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Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally, it reminds me of eBay without the feedback score. I (and probably many of you) know / knew that when buying from eBay, the seller is really some person in Milwaukee, or a warehouse in New Jersey. I checked feedback ratings, history, and so on for each purchase. My mother knows this too.

In Amazon, I know to try to do this, but I don’t quite trust that what I bought came from who it claims to be. My mother has no concept of a “third party seller.” She just knows “it’s on Prime!”

IMHO the Amazon user experience tries to explicitly bury the 3rd party “bazaar” inside the “store,” and (some time ago) successfully managed to mingle them both into a single “marketplace.”

When I’m shopping for a 1978 printing of a book, I want the bazaar. When I’m shopping for a Chromecast, I want a “store.”

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The problem on Amazon is that it doesn't matter which vendor you buy from. If it's Amazon or 'fulfilled by Amazon', all the goods are intermingled. It's like going to the bazaar and paying your money to the trustworthy vendor but when it's time to get your item, a dog goes and grabs your item from any random vendor he sees that looks like the thing you bought.

You can request your products not be commingled, but by default, they are.

You should make it clear that this is on the merchant's side. Consumers are not allowed to choose where their purchases come from.

So interestingly - I’m an amazon shopper who’s unhappy occasionally. Where to I flee to? I want to buy a new cutting board. Where do I go? AliExpress? Walmart?

Local retail stores are always an option, plus you get to make your decision based on more than a grainy or staged picture and likely faked reviews.

More importantly, the customer can't tell if there is commingling.

There is very likely a person or group at Amazon that considers this a feature, at least when product commingling was introduced.

In an ideal world with no counterfeits, product commingling is an efficient thing to do, and if a product is commingled, there is no point in giving the 3rd-party seller top billing, the customer should feel like they're buying from Amazon.

True, but that's useless to the customer, who has no idea of whether commingling happens or not.

The other day I found myself needing printer toner. Amazon has a much better price, even when they sell it themselves, than local stores. But then I see that along with the "sold and shipped by amazon", which is still quite cheap, there are dozens of even cheaper options, some of which are fulfilled by Amazon anyway. So how do I know I am buying a new, original cartridge, an honest, quality refurb, or something that might print badly, or even damage my printer? Even the sold by Amazon merchandise, which I'd hope is original, could be comingled with a refilled knock off that might be indistinguishable out of the box, but will be very different in operations.

For something like this, as a consumer, I absolutely need to know the provenance of what I am purchasing, and the chance that there is commingling means I cannot buy something like this from Amazon, as I won't even be able to tell for a while.

Does Amazon do this in .de/.co.uk/.es/.fr presence, too, or is this only a .com thing?

.co.uk is the same.

Happens in .de too.

I've never heard of counterfeits (by 3rd party, fulfilled by amazon) being mixed with official products(sold by amazon) on .fr (yet). Any pointers on this being done for .de ?

Except that the dog is an exhausted human being wearing hand-tracking wristbands [ https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/31/amazon-patent-hand-track... ].

I've been working on tech inside the Amazon Fulfillment Centers got the last six years. I travel to different FCs every week in my current role. I have never heard of nor seen these wristbands.

Amazon has a tool to make it very easy for any idea anyone has to be patented. If I think it some crazy idea today, I can fill in a form describing it and lawyers will see if it's a valid patentable idea, then file the needed paperwork. Half the ideas may never be thought about again. That's where this came from, almost certainly.

Just because Amazon patents an idea doesn't mean it becomes real. It just means that if they ever decide to do it, they can't be sued by someone else who patented it.

Fair enough, but there have been quite a number of stories about working conditions in Amazon warehouses, and it doesn't sound particularly pleasant, hand-tracking wristbands or no.

On a side note IBM has a similar process for parenting things. We’ll obviously cover content that goes into a product, but we also allow more hypothetical ideas assuming they Pass a series of tests for value originality and some other points.

Exactly. My fiancé bought a board game from Amazon. Some of the die cuts for stuff weren’t quite lined up with the graphics. We contacted the creator and their answer was that it was counterfeit.

We left a bad review of the seller. I challenge you to find that - and even better - who’s to say it was that seller or another bad actor that polluted the stock?

There's also the mixing of reviews, even across models, which makes it much harder for the uneducated user to weed out the bad eggs. The entire Amazon user experience is designed to hide the mixed source nature of their inventory and instead make it appear like a unified storefront.

This phenomenon has ruined amazon reviews entirely.

Why does crap like this always happen? Can’t we not just keep the things that work well?

It's interesting looking at the reputation and practices of amazon and ebay over the past 20 years. Ebay started out with random individuals, and slowly became more reputable as it attracted large sellers of knock-off brands. Amazon started out with decent brands, then slowly became less reputable as they picked up large sellers of knock-off brands. At this point, they occupy essentially the same space, despite starting off with completely different bases.

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