Our sales figures definitely weren't high. I think it may have been related to how much stock we had for all the sizes of the product.
Soon the product images and descriptions we provided became the canonical version and overrode whatever was there before. Even previous customer reviews from other sellers would continue to be shown on was what now basically our product page.
I thought it was a bug at first but I've seen this too often. I don't understand how Amazon doesn't know this is happening, or why it even lets it happen in the first place. Product pages should be immutable.
It seems like sellers recycle old listings to keep their reviews.
Luckily the review system can catch this, as long as you look at recent reviews and the seller isn't buying any new reviews.
Anecdote: in my country they sell Toppits brand cling film, and it used to be great. Now it’s absolutely useless! Doesn’t self adhere at all.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kin...
When I’ve done it, it is legit the same thing and verify it, but I can easily see scale or greed causing people to do the wrong thing with this.
They are no longer offering 1-day shipping. When I signed up for prime, one of the benefits was discounted 1-day shipping on items for which the free 2-day shipping wasn't fast enough. I recently had need of that, and learned that the options are now (1) "prime shipping", with no particular service guarantee. There is no second option. I contacted customer service multiple times asking why I couldn't choose 1-day shipping and was told "because the item is out of stock. There is only one item left in stock, that means the item is out of stock".
The alternative of separating Kindle reviews seems wrong. Most reviews are useful to buyers of both formats.
Perhaps also put the date in the review itself and state that you do not give permission for the review to be edited.
Unfortunately, I think that some sites don't allow reviews to mention prices.
Even if the T&Cs say you give up all your rights in the review you perhaps still have a right not to be misrepresented so they shouldn't edit your review if the review is still going to be attributed or attributable to you.
But not all Amazon products work that way. The "t-shirt with eagle print" could be made by a number of companies with wildly varying quality, all fitting this product description. Similarly there are lots of 10m Cat 7 S/FTP lan cables.
Instead of hoping for Amazon to make this slightly less bad, I think legal action is called for at this point.
Amazon's protection against state action has always been that it offers a good enough return experience that people will turn to it rather than public authorities with problems. It's not a legal shield so much as a practical one, though.
People seem to talk about amazon as if it has some unprecedented customer service and that is why it's so successful. But this is the bare minimum for pretty much any shop. Is it different in America?
I feel like you didn't returns something with Amazon, but a third party seller instead.
Amazon will ship you the replacement as soon as you confirm and give you a return shipping label to print and stick on the package, which you can bring to your local post office. The process is quite painless.
> I can only return the item in a very short window after it is purchased.
Their return windows is 30 days for most stuff, which is good enough.
I have stopped using Amazon after 15 years due to the unacceptably high rate of counterfeit, grey market or used items I got on a daily basis.
It's totally insane. I have even emailed Jeff Bezos and got into the trouble of talking to all middle managers. They don't care.
Thanks to software like Shopify, ordering from other e-commerce sites is pretty painless now. When you factor in finding the product, many sites are now more convenient to order from than Amazon.
Months back I ordered some Miele vacuum bags and they too were counterfeit.
I had never experienced this until 2019.
Some problems they seem unable to fix. I have a Nespresso machine and a few times now I've ordered a decaff selection and every single time they send me the caffeinated version of whatever I order. I call them and they refund the order. They've probably sent 16 sleeves of coffee for free (worth around $150) and have never sent the product I've actually ordered. It feels a little wrong to take advantage of their incompetence like this, but hey, free coffee!
I mean apple cables, apple chargers, apple headphones.
This was probably > 5 years ago, I stopped ordering them after that.
I would assume there are other product categories still suffering the same problems.
I can identify grey market items easily. Buy an item in Amazon UK of product X and get version packed to be sold in Italy (with all labels in Italian) or Russian (with all labels in Russian), instead of the UK version. This is because some smart supplier is doing arbitrage.
