> During Wednesday’s presentation in Seattle, Amazon executives said the economics of commingling no longer worked. With the company’s logistics network now capable of storing products closer to customers, the speed advantage of pooled inventory has diminished.
Sounds more like they were losing market to other retailers.
I’m astounded, this has been a problem for 10+ years and I just assumed they didn’t care and would never change it. Better late than never, but why the sudden change?
Brands have started getting into ecommerce/d2c directly where earlier they left it up to distributors and third parties. Amazon needs to attract them because co-mingling is a strict no-no for them.
Amazon has turned racketeering brands into a profit center. Brands now pay Amazon to block unauthorized sellers. Only Amazon would have the gall to turn their willful negligence into an opportunity.
It is totally possible that on the second day of launch someone realized the problem, truly thought this being wrong, and deeply cared about all the impact on consumer and seller. Yet, it took them 10+ years for the circumstances to be right to get this fixed.
Commingling must have been someone's big, successful project, with all the benefits, probably faster shipping, lower cost, etc.
Once a big project got launched with all these benefits materialized, it is really hard to undo it. When a problem is identified, higher-ups usually ask to address it, rather than undoing the whole project. Anyone pushing to undo a project would be claiming the entire team up to whatever level making that original decision made a huge mistake. In other words, committing a political suicide.
It may take some mix of the following to trigger such drastic changes:
- Some fundamental assumptions changed (for example, one may claim that the logistics got so much better that the original benefits on the delivery speed can be achieved now without commingling).
- Multiple attempts at addressing the problems without killing the project proved unsuccessful.
- The ppl who original launched the project moved, to other domains or other companies.
- Some external triggers (new regulation, a large chunk of partners / stakeholders complaining, the company literally dying, etc.)
In all, there has to be someone for whom the incentive to undo it overcomes the hurdle, political or otherwise to reverse course on a huge project. After that, there need to be the usual logistics, including convincing, budgeting, prioritization, and a million other things you do at a big company to get a thing done. Now, 10 years have passed and it is finally making news.
Or, I can be totally wrong and it's just a bunch of privileged dumbasses who don't give a fork and randomly making one project after another, while pointing at some graphs and numbers claiming successes regardless of what really happens. ;)
There have been a lot of boycotts and blackouts so maybe they're trying to win back some of the customers they've lost after repeatedly selling them fake garbage.
Literally dealing with this right now. My wife got what appears to be a (very expensive) counterfeit item that is technically non-returnable (not laying down without a fight). Kind of cathartic to see this pop up.
I received counterfeit goods multiple times due to this. I set up a subscribe and save order and they would let random retailers fill the order with fake products. Amazon collected the money and just did not care, they need to be held accountable for these things.
I've been ordering on Amazon in Germany for a good 20 years now and I've never received a counterfeit item. Is it not a thing here? Does it primarily affect certain countries? Am I insanely lucky?
Yep. The number of times I've received garbage while paying full price is wild. I finally asked the rep what I need to be looking for before purchasing to avoid this. They didn't really have an answer.
I did get a refund most of the time. Amazon's service is still quite good even today. Already don't feel great about ordering from Amazon but this really made me cut back over the last year or two.
I ordered a quantity of o’reilly books from Amazon because that was the only outlet offered by them.
I received some real books, and several counterfeit copies. The same books weren’t even the same size, some also had thin pages, some yellow pages, and several with printing errors the others didn’t have.
Sadly I tried to contact the publisher and let them know about the counterfeit books in their listings and tried to warn them about what was going on, but their support people only wanted me to take it up with Amazon, and couldn’t understand how to escalate my concerns internally and just kept asking me if they could close the ticket.
Also Amazon refunds aren’t as smooth when you don’t live in the US and already paid customs duties on the counterfeit products, and the return shipping costs make returns prohibitively expensive.
I wouldn’t have even ordered from them in the first place if I could have avoided it.
I’m glad they are solving this problem, but I also kind of don’t want them to succeed because of their terrible legacy.
I received counterfeit toothpaste from Amazon during COVID. I got asthma from using it and never had asthma before or symptoms like that. I purchased tubes from Costco to compare and the Amazon ones were clearly fake.
I left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.
You're exchanging a 50% chance (?) of having to fill in a form with a 100% chance of having to drive to the store, finding parking, going home and having a 50% it doesn't work when plugged in anyway.
If Amazon can also ensure that every "Sold by Amazon" unit is legitimate (that they aren't sometimes sourcing badly), then it's 10x great.
