Yes, my understanding is, at least in some cases, the fulfillment centers mingle items from different sellers. So, if you're buying "Band X Widget Y", and there are multiple "Fulfilled by Amazon" sellers, and one of those sellers introduces counterfeits, then the whole pool of Widgets is now suspect.

However, you would probably avoid what happened to this guy in the story since it would be coming from their fulfillment centers. You more than likely wouldn't be tagged as importing counterfeit goods.

True. You avoid being labelled a counterfeiter (or importer thereof).

But, you still run the risk of being shipped widgets that will [combust|impale|disintegrate|other calamity]

Thanks, that's what I thought. Because there's no way Amazon are going to have separate bins for SKU's they sell, and those in the co-mingled "seller" bins; it'd be a huge waste of space, and they'd have a much less wider range of SKU's to punt.

You're assuming they need a bin per SKU. They don't. Multiple SKUs can share a bin. Google 'Amazon random stow'

Thanks!....I had no idea about the "random stow" thing.

It's not a matter of it being a waste of space, even, but a waste of time. The first person in a FC to even see an item after the boxes get offloaded from the trucks is probably a stower who is being paid as little as possible to do nothing but scan whatever ASINs are in front of them and shove things into the bins as fast as possible.

Any random bin can contain books, food, electronics, jewelry, anything from anywhere as it gets picked from, restowed into, counted and recounted, etc. There's little room for quality control before items are available for purchase, because the system is optimized to get as many things listed on the site as quickly as possible. There are many ways in which the process could be made more robust, but it won't be because doing so would cost precious seconds.

If you inspect the account/brand listed as the seller, it is much harder to get fooled by a counterfeit. Amazon-brand items sold by Amazon are pretty hard to mistake, in my experience.

Co-mingling breaks that. What happens is even though you buy from seller 1, they will send you seller 2s item if its in a warehouse closer to you.

The only way to avoid this is to by things only sold by 1 seller.

Ziess lens cleaner being Sold under the Ziess account is sometimes counterfeit. The thing with that is the counterfeit destroys lens coatings.

Pretty sure this has to do with the co-mingling people are mentioning which means you can’t be sure even if it’s coming from the brand.

That's starting to be a lot of work when I can buy from another site where inspecting the seller isn't a necessary step.