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> they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products What made this all particularly insidious is that Amazon not only commingled inventory, but

> they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products What made this all particularly insidious is that Amazon not only commingled inventory, but actively refused to track where inventory came from. This meant you only needed one fraudulent seller to poison the entire inventory pool and there was no way know where the bad product came from because Amazon actively avoided being able to track it. That's the aspect of it that always felt particularly malicious to me.

FredPret 1y ago
The bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in. Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items. You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical. If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  Amazon has many requirements for vendors. Having them tag SKUs with a vendor id would be minor. I stopped buying from "fullfilled by Amazon" as the level of fraud was just insane.
- josefx 1y ago
  > Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item. Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?
  - FredPret 1y ago
    These things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up. But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!
  - SteveNuts 1y ago
    I thought Walmart has been doing this with their vendors for many years
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    I read it as "For items in the ten to twenty dollar range, its not worth adding a vendor label" and I don't suppose its the cost of the sticker, but how much longer does it take the warehouse worker to take it from a shelf and put it in a box if they add a sticker to every item? +5% ? +10% ? +100% ? (It takes very little time to put an item in a box, I could see adding a sticker doubling this...)
- diab0lic 1y ago
  > or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical. The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    My understanding is every individual item is tracked in an Amazon warehouse - so Amazon knows that the 67th item in a box from supplier X was shipped to user Y. They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.
- Retric 1y ago
  They didn’t need to actually track things internally, add a sticker or even have someone stamp the vender code to the item listing the vendor when you’re adding the item to the bins and if the customer complains you can likely use that sticker to track who added the item after the fact. Critically you don’t need some 6 digit number for vender code, every new vender for a given item gets a number for that item, software can remember the relevant mapping. If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out. Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - oidar 1y ago
      https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28201/vendor-vs-vender-in-standard-american-english https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28201/vendor-vs-... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      They are both correct. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vender https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vendor https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vendor
    - defrost 1y ago
      Vender has been a published word since at least 1596 according to the full Oxford English Dictionary. You can find it in Francis Bacon's The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (printed 1630) - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oldelawebookes/28/ https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oldelawebookes/28/ That said, vendor has become more and more the standard spelling in legal texts.
- gonzobonzo 1y ago
  This always confused me. You have a bottle of glue sold by company X. Then you have 87 different people "buying" the glue in bulk, having it sent to Amazon, and selling it on Amazon as if it comes from their store: Buying option 1: Company X glue from store A. Buying option 2: Company X glue from store B. Buying option 3: Company X glue from store C. ...etc. But then Amazon says, "actually, these are all the exact same bottles of glue, so we'll thrown them all into the same bin, and no matter what "store" the people buy them from, we'll just grab them out and send them to the customer. Now even without counterfeits, this is weird. What exactly is the point of store A, B, C, etc.? Company X sends the bottles to Amazon, they get put in one big pile, you buy them on Amazon, and Amazon takes them out of that one big pile and sends them to you. The only thing purpose of the "stores" when you co-mingle inventory seems to be: 1. Plausible deniability for counterfeits. Hey, they told us they bought it from company X, we had no way of knowing they didn't. 2. Getting money from people trying to get rich quick in the marketplace. Some people will try all sorts of cuts to boost their Amazon sales in the hope that it will pay off later.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    The reality is more complicated than you are assuming. A shockingly large number of vendors grossly mismanage their supply chains such that Company X can actually be legitimately undercut by reseller Company A on Amazon even though Company X produces the product! The mechanics of it are convoluted but legit, and there is a huge ecosystem of companies that arbitrage the legions of producers that are bad at managing their global supply chains. Amazon has an interest in allowing these resellers of legitimate products to exist because it pushes down prices from the primary vendors, lowering prices for the customer. The primary vendors end up competing against themselves indirectly but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is the milieu in which counterfeit products exist. If the producers of these products were consistently competent at managing their supply chains it would be much less of an issue because it would clear the field of resellers arbitraging the mismanagement, leaving only Company X and the counterfeiters which is a much easier problem to solve because you don’t have to worry about banning legitimate resellers. But that isn’t where we are.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
