Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
It doesn't matter who you buy from. The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box, the actual product could come from any seller, even if it's "Sold by Amazon".
Who you purchase from is purely an accounting thing, unless they manage their own stock and is not part of Prime.
If you would like assurance that the goods you purchased actually us genuine, you have to shop from other retailers.
Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.
I trust Amazon to the extent that I am okay with them storing my card information. Their security practices in that regard are pretty damn good. (I do not trust Google with my payment card info. I do not want them to have anything on file they could trigger charges against, either by accident or through their many dark patterns.)
I do not trust Amazon when it comes to vendor or marketplace management. They have an enormous fake review problem, and the probability for counterfeits is, in some categories, unacceptably high.
Meaning: I don't buy any big ticket items from them. I'm still happily doing mostly recurring purchases from Amazon, for product categories where the chance of getting mislabelled junk is practically zero.
So under these conditions, I would strongly urge people not to purchase from amazon's site, because it's gonna be essentially 100% potential scams. They should move to target or walmart. At least until those stores are also obliged to do the same thing. (Since they have the same fulfillment business models I'm assuming they'd be next? But they should be safe for now.) After the law gets to them too, people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items that won't cause too much disappointment if you get scammed. Because online shopping will become the wild west with every transaction being backed only by caveat emptor.
Example: All coin cells (regardless of brand/seller) on Amazon are fake. These cells last 2-4 months (long enough that most people won’t bother to contact support) when the same model from an electronics distributor like Mouser lasts ~8 years as advertised.
> people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items
Oddly enough, I’ve had much better luck with big ticket items on Amazon since they’re much harder to fake and because they get special treatment (brand registration) from Amazon. But for small stuff Amazon is just AliExpress with faster shipping.
A decent proportion of all the memory cards, flash drives and SSDs are fake on Amazon.
I'm slowly collecting a list of things that I need to buy only from genuine suppliers.
You did not read the article.
Amazon can still locate all products of a particular SKU received from vendor X on a particular date, or know what receipt your sale was from.
Amazon's tracking will internally tell them I got an item that was sent in by Cyberdyne, but they don't tell me about that.
This as a customer means I can order an item from ACME, that I know is extremely careful about not selling counterfeits, but end up getting a counterfeit, because Cyberdyne is super sloppy, and the one I got actually came from Cyberdyne. Even though amazon can track this internally, as a customer I have no idea the one I got came from Cyberdyne instead of ACME.
For some products the counterfeits may look the same, and even function the same, but cut a lot of safety corners etc to be cheaper to make, and I might only know that I got a counterfeit after it catches on fire, and burns my house down, possibly losing family in the process.
At this point if I complain Amazon can look it up, and point the finger at Cyberdyne, but it is a bit too late by then.
If ACME instead went with the stickered non-comingled option, I will get one of the items that ACME actually sent in, even though they might need to send it from a further away warehouse, if the closer ones only have the comingled stuff.
I was just responding to OP's point that implied that this is a side-effect of how the inventory is physically stored, rather than a decision on sales strategy by Amazon.
They're closed for several weeks because the warehouse staff is out due to COVID. Who knows when I'll get the several hundred dollars of stuff I ordered. I'd already have it if I had ordered from Amazon.
Because Amazon force their staff to keep working?
I have noticed less counterfeits these days
This would be a great area for regulation as well. If Amazon did it, someone else is bound to do it in the future as well.
That's not true. Commingled inventory is stored in separate bins so that the original source of the unit can always be determined.
This is explicitly said on the Amazon seller help pages for commingling ( https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/20014148... , https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G... )
There is also this Financial Times article from 2019: https://archive.md/kfABj - quote from Amazon spokesman:
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
I guess the confusion came from the name "commingled inventory" - Amazon seems to have recognized this recently and is now referencing this feature as "virtual tracking" instead (quote from the above help pages):
> Commingling is a term that was sometimes used to refer to virtual tracking. However, virtual tracking is a more accurate term, because we trace the source of eligible products throughout the fulfillment process. Identical items from different suppliers are not stored together.
