I'm extra confused, as I'd interpreted "Ships from and sold by Amazon" as "Amazon supplied the goods and will vouch for their validity", whereas "Sold by ISL" would have meant that ISL was on the ultimate hook should the goods prove to be counterfeit.
To be specific, Amazon co-mingles inventory between Amazon, Sold by Amazon, and its third party sellers that are Fulfilled by Amazon.
It doesn't matter who you buy from. The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box, the actual product could come from any seller, even if it's "Sold by Amazon".
Who you purchase from is purely an accounting thing, unless they manage their own stock and is not part of Prime.
If you would like assurance that the goods you purchased actually us genuine, you have to shop from other retailers.
They don't co-mingle inventory on everything, it varies from product to product (although the majority are indeed co-mingled). While there's no visible way to tell if a product is co-mingled, Amazon support is able to look it up. Whenever I'm buying an item that I would be unhappy with a counterfeit (so anything expensive, electronic, or that goes in my mouth or body) I contact Amazon support by live chat and ask them about that particular item. It generally takes about one minute of my time, spread over half an hour as they chase things down and escalate -- probably ends up costing them a heck of a lot more in support costs than they make on the item, but perhaps if it costs them enough they'll just expose the info?
B&H and Adorama are increasingly my go-tos for anything with microchips. They've both branched out from photography to A/V gear to tech goods generally.
I run my list in the opposite order. Prices are generally just as good and I prefer to support those I trust first. Actually before I get to amazon I will search for small specialized vendors that might be more expensive but the staff actually knows something about their product, and so the web recommendations are good (they will of course recommend what they sell over an equally good brand they don't, but they are selling the good brands)
Alot of people outside of news/tech circles do trust Amazon. They're literally the most popular retailer, of course people trust them. Anecdotes are everywhere about inventory co-mingling being such a mega problem, but I think opinions are getting repeated and amplified by a vocal minority.
Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.
I trust Amazon to the extent that I am okay with them storing my card information. Their security practices in that regard are pretty damn good. (I do not trust Google with my payment card info. I do not want them to have anything on file they could trigger charges against, either by accident or through their many dark patterns.)
I do not trust Amazon when it comes to vendor or marketplace management. They have an enormous fake review problem, and the probability for counterfeits is, in some categories, unacceptably high.
Meaning: I don't buy any big ticket items from them. I'm still happily doing mostly recurring purchases from Amazon, for product categories where the chance of getting mislabelled junk is practically zero.
Well, I think people do trust amazon, they don't trust all the other companies on amazon. But unless I'm misunderstanding, this move means that people can't buy from amazon any longer. They have to buy everything from all the other vendors on amazon. The problem being, of course, that these other sellers may or may not scam you. (I'm not 100% about that interpretation of this move, but that's what it sounds like? Lawyers may want to chime in.)
So under these conditions, I would strongly urge people not to purchase from amazon's site, because it's gonna be essentially 100% potential scams. They should move to target or walmart. At least until those stores are also obliged to do the same thing. (Since they have the same fulfillment business models I'm assuming they'd be next? But they should be safe for now.) After the law gets to them too, people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items that won't cause too much disappointment if you get scammed. Because online shopping will become the wild west with every transaction being backed only by caveat emptor.
Oh Amazon has been selling garbage for years, but only for “commodity” items that the average user can’t test for quality.
Example: All coin cells (regardless of brand/seller) on Amazon are fake. These cells last 2-4 months (long enough that most people won’t bother to contact support) when the same model from an electronics distributor like Mouser lasts ~8 years as advertised.
> people may want to limit online shopping only to small ticket items
Oddly enough, I’ve had much better luck with big ticket items on Amazon since they’re much harder to fake and because they get special treatment (brand registration) from Amazon. But for small stuff Amazon is just AliExpress with faster shipping.
Thanks for the heads-up. I've always accepted that Ethernet cables do what they say on the wire, but now that you mention it, it seems ruthlessly easy to print whatever on the cable and give you something that will only transfer at a fraction of the bandwidth.
I'm slowly collecting a list of things that I need to buy only from genuine suppliers.
“Co-mingling” doesn’t somehow make counterfeiting easier - Amazon uses chaotic storage such that more than one sku-receipt will never go into the same pickface (co-mingling isn’t talking about mixing the same SKUs together, it’s mixing all SKUs together but tracking them by location).
