Newegg went through the same bifurcation when it introduced third-party sellers in 2010. It turned a largely hassle-free shopping experience into one where extra care had to be taken to filter out results that weren't sold by Newegg itself.

I'd argue that Newegg was more hurt by this than Amazon, because customers were trusting Newegg to deliver a consistent experience at the expense of fewer categories of inventory, while Amazon's offerings were already diluted by a smattering of tiered experiences and bundling with tangentially-related services, of which the Prime/not Prime distinction became increasingly more intrusive.

Though many people use Amazon to find quirky, oddball, one-off products, it does tend to work best when used as an online-only warehouse club -- for repurchasing the same mainstream product over and over; with the added benefit that then you largely avoid having to wade through the filters of 'Sold by Amazon' and 'Eligible for Amazon Prime'. And since they pushed Prime on so many people, they can branch out into eBay's territory with little worries about the health of their customer-facing bottom line.

Didn't I read that Prime loses them money most of the time? I don't think the membership fee is a real replacement for regular revenue streams; it seems to me like the point is more to encourage people to "get their money's worth" by buying from Amazon more.

People do really get their money's worth from Prime: "40% of Amazon Prime members spend over $1,000 a year on Amazon, while only 8% of non-Prime shoppers do so."

I'd be really interested to see what Amazon's numbers as a whole would look like if Prime didn't exist, clearly it is profitable enough for Amazon to be able to keep bundling "free" stuff into the package like video / music, file storage etc.

82% of households making more than $112,000 a year have a Prime account (https://www.thebillfold.com/2017/06/at-what-age-do-teens-get...). Once you take that into consideration your numbers aren't that surprising.

I think a similar effect is at work with Costco memberships.

Nope, you must be thinking about hotdogs. Hotdogs are a loss leader for Costco. Memberships make them money.

"The most important factor about membership fees is that they go straight to the company's bottom lines. Costco operates its warehouses on essentially a breakeven basis, making its profits on memberships instead of merchandise. "

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/08/18/what-do-membership...

Not that they lose money (they hardly give you anything besides the right to shop at the store) but that they cause people to buy more than they otherwise would because they feel like they've made an investment and would otherwise be wasting the money they spent on the membership.

I haven't done the math, but I don't know how accurate this is given that 2/3 of their sales are to members who receive 2% cash back ($110 executive members). The executive membership would need to average $5500 in purchases to wipe out any Costco profit on their memberships. $8250 average to wipe out ALL membership profit.

I'll have to come up with a formula based on the numbers in your article. It'll be interesting to see how accurate that "profit from memberships" statement really is.

Please post if you figure it out :) I've heard the statement for a while and am curious as well.

This 100 times.

I never buy from third-party sellers in Amazon, but I am having such a hard time explaining to friends and family how to do the same. They keep buying from third-party sellers and keep wondering how it is not "Amazon".

I wish there was an option to set it once and never see third-party seller items again.

There have been a couple of previous hacker news discussions on the problem of counterfeit goods being sold by Amazon. The problem here is that if there are counterfeit goods being sold by a 3rd party, you might get them even if the product listing your ordered from says that it is sold and shipped by Amazon. Amazon co-mingles goods from Amazon and third party sellers unless the third party seller explicitly opts out of it (which costs more money for them and someone selling counterfeit goods has every incentive to co-mingle their goods with others). I don't think I have run into counterfeit goods, but others claim to have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955981

I like the convenience and selection of Amazon, (and have been a customer since they started) but until they stop this comingling, I feel I have to be a little more careful what I buy from them.

I received a counterfeit item after paying more for the item that was "Sold my Amazon", thinking that way, I would get the real product. What's more frustrating is that Amazon didn't really care or do anything about it. They offered a return or an exchange but couldn't guarantee that that the exchanged item wouldn't be fake. I no longer trust them with items that are easily faked.

> Amazon didn't really care or do anything about it. They offered a return or an exchange

Sorry to sound like an Amazon fanboy, but what else could Amazon do for you?

