This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.

Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.

Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.

In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.

The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.

Occasionally the knockoffs are better than the "real" thing.

I once had a fleet of HP servers that had storage parts constantly failing. HP techs couldn't do anything useful about it, they just kept replacing the parts with authentic HP replacements.

Then HP ran out of the parts, probably due to the failure rates. Out of desperation we bought some cheap knockoffs to keep things running until the HP parts came back into stock. Those cheap knockoffs worked perfectly and were reliable, zero issues. Much better than the HP parts. We ended up buying enough of those parts to replace all the HP parts.

Many times the expensive official parts are literally the cheap knockoffs with more steps. And sometimes high-quality knockoffs are competing with the low-quality branded versions.

There would be enormous value in being able to trace the true provenance and supply chain for everything you can buy. It would be extremely challenging due to the incentives to misrepresent this information.

> follow regulation

This one bit me recently when I bought a package of budget light fixtures (in Canada, from amazon.ca) and then my licensed electrician informed me that he wouldn't be able to install them as they didn't have a CSA or UL mark. (edit: originally I had mis-recalled and said CE here)

To their credit, Amazon did allow me to return them without penalty, and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use and even then you are risking your home's insurance coverage.

> You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller

That is assuming the component is even available locally or from a responsible seller. I live in a small city (half a million people). It is often impossible to find parts locally even for popular products that were purchased locally. Then there are parts where it is impossible to find official replacements, either because it is outside of the product's support windows, or because the replacement parts were never available to start with.

For some kinds of things, I don't have a local store that sells it. Maybe that's less of an issue if you live in big city, but not everyone does.

They also need to fix the problem of (good) reviews for one product getting transferred to another (lower quality) product.

Not seeing the connection.

In "non-secular times" people as a whole were far less mobile, so they grew up and built connections around the same people, and any connections to the wider world were very low-bandwidth if they existed at all. So they trusted the people they were near because they were around them constantly, and also tended to resist change.

I think you are conflating religious values with how things were when people mostly lived among the same people for most of their lives and didn't have modern communication methods that brought the whole world (or an appearance thereof which is what modern social media is) to their face.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that secularism is the cause of counterfeit goods on Amazon? Or am I reading you wrong?

> The time of retailers being 'honest' is over.

First, I'm not sure it ever started. Second, this article is about moving towards honesty.

Worked with a guy that used this to his advantage. He sold CD's and DVD's through FBA. He would get them "new enough" looking via buffing them out (often making them unplayable), shrinkwrapping them, and then hope whomever got them wasn't him that got the commission for that sale and instead the person who bought "from him" got one of the actual new ones. He made a killing off of this since "used" inventory was incredibly cheap for a whole pallet of them.

There was some overhead to commingling once it got extended to FBA, because in order to increase commingling they did attempt to track inventory provenance information even on commingled inventory.

My first job out of college in 2013 was working at Amazon on one of the teams that was implementing inventory commingling at the warehouse level, and my first big project was implementing this process into the receiving software, which is when inventory arrives at warehouses from vendor/seller trucks and employees scan everything to make database records that lead to paying for the goods. Note: in Amazon lingo "vendor" means a provider of goods that are legally purchased and owned by Amazon in the warehouse, while "sellers" are FBA sellers that maintain ownership of their goods and basically rent Amazon's warehouse services.

The big software undertaking was determining, at inventory receive time, whether we trusted the seller enough to allow their inventory to be commingled with others. If yes we would be "virtually track" the provenance: store in the database a record of the vendor, but if the item became commingled (according to UPC scans as it moves around the warehouse) with other sellers' inventory, blur the information so as to not falsely attribute provenance when it was no longer known. The whole project was based off the cost:benefit analysis that the efficiency and customer experience benefits outweighed the cost of not being able to attribute damage to the correct vendors (particularly the fact that you could ship a customer a product from the closest warehouse that it had it, instead of transshipping it from the warehouse that had the one owned by the person they bought it from).

In cases where sellers were not trusted enough to commingle there were alternate processes that were supposed to track their items individually; the most granular was "LPN" receive, license-plate-number, where every product got an individual UPC to distinguish it from all others. This was borrowed from Zappos, whose one warehouse in Vegas was initially the only one who used this process; I was told that was because the online shoe business heavily relied on letting customers do loads of returns and so it was implemented out of necessity early on. One of our projects was rolling LPN out to more of the North American network. But it was a lot more expensive (in the stickers, labor, data management, and picking inefficiency) so it was dispreferred whenever possible.

