or...
I would never buy anything my life depends on off Amazon. Or food. There is absolutely zero accountability from them, they’ll sell absolutely anything without any regards for authenticity or safety and then throw their arms up in the air when something happens.
I really hate that we live in a world where this behaviour is celebrated and rewarded without any limit (isnt Bezos one of the richest men in the history of humanity despite his despicable labour practices and selling dangerous goods?)
This is actually a serious business problem at my workplace. We sell a component that depends on a specific lithium ion battery spec for proper functioning. We sell that battery (purchased direct...
This is actually a serious business problem at my workplace. We sell a component that depends on a specific lithium ion battery spec for proper functioning.
We sell that battery (purchased direct from the manufacturer) for a modest markup, but customers go buy the "same" brand and spec on Amazon for less. Lo and behold, we get customers complaining that our component doesn't work... and counterfeit batteries are 100% to blame.
Amazon revealed at its annual Accelerate seller conference in Seattle that it is shutting down its long-running “commingling” program — a move that drew louder applause from sellers than any other update of the morning.
The decision marks the end of a controversial practice in which Amazon pooled identical items from different sellers under one barcode. The system, intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space, had also allowed counterfeit or expired goods to be mixed in with authentic ones, according to The Wall Street Journal. For years, brands complained that commingling made it difficult to trace problems back to specific sellers and left their reputations vulnerable when customers received knockoffs. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson temporarily pulled many of its consumer products from Amazon, arguing the retailer wasn’t doing enough to curb third-party sales of damaged or expired goods.
By ending commingling, Amazon is signaling a stronger commitment to protecting brands on its marketplace, while further distancing itself from resellers. The announcement underscores the company’s ongoing strategy to prioritize trusted brand relationships — evident in moves like its revived wholesale partnership with Nike — while responding to mounting seller and consumer frustration over counterfeit risks.
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.
It annoys me that they call this a "commingling" program. There was nothing programmatic about it. It was just laziness and indifference to the harm caused by counterfeits.
It annoys me that they call this a "commingling" program. There was nothing programmatic about it. It was just laziness and indifference to the harm caused by counterfeits.
It's not laziness or an accident. Amazon executives admitted that commingling was a deliberate strategy, "intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space."
It's not laziness or an accident. Amazon executives admitted that commingling was a deliberate strategy, "intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space."
It’s one of those things that makes perfect sense in principle and then fails to account for messy reality. Mass produced products are fungible, after all, that’s why they all have the same...
It’s one of those things that makes perfect sense in principle and then fails to account for messy reality.
Mass produced products are fungible, after all, that’s why they all have the same barcode in the first place - why would you waste time and fuel shipping a specific one across the country when there’s another just down the road from the person who bought it?! Sure, the one down the road came from another supplier, but that’s just inventory tracking on the computer, it’d be crazy to physically move something hundreds of miles rather than just changing a line in a database.
Except you can’t make that base assumption about items being fungible when you don’t control the supply chain. You especially can’t when people actively know you’re treating items from untrusted sources that way, and might choose to deliberately exploit that fact. You can have the efficiency of centralisation at the cost of overhead to manage that in a trustworthy way, or you can have an open marketplace of independent traders at the cost of redundancy and duplication, because they are, y’know, independent. You can’t have both, however much Amazon might have tried to do so for many years.
...this is a very, very, big sea change in reputability for amazon fulfillment, but it's going to take a long time to undo the ill will their brand has fostered as a merchant... ...no telling how...
...this is a very, very, big sea change in reputability for amazon fulfillment, but it's going to take a long time to undo the ill will their brand has fostered as a merchant...
...no telling how long it might take to liquidate comingled stock from their inventory, though...
Even if commingled, Amazon would need to know which seller's item they just sold in order to credit them, no? And if they have that information, they should be able to separate the inventory.
Even if commingled, Amazon would need to know which seller's item they just sold in order to credit them, no? And if they have that information, they should be able to separate the inventory.