Amazon can still locate all products of a particular SKU received from vendor X on a particular date, or know what receipt your sale was from.
Amazon may be able to determine the source of stickerless comingled inventory like this, but stickerless comingled inventory is treated as interchangeable on the fulfillment side. So if I order an item "Sold by ACME, Fufilled by Amazon" I may receive a copy that was shipped in by "Cyberdyne".
Amazon's tracking will internally tell them I got an item that was sent in by Cyberdyne, but they don't tell me about that.
This as a customer means I can order an item from ACME, that I know is extremely careful about not selling counterfeits, but end up getting a counterfeit, because Cyberdyne is super sloppy, and the one I got actually came from Cyberdyne. Even though amazon can track this internally, as a customer I have no idea the one I got came from Cyberdyne instead of ACME.
For some products the counterfeits may look the same, and even function the same, but cut a lot of safety corners etc to be cheaper to make, and I might only know that I got a counterfeit after it catches on fire, and burns my house down, possibly losing family in the process.
At this point if I complain Amazon can look it up, and point the finger at Cyberdyne, but it is a bit too late by then.
If ACME instead went with the stickered non-comingled option, I will get one of the items that ACME actually sent in, even though they might need to send it from a further away warehouse, if the closer ones only have the comingled stuff.
Absolutely true - but it's the sales strategy that is 'co-mingled'.
I was just responding to OP's point that implied that this is a side-effect of how the inventory is physically stored, rather than a decision on sales strategy by Amazon.
I'm not GP, but I just ordered from a reputable seller online.
They're closed for several weeks because the warehouse staff is out due to COVID. Who knows when I'll get the several hundred dollars of stuff I ordered. I'd already have it if I had ordered from Amazon.
Ive also heard that they no longer comingle products multiple times so I am not sure what to believe anymore. Lots of people have told me that this is old data (in regards to Ships and Sold by Amazon).
My understanding is that the support is exactly why you'd buy Sold By Amazon - for others, the 3p seller might be the one to negotiate returns, while SBA is returnable no-questions-asked within the due date they list.
There is also this Financial Times article from 2019: https://archive.md/kfABj - quote from Amazon spokesman:
> The system is purposefully designed so that similar products are not placed next to or near each other, and Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit.
I guess the confusion came from the name "commingled inventory" - Amazon seems to have recognized this recently and is now referencing this feature as "virtual tracking" instead (quote from the above help pages):
> Commingling is a term that was sometimes used to refer to virtual tracking. However, virtual tracking is a more accurate term, because we trace the source of eligible products throughout the fulfillment process. Identical items from different suppliers are not stored together.
I may be misunderstanding the links you're providing, but to me they only appear to say that Amazon is aware of the original source of each unit sold. They don't appear to say that a consumer has any control over which bin a product is pulled from. i.e., A consumer may choose to buy a product "sold and shipped by Amazon" and it may get fulfilled from a bin supplied by a third-party. The Financial Times article you linked to seems to confirm this.
> Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
For whatever reason, I have noticed this getting dramatically worse over the past couple of years. Almost all "5-star" reviewed products are filled with top reviews of 1-star reporting fake products. And because of Amazon's overly generous return policy, there's a lot of used products sold as well.
Buying off of Amazon feels like there's a high probability you'll get a used or counterfeit/fake product or both.
I have been reducing what I buy on Amazon because I just don't trust it.
Fakes are definitely more prevalent in certain categories, for sure. Batteries, power adapters, flash drives and SD cards are probably the biggest off the top of my head. Probably because they’re relatively simple devices that are easy to manufacture to a lower quality standard than the genuine item and will usually at least superficially appear to work when received by the average buyer.
> Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
That is a very generalized statement. I have bought hundreds products shipped and sold by Amazon and never had an issue with authenticity. I'm sure it happens, but I'm willing to guess it is pretty rare and Amazon has always been quick to refund products that are shipped and sold by Amazon.
My own experience of counterfeits includes, of all things, water filters. The packaging was perfect, but the filters literally wouldn't fit without modification.
I gave up after the third time and went back to buying from brick-and-mortar, and haven't had a problem since.
