Sometimes I may not care which seller it comes from and just want the closest one. Other times, I'm OK with waiting if it means I am more sure of what I'm getting.
There's not really a half-measure solution here. They either have to completely redo their supply chain management (not co-mingle) or it won't work. What pool of goods do they pull from to fulfill your order? Where do they store these goods?
Well, that separate pool of goods now has to be maintained.
How man separate piles from how many "trusted" suppliers do they create?
The probably should start doing something like this, but I don't think it's simple.
It's a similar problem to Facebook not being able to tame disinformation: how can a trust based system police maleficence at scale?
Even if you can't demonstrate it immediately, you can then start to bin out their stuff. High index that that seller is counterfeiting/selling it? Start un-mingling their stuff, internally - you don't -need- to physically verify authenticity, but if you're unmingling their stuff due to suspicion they're a bad actor and you keep getting complaints... probably a good sign.
> compounded by bad actors simply shifting identities
Identities have to keep getting paid. Start requiring ACH/EBT payments only for those actors (i.e. no more checks or whatever). They might be able to keep 'creating' identities - it might be harder to keep creating bank accounts.
http://www.smart-alliance.com/en/news_ms_2883.html
At this point, it's possible to put the on most/all commingled products and automatically verify authenticity.
How hard are those to fake, btw?
I would like Amazon to, effectively, offer that demon as an option, to guarantee the provenance of an order's items. Of course, it might work better to filter commingled items out at search time, if that's possible, or put a big warning banner up on the product or order page when you might get your item from another seller's inventory.
The difference between 1 fungible pile of a good spread out everywhere, and multiple distinct piles is enormous.
It's only a guess, but I would think the added expense wouldn't be that big of a deal. With popular products, they already have lots of units everywhere so it would very rarely be an issue. With other products, it is more likely to be an issue, but still not every time.