No, the whole point is that they only have to know which seller sold the product not which seller's item they shipped. If four different sellers sell product A and they each sent 10 to the...
No, the whole point is that they only have to know which seller sold the product not which seller's item they shipped. If four different sellers sell product A and they each sent 10 to the commingled bin. One seller might sell 10 boxes and none of them shipped were the actual physical products they provided to the bin.
They may have some other way of tracking that information, but simply knowing who sold the item does not tell it to you
Nope. They might have that info, but there is no reason they have to have it. Seller A gives Amazon 5 shirts. Seller B provides Amazon 3 shirts. They are the same, so throw them in a pile...
Nope. They might have that info, but there is no reason they have to have it.
Seller A gives Amazon 5 shirts. Seller B provides Amazon 3 shirts. They are the same, so throw them in a pile together. Seller A sells 3 shirts and seller B sells 1 shirt. Amazon just ships a random item from the pile, since everything is the same (in theory). So seller B, who still has “2” shirts in inventory might have zero of the items it actually sent to Amazon, since they may have been sent to fulfill seller A orders. If nothing can be counterfeited, it’s a really good system. But it just doesn’t work in practice.
Amazon might keep that data anyway. They are the creators of AWS, and keeping a bit of extra data probably isn’t a big deal. But even if they have it, they probably can’t uncomingle even if they wanted to. In the above example, seller B would have no actual inventory, despite still having two sellable items. Seller A should have only 2 items, but may have 4 actual items.
This actually makes me wonder about one order I was very unhappy with. When I first got my New Nintendo 3DS, I tried to find a telescopic stylus but the only ones I could find were for the XL...
This actually makes me wonder about one order I was very unhappy with. When I first got my New Nintendo 3DS, I tried to find a telescopic stylus but the only ones I could find were for the XL model or were new, unused styluses for the original 3DS.
I finally found a listing on Amazon, but when it arrived it was just new styluses for the original 3DS. It didn't even have the same packaging or number of styluses as the picture in the listing. Pretty sure I also realized the serial number or something on the packaging was totally different. When I contacted their customer service chat and pointed all that out, the rep just gave me a refund. Didn't even try to talk about making it right or trying to do an exchange, and I just gave up.
Now I wonder if that was Amazon's commingling and not the seller. Could go either way with how niche the product was.
Full refunds are easier than helping you find the right item. Helping every customer with the wrong item find what they're looking for would practically turn into a specialized shopping assistant...
Full refunds are easier than helping you find the right item. Helping every customer with the wrong item find what they're looking for would practically turn into a specialized shopping assistant service. Instead, Amazon aggressively bans sellers with high rates of fraud or bad reviews.
From a consumer level, I really hope it fixes things. I ordered a 6-pack of a very specific brand of smart lights because I have HomeKit, so I need Matter compatibility. They sent me ones from...
From a consumer level, I really hope it fixes things. I ordered a 6-pack of a very specific brand of smart lights because I have HomeKit, so I need Matter compatibility. They sent me ones from some fly by night knockoff that only worked with Google and Alexa. Had I been a user of one of those two ecosystems I might not have noticed. But I searched the box for Matter or HomeKit compatibility and it was nowhere to be found. I had them ship the correct ones, and then it was up to me to take the old ones back. So they were out shipping 3 times (the wrong one, the right one, the return of the wrong one) and that saved them money HOW exactly? And it put me out because I have to drive 20 minutes or more to get to the nearest competent UPS Store for drop off (there's a couple closer but they always mess something up.) It's maddening.
Most people would opt to not deal with that, so the shipping costs don't matter. You are an anomaly in that you actually went through the inconvenient motions.
and that saved them money HOW exactly
Most people would opt to not deal with that, so the shipping costs don't matter. You are an anomaly in that you actually went through the inconvenient motions.
I'm not sure it's that anomalous, at least not anymore. The last several times I've done an Amazon return drop off I've rarely been the only person doing so. One time at Whole Foods there had to...