They offered a return without even questioning you. I don’t know a lot of companies that would do that.

They could allow me to purchase only items sold by Amazon, not by third party sellers, with no inventory co-mingling.

Apple bought a bunch of chargers and found over 80% were fake iirc.

If you buy a charger/power brick on amazon, from any vendor, amazon's unethical inventory mingling and lack of care mean there's a very high chance you get a cheap chinese knockoff that wouldn't come close to passing UL.

ps -- I told amazon about a charger they had with a fake Intertek (a UL competitor) mark. Their response was to offer me a refund... and keep selling the device. Which (imo) should be illegal to sell.

They could stop selling fakes. Or at least stop co-mingling their own inventory with unverified inventory sent to them by 3rd parties, so that it's even logistically possible for them to know what they are selling.

Ok fair enough. I meant what more could it to to rectify the situation after he received the item and found out it was counterfeit.

Why they choose to mingle their inventory with 3rd party inventory is beyond me.

> They offered a return without even questioning you. I don’t know a lot of companies that would do that.

There's an automatic right to a refund within 14 days of delivery in the EU, so every company must offer that. I wonder if that means these frauds don't happen here?

http://europa.eu/youreurope/business/sell-abroad/on-line/ind...

They could offer to check the stock bin the counterfeit item was sold from; they could check suppliers to that bin.

"I wish there was an option to set it once and never see third-party seller items again."

This is my biggest issue by far as a customer of Amazon.

I have zero interest in buying anything off Amazon that isn't Amazon fulfilled with Prime shipping because virtually 100% of the reason I use Amazon is the quick, predictable shipping. While they do have various filters to show only prime-listed stuff in search results, the system is real fucky and you still end up getting into situations way too often where you are seeing items that can only really be bought through third parties (eg. the same SKU sells on Prime and via third party, so it makes it through the filter, but the prime option is sold out).

My enjoyment of using Amazon as a buyer would increase by like 100% if I could just tell it to act like anything not available through Prime just doesn't exist to me.

>My enjoyment of using Amazon as a buyer would increase by like 100% if I could just tell it to act like anything not available through Prime just doesn't exist to me.

So you check mark the little box on the left that say "Prime" and it removes all non-prime listings...

That doesn't take availability into account.

Checking "Prime" includes only those listings that are prime. It does not remove non-prime listings.

If only listings that are prime are including then by definition non-prime listings are excluded.

No because products are sold by both Amazon and 3p sellers. If you filter prime you get things that have prime offers, not things that have only prime offers. It's possible you see something that is sold by Amazon and is prime but is out of stock and in stock for 3p fulfillment.

> I never buy from third-party sellers in Amazon, but I am having such a hard time explaining to friends and family how to do the same. They keep buying from third-party sellers and keep wondering how it is not "Amazon".

3rd party sellers are usually fine.

There are things I check for:

1. A "critical" mass of 4-5 star reviews

2. Prime Shipping

3. History of selling the types of items I want to buy.

If I am going to buy from someone who is a one-off seller, I'll do so locally via Craigslist, or OfferUp.

I feel pretty comfortable if the seller's name is the manufacturer, and their inventory is full of stuff they manufacture, with a long history of positive feedback.

I get scared off by seller names that sound like alphabet soup, small numbers of sales and reviews (for a $5 item I'll chance it, though), and recent reviews suddenly changing for the negative.

And I'm really skittish about clothing, unless I know the brand. Too many times, I've gotten what was listed, technically, and it really isn't what I was thinking. T-shirts that look glorious but are really crappy iron-ons, shirts that look great but are really, really thin... that sort of thing. I don't want to go to a store, but I order brands I like and trust directly from them instead.

Especially with camera equipment there are a ton of sellers that have no reviews and great prices. I am sure they almost all are scams.

I also use only sellers that have many reviews and 90+% positive.

