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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Due to commingling counterfeiters don’t need to sell to customers as Amazon will simply substitute real products with fake ones. Effectively, any Amazon seller becomes a counterfeit channel and the counterfeiters get access to sell the real products to minimize returns and thus issues with credit cards etc.

This is obviously a horrible deal for the legit producer who also gets saddled with a terrible reputation.

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This is easily addressed by requiring your Amazon sellers to not use commingling. I've even seen a handful of companies that require their sellers not to use FBA.

>counterfeiters get access to sell the real products to minimize returns and thus issues with credit cards etc.

Not following. Amazon knows which unit was sold by which seller, so they can attribute returns to the correct seller even if was actually sold by another.

Only if the seller pays more to keep their products separate via stickering. Otherwise the seller’s products are commingled with other sellers’ products and it’s impossible to know which seller’s physical inventory was used to fulfill the order.

This is false. Amazon keeps them separate and knows which seller originally shipped in each unit.

A quick search turned up https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/how-to-prevent-com... suggesting products actually have been commingled and you need to replace stock with a different SKU label to opt out in the future.

Yes, once you have products in the program you can't recall those specific products - this should be obvious, because Amazon may have already shipped some or all of the actual products you sent in for someone else's sales.

However, that does not mean Amazon hasn't been keeping track. They explicitly say that they keep track of which seller originally shipped each item.

See https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...

Too many instances of this happening for this to be the case. Plenty of reports on this site and others stating they bought from the proper Amazon seller and still getting counterfeit product. I bought a SpyderCo knife "Ship and Sold by Amazon" that was an obvious fake. I just think Amazon doesn't care, they shipped a free replacement that happened to be legitimate.

>Plenty of reports on this site and others stating they bought from the proper Amazon seller and still getting counterfeit product.

That's entirely consistent with them tracking it. If you report that, they'll know who actually shipped it in and will punish them.

What sort of punishment are we talking about? They can't take back money they've already paid out. Do they throw away the rest of the products?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

Two things. First, your link describes various punishments suffered by "good guys": legitimate sellers who've built up a brand and product set over time, whose thin margins are destroyed by those punishments. The bad guys don't have to spend near as much money on their fake goods, so their margins aren't thin and these punishments are simply a cost of doing business. They also structure their Amazon relationship differently, with lots of different accounts and brands and products, so that any particular adverse event won't kill them.

Second, I don't see anywhere in that link where they're talking about commingling and its related issues. I think that was already a well-publicized issue back in December when this link was published, so I assume that they didn't mention it in order to curry favor with either Amazon or with the various entrepreneurs in the Amazon ecosystem who agreed to be quoted. This link certainly doesn't establish that malignant comminglers are ever punished in any way.

It's a lot harder to open multiple accounts than it used to be. They now require ID verification on every account.

You just asked me how Amazon punishes sellers, so I provided some examples. You can find many more by searching.

Obviously the sellers that were actually selling counterfeits aren't going to be doing interviews.

I believe they know how many units you've sent, and how many sold units to attribute to your listing. So they can calculate how many units they owe you. But I don't believe they know where to find them. If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you, and they wouldn't need to replace barcodes to stop commingling.

1. You're wrong, and I linked to an Amazon page that explicitly says that. "For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit." from the link above.

2. " If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you" no, because they may have sold already. If I ship 100 units in, sell 50 myself, then someone else sells 50 and Amazon ships my units for their sales, then Amazon can't return my units for me, even though they know exactly which 100 orders my units were shipped for.

They say they can, but they don't act like they believe it. If I had to guess, I'd say new inventory might now be on separate shelves but some existing inventory is permanently in doubt.

On what basis are you saying they aren't acting like it?

And they've been saying that for years, and basically nobody keeps inventory for years because Amazon charges huge fees for doing so. If your position is they switched over years ago then it's not an issue now.

You don't know whose units were used to fill an order for your listing. You can't blacklist scammers. You don't know how many of your units remain in stock, and you can't get just those back.

If every lot of units were individually tracked, why would barcodes even matter?

Who's you? If you mean Amazon, then they know. Individual sellers don't know, correct.

If you as a seller want to be able to get the same units shipped back, then don't use the manufacturer barcode program.

Barcodes matter so the warehouse can scan and know which product has been shipped in. Every product in the system requires a barcode of some sort.

Amazon may eventually catch on, but it’s a ticking clock until they get paid and disappear.

Day A, they ship X fakes to Amazon. Day B, they sell at slightly below market rates to sell as quickly as possible. Importantly as they have the lowest price they should get the bulk of orders. Selling off a mix of real units from others and fake units from themselves.

If they are a fairly low percentage of the market it could take a while for any significant number of their fakes to be shipped. Now it’s a race if they get paid by Amazon before Amazon catches on.

Obviously this works best if the fakes are close to the real product so it takes a while before a significant number of people notice. Think functional but substandard USB cables etc.

It's not randomly chosen which units get shipped. It has to do with location, ownership, risk, and other things.

If a brand new seller is selling they're likely not to commingle their high risk products until they've proven themselves.

It's not nearly as easy as you think.

Some categories have commingling turned off completely.

> It's not nearly as easy as you think.

Sure, but it does not have to be successful to harm the reputation of a manufacturer. The issue is it’s a cat and mouse game with some actual winners which get others to try and do the same.

That's not a reason to avoid selling any units on Amazon. The only brands this may be relevant to is very high end luxury brands, some of which avoid Amazon sales for that reason.

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