  Russia has a working system that tracks retail sales of individual cans of beer, bottles of milk and such. Initially it was introduced to track things like shoes and furs that were massively counterfeited, but then expanded to include other goods. So now in a grocery store you use it, for example, for all milk products (milk, cheese, ice cream, etc.), vegetable oil, beer, mineral water. Technically you just scan a different barcode (QR code). There's also an app you can use to scan the thing and get more information, such as the exact producer. The general idea was to fight counterfeit goods, but as a side effect it also enforces shelf life rules or may help to find a drugstore that has a specific drug. So it is possible and not that expensive even as a country-wide system for goods that cost around $1 (a typical can of beer).
  - paradox460 1y ago
    Fwiw this was the original vision of upc
  - orthoxerox 1y ago
    And yes, it does have additional codes for larger-scale packages. So a pack of cigarettes gets its own code, a carton gets its own code, a box of cartons gets its own code. A wholesaler can just scan the box and the system updates the status of every pack inside.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    What am I missing about this? Couldn't the scammer just replicate the QR code of a legit shop? I thought the point of counterfeit goods was to fool you into buying them instead of the real thing. I guess part of the process would have to be verifying that every shipment of goods received was accurately tracked from a valid "ship from" address, but I have to imagine there's a lot of common warehousing in use for bulk goods. I'm not understanding how the QR code helps solve that. Maybe a unique bar code per-item that includes some private hash information that makes it unique to the producer? Sort of an electronic signature for physical goods? Then if there's a centralized database, copying the QR codes wouldn't do much good. You might be able to slip in one if it is sold before the real version. But each subsequent copy could be caught.
  - 1y ago
- account42 1y ago
  How much do you think printing a barcode costs???
bapak 1y ago
> Amazon actively avoided being able to track it. Is that real? I find it hard to believe that Amazon effectively accepted stock from third parties "as is" and lost track of where it came from. It's more likely that they don't tell you than they don't track.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That’s a worse situation then because Amazon would then be intentionally withholding data in counterfeiting investigations.
  - kotaKat 1y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me. Amazon knows where every item is in its FC and knows the motions of every item's placement, from the grand scheme of things. It's not that hard to then track back from an order exactly what bin or tote or shelf the item was pulled from, then look at what shipment(s) that bin's items came from to figure out what supplier it came from. They know the counterfeit goods came in and were stowed to bin XYZ and they know that someone pulled from XYZ...
- mcherm 1y ago
  We know that they would not provide such tracking for those conducting fraud investigations. You can believe they intentionally didn't track the source or that they intentionally refused to share the information to root out fraud; either one is a very bad look for Amazon. I'm glad to see this change.
- AnssiH 1y ago
  No, it is not true, just a common myth. In the seller documentation they say they can track the source of commingled inventory - they achieve this by never putting them on the same physical shelf location. Also mentioned by Amazon spokesman in e.g. this article: https://archive.is/ra6RT https://archive.is/ra6RT > Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit
  - 0manrho 1y ago
fuzzehchat 1y ago
Amazon don't check returns either. It's a nightmare if you use their FOB service. We've had product returned, not checked and then shipped to another customer who then pputs in a claim because they didn't get what they ordered - because Amazon didn't check the return. Amazon then claim you're selling counterfeit goods. Entirely why we no longer use their service and ship direct for amazon orders. Some people still try the trick but we always put a claim in and amazon after they automatically give a refund to the buyer, and Amazon pay it. So Amazon pay twice. Maybe the cost of just accepting that loss is less than having someone check the return.
privatelypublic 1y ago
They know where every item is- if not, how do FBA folks get their stuff back?
- woleium 1y ago
  Its co-mingled, so you may not your stuff back, you just get similar stuff back. That is if you pay to get it back. It’s usually cheaper to let them flog it off cheap on prime day

FredPret 1y ago

The bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in. Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items. You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical. If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.