I buy from third-party sellers all the time for hobby equipment/parts. Yes, they mostly resell bulk container-ship-specials from East Asia. But that's fine for hobbying around - sometimes you don't want to pay a lot for a bunch of M3 screws/nuts and you don't mind a poor shear strength and heads that easily strip. You know what you're getting, and the two-day shipping is very nice when you don't want to wait for an agent to collect your RMB orders, chuck as much extra weight as they can, and drop it in the international post. Things like:

- Small screwdrivers/hex keys

- Breadboards

- Hookup/jumper wires

- Perfboards and copper-clad FR4.

- Bulk discretes like resistors/capacitors/buttons/potentiometers/LEDs. Especially buttons.

- Springs

- Bolts, nuts, spacers, etc.

- Common microchips (a bit risky, but these days at the IC level, knock-offs are often sold as their own similarly-named brand at a steep discount. You're usually fine if you pay the prevailing price and don't scrounge for a suspiciously-good price. Issues like the famous FTDI bricks are rare, so again, okay for hobby work.)

- Active elements (ceramic heating elements, piezos, peltier modules, small DC/stepper motors, pumps, etc.)

These are fairly specialty items, but there is still enough of a demand for several players to take advantage of arbitrage with shipping and bulk discounts. The quality is bland and rarely outstanding, but it is fairly consistent. While I wouldn't use most of the stuff in a critical product, I still have a lot of hobbying to do and frankly I can't afford high-quality parts/equipment for all of my projects.

If Amazon banned third-party sellers, they would not bother stocking most of these niche items. I would have to go somewhere else; ebay, or making strategically-timed Taobao orders to minimize international shipping costs and the weeks of waiting. Companies like Adafruit, Seeed, Shapeways, Tindie, Etsy, and Sparkfun would probably step in with their own centralized 'hobby marketplace' offerings that Amazon's current customers would hop to.

That said, I do agree that they should at least make a search option to filter them out.

"I do agree that they should at least make a search option to filter them out"

They have a filter "Free Shipping by Amazon" under "Eligible for Free Shipping". It should filter out most if not all items not serviced by Amazon.

I believe the feature OP was looking for was to filter out 3rd party sellers regardless of who fulfills the order.

Or just stop using Amazon altogether, until they can sort their crap out.

Would love to see some official response now that the story has hit HN.

> I never buy from third-party sellers in Amazon

Does it actually make any sense now? Wasn't it confirmed many times that Amazon just ship it to you from closest warehouse even if it's item by 3rd party seller?

AFAIK there are three kind of items:

1. Sold and shipped by Amazon

2. Sold by third-party, fulfilled by Amazon

3. Sold and shipped by third-party

I never buy (3) and generally avoid (2) when there is a possibility of counterfeit, but otherwise I agree with you (2) is fine.

I think there's a kind of 1.5 as well - Sold by Amazon, supplied by god knows who (co-mingled stock of varying authenticity - could by Amazon, could be Chinese knock off), fulfilled by Amazon.

That's actually not 1.5, that's 1 that you just described. There is no option 1 that isn't co-mingled with inventory of unknown authenticity that (unless it happens to be an item that's never had inventory sent in by a 3rd party, but you have no way of knowing that).

Depending on the item and seller "sold and shipped by third party" may actually be better - no mingled inventory, might even be direct from manufacturer.

Agree. I send some people here[1], but they still mess it up.

[1] http://www.nomarketplace.com/us/

sounds like a browser extension to me... hmm....

That's exactly what I was thinking!

Perhaps blocking all the 3rd party sellers and/or checking with fakespot.com then injecting some <div /> in the page displaying some sort of rating...

What the brand gains at the expense of quality is MUCH more valuable: the notion that "if I only have time to check one website, Amazon's going to have it because Amazon has EVERYTHING." Adding third-party sellers allows it to have a much larger catalog of obscure items.