I already basically gave up buying anything important and/or fragile from Amazon and now avoid them for almost everything around holiday seasons. Far too many instances a few years ago of things like different sizes of items thrown into a box with obviously inadequate packaging, resulting in damaged electrical items, would-be Christmas presents turning up unfit to give as gifts, and so on. They're pretty good about accepting returns without quibbling much these days, but it's still a huge hassle when things go wrong so often and so avoidably.
It's a shame, because for a while Amazon was a convenient alternative to bricks and mortar stores and carried a wider range of books and TV/film/music than any physical store. I'm glad I supported the better local stores now, and that some of them are still there so I can buy from them instead today.
Supply chain control.
Amazon may continue to dominate AWS and even the 3rd party marketplace, but they've already ruined their brand reputation as a supplier.
Edit: Sold and shipped 3rd party marketplace may survive.
Still a better option than Amazon (for now, at least).
Gotta love startup funding.
I can buy Sam's Club brands and/or sizes first party through Walmart.com, and I could do so before the Jet.com-ification of the Walmart website... it just wasn't well known until recently.
There are still 3rd party sellers somehow selling Walmarts own product cheaper via Sam's Club. Or sometimes for products that aren't available on both public facing sites. (Sam's and Walmart)
Which is probably why Walmart made the effort to better integrate the brands.
Fulfillment is just fine (indeed - beneficial to small businesses) as long as there is no inventory co-mingling.
There was a time when I went to Wal-Mart to buy a new package of cheap cotton ankle socks every month or so, incrementally replenishing my cache, over the period of about a year.
The exact same brand, make, and size of socks, what were ostensibly identical, would vary in their constituent materials at what seemed to be random. One month they'd be ~80% cotton. The next month ~80% polyester. For what appeared to be the same damn product.
I don't know if this is something the big brands do in cooperation with Wal-Mart, or if it's entirely out of Wal-Mart's control and something Hanes/FTL has started doing independently. But next time you see packages for socks, check out the contents. In Wal-Mart the contents are printed on an adhesive-backed sticker. They use a sticker because it gets switched all the time, presumably to whatever was the cheapest recipe/supplier at the time. There's basically no persistence to what the SKU actually represents.
The Wal-Mart advantage, in my opinion, is that I have the opportunity to actually scrutinize the instance I will take home of the thing I'm purchasing, before doing so.
With Amazon I can't possibly know if they'll send me the 80% cotton or 80% polyester variant of the same SKU.
I've noticed similar practices with canned fish. Depending on what day of the week it is, the same canned fish e.g. beachcliff sardines in water, will have salt or won't have salt in the ingredients list. It seems to correlate with the country of origin. Same SKU, different ingredients. You have to look really closely at the package to notice it, but you definitely notice it when eating the stuff.
> There's basically no persistence to what the SKU actually represents.
I disagree. The SKU represents generic ankle socks. They're a commodity.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3322867-where-underpants...
Or the standards on commodity exchanges, like Kansas City Hard Red Winter Wheat Futures, which come in 5,000 bushel lots and require a deliverable grade of "No. 2 at contract price with a maximum of 10 IDK per 100 grams; No. 1 at a 1 1/2-cent premium. Deliverable grades of HRW shall contain a minimum 11% protein level. However, protein levels of less than 11%, but equal to or greater than 10.5% are deliverable at a ten cent (10¢) discount to contract price. Protein levels of less than 10.5% are not deliverable." -- from https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/files/fact-car...
Real-world commodities have exacting standards precisely to prevent this kind of nonsense.
If you want consistency in terms of quality, go upmarket. Even a JC Penney or Kohl’s will be more consistent for the socks.
Even if product quality might vary (or even different items under the same upc), the product is never (ime) misrepresented, and I've never had any concern about getting a counterfeit.
Expecting 100% consistency.... Thats probably going to be a disappointment.
At this point I'll happily take the Walmart-specific version over the risk of an Amazon supplied product.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm with you that co-branded products like "Only at Target" KitchenAid are pretty much trash but store-brand stuff doesn't really seem that different to me than any other brand on the shelf. Kroger brand pretzels are dope, their Oreo clone is garbage, c'est la vie.