PeterStuer 1y ago
Amazon has many requirements for vendors. Having them tag SKUs with a vendor id would be minor. I stopped buying from "fullfilled by Amazon" as the level of fraud was just insane.
josefx 1y ago
> Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item. Really? Adding a unique ID at the point of entry costs that much?
- FredPret 1y ago
  These things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up. But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!
- SteveNuts 1y ago
  I thought Walmart has been doing this with their vendors for many years
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  I read it as "For items in the ten to twenty dollar range, its not worth adding a vendor label" and I don't suppose its the cost of the sticker, but how much longer does it take the warehouse worker to take it from a shelf and put it in a box if they add a sticker to every item? +5% ? +10% ? +100% ? (It takes very little time to put an item in a box, I could see adding a sticker doubling this...)
diab0lic 1y ago
> or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical. The headline seems to indicate that the geniuses in logistics at Amazon have figured out how to make it practical!
- londons_explore 1y ago
  My understanding is every individual item is tracked in an Amazon warehouse - so Amazon knows that the 67th item in a box from supplier X was shipped to user Y. They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.
Retric 1y ago
They didn’t need to actually track things internally, add a sticker or even have someone stamp the vender code to the item listing the vendor when you’re adding the item to the bins and if the customer complains you can likely use that sticker to track who added the item after the fact. Critically you don’t need some 6 digit number for vender code, every new vender for a given item gets a number for that item, software can remember the relevant mapping. If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out. Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - oidar 1y ago
    https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28201/vendor-vs-vender-in-standard-american-english https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28201/vendor-vs-... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    They are both correct. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vender https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vender https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vendor https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vendor
  - defrost 1y ago
    Vender has been a published word since at least 1596 according to the full Oxford English Dictionary. You can find it in Francis Bacon's The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (printed 1630) - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oldelawebookes/28/ https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oldelawebookes/28/ That said, vendor has become more and more the standard spelling in legal texts.
gonzobonzo 1y ago
This always confused me. You have a bottle of glue sold by company X. Then you have 87 different people "buying" the glue in bulk, having it sent to Amazon, and selling it on Amazon as if it comes from their store: Buying option 1: Company X glue from store A. Buying option 2: Company X glue from store B. Buying option 3: Company X glue from store C. ...etc. But then Amazon says, "actually, these are all the exact same bottles of glue, so we'll thrown them all into the same bin, and no matter what "store" the people buy them from, we'll just grab them out and send them to the customer. Now even without counterfeits, this is weird. What exactly is the point of store A, B, C, etc.? Company X sends the bottles to Amazon, they get put in one big pile, you buy them on Amazon, and Amazon takes them out of that one big pile and sends them to you. The only thing purpose of the "stores" when you co-mingle inventory seems to be: 1. Plausible deniability for counterfeits. Hey, they told us they bought it from company X, we had no way of knowing they didn't. 2. Getting money from people trying to get rich quick in the marketplace. Some people will try all sorts of cuts to boost their Amazon sales in the hope that it will pay off later.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The reality is more complicated than you are assuming. A shockingly large number of vendors grossly mismanage their supply chains such that Company X can actually be legitimately undercut by reseller Company A on Amazon even though Company X produces the product! The mechanics of it are convoluted but legit, and there is a huge ecosystem of companies that arbitrage the legions of producers that are bad at managing their global supply chains. Amazon has an interest in allowing these resellers of legitimate products to exist because it pushes down prices from the primary vendors, lowering prices for the customer. The primary vendors end up competing against themselves indirectly but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is the milieu in which counterfeit products exist. If the producers of these products were consistently competent at managing their supply chains it would be much less of an issue because it would clear the field of resellers arbitraging the mismanagement, leaving only Company X and the counterfeiters which is a much easier problem to solve because you don’t have to worry about banning legitimate resellers. But that isn’t where we are.
Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
Russia has a working system that tracks retail sales of individual cans of beer, bottles of milk and such. Initially it was introduced to track things like shoes and furs that were massively counterfeited, but then expanded to include other goods. So now in a grocery store you use it, for example, for all milk products (milk, cheese, ice cream, etc.), vegetable oil, beer, mineral water. Technically you just scan a different barcode (QR code). There's also an app you can use to scan the thing and get more information, such as the exact producer. The general idea was to fight counterfeit goods, but as a side effect it also enforces shelf life rules or may help to find a drugstore that has a specific drug. So it is possible and not that expensive even as a country-wide system for goods that cost around $1 (a typical can of beer).
- paradox460 1y ago
  Fwiw this was the original vision of upc
- orthoxerox 1y ago
  And yes, it does have additional codes for larger-scale packages. So a pack of cigarettes gets its own code, a carton gets its own code, a box of cartons gets its own code. A wholesaler can just scan the box and the system updates the status of every pack inside.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  What am I missing about this? Couldn't the scammer just replicate the QR code of a legit shop? I thought the point of counterfeit goods was to fool you into buying them instead of the real thing. I guess part of the process would have to be verifying that every shipment of goods received was accurately tracked from a valid "ship from" address, but I have to imagine there's a lot of common warehousing in use for bulk goods. I'm not understanding how the QR code helps solve that. Maybe a unique bar code per-item that includes some private hash information that makes it unique to the producer? Sort of an electronic signature for physical goods? Then if there's a centralized database, copying the QR codes wouldn't do much good. You might be able to slip in one if it is sold before the real version. But each subsequent copy could be caught.
- 1y ago
account42 1y ago
How much do you think printing a barcode costs???