Any shopper who's been burned will still use Amazon in the way you are, just being careful to filter by Prime and/or Fulfilled by Amazon. So the damage to the core brand is minimal even for rare cases like OP, who even ends his article with "even if it’s through an online retailer as trustworthy as Amazon." Despite this experience, he'll still buy his memory cards and Whole Foods groceries over Amazon Prime.

The notion that "Amazon has EVERYTHING" only works if you can actually count on the purchase to work. Once it becomes apparent that third-party sellers are crap and those items don't count, you're back to "Amazon has certain things."

And I'm not merely careful to filter stuff. Amazon is no longer my go-to in general. I do buy stuff from them sometimes, but they're not the first place I check for most things.

A less savvy buyer probably won't even do that. If they get burned too badly on an Amazon purchase, they'll just abandon Amazon, not learn which checkboxes mean "hide the scams."

This is my experience too. Since I can't trust Amazon entirely, I don't start there anymore.

If I have to do careful homework on the seller for any Amazon purchase anyway, it's just as easy to find a more niche e-commerce site, or use a dedicated marketplace like eBay or Craigslist.

I still use Amazon's dedicated product sites like Zappos or Diapers.com. I feel much confident I'm going to get what I ordered there than on Amazon.com.

Frankly, I don't think you're in the majority. Personally, I buy from third-party sellers a lot because I get two-day shipping free and it's easy to shop on Amazon. If I got badly burned I might change my behavior but so far I haven't. I wonder how many even notice the difference.

I just don't see how Amazon isn't the go to. Anything handled directly by Amazon generally has the most competitive pricing, near guarantee of two day delivery or faster, and far larger selection than any other individual store. I cannot think of any general purpose store off the top of my head I would prioritize over Amazon.

To be clear, there are some specific purchases I would not make over Amazon. Amazon's clothing section is a complete joke, for example. I also like B&H, and use them when buying high end equipment.

Amazon frequently has prices much higher than other places. It depends on the product, of course, but it's definitely not a situation where I can just buy from Amazon and be confident I got a good deal.

There isn't any general-purpose store I prioritize over Amazon, but usually I know which stores sell the things I want. For example, Home Depot often has better deals with less search hassle than Amazon for hardware stuff.

Amazon's clothing section is generally reasonably priced (especially for delivery) once you've already found what you're looking for elsewhere.

The fact that Amazon's search is essentially unusable is a longstanding criticism.

Personally I've been using Walmart for consumables (paper products, cat food & litter). Still use amazon for books (the dead tree variety) and the occasional electronic item. Delivery time is comparable, and the free shipping threshold is $50 IIRC, regardless of what you're shipping (e.g. 100lbs of cat litter).

Amazon doesn't have close to competitive pricing, even before you factor in cost of Prime and/or slow shipping times from random 3rd party vendors and/or free shipping minimums.

My go-to is now froogle.com (Google's product advert index). It used to be Amazon, but they have way too many issues now.

I started doing comparative shopping via the local trovaprezzi.it since amazon collapsed third party seller inventories by sku and seldom buy from amazon today unless is from amazon itself (not even warehouse) and still I return a third of purchases

Shame because I previously bought dozens of books completely hassle-free

I've pretty much switched most of my online shopping over to eBay instead of Amazon because of this. Before Amazon opened the floodgates to 3rd party sellers, I had much more confidence that I wasn't going to get scammed there or buy some counterfeit junk. Now it's probably equal likelihood as on eBay. Most of what I buy is cheaper on eBay and almost everything comes with free shipping, so the balance now favors eBay.

For things that I absolutely 100% want to get without the hassle of dealing with fraud, I'm back to the online stores of traditional retail places. :(

If Amazon could clean house of all that trash, I'd probably move my shopping back.

I agree. Amazon could also ban third-party for certain classes of items or make it harder to be a seller of those items. Camera equipment is notoriously fraud prone, and was before Amazon was even a thing.

I only buy used camera equipment from B&H or Adorama, and even with new equipment I am very cautious on Amazon. I tried getting used lenses a few times on Amazon and every single time the first order was the wrong, cheaper version of the lens I paid for. Amazon always quickly sent the right one, but I'd rather not deal with hassle. Particularly, since at that price point B&H or Adorama both have free shipping.