The store has an incentive to stock it's own brand product beyond what the incentive for competitors is. Ie, they are going to carry a competitor either because it's a good product that sells, or the competitor has paid for shelf space (and is betting it's own money that it's product is good).
Neither of these necessarily applies to a store brand. So even if it's between store brand and unknown 3rd party competitor, I'll go 3rd party first.
That said, there are some store brand products that, having tested, I enjoy. It's just usually not worth the 25¢ to me for the gamble.
I know because I ordered two copies last week. Both came and both were counterfeit.
If people didn't sell counterfeit products, we would enjoy the amazing logistics network that Amazon has built.
My recommendation is that you become Brand Registered on Amazon, you get a hell of a lot more weight to throw around on your listing, ie. kicking off sellers who are not authorized to sell your products. Go look at any Anker product, you will see that "AnkerDirect" is the only seller on any of their listings because they are Brand Registered.
You could also go the Seller Fulfilled Prime route for full quality control, which allows you to keep access to the Amazon marketplace but you are responsible for logistics end of the bill which is a tall order but there are 3PLs that can help with that sort of ask.
Amazon has managed to completely invert the original hierarchy of seller trust.
Which says they do commingle their "sold by Amazon" stock with their FBA stock. I'm actually pretty surprised, I had no idea this was the case.
i think most items that are "sold and shipped by amazon" are commingled as well.
I've stopped buying things from Amazon and instead gone back to using bricks and mortar stores with online presences and do click and collect, there's just too much crap to sift through these days.
You have to pick a vaguely related reason like “Item Not As Described” and then you can optionally leave a comment noting that it is counterfeit. There is no indication that anyone ever looks at that comment, or takes any action about it.
I have with a camera lens, but Amazon didn't honor the original price. I had to pay the difference for the 'real' version. In my case though, it was not a knock off or grey market, but the seller was selling the cheap version of the same lens as the more expensive version.
That was my last time buying anything camera related on Amazon since it was impossible to ever get the right thing on the first try. I only use Adorama or B&H now.
I suspect they're aware enough of the problem to know who's likely to get a 2nd counterfeit shipped after receiving a 1st, and realized it's cheaper for them to abandon the sale than continue to possibly send counterfeits to a customer who's now more likely to notice.
That’s a pretty damn far cry from the current situation.
It’s precisely because of commingling that, just because you buy a book “Shipped From and Sold By Amazon” you have no guarantee that the book they ship to you was actually bought and entered into their inventory by them. Their books and every other “fulfilled by Amazon” sellers’ are treated as completely fungible by their fulfilment centres.
“Ships From and Sold by Amazon” doesn’t really mean anything re: the actual book you receive, which could easily be one that came into their system from Bob’s Big Store of Counterfeit Bullshit.
This is not a matter of some other seller providing Amazon with inventory. These are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory.
There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.
No, it's not.
Even if it says "Shipped and sold by Amazon", it does not mean that the item originated from Amazon's purchase. Amazon considers co-mingled inventory as fungible.
Let's say Amazon has 10 warehouses, and every month, they order 100 copies of a book, and put 10 in each warehouse. Now, a third party seller comes onto the scene, and wants to sell the same book, fulfilled by Amazon, with co-mingling to reduce costs. To further reduce costs, he also only wants to send his inventory to the closest warehouse so shipping is cheaper. Let's say he has 100 copies of this book, and he sends them to warehouse 10. Amazon, seeing that there are 100 additional copies of this book in this warehouse, and knowing that demand is likely to stay relatively the same, knows that for the next 10 months, they do not have ship those 10 books a month to it. Now, Amazon has run through the stock they stored at warehouse 10, but they have an order from someone who lives down the street. They don't have any copies of the book that they purchased, but they have the co-mingled copy that should, in theory, be an exact copy of the original product. They then send it to the customer so that they have a shorter delivery time. If they were to ship all of the copies of the book that were sent to them by that seller, and had not replenished, when a customer ordered from that seller they could ship a copy from warehouse 3, but it would take an extra day to arrive. Or, someone who lives next door to warehouse 1 could order from the third party seller, but still get same day delivery because Amazon has a copy of the book there, even though it is their copy and not the seller.