I'm not sure it's that anomalous, at least not anymore.
The last several times I've done an Amazon return drop off I've rarely been the only person doing so. One time at Whole Foods there had to have been over a dozen people in line.
Doesn't matter - any brand goodwill that they had has been thoroughly burned.
I ordered fuses by reputable brands and got what amounted to rolls of pennies from an alphabet soup company - they did not blow at the advertised load. That will burn a house down. It took me months to get a refund and the product stayed up.
They were happy to ship these for years to people. People that trusted the product that they ordered would be the one that they received. People that very well may have now lost their homes or loved ones because Amazon wanted to save a couple cents on shipping.
There is no scenario where they would ever be held accountable for it, either. The investigation would find a faulty fuse and that would be the end of it.
I read an article a few years back on Medium about "trust thermocline" that I think applies here. The concept is taken from how deep oceans slowly get colder until they reach an inflection point where the temperature drops sharply. A similar phenomenon happens when a business takes little shortcuts over time and then at some point the goodwill just drops off. In these cases there isn't a way to back up slowly and reverse the damage. That's mostly how I feel about Amazon at this point. I'm actively avoiding buying anything from Amazon wherever possible.
Yeah, it's pretty wild they can sell goods under "name brand" and then have no culpability if you get a knock off. Isn't that fraud? I have a hard time understanding how we're currently approaching domestic regulation.
It's possible to order name brand products from sellers that use Amazon programs like Transparency and guarantee you'll receive the expected item from the expected seller.
Physical inventory commingling has always been a compromise which sellers could opt out of. It only applied in cases where goods were fulfilled by Amazon and sold under the same common ASIN. Sellers have always had the option to sticker their products and sell under a unique ASIN to avoid commingling. Transparency is an additional program on top of that to avoid fraud for certain items like sex toys which have high counterfeit rates.
So, is the argument being made here that it's Samsung's fault ordering a microSD card was a total lottery? It got to the point that on the rare occasions I just go to a store and buy a card.
...i expected the cost of returns to motivate process improvements years ago, but likely a lot of customers were content to receive whatever cheap product lands on their doorstop, perhaps enough to water down that metric...
The metric of returns as a marker of quality is also watered down by how many people order several things to try and return all but one. All the products in that case may be good products, they just didn't fit the customer's preference as well as the single non-returned item.
It's not fraud if you make enough money doing it. Then it's entrepreneurial.
I would never buy anything my life depends on off Amazon. Or food. There is absolutely zero accountability from them, they’ll sell absolutely anything without any regards for authenticity or safety and then throw their arms up in the air when something happens.
I really hate that we live in a world where this behaviour is celebrated and rewarded without any limit (isnt Bezos one of the richest men in the history of humanity despite his despicable labour practices and selling dangerous goods?)
Despite? You mean his market advantage of despicable labour practices and selling dangerous goods!
This is actually a serious business problem at my workplace. We sell a component that depends on a specific lithium ion battery spec for proper functioning.
We sell that battery (purchased direct from the manufacturer) for a modest markup, but customers go buy the "same" brand and spec on Amazon for less. Lo and behold, we get customers complaining that our component doesn't work... and counterfeit batteries are 100% to blame.
From the article:
It annoys me that they call this a "commingling" program. There was nothing programmatic about it. It was just laziness and indifference to the harm caused by counterfeits.
It's not laziness or an accident. Amazon executives admitted that commingling was a deliberate strategy, "intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space."
It’s one of those things that makes perfect sense in principle and then fails to account for messy reality.
Mass produced products are fungible, after all, that’s why they all have the same barcode in the first place - why would you waste time and fuel shipping a specific one across the country when there’s another just down the road from the person who bought it?! Sure, the one down the road came from another supplier, but that’s just inventory tracking on the computer, it’d be crazy to physically move something hundreds of miles rather than just changing a line in a database.