Buy and Sell forums at FredMiranda.com are very very good as well.

Don't publish this too much. I think scammers could easily destroy that forum if they jumped on it

So is keh.com.

Also the incredible number of "new seller" listings with suspiciously low prices. And the seller description is * PLEASE EMAIL X Y Z (at) gmail dot com *. Which of course is an address which replies with instructions on how to finish the transaction off Amazon.

You figure they'd have filters for these things.

> It is really worth it for Amazon to have them? I struggle to see how.

I think the main reason is that it gives Amazon huge amounts of market data essentially for free. For example, they can easily identify best-selling new products even if they're not sold directly by Amazon. If you're successful selling stuff on Amazon, it's only a matter of time until Amazon will compete with you and possibly destroy your business.

That is a really interesting angle on it.

> If you're successful selling stuff on Amazon, it's only a matter of time until Amazon will compete with you and possibly destroy your business.

Mind you that this is not just a "when Amazon turns bad" scenario, but actually what they are doing daily. When I was writing software for Amazon sellers, their most profitable items were always some new niche product they discovered and worked well for ~1 month until Amazon swooped in and sold the same thing.

The real damage to Amazon from this behavior is that it's no longer reflexive to buy things on Amazon.

The problems with fraudsters makes it enough of a cognitive burden to buy small items at a reasonable price -- which often are cheap knockoffs requiring careful vetting or overpriced resellers -- that I routinely find myself thinking "Eh, maybe I'll just stop by the store on my way home."

It's not that I'll stop buying things at all from Amazon, it's that other sellers now have a chance to make their case for my dollars because Amazon isn't a clear win in terms of effort involved, satisfaction with purchase, etc and that I no longer feel comfortable making impulse buys -- I have to second guess the quality of the product, which often means I just won't buy it.

My Amazon bill is down ~25% YoY because of that.

The cognitive burden part is a really important point. I used to like it a lot more, but recently I find shopping on Amazon.ca exhausting. Even for a cheap little $4 whatsit, I routinely find myself paging through multiple options, all with terribly inconsistent descriptions, in search of one that looks the least like a scam. Only to find that the one size sold by Amazon[1] is sold out and everything else is sold by random bozos and shipped by turtle at six times the price, and probably not even the same product anyway. If I decide to buy it somewhere else, I am then followed by that gizmo everywhere on the internet.

Meanwhile, as Amazon has descended to the realm of YouTube comments[2], my local retailers have actually been getting pretty good at this whole online shopping thing. Which isn't terribly surprising, come to think of it. Even smaller department stores like London Drugs have been doing searchable inventories, order fulfilment, curation, and distribution for a hell of a lot longer than Amazon. All they needed was the technology and the incentive. I think it's a matter of time until people realize there are better options and just leave.

[1] The size sold by Amazon is of course measured in shekels, while the others are measured in furlongs and picoparsecs.

[2] I'm being rather unkind to YouTube comments.

Same here. Somewhen last year I realized that buying on Amazon is becoming stressful with so many questionable sellers. Unfortunately Newegg and Walmart have gone in similar direction. For camera stuff Adorama and BH are still reliable but fir other stuff it's difficult to find a good seller.

As someone who sells on Amazon (just used books and whatnot), the third-party system is great when everyone's honest. I can sell a $40 book for $15 used because otherwise it's just collecting dust, the buyer can easily find the item and shop among third-party sellers. (since my item gets organized under the main amazon search result, vs. ebay where every item is totally seperate)

The big issue is scammers ruining it for everyone

It's much worse for me now that I have a kid. I of course categorically refuse to buy any kids products from third-party sellers on Amazon, and Amazon provides no good way of filtering them out, so I have started to drive to Target much more often. The secondary benefit is that Target has much better prices than Amazon.