This is what co-mingled inventory means. That all inventory is fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item, as long as it is properly accounted for on the ledgers. That is fundamentally the point - you save significant costs and introduce real benefits to customers when you can ignore where the item was sourced from. The problems arise when not all of the sources for the items are good actors.
Looking at the No Starch Press Serious Python book, there are 41 sellers. I don't know how many co-mingle inventory or are FBA, but that means that any book sold that from any seller that co-mingles inventory (and items sold by Amazon directly are) can be fulfilled by items physically sourced from any other seller that also co-mingles inventory.
These are counterfeit copies. They're not coming from legitimate suppliers. Frankly we don't care who resells our books as long as they're selling legitimate copies. These are not.
I've been dealing with this issue with Amazon since 2017. It's not that what you're describing doesn't happen but if this is like previous cases this is something different.
In this and other recent cases as has been shared online, Amazon replaced our legitimate inventory entirely with counterfeit copies that it was sourcing directly from a printer that it works with for print-on-demand. That printer supplies Createspace. We receive absolutely no revenue from the sale of these copies because we're not the ones printing them. They're produced from stolen files.
Once again, Amazon is stealing from authors and leaving it to vendors like us to police them. Why should we have to police Amazon?
In this case the copies that I received appear to be from that same printer. They look just like the other counterfeits that we've seen over the years.
As with other instances we receive NO revenue from these sales and as a consequence neither do our authors.
In this case and in previous cases Amazon stopped ordering directly from authorized resellers. They fulfilled orders only with counterfeit books.
This is not the case of commingling as you describe. This has nothing to do with FBA or other resellers. This is Amazon's supply chain sourcing counterfeit copies directly from a printer that they work with and selling them in place of our legitimate inventory.
Love your books. FWIW, I almost entirely stopped buying from Amazon 2 years ago in part because of issues like this. Canceling prime was scary and then liberating.
This is such a bullshit rationalisation.
If the product is treated as fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item then of course Amazon is responsible for selling / fulfilling the counterfeit product because, as you say, it doesn’t matter physically who sourced the product.
Amazon is aware of this issue, but fixing it breaks their enabling-crime business-model.
I do think it's unfair to say Amazon isn't attempting to fight this - someone linked a website in here that shows them as employing thousands of people and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in fighting it. It just seems like they're not currently winning the arms race.
You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers, but most customers don't care and prefer cheaper over more reliable. That effect is not enough to help "enormously".
Since (according to others in this thread) the Amazon "Reason for return" menu does not provide the option "Item is counterfeit", it does not sound like Amazon is very interested in receiving these sorts of complaints. So I have to wonder how interested Amazon is in punishing the sellers of counterfeit items. If you close your ears to bad news, you won't hear any.
> You are correct that customers could themselves choose better sellers...
That's right. For items where genuineness really matters, I choose the seller "Sold by Walmart" at walmart.com. There are no reliable sellers at amazon.com, not even "Sold by Amazon". Which is a shame.
P.S. Reply to msbarnett, since I can't reply directly: Amazon does not literally put all identical items into a single physical bin, so it is at least feasible for them to keep track of which item came from which seller, if they choose to. I recommend that you (and other readers) take a tour of an Amazon fulfillment center: https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment-center-tours/ It's pretty interesting.
But seriously, my point is that "Sold by Amazon" should have a counterfeit rate of near zero. I'm willing to help QC third-party sellers. But "Sold by Amazon" should do its own QC. Just as "Sold by Walmart" does (for now).
Huuuuge citation needed.
It’s precisely because of comingling that they don’t have the ability to do this: they put multiple sellers goods, including their own, in the same storage bins, provided they have the same UPC. By what means do you suggest they can distinguish Seller A’s widget in Bin 37624 from Seller B’s? They do not appear to attach any additional tracking stickers to their goods.
