If you bought it on Amazon.com and your credit card was charged by Amazon.com, you bought it from Amazon. Consumers shouldn't be concerned with what supplier Amazon gets their inventory from.

Sure - but that doesn't answer my question:

was the product

- 3P

- Sold by Amazon

- Fulfilled by Amazon

As a customer with agency, I have the ability to not buy things on the Amazon site that aren't sold by amazon. When FBA stock contaminates sold by amazon stock, I lose that agency. That is a problem for my own personal uses of the Amazon site.

That some large portion of Amazon functions like a more industrial Ebay is for others to enjoy - YMMV.

Amazon does not make it easy to know, not as a consumer do I even know what the difference is between those three options. I'm a pretty savvy shopper and world wide web surfer but from looking at a product page I have no idea which one of those it is not what the implications even are.

What on earth is "3P" and how does a consumer know? What is the difference between "sold by Amazon" and "fulfilled by Amazon"? Isn't anything sold by Amazon also fulfilled by Amazon? Do they not fulfill some products they sell? Do they fulfill some things they don't sell? I've never seen an item on Amazon that they didn't take your money for. Everything I've ever bought there Amazon has charged my card for.

As a consumer, the nature of the business relationship between Amazon and its suppliers shouldn't be my concern.

Fair enough.

So there is Amazon the retailer. That is what Amazon originally did - buy inventory from vendors then sell them. As Amazon gained scale they launched 3P aka 3rd party selling. This is essentially Ebay at scale. Returns for these products are more or less managed by the seller.

FBA then came where 3rd party sellers can take advantage of Amazon's delivery and warehouse logistics. The stock is held by Amazon and can tap into Prime delivery. IIRC returns are also handled by Amazon so you get no questions asked returns.

I will usually filter products by Prime and will then usually look for the "sold by Amazon" text on a product page (as opposed to "Fulfilled By Amazon")

In the same way I think twice about buying random things on eBay, I also think twice about buying 3P (and FBA to a degree) on Amazon.

Filtering out 3P on Amazon is fairly straightforward. Filtering FBA is more manual and takes reading of the page.

If fake inventory is being comingled that becomes impossible.

Amazon the retailer is (from my experience) reasonably priced, delivers goods in a day (sometimes less) and offers me a return policy that is hard to compete with anywhere else.

I would never buy cables or batteries from a 3P seller. I would think twice with a FBA seller.

The problem there is that all Amazon stock is comingled. There isn't a difference between sold by Amazon and third-party FBA. It all gets sorted under the same UPC/SKU.

Amazon is attempting to be a physical CDN, and that's bad news when what you're looking for is a guarantee that some product will be delivered from some specific seller to you after getting comingled.

Normally, that isn't much of an issue when you've got procurement going sanely.

When it is predated by fake/damaged good sellers predominantly though is where you run into problems.

Thanks, that's enlightening and also a perfect example of what's wrong with Amazon.

No average consumer is going to know any of this. It's all Amazon as far as most people are concerned; Amazon goes to great lengths to make you think it's all them - right up until you have an issue.

If Amazon commingles the inventory from unknown supply chains, how can any of it be called "legitimate"?

Yeah - FBA is actually a really awful attack vector. I hope that they internally are able to track sub-ASIN level inventory, otherwise they have made a fantastic laundering platform.

Yes, they are able to track original sources (by never putting commingled units in the same bin), per seller help pages (and e.g. Amazon comments in this article: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/04/03/1554287401000/Amazon-...).

Yeah fair. There will be all kinds of audits which would be hard if they couldn't do that