I'm sure they optimized for this but going to Target is sort of fun too.

Same is happening with Walmart and Newegg. It's really annoying and I wish they'd all stop it. Worse thing on Amazon is the third party sellers that race to the bottom with price but have insane shipping fees.

I used to sell some items on Amazon and paying them %15 - %25 of sell price. I think this is where Amazon makes its major money. I was costing Amazon very little, unlike Prime and free one day shipping, 2 hours shipping, etc.

I think Amazon lose money on lots of its own services to drive customers in, and force 3rd party sellers to use its service for a nice commission.

Also items which are 'fullfilled by amazon' are supplied by third parties and stocked on the same shelf in amazons warehouse. So even if you buy direct from Amazon if any 3rd party seller is qualified to fullfill the same item, then you may just get that item from the shelf - and it might be a fake.

Amazon Mexico opened a few years back and my experience has been mostly negative precisely because most of the products are sold by third parties.

I just avoid amazon.mx and buy at amazon.com.

Even when buying at amazon.com I only buy products sold or handled by Amazon. I've also run into problems with scams, shipping, etc, with third parties.

I had someone set up an amazon.mx account using my credentials somehow.... they ordered a bunch of online books, include a $1200 textbook. I have no idea how they were able to do it.

I was able to get them to reverse all the charges pretty quickly, but I still get messages from amazon mexico saying i should buy stuff, and for a while amazon.com would ask me if i wanted to go to amazon mexico when i logged in.

I have only been to Mexico a few times in my life, and my spanish is really bad. I have no idea how it all happened, since they didn't seem to be able to (or didn't) change any settings that would lock me out of my account.

As a sort of counterpoint, I really wish that Amazon UK was integrated with the Amazon US customer database. I'd like to be able to log into Amazon UK with my normal credentials and order something from there, with the option of international shipping - because occasionally I want to order a product that's not available over here in any way.

It works this way for me. My credentials work for both .uk and .com although I only have Prime on .com. My order history is unique to the country site, but address book is the same for both.

Are you sure you didn't create accounts on both with the same credentials? That's what I did.

I've gotten counterfeit body wash (Shiseido Super Mild) and counterfeit microSD cards off Amazon, and, ironically, the only things I buy off amazon.com now are books.

Everything else I'd rather buy from the manufacturer (and pay the full shipping cost and not Amazon Prime) or a reputable distributor (digi-key/mouser for electronics, CS Hyde for films/tapes, etc).

Counterfeit items -- and the co-mingling of items "fulfilled by Amazon" -- ruined the whole experience for me.

Counterfeit body wash, I haven't heard of that one before. How did you know it was counterfeit? The body wash or the packaging?

The legit / non-counterfeit versions of this product have the {ingredient list, usage instructions, country of origin} printed directly onto the plastic of the pump bottle -- no paper label involved.

An instance of the product that I ordered off amazon.com was received by me, with a low-quality (it flaked off in the shower...) self-adhesive paper label stuck onto to the pump bottle, with another country of origin listed.

Yeah, I suspected. Counterfeiter seem to really cheap out on the label a lot.

Not even books are safe on Amazon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

I think it is mostly about maximizing scale (and lower costs) for the shipping and logistics business. It also used to be that buying from Amazon as the seller was safe but that has gone by the wayside as they decided it was worth the risk to not have to manage separately. I think they will soon have to roll that decision back. At least then their brand stays strong and the get economies of scale for logistics for the third parties.

There was also a story recently about the number of people who post stuff on ebay and just drop ship from Amazon directly. Then the customer gets the product and thinks "this is just from Amazon" and looks up the price. The seller had marked it up and the buy say "bullcrap" and returns the original item and buys it direct from Amazon. However, the actual OEM now has countless returns for no reason. The seller was just running a business on top of Amazon. This is something they have to stop.

>I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all.

Generally the reason any for-profit entity takes a certain action (or inaction) is... yep, for profit. Sure Amazon can have tremendous scale just retailing for itself. But becoming a marketplace greatly increased its ability to compete with the likes of eBay and Rakuten.