And they do not have a formal system for complaining about counterfeit goods. They don’t even offer it as a distinct option on returns — probably quite purposefully. All you can do is request a return for some vaguely-related reason and manually add a note about it being counterfeit. They’re clearly not attempting to automate identification of bad goods, let alone removal of bad actors.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...
"For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit."
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549623, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952939, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12062856
This is the biggest misconception about Amazon I've seen, and has been for years, at least on HN.
On top of that I once sent in a box of items that was checked in twice several weeks apart. Amazon sold double the inventory I sent them on my behalf and paid me for the sales of products I never sent them. Stories of phantom inventory are common. It can get crazy - someone [1] sent in a shipment of four items and 72 were added to their inventory, which Amazon happily sold for them after checking with the fulfillment center and insisting that the inventory was correct. This sort of thing shouldn't happen if you're actually tracking inventory. Also, their system shouldn't allow a shipment to be checked in twice.
[1] http://www.orensmoneysaver.com/2016/06/turnover-tuesdays-ama...
Generic complaints typically come from customer complaints. Customers complain even when the product is authentic. There's nothing in your story to suggest commingling is the issue.
Phantom inventory is an issue, usually arising when someone else's units were checked into your inventory. There's always a record of that, and you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
By "virtually no one" you mean "virtually everyone." Because what I described is very common. I've experienced it and I sell very little on Amazon - less than 100 sales a year. Less than 50 items a year in the past several years.
>you should report the discrepancy to Amazon.
How about you actually pay attention to people's experiences before discounting them? The author of the blog post I linked to literally reported the issue to Amazon and Amazon insisted the massive amount of inventory was theirs. It would be easy to see that it wasn't merely by looking at the weight of what was shipped (among other very obvious things...). Since they can't get their heads out of their ass enough to do that (or simply not check in the same shipment twice and double count that inventory), I'm not believing they have much inventory source tracking going on.
Amazon may think they are doing a great job tracking inventory but the facts say otherwise.
I've sold millions on Amazon and am friends with many sellers who've collectively sold at least hundreds of millions. I've heard many people with issues with inauthentic complaints. I've never heard of one that can be traced back to commingling.
I've dealt with phantom inventory many times. The correct thing to do is report it. It doesn't always get fixed. The fact that they occasionally have stranded inventory and assign it to a seller doesn't mean they don't generally track transfers of manufacturer barcode inventory, like they say they do. They never claim inventory receiving is perfect. They do claim they track the original source of sales, and there's no reason to think it's not true.
Alternately, how does the picker know which item on the shelf to select to ensure they have selected the right seller's unit? Look at how amazon stores books in their warehouses:
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+warehouse+books&sourc...
Without a label on the book, how do they know which copy to pull from the shelf and put in the box?
I know Amazon says they track inventory, but prime shipped and sold-by-amazon.com boardgames arrive as counterfeits pretty regularly in the board game industry. You can find plenty of reports, with detailed pictures and manufacturer confirmation on BGG. There has to be something going on here, even if it may be more complicated than Amazon is commingling counterfeit and genuine articles.
It's very simple: they're stored in different locations. If seller A is on shelf B, and seller C is on shelf D, then even though the individual items are identical, if you pick up a unit on shelf D you know it's from seller B.
They don't store identical products from different sellers next to each other.
I agree there's a counterfeit issue. Amazon agrees there's an issue, and actually has it as a risk factor in their financial reports. But commingling isn't a significant contributor to it.
You can check if the location it was supposed to be in is empty. From my understanding, the main issues happen during receiving; if it's received to the wrong shipment it'll be incorrectly marked in the system and unlikely to be fixed. Once it's received to the correct system everything else is fairly robust.
>If an item is pulled incorrectly, and then set on the return-to-stock pile, you have no idea where to put it.
If it's pulled, then there'd be a record of where it was pulled from, and that place would be empty.