For whatever reason, I have noticed this getting dramatically worse over the past couple of years. Almost all "5-star" reviewed products are filled with top reviews of 1-star reporting fake products. And because of Amazon's overly generous return policy, there's a lot of used products sold as well.
Buying off of Amazon feels like there's a high probability you'll get a used or counterfeit/fake product or both.
I have been reducing what I buy on Amazon because I just don't trust it.
I wonder whether fakes are more prevalent in some product categories than in others.
That is a very generalized statement. I have bought hundreds products shipped and sold by Amazon and never had an issue with authenticity. I'm sure it happens, but I'm willing to guess it is pretty rare and Amazon has always been quick to refund products that are shipped and sold by Amazon.
I gave up after the third time and went back to buying from brick-and-mortar, and haven't had a problem since.
Between my experience and reports from others, I'd say that you've been extraordinarily lucky.
Other gear (filters, nose cusions, tubing) looks more or less authentically packaged correctly.
Some of the fake stuff is pretty good. Would you notice if your energizer batteries were random Chinese fakes?
The first fake I discovered on amazon was a mouse trap of all things.
I probably wouldn't care about a mouse trap though, as long as the mechanism doesn't store enough energy to burn my house down.
My friends and I all bought fake Bose headphones from a shady dealer in China (in person), and the $50 knockoffs sounded exactly as good as the real $600 ones. The only way to tell there was anything wrong was by the fact that they all broke down within a few months.
Workers will “divert” product from factories (or almost) finished product and sell on the side.
I’ve heard this is a big issue with clothing manufacturers.
Of course determining whether it’s actually counterfeit or just diverted product is likely impossible at the point of purchase.
He’d buy “grey market” gear from stores in NYC that were legit, but intended for Latin America or other markets. Sometimes the fit and finish would be interior or connectors would be lower quality, but the price was right and an 80% product is better than nothing.
If I know I’m buying a “Rolox”, that’s one thing. If you sell and price a Rolex that is not, that’s a problem.
Let's say you wanted to buy an iPhone or a Canon SLR camera or a Lenovo laptop. You can't buy these from Amazon? What happens if you try? Will they ship you a block of wood in a box, or a myPhone? And won't refund it?
(this is an example, you can google for real stories)
To add, there are stores of extreme coupons who will products (again, lets use toothpaste) from brick and mortar stores on discount, then sell them on amazon. Or buying returns/expired food products from brick and mortar stores, then selling into amazon.
Again, the issue in all this is co-mingling because any genuine sourced products compete with these less reputable ones.
They might come without packaging, but then so do the geniune ones sometimes. They look normal to non-expert eye, but then when you use them they either break quickly, or whilst functiontal are not as effective as a genuine item(worse sound quality, slower charging, slower transfer speed etc.).
https://bestlifeonline.com/walmart-amazon-counterfeit-news/
The issue is that there's huge incentives for vendors to counterfeit and few incentives for stores to deeply spot-check their middle-layer resellers or the stories they're told from wholesale sources, many of whom are in another country (with all the associated barriers of communication, documentation, and even good ol' fashioned "playing the foreign sucker for their money"). When nobody is actually getting hurt, the incentives to make sure everyone is playing by the rules are very low (and the benefits for cheating, i.e. making win-win deals that bring costs down while bringing revenue up for the merchant and some counterfeit outfit at the cost of lost potential sales to the brand owner, are high).
My recommendation would be to treat all stores with a long supply chain as sus until proven otherwise.
Untrue. Stick to SBA, and it's like any other retail store with customary supply chain integrity.
FBA can be anything because Amazon didn't purchase the goods, they're only warehousing and delivering them.
SBA and each FBA are separate bins by design. The commingling of different SBA/FBA sources at the same ASIN (item on the website the customer buys from) would be a different issue.
Learn something new (and important) every day.