Re:Amazon and Google are on a collision course
by potatolicious on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @03:38PM
(#5676364)
The other big problem with buying computer parts on Amazon is that they have a massive gray market supply chain problem that Newegg seems to have been able to avoid.
Put more simply, Amazon's warehouses are filled with knockoff RAM chips, memory cards, and other such hard-to-identify components. Amazon isn't doing this deliberately, but your odds of getting bad RAM, HDD, or flash memory is really quite high.
It's been a while since I worked there - when I was there there was a big problem with inventory mixing. Third party merchants selling on Amazon would routinely ship items to Amazon warehouses to take advantage of Amazon's fulfillment process (this is known as Fulfillment By Amazon), and a huge amount of gray market goods were able to get into warehouses this way. Amazon's own supply chain integrity is, by itself, actually pretty good.
For a long time Amazon allowed these third party-sourced items to mix freely with the legitimate items they purchased themselves, and if you ordered the item (regardless of which merchant you ordered from) you'd be drawing from this shared pool. It was frustrating, and I'm not sure if they've fixed it yet.
Put more simply, Amazon's warehouses are filled with knockoff RAM chips, memory cards, and other such hard-to-identify components. Amazon isn't doing this deliberately, but your odds of getting bad RAM, HDD, or flash memory is really quite high.
It's been a while since I worked there - when I was there there was a big problem with inventory mixing. Third party merchants selling on Amazon would routinely ship items to Amazon warehouses to take advantage of Amazon's fulfillment process (this is known as Fulfillment By Amazon), and a huge amount of gray market goods were able to get into warehouses this way. Amazon's own supply chain integrity is, by itself, actually pretty good.
For a long time Amazon allowed these third party-sourced items to mix freely with the legitimate items they purchased themselves, and if you ordered the item (regardless of which merchant you ordered from) you'd be drawing from this shared pool. It was frustrating, and I'm not sure if they've fixed it yet.