(That I didn't feel comfortable enough trusting Amazon for some kinds of items is usually the only reason I've been buying direct-to-consumer from the brands' Web sites. I've had even Samsung and Crucial do DTC poorly in the last couple years.)
(Also, if I felt I could trust Amazon for genuine brand-name monthly OTC allergy products, that would mean no more hassling with the pharmacy chains. And maybe no more Walmart, though I don't recall a recent problem in their execution, and have been trusting them a little more than Amazon recently.)
It's definitely not going to be immediate. The last sentence of the article: "Amazon said commingling will be phased out across its supply chain later this year."
A serious question for the people in this thread who have bitten by this: why do you keep giving Amazon your business? Is it worth it despite these experiences?
I bought some expensive camera gear from Amazon and had a terrible experience. The delivery person obviously stole the gear and kept making fake "delivery attempted" notifications at exactly midnight while I was at home night after night. Amazon eventually refunded me, but they made me wait weeks to get my money back despite years of being a customer and spending many thousands with them and never requesting other refunds.
So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?
This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.
Yeah, I don’t understand it either. When someone sells me a fake item, I stop giving them my money. It happened to me with Amazon almost a decade ago and I haven’t ordered from there since.
A good move, even if many years late. It's a bilateral trustbuster when the same platform that allows commingling and knockoffs then begins tagging legit items as "frequently returned" in the feed.
Can we also get the ability to filter by seller entity country of origin?
Amazon also needs to offer far better tools for buyers to effectively find and attach to brands.
Was burned by counterfeit goods multiple times with my Amazon purchases. Their return policy is good, but still it was really annoying when I’d order something and you get counterfeit product.
They were cutting a lot of corners on quality control and it really started to show. Seems like this got to be a big enough issue they couldn’t just keep pretending like selling and shipping bogus junk wasn’t a real problem.
I have had serious issues with Amazon these last two-three months which has resulted in my moving a majority of my purchases to a different online retailer.
I bought some ASSIMIL language-learning books being sold by a (known) POD firm. But I got some random (or so I thought) POD crap instead of the books I had ordered. I returned them and tried it again a month later (after confirming with customer care that I will get what I see in the listing) to see that the exact same books were sent again.
When I compared the ISBN numbers, I found that the books I had ordered were the older 978 series which can be reduced to the 10-digit version while the ones they were sending were the newer 979 series with only the check digit differing. I had to call them 15-20 times before I got my money back because they would repeatedly set up a return pickup, not do it and then claim that I have cancelled it. The books are still lying with me. They haven't bothered to collect.
They have routinely sabotaged multiple other deliveries by not visiting my house and providing bogus "OTP not provided/unable to contact" updates.
The absolute worst thing that happened was with some books I bought from a small publisher that they, unfortunately, sent by Amazon Shipping. One month and multiple calls/emails later to complain about Amazon's bogus delivery attempts, they completely ghosted me and the publisher had to RTO the books back. I talked to the publisher and they said they cannot afford to be out of pocket on shipping, so I paid them INR 1,000 to cover their expenses for the unnecessary two legs of shipping.
I have now decided that I am dealing with absolute scoundrels who do not value their customer's time and plan my purchases accordingly.
This is great, though at the same time I feel Amazon deserves no credit for fixing a fuckup they created. Congratulations on deciding to implement a non-broken system
While better for sellers I think the experience will be terrible for buyers. You already have dozens of pages of very similar products at the moment coming from the same Chinese factory under a different brand name, if on top of that you split the ones that are currently comingled, it's going to be an absolute horrendous UX.
I used to order things from amazon.co.jp to avoid this issue until the clowns stopped de minimis. Amazon quality varies greatly across the globe. The worst, in my experience, is amazon.de. Quality really plummeted since the pandemic. I consistently received used products from them and this led me to think it’s a cultural thing in Europe where people routinely use products and simply return them after use.
I’m more irritated by the comingling of small, fragile products with large, heavy ones in the same box, like a box of crackers shipped together with detergent. Because of this, I had to stop my Subscribe & Save orders. Every month they would do this nonsense.
37 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadSounds more like they were losing market to other retailers.
Commingling must have been someone's big, successful project, with all the benefits, probably faster shipping, lower cost, etc.
Once a big project got launched with all these benefits materialized, it is really hard to undo it. When a problem is identified, higher-ups usually ask to address it, rather than undoing the whole project. Anyone pushing to undo a project would be claiming the entire team up to whatever level making that original decision made a huge mistake. In other words, committing a political suicide.