At the time the whole commingling initiative was regarded to be a big win for both Amazon and customers. It was fairly janky from the beginning, though, and I'm not at all surprised that sellers (and to a lesser extent vendors) began taking advantage of it as soon as they began to realize how it worked. There were a lot of initiatives around the time I left to provide better accountability in the whole process, but it is ultimately an arms race between Amazon and the merchants and my impression is that for many years Amazon was losing.

It is amusing that they're ending it. I never heard how things were going after I left, but had the impression externally that it was ending up being a disaster, and knowing how it works on the inside it's not a surprise. In hindsight trusting FBA sellers to not become essentially malevolent actors seems comically naive.

Or also signal that they've learnt about exactly how many of us stopped using Amazon because we got tired of receiving counterfeit products because of the commingling...

I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.

To the contrary. At least in my area, there are more items with 1-day shipping than ever before.

A few years ago, most stuff was 2-day. Now most stuff is 1-day. And it's constantly popping up options for same-day too.

> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products

While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.

Of course. Businesses only change when you complain and vote with your money.

That’s not cynical, that’s the system working. And if you keep bringing your money, you are signaling it’s a little annoying but not it’s ultimately ok.

Or alternatively: they have reduced the expectations of "two day shipping" so much that they no longer need to try that hard (by commingling inventory) to actually meet them.

That wouldn’t be cynical at all! It would mean that the system works, albeit slowly.

The best we can hope for is a world where Amazon faces real financial pressure to prevent counterfeits. Thus far I haven’t seen much evidence this was happening, but this is a welcome sign.

I suspect this one is death by 1000 cuts as Amazon has distribution facilities everywhere and will be subject to state and even local laws concerning warranty, product safety, and trademark. You can't contract your way out of it, and defective and counterfeit product can even carry criminal liability depending on jurisdiction. Good move Amazon.

"Commingling" is such a great euphemism for fraudulent counterfeiting.

I can't count the number of times I've ordered a book from Amazon (1st party, Amazon as the seller) and received an obvious counterfeit, with fuzzy text and a poorly printed cover. On one occasion, the scanning/OCR process had missed most of one chapter, so there were just section headers, page numbers and blank pages.

Unfortunately publishers and manufacturers don't have a lot of leverage with Amazon. If there's pressure coming from somewhere, it must be coming from a regulatory body.

Amazon apparently credit full declared cost for the seller who delivered items to be comingled, and all responsibilities for the item are offloaded to whoever seller that would appear on customer invoices.

This means malicious sellers can deliver literal counterfeits to warehouses and externalize the consequences, down to angry 1-star reviews and disposal of returned counterfeit examples, to somebody else.

Good point. The screenshot says the new requirements are for inventory shipped to Amazon by sellers on or after March 31. So they're not cleaning up existing inventory, just changing the requirements for new stock. It'll probably take some time after that for older commingled inventory to all get sold off.

Amazon's assumption was that every box of "Apple AirPods 4" is the same, so it doesn't matter if you got the one sold directly from Apple or from some random reseller. They would just put them in the same bin, after all they are all the same product. Great for logistics because it doesn't matter if the closest fulfillment center has AirPods sold by Apple or "Office Partner Inc", they just ship you whatever is closest. Obviously this fails spectacularly if a seller ever lies about their product, but who would ever do such a thing

It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).

I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...

Because if they take Amazon to court, they no longer have a business. Amazon effectively is a large part of American retail, which they cannot afford to not be on.

Because your livelihood depends on Amazon not kicking you off of the platform, and suing them will 100% lead to the situation where they kick you out of the platform.

I'd assume that Amazon's Sellers Contract includes a fair bit of "heads we win, tails you lose" language.

If my grocery store held themselves out as a banana marketplace, carried boxes from a variety of different banana companies and told me to do my own research on which ones are good, sold me a box labeled Chiquita bananas that I couldn't open until I got home, and then after I purchased it, got home, and opened it, it was full of bananas from Shitty Rotten Banana Farms LLC with fake Chiquita stickers on them, that would be pretty crazy yeah.

I can't show up at the grocery store with a pick-up truck full of lettuce and say, "This is Dole lettuce, just put this on the Dole pile and give me the money".

Grocery stores have distribution trains from trusted vendors, with QC and regulatory oversight to defend them against the liability they are subject to if they sell a harmful product.

