Isn't the chain: (thief) -> (fence) -> (Amazon) -> (customer)? If a fence sells his wares in a bazaar, the bazaar is the fence? No, the fence is the fence the bazaar is the marketplace.

If Amazon is commingling inventory and Fulfilled By Amazon, it's not a bazaar, it is the fence.

They should rename it Fenced By Amazon

Fullfencement by Amazon?!

There's actually an interesting point here. We can easily imagine a scenario where someone steals a bicycle, lists it for sale on Amazon, and ships it off to the customer themselves. Amazon was just a billboard in that case, kind of.

A fence is providing a few semiseparate services:

1. They will buy stolen goods. You get a lower price, but you don't have to face nasty questions like "how did you get this?"

2. They may assume the risk of policing. If you stole something surprisingly important and it gets thoroughly investigated, the fence goes to jail, and you don't.

3. They locate people who want to buy stolen goods. It's easy to conceive of this as a service they provide for their own benefit, after buying your stuff (#1), but in reality you can't really do either without the other one.

Amazon commingling inventory lets it provide service #2. The police can establish that a stolen object was delivered to an Amazon customer, but if it came from a commingled pool, they can't establish who sold it.

But Amazon's whole concept is to provide service(s) 1 and 3. This would make it fairly strongly parallel to a fence who, when the police show up, lets them know where to find you. But even then Amazon is still doing the largest part of fencing; usually the police don't show up. The hard part is locating the customers, and that's what Amazon does.

It's not fencing if you don't know it is stolen.

An even more perverse chain is: (thief) -> (fence) -> (Amazon) -> (delivery) -> (thief) -> (fence) -> (Amazon) ...

At least it's Amazon losing money then rather than Amazon benefiting from crime against competitors.

But what's the cathedral?

Perhaps the definition is that to be a fence you have had to buy the good and take ownership (and responsibility) for the goods yourself. You then resell them to pass on ownership. Otherwise you're just providing services, whether that's storage, transport or whatever. So do Amazon take ownership, or do they just sell them on your behalf?

Amazon would say it is merely the credit card processor, the web store provider and provides ad space.

Same as if stripe, google ads and shopify were used.

They don’t take possession of the items at any time. Even if they warehouse has them, they are in the same boat as uhaul or a storage company.

I think this would be a stretch on their part: unlike a storage company, these products get put into an SKU bin in the Amazon warehouse. They get mixed with other Amazon stock, show up in inventory DBs, and are ultimately shipped in Amazon-branded packages with Amazon-originated shipping labels. Users track their packages containing these products on Amazon's website.

Except products like deodorant are considered health products. Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.

More likely this stuff is sold on ebay

> Except products like deodorant are considered health products. Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.

I have doubts about this.

It appears to be true. This page describes the categories and there seems to be an approval process to prevent what this article is talking about. https://www.sellerapp.com/blog/amazon-restricted-categories-...

It does link to Amazon's seller central but I don't have an account to see the actual list.

It’s true. Selling in this and a growing list of other categories is gated, every year the rules get stricter.

Source: I have a seller account on Amazon.

No, instead they reach out to Amazon to school a sweet deal directly. I think a lot of people forget that a typical retailer relationship is manufacturer => distributor => retailer. Large companies like Amazon often can (and do) negotiate directly with manufacturers, however, sometimes larger distributors can offer a better deal. This is why, for example, you'll sometimes find Amazon themselves selling fake SD cards.

Sure, but Amazon chooses the companies they buy directly from (its called Amazon Vendor Central) very carefully and they only buy from people who are already established 3rd party sellers on Seller Central, so im not sure these small time thieves are able to do that.

But it could be that maybe one of them is a legit seller/vendor and buys these stolen goods off of these crooks or doesnt even know about the fact that they are stolen.

There are lots of Facebook groups for amazon sellers where people often post “liquidation” sales so maybe this could be a way to do it.

> Amazon doesn’t just let you easily sell health products, you need to produce invoices, receipts, etc.

I sure hope so.

Amazon seems to only carry many common household items through dubious 3rd party sellers.

On the subject of deodorant, I've received the wrong type from Amazon multiple times, including some that obviously came from a foreign market. I ordered Dove. That can't be difficult to source from the manufacturer.

I just want Target to bring back Subscribe and Save so I can ditch Amazon completely. Third party fulfillment ruined Amazon's store.

I dont know about Unilever (Dove) but actually a lot of manufacturers do not sell directly thru Amazon. For numerous reasons.

It seems like that can be easily faked.

Help me understand here: how is blaming amazon any different to blaming the post office (who are also an intermediary here) or the payment processors and banks? None of these groups actually know theft is involved in the transactions they're facilitating.