And it may work to benefit Amazon in finding problematic sellers, and it may scare most legit sellers to never supply fake products.
But it doesn't seem to do anything to actually benefit sellers or buyers, at this point.
For one, I suspect resold returned items to be a major weakness of this policy. Or orders of multiple quantity with different sources, which are picked, boxed, then returned to inventory for whatever reason.
I see the other side: I was suspended after false counterfeit complaints from tp-link, and was forced to sue them in federal court. In my case, Amazon suspended me despite having provided extensive proof of authenticity, simply because the brand didn't want me to legally resell their product and was willing to lie about it.
I agree that returns are a weakness, where counterfeits can enter the supply chain. But returns are a low percentage of sales, and counterfeit returns (fraud) are a low percentage of returns. Seems like a relatively small problem.
Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined. If they're in the same warehouse they would just ship from the same seller. I don't know for sure how Amazon handles it but again, doesn't seem like a huge problem.
And you kinda make my point. The practice is for the benefit of Amazon, not us.
(It still benefits Amazon to sell fakes already within their inventory.)
>Multiple quantity from different sellers shouldn't be combined
Yet it's happening. I don't claim to know all the whys, but I've ordered enough to know that it's happening. And a lot.
Re multiple quantity: have you gotten counterfeit and authentic product in the same box?
Some problematic products, I've ordered a couple dozen times and never gotten a genuine product.
>in the same box?
Yes, multiple times, although probably less than 10. And a couple were supposed single seller items. Didn't matter.
(One case initially got my account flagged and couldn't buy anything else until I sent pictures for proof. One of the only times I've ever had Amazon call me.)
However, the much more common occurrence is variance over separate orders.
Knowing how Seller Performance works, they aren't about to close off a listing that is doing $nn-K revenue per month because of a couple of copyright reports. The economics simply don't make sense for Amazon to poison the inventory of a seller because of a couple of reports, to fix this problem Amazon truly needs to figure out a way to verify the validity of inventory sent in to their warehouses.
That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I do hope that someone from Amazon is really working on it. Inventory commingling and a myriad of other issues present in the processes of selling on Amazon are the reason that I decided to not pursue FBA further.
Regarding your points:
1. Amazon takes action when a brand complains, even with only a single complaint. Sellers have to prove the complaint is wrong to be allowed to continue to sell the product, or in some cases to be reinstated. Usually this is done by providing an invoice which Amazon verifies.
2. The enforcement is usually at the seller level, not the listing level.
The owner of No Starch Press shows up at a lot of CS shows and other shows. Next time you are at one, seek him out for a chat. Tell him Anazon takes action after a single complaint. Be prepared for him to disabuse you of your misconceptions.
Source: I heard his story first-hand at PyCon.
I very much doubt Amazon is rejecting DMCA notices, and suspect the story is more complicated than that. I've heard from many sellers that it's easy to file complaints, and I know many sellers who have gotten false complaints, which is also what you'd expect if it's super easy to file complaints.
With this in place, it seems vendors get to choose if they want commingling or not. Would be nice to provide a checkout option to buyers as well, like choose a slower shipping but guarantee your getting the item from the vendor. Or even if it asked you... getting item from alternate vendor will ship faster? Is that okay? And mentioned the alternate vendor.
Amazon is either ignoring the preference when it suits them, or has significant flaws in how they're implementing the policy.
Either way, they're destroying their brand reputation.
If they were pushing for greater criminal penalties for distributing counterfeit goods, as a crime of negligence or strict liability, then I'd think they cared.
Or, if they just took tangible action to stop distributing counterfeits themselves, that would be even more convincing.
Now in theory this seems like a reasonable approach to deliver products to customers faster, the catch 22 is that third party vendors have clearly taken advantage of Amazon's complete lack of quality control. Third party sellers can sign up for a Seller Central account, and send in counterfeit products with fake bar codes because Amazon doesn't check at all.
I could sit here and talk for hours about mess that is Seller Central. I've dabbled with Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), and I would never recommend any company use AMZN for third party logistics.