Between my experience and reports from others, I'd say that you've been extraordinarily lucky.
And I used to buy SD cards and Mac adapters from Amazon for work and it was about half of them products were fake until I finally stopped and got them from cdw. They would fight me every time I brought it up. It is well know issue glad you never dealt with it.
Batteries (as energy storage devices) are a great example of something I wouldn't want to be counterfeit. A poorly made battery has a better chance of starting a fire. Probably not going to happen with AAAs, but larger cells like 18650s might be worth a worry.
I probably wouldn't care about a mouse trap though, as long as the mechanism doesn't store enough energy to burn my house down.
My friends and I all bought fake Bose headphones from a shady dealer in China (in person), and the $50 knockoffs sounded exactly as good as the real $600 ones. The only way to tell there was anything wrong was by the fact that they all broke down within a few months.
Still, for value conscious people it’s fine. My dad was really into shortwave radio and other stuff in the 80s.
He’d buy “grey market” gear from stores in NYC that were legit, but intended for Latin America or other markets. Sometimes the fit and finish would be interior or connectors would be lower quality, but the price was right and an 80% product is better than nothing.
If I know I’m buying a “Rolox”, that’s one thing. If you sell and price a Rolex that is not, that’s a problem.
I've used Amazon all of once so I don't know anything. What do you mean really need genuine?
Let's say you wanted to buy an iPhone or a Canon SLR camera or a Lenovo laptop. You can't buy these from Amazon? What happens if you try? Will they ship you a block of wood in a box, or a myPhone? And won't refund it?
Consumable goods, eg. Toothpaste are things that you may want to be genuine. Sure it may say "Crest", but did it come from the Crest factory, or did a no-name company drop ship fake crest toothpaste to an amazon warehouse, and now their product is co-mingled with genuine crest?
(this is an example, you can google for real stories)
To add, there are stores of extreme coupons who will products (again, lets use toothpaste) from brick and mortar stores on discount, then sell them on amazon. Or buying returns/expired food products from brick and mortar stores, then selling into amazon.
Again, the issue in all this is co-mingling because any genuine sourced products compete with these less reputable ones.
We are not talking here about laptops or cameras. The usual targets for counterfeiting are things like USB cables or headphones.
They might come without packaging, but then so do the geniune ones sometimes.
They look normal to non-expert eye, but then when you use them they either break quickly, or whilst functiontal are not as effective as a genuine item(worse sound quality, slower charging, slower transfer speed etc.).
Okay I didn't realize that was implied with the context. So you can't use Amazon for buying genuine USB cables, headphones, or toothpaste. But laptops, cameras and phones are okay.
The issue is that there's huge incentives for vendors to counterfeit and few incentives for stores to deeply spot-check their middle-layer resellers or the stories they're told from wholesale sources, many of whom are in another country (with all the associated barriers of communication, documentation, and even good ol' fashioned "playing the foreign sucker for their money"). When nobody is actually getting hurt, the incentives to make sure everyone is playing by the rules are very low (and the benefits for cheating, i.e. making win-win deals that bring costs down while bringing revenue up for the merchant and some counterfeit outfit at the cost of lost potential sales to the brand owner, are high).
My recommendation would be to treat all stores with a long supply chain as sus until proven otherwise.
I’ve been bitten by so much garbage bought on Amazon, including clear counterfeits that I had to charge back on the credit card, that we have a rule in our house to never ever buy anything in that site even if it’s the only site offering it.
> Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.
Untrue. Stick to SBA, and it's like any other retail store with customary supply chain integrity.
FBA can be anything because Amazon didn't purchase the goods, they're only warehousing and delivering them.
SBA and each FBA are separate bins by design. The commingling of different SBA/FBA sources at the same ASIN (item on the website the customer buys from) would be a different issue.
Amazon's inventory is co-mingled. So, the warehouse has the widgets sourced by Amazon itself to sell, by the widget maker themselves on their own store on Amazon, by a small chain store in one state to sell, and by random dude who might possibly be importing counterfeits to sell on his fulfilled by Amazon store. All of those widgets are in a big pile and all have the same packaging and barcodes. Whether you buy from random dude or Amazon, you're getting a random one from the pile.
Learn something new (and important) every day.