I also go out of my way to select the sold by Amazon option if there is one, but often times FBA or completely third-party is the only option. Marketplace increases the surface area of Amazon's product offerings and more importantly makes it a true platform. That's the kind of thinking that can scale up to multibillion-dollar business.

Amusingly, I've actually been finding myself buying more things on Ebay.

Same here! If I'm going to have the hassle of dealing with random unknown sellers, I might as well do it with the company that specializes in it.

There's a lot of good responses here, but the real reason is Amazon isn't set up to do it any other way. The arm of Amazon that does direct purchasing is fairly small and invite only. It's been this way since the beginning. They now have an automated program called Vendor Express that does direct purchasing, but only for certain categories and because it's 100% automated and self serve there are a lot of problems.

They are working on it though, and Vendor Express gets better every day.

Agree wholeheartedly. I’ve also been scammed by a third-party Amazon seller, and I half-wonder if they continue to allow third-party sellers as a way to further promote Amazon Prime — when you’re on Prime, you can simply filter out all non-Prime items. You know in your head you don’t have to deal with all the extraneous, spammy crap associated with non-Prime purchases.

Many third-party sellers are included under Prime though.

But presumably Amazon wouldn't send an empty box to the wrong address through Prime. You still have to worry about commingling, but it is still much better than straight third-party sales.

Fair point.

My only bad experiences with Amazon has been with 3rd parties. From minor things like misrepresentations of when items will ship (very frequent), to poor packaging (also common), to really crappy quality products. I now buy on Amazon only if it's sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

So much this, but I think Amazon could still allow outside sellers through some sort of verification. I honestly often by from ebay with a high seller rating than an Amazon seller that has no transparency. Amazon needs to figure out a way to get sellers verified and rated better.

> I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all.

To offer better selection. I dislike dealing with third party sellers as well but for certain rare items (say, used vinyl) it's the only way, and it's better than nothing.

Both Amazon and Ebay make huge fees off this and really that is why they do it.

Is there a way to just turn third party offers off?

I don't think so. Filtering for Prime or Free Shipping by Amazon helps a lot though. You still get third-party sellers, but they're at least fulfilled by Amazon so the chances of trouble are quite a bit lower.

Except for comingling of SKUs. If a supplier ships knock-off producrs to a particular product code it all gets mixed in the warehouse and you get product roulette.

They don't prefix with the vendor? So they mix the stock of all their suppliers? That's pretty unbelievably sloppy, is there some public proof of this?

This has been widely reported, is ongoing for years, and is the source of frequent complaints from both users and manufacturers.

Here are a few examples, starting with Amazon's own website explaining commingling:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

https://cblr.columbia.edu/amazons-war-on-counterfeits/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-op...

Thank you for digging that up. Amazon should really not do this, it opens them up to all kinds of scams and has the potential to harm their brand in ways that will not be easy to repair.

I doubt that is true, and I haven't seen any proof of it either.

What I can tell you though, is that Amazon is incredibly lenient on enforcing EANs. So even though there is that identifier that should be able to uniquely identify a product, often times third-party replacements for the product, or even completely unrelated items are listed under the EAN, and Amazon doesn't give a shit.

Proof? Amazon terms of service for vendors is a hood place to start.

Oh that's clever, thank you for that idea. If I ever go back to ordering stuff on Amazon I'll definitely use it. I got burned twice with one order from two different sellers and I'm kind of done with them for a while (both out of print biology texts).

When you search for an item, you can filter it to only items sold by Amazon directly. It's under the "Seller" category. I do this quite a bit.

When I try it, the Seller category is only available if I first pick a department. If I search within "All" then for some reason it doesn't appear. Weird stuff.

Amazon cannot stock everything. 3p sellers exist because they are more efficient than Amazon in their specific niches.

> I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all.