Except you can’t make that base assumption about items being fungible when you don’t control the supply chain. You especially can’t when people actively know you’re treating items from untrusted sources that way, and might choose to deliberately exploit that fact. You can have the efficiency of centralisation at the cost of overhead to manage that in a trustworthy way, or you can have an open marketplace of independent traders at the cost of redundancy and duplication, because they are, y’know, independent. You can’t have both, however much Amazon might have tried to do so for many years.
...this is a very, very, big sea change in reputability for amazon fulfillment, but it's going to take a long time to undo the ill will their brand has fostered as a merchant...
...no telling how long it might take to liquidate comingled stock from their inventory, though...
Even if commingled, Amazon would need to know which seller's item they just sold in order to credit them, no? And if they have that information, they should be able to separate the inventory.
No, the whole point is that they only have to know which seller sold the product not which seller's item they shipped. If four different sellers sell product A and they each sent 10 to the commingled bin. One seller might sell 10 boxes and none of them shipped were the actual physical products they provided to the bin.
They may have some other way of tracking that information, but simply knowing who sold the item does not tell it to you
Nope. They might have that info, but there is no reason they have to have it.
Seller A gives Amazon 5 shirts. Seller B provides Amazon 3 shirts. They are the same, so throw them in a pile together. Seller A sells 3 shirts and seller B sells 1 shirt. Amazon just ships a random item from the pile, since everything is the same (in theory). So seller B, who still has “2” shirts in inventory might have zero of the items it actually sent to Amazon, since they may have been sent to fulfill seller A orders. If nothing can be counterfeited, it’s a really good system. But it just doesn’t work in practice.
Amazon might keep that data anyway. They are the creators of AWS, and keeping a bit of extra data probably isn’t a big deal. But even if they have it, they probably can’t uncomingle even if they wanted to. In the above example, seller B would have no actual inventory, despite still having two sellable items. Seller A should have only 2 items, but may have 4 actual items.
That explains at least partly the insane jump in literal trash I had to get refunded from Amazon.
I think that comes down to Amazon insufficiently checking returns before sending them out to the next customer so this might still be a problem
This actually makes me wonder about one order I was very unhappy with. When I first got my New Nintendo 3DS, I tried to find a telescopic stylus but the only ones I could find were for the XL model or were new, unused styluses for the original 3DS.
I finally found a listing on Amazon, but when it arrived it was just new styluses for the original 3DS. It didn't even have the same packaging or number of styluses as the picture in the listing. Pretty sure I also realized the serial number or something on the packaging was totally different. When I contacted their customer service chat and pointed all that out, the rep just gave me a refund. Didn't even try to talk about making it right or trying to do an exchange, and I just gave up.
Now I wonder if that was Amazon's commingling and not the seller. Could go either way with how niche the product was.
Full refunds are easier than helping you find the right item. Helping every customer with the wrong item find what they're looking for would practically turn into a specialized shopping assistant service. Instead, Amazon aggressively bans sellers with high rates of fraud or bad reviews.
From a consumer level, I really hope it fixes things. I ordered a 6-pack of a very specific brand of smart lights because I have HomeKit, so I need Matter compatibility. They sent me ones from some fly by night knockoff that only worked with Google and Alexa. Had I been a user of one of those two ecosystems I might not have noticed. But I searched the box for Matter or HomeKit compatibility and it was nowhere to be found. I had them ship the correct ones, and then it was up to me to take the old ones back. So they were out shipping 3 times (the wrong one, the right one, the return of the wrong one) and that saved them money HOW exactly? And it put me out because I have to drive 20 minutes or more to get to the nearest competent UPS Store for drop off (there's a couple closer but they always mess something up.) It's maddening.
Most people would opt to not deal with that, so the shipping costs don't matter. You are an anomaly in that you actually went through the inconvenient motions.
I'm not sure it's that anomalous, at least not anymore.
The last several times I've done an Amazon return drop off I've rarely been the only person doing so. One time at Whole Foods there had to have been over a dozen people in line.
Jesus, it’s about fucking time.