There is no way your grocery store has lettuce from two different vendors and isn’t labeling the difference.

You could wonder if the distributor is commingling. Milk production, probably. They’re taking responsibility for the quality of the final product, though.

Come on, even if that's true, it's obviously a very different situation.

For one thing, the grocery store is deciding what produce to stock and what suppliers to get it from. They can choose suppliers that have at least a minimum standard of quality. They don't just let anyone on the world slap a barcode on anything at all, claim it's a grapefruit, and put it into their stores.

For another, a large fraction of produce (though not all) is bought in person, and customers can see if it's obviously bad quality before buying it, unlike Amazon where all you have to go by is the product listing for the SKU.

Hands-on plus visual inspection of your avacado to assess quality is obviously different than knowing if your thunderbolt cable will work at all just by looking at the site so what are you even talking about?

Even then you’d buy the correct ISBN and receive an identical copy but clearly marked FOR SALE IN INDIA ONLY.

Just on a related note for anyone in college in this thread. Forgo the book fees or technology fees or whatever bullshit they wrap up in your tuition and go to dealoz.com. Buy the books you want to keep and rent the ones you don't. Save yourself.

Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.

I've made that decision before without LLMs too. If I had been Googling to find possibly relevant material instead of using LLMs to find possibly relevant material, I probably would have bought from Amazon.

With Googling the "figure out what is going wrong" part of solving the problem is more decoupled from the "figure out where to buy this thing" part. The first part involves Googling, looking at a bunch of results, finding a lot are not relevant, trying to refine the search, and repeating probably many times. After that time consuming process when I have finally decided that I needed a new cable I'd probably just go to Amazon without thinking about it.

I always have a little doubt when buying from Amazon because of commingling, but usually not enough to look deeper into it unless the product is something with a high risk of it.

With the LLM instead of Google I upfront described to it a lot of details of my equipment, how I was using it, what symptoms I was seeing, what diagnostic steps I'd taken and the results of those, and why I believe certain things that could cause such problems would not be applicable in my case.

It then finds all the stuff I would have found by Googling, but because it also has way more information from what I told it at the start it can eliminate a whole bunch of the irrelevant results, so I'm starting out way ahead of where I would be after a first Google. A little back and forth and I know what I need to buy.

At that point I'm still at the LLM screen. Since it is right there tossing in a final question about buying from Amazon vs Best Buy is trivial.

I'm not a frequent LLM user. I have yet to pay for any LLM. (I did have a year of free Perplexity Pro that Xfinity gave to its customers a little over a year ago, but when that expired I did not subscribe.

(There's a funny story there--when it expired and they tried to convince me to subscribe, I asked Perplexity if a subscription would be worth it. It told me that considering my usage patterns the free plan was perfectly fine for me and I should stick with that).

A lot of people now are using LLMs instead of or before traditional Google-style searches when they want information. Not just techies or early adopters. The are or are quickly becoming mainstream.

If they are recommending not buying from Amazon that might be something Amazon would want to address.

Yes, it is common knowledge, but you need to get that information from somewhere in the first place, and why not a LLM?

And sometimes, common knowledge may be wrong, so it doesn't hurt to use LLMs, search engines and other sources to confirm that. Maybe you could discover that Best Buy has a problem with just the product you want, or any other reason. It doesn't hurt to spend a couple of minutes to double check and avoid losing $70.

You don't want to risk damaging an expensive phone/laptop/TV by plugging in the absolute cheapest unbranded cables/adaptors etc if there's a trustworthy brand available.

And with some electrical stuff, such as power strips and chargers, there might be safety issues/fire hazards too.

I never accepted it, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this specific issue long ago. Unfortunately I am not an Attorney General, so I can't bring criminal charges.

Prior to that it was stuffed with devices labeled only as "Apple iPhone Charger" so I'll take the million jibberish brands

Well sure. I mean their reputation for being able to deliver the thing I thought I was buying, rather than some counterfeit crap.

20 years of known fraud and then a "ok ok, but we decided that it was necessary to maximize our profits" is not a respectable timeline.

I tried to buy a cellphone case from the mfg. rather than Amazon.

Placed the order on their website, using their payment processing.

Delivered in an Amazon box by Amazon.

It was cheaper on Amazon as well. So I guess the joke is on me.

But not same-day. But even that's a bit iffy - I made a purchase from Amazon recently where they promised same-day delivery, on a Sunday no less! But it didn't actually arrive until Wednesday.