It's pretty much pure profit from Amazon's point of view. They got their cut of that $1500, and no matter how much furor comes out of this (and similar) articles, Amazon's overall brand won't be adversely affected.

After all, look at the comments here. Everyone is primarily blaming the seller, not Amazon. Amazon comes across as a secondary party to this at most.

Amazon is getting hit with a chargeback on this one, and I see a lot of comments critical of Amazon on here. And this is a tech-savvy crowd. Most Amazon customers probably don't pay enough attention to Amazon to understand the difference between "Sold by Amazon" and "Fulfilled by Amazon" and straight third-party sellers. When it goes wrong, people will blame the one entity they actually interacted with: Amazon.

I order from Amazon exactly because I don't have to deal with this bullshit.

If I was willing to carefully scrutinize sellers, comb through intentionally misleading ads, build a working knowledge of common scams, and keep all records for the occasional resolution process, I would use eBay or Craigslist.

I would much rather switch to ordering from Best Buy and Target than adapt to this kind of adversarial buyer beware model.

The point of this thread is that if you are ordered from Amazon, you actually might have to deal with this bullshit. Selecting a seller requires as much care as eBay at this point. It's not what it was.

That takes away most of the reasons for using Amazon.

You're being persuaded by anecdotal evidence. At the volume of sales Amazon makes, fraud is but a tiny fraction. The probability of your next purchase to be a fraudulent one is minuscule.

Not saying fraud isn't an issue, and there's certainly room for Amazon to improve in that area and keep it at bay even more, but I think the reason they don't do what you say is probably that they k ow the numbers, if they see a million third party purchase, and only 1000 were fraud, its not really cause for killing the other 990000 sales.

I'm being persuaded by personal experience. I haven't actually been the victim of any fraud on Amazon, but the other problems with third-party sellers are already enough to make me shy away.

Personal experience is anecdotal by definition.

What are the other problems?

Anyways, I'm not defending, just surprised the HN crowd accepts a few anecdotes which are statistically insignificant given the Amazon volumes.

I see questions like, how do people still trust to buy on Amazon? Aren't they aware of all the fraud?

And the answer is no they are not, because they've never been frauded through Amazon, and know no one who has. And that's the case for most Amazon shoppers.

People on hacker news have seen the outliers, the blog post about a single third party fraudster, and a few commenters who maybe experienced something similar.

There are many great 3rd party sellers on Amazon that operate in good faith, and give just as good an experience as 1st party Amazon. But on HN, it seems people see black or white only, and somehow they conclude all black even though the canvas is majority white.

I feel like I'm back in 2000, when some people were asking: How can you trust buying anything online, aren't you afraid of the fraud?

I've ordered countless items on Amazon, in the hundreds, most from 3rd party, never got frauded, never had issues. If you go by anecdotes, add this one to your samples.

Should I not evaluate things based on my personal experience...?

The other problems are: third-party sellers pollute the listings with unobtainable low prices, long delays, and shit products I'd never want to buy. It's common for me to find a product on Amazon only to discover that the low price I thought I was getting isn't actually available, and I have to pay some absurd shipping fee with a third-party seller. Or the cost is correct, but it'll take two months to ship. (This just happened to me yesterday with a "Prime two-day shipping" entry!) Or I have to dig past the first page of the search results because the first page is filled with nonsense from third party sellers.

These are the reasons I use Amazon less and less. Stories about fraud (and more importantly, Amazon siding with a scammer for no good reason) just add more weight.

Make sense, you might be seeing a real trend, but maybe not. You can evaluate things from personal experience, and even a small amount of negative individual experience can hurt a business, because of word of mouth. You should also calibrate your experiences once in a while though. A restaurant you had a bad experience at when you went might still be the best restaurant in town.

If fraud was a huge part of their business, they'd kill the 3rd party sellers from their platform, but I doubt it is. I think it's a net positive as a whole, but a small number of customers hate it. What they need to do now is improve those quirks you mentioned. That's much more reasonable then killing the whole marketplace.