bapak 1y ago

> Amazon actively avoided being able to track it. Is that real? I find it hard to believe that Amazon effectively accepted stock from third parties "as is" and lost track of where it came from. It's more likely that they don't tell you than they don't track.

hnlmorg 1y ago
That’s a worse situation then because Amazon would then be intentionally withholding data in counterfeiting investigations.
- kotaKat 1y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me. Amazon knows where every item is in its FC and knows the motions of every item's placement, from the grand scheme of things. It's not that hard to then track back from an order exactly what bin or tote or shelf the item was pulled from, then look at what shipment(s) that bin's items came from to figure out what supplier it came from. They know the counterfeit goods came in and were stowed to bin XYZ and they know that someone pulled from XYZ...
mcherm 1y ago
We know that they would not provide such tracking for those conducting fraud investigations. You can believe they intentionally didn't track the source or that they intentionally refused to share the information to root out fraud; either one is a very bad look for Amazon. I'm glad to see this change.
AnssiH 1y ago
No, it is not true, just a common myth. In the seller documentation they say they can track the source of commingled inventory - they achieve this by never putting them on the same physical shelf location. Also mentioned by Amazon spokesman in e.g. this article: https://archive.is/ra6RT https://archive.is/ra6RT > Amazon can also track the original seller of each unit
- 0manrho 1y ago

fuzzehchat 1y ago

Amazon don't check returns either. It's a nightmare if you use their FOB service. We've had product returned, not checked and then shipped to another customer who then pputs in a claim because they didn't get what they ordered - because Amazon didn't check the return. Amazon then claim you're selling counterfeit goods. Entirely why we no longer use their service and ship direct for amazon orders. Some people still try the trick but we always put a claim in and amazon after they automatically give a refund to the buyer, and Amazon pay it. So Amazon pay twice. Maybe the cost of just accepting that loss is less than having someone check the return.

privatelypublic 1y ago

They know where every item is- if not, how do FBA folks get their stuff back?

woleium 1y ago
Its co-mingled, so you may not your stuff back, you just get similar stuff back. That is if you pay to get it back. It’s usually cheaper to let them flog it off cheap on prime day