They don't co-mingle inventory on everything, it varies from product to product (although the majority are indeed co-mingled). While there's no visible way to tell if a product is co-mingled, Amazon support is able to look it up. Whenever I'm buying an item that I would be unhappy with a counterfeit (so anything expensive, electronic, or that goes in my mouth or body) I contact Amazon support by live chat and ask them about that particular item. It generally takes about one minute of my time, spread over half an hour as they chase things down and escalate -- probably ends up costing them a heck of a lot more in support costs than they make on the item, but perhaps if it costs them enough they'll just expose the info?

Why not just buy from somewhere else? I don’t understand why you would put this level of effort into shopping at a place you don’t trust.

It takes a minute, they often have the best price, and vetting a new vendor -- with their own unknown challenges -- is non-trivial.

B&H and Adorama are increasingly my go-tos for anything with microchips. They've both branched out from photography to A/V gear to tech goods generally.

B&H might be closed half the year for holidays, but I never worry they'll send a fake.

Personally I have a list I go down the more critical a component is. Amazon if it doesn’t really matter. Then newegg/Best Buy. Then b+h.

I run my list in the opposite order. Prices are generally just as good and I prefer to support those I trust first. Actually before I get to amazon I will search for small specialized vendors that might be more expensive but the staff actually knows something about their product, and so the web recommendations are good (they will of course recommend what they sell over an equally good brand they don't, but they are selling the good brands)

Problem is return policy. Amazon I feel comfortable ordering anything because if it’s not great I return it. Small vendors not so much.

Alot of people outside of news/tech circles do trust Amazon. They're literally the most popular retailer, of course people trust them. Anecdotes are everywhere about inventory co-mingling being such a mega problem, but I think opinions are getting repeated and amplified by a vocal minority.

Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.

I have a split-brain on the matter.

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.

Not sure it's that wasteful? Amazon pays for the returns/refunds, so they have an obvious incentive to keep them to a small number of cases.

Free shipping

tinstaafl... tinstaafs?

Correct, cobber.

Well, I think people do trust amazon, they don't trust all the other companies on amazon. But unless I'm misunderstanding, this move means that people can't buy from amazon any longer. They have to buy everything from all the other vendors on amazon. The problem being, of course, that these other sellers may or may not scam you. (I'm not 100% about that interpretation of this move, but that's what it sounds like? Lawyers may want to chime in.)

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.

Oh Amazon has been selling garbage for years, but only for “commodity” items that the average user can’t test for quality.

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.

I would guess that carries to other batteries as they are easy to fake and hard to detect.

A decent proportion of all the memory cards, flash drives and SSDs are fake on Amazon.

Agreed on both batteries and SD cards. I would add Ethernet cables are crap off Amazon also. The specs offered are useless.

Thanks for the heads-up. I've always accepted that Ethernet cables do what they say on the wire, but now that you mention it, it seems ruthlessly easy to print whatever on the cable and give you something that will only transfer at a fraction of the bandwidth.

I'm slowly collecting a list of things that I need to buy only from genuine suppliers.

"this move means that people can't buy from amazon any longer. They have to buy everything from all the other vendors on amazon."

You did not read the article.

“Co-mingling” doesn’t somehow make counterfeiting easier - Amazon uses chaotic storage such that more than one sku-receipt will never go into the same pickface (co-mingling isn’t talking about mixing the same SKUs together, it’s mixing all SKUs together but tracking them by location).

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 may be able to determine the source of stickerless comingled inventory like this, but stickerless comingled inventory is treated as interchangeable on the fulfillment side. So if I order an item "Sold by ACME, Fufilled by Amazon" I may receive a copy that was shipped in by "Cyberdyne".

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.

Absolutely true - but it's the sales strategy that is 'co-mingled'.

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.

So you keep buying from them? Seems a bit crazy to me. I’d rather find a reputable seller for things where it matters.

I'm not GP, but I just ordered from a reputable seller online.

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.

> I'd already have it if I had ordered from Amazon.

Because Amazon force their staff to keep working?

Source https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/two-amazon-warehou...

That's how Amazon has the competitive edge.

Ive also heard that they no longer comingle products multiple times so I am not sure what to believe anymore. Lots of people have told me that this is old data (in regards to Ships and Sold by Amazon).

I have noticed less counterfeits these days

My understanding is that the support is exactly why you'd buy Sold By Amazon - for others, the 3p seller might be the one to negotiate returns, while SBA is returnable no-questions-asked within the due date they list.

I bet they just don’t allow you to investigate this via customer service anymore.

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.

"Investigate" what? Amazon would never disclose or discuss proprietary bizops.

> The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box

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.

I may be misunderstanding the links you're providing, but to me they only appear to say that Amazon is aware of the original source of each unit sold. They don't appear to say that a consumer has any control over which bin a product is pulled from. i.e., A consumer may choose to buy a product "sold and shipped by Amazon" and it may get fulfilled from a bin supplied by a third-party. The Financial Times article you linked to seems to confirm this.

Your understanding is correct. My point was only that the claim "picker picks from the same box" is incorrect.