But amazon wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to offload all that inventory risk into others and it wants its customers to pay the same or more as other retailers who you can trust to not sell counterfeit goods.

A consumer’s only solution is to switch your purchases to actual retailers who are selling goods you can trust.

At the very least, Amazon should mark the commingled vs. non-commingled status for each offer. Right now, you only see this once you hold the item in your hands - if there's a barcode starting with "X" on the package, it's non-commingled AFAIK.

(But I wonder if Amazon actually authenticates X-labeled incoming merchandise, e.g. by requiring a shared secret on the package slip. Otherwise, if an attacker sends in a fake item that's X-labeled as if it came from an honest seller, they would still be able to tank the reputation of the honest seller. Maybe this could even be done from the position of an Amazon customer, i.e. they would apply the fraudulent X-label to a swapped "returned" item. Who would believe the honest seller in this circumstance?)