It may take some mix of the following to trigger such drastic changes:
- Some fundamental assumptions changed (for example, one may claim that the logistics got so much better that the original benefits on the delivery speed can be achieved now without commingling).
- Multiple attempts at addressing the problems without killing the project proved unsuccessful.
- The ppl who original launched the project moved, to other domains or other companies.
- Some external triggers (new regulation, a large chunk of partners / stakeholders complaining, the company literally dying, etc.)
In all, there has to be someone for whom the incentive to undo it overcomes the hurdle, political or otherwise to reverse course on a huge project. After that, there need to be the usual logistics, including convincing, budgeting, prioritization, and a million other things you do at a big company to get a thing done. Now, 10 years have passed and it is finally making news.
Or, I can be totally wrong and it's just a bunch of privileged dumbasses who don't give a fork and randomly making one project after another, while pointing at some graphs and numbers claiming successes regardless of what really happens. ;)
I did get a refund most of the time. Amazon's service is still quite good even today. Already don't feel great about ordering from Amazon but this really made me cut back over the last year or two.
I received some real books, and several counterfeit copies. The same books weren’t even the same size, some also had thin pages, some yellow pages, and several with printing errors the others didn’t have.
Sadly I tried to contact the publisher and let them know about the counterfeit books in their listings and tried to warn them about what was going on, but their support people only wanted me to take it up with Amazon, and couldn’t understand how to escalate my concerns internally and just kept asking me if they could close the ticket.
Also Amazon refunds aren’t as smooth when you don’t live in the US and already paid customs duties on the counterfeit products, and the return shipping costs make returns prohibitively expensive.
I wouldn’t have even ordered from them in the first place if I could have avoided it.
I’m glad they are solving this problem, but I also kind of don’t want them to succeed because of their terrible legacy.
I left a review to warn others on the page. Amazon removed my review and lifetime banned me from leaving reviews again citing “abnormalities.
Closest I got was a bottle that was slightly off color and the label had a different texture.
Seeing more and more AI generated illustrations on products too.
If Amazon can also ensure that every "Sold by Amazon" unit is legitimate (that they aren't sometimes sourcing badly), then it's 10x great.
(That I didn't feel comfortable enough trusting Amazon for some kinds of items is usually the only reason I've been buying direct-to-consumer from the brands' Web sites. I've had even Samsung and Crucial do DTC poorly in the last couple years.)
(Also, if I felt I could trust Amazon for genuine brand-name monthly OTC allergy products, that would mean no more hassling with the pharmacy chains. And maybe no more Walmart, though I don't recall a recent problem in their execution, and have been trusting them a little more than Amazon recently.)
So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?
This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.
Stop rewarding bad behavior!
Can we also get the ability to filter by seller entity country of origin?
Amazon also needs to offer far better tools for buyers to effectively find and attach to brands.
They were cutting a lot of corners on quality control and it really started to show. Seems like this got to be a big enough issue they couldn’t just keep pretending like selling and shipping bogus junk wasn’t a real problem.
I bought some ASSIMIL language-learning books being sold by a (known) POD firm. But I got some random (or so I thought) POD crap instead of the books I had ordered. I returned them and tried it again a month later (after confirming with customer care that I will get what I see in the listing) to see that the exact same books were sent again.
When I compared the ISBN numbers, I found that the books I had ordered were the older 978 series which can be reduced to the 10-digit version while the ones they were sending were the newer 979 series with only the check digit differing. I had to call them 15-20 times before I got my money back because they would repeatedly set up a return pickup, not do it and then claim that I have cancelled it. The books are still lying with me. They haven't bothered to collect.
They have routinely sabotaged multiple other deliveries by not visiting my house and providing bogus "OTP not provided/unable to contact" updates.
The absolute worst thing that happened was with some books I bought from a small publisher that they, unfortunately, sent by Amazon Shipping. One month and multiple calls/emails later to complain about Amazon's bogus delivery attempts, they completely ghosted me and the publisher had to RTO the books back. I talked to the publisher and they said they cannot afford to be out of pocket on shipping, so I paid them INR 1,000 to cover their expenses for the unnecessary two legs of shipping.
I have now decided that I am dealing with absolute scoundrels who do not value their customer's time and plan my purchases accordingly.
Pushed me to bookshop.org for most normal stuff. I go to the publisher for everything else.