Re:Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program n...
by AlanYx on Thursday January 27, 2022 @09:47AM
(#30101184)
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.
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.