I send 100 tubes of Crest Toothpaste to Amazon for Amazon fulfillment, and then 100 tubes are listed by me on Amazon. So, let's say I am a third-party seller on Amazon, and I am selling Crest Toothpaste. Sounds straight-forward enough, right? Here's the problem, though: Amazon treats all items with the same SKU as identical. When a buyer buys that item, Amazon will ship the products directly to buyers.These sellers send in their products to be stored at an Amazon warehouse.As we know, Amazon has third-party sellers that have their products fulfilled by Amazon.I started looking into why this was the case, and I found a pretty clear answer: commingled inventory. The bigger question is "what the hell is going on?" This didn't seem to be a problem, say, 5 years ago. It got so bad that I completely stopped using Amazon. Since I started noticing this issue, I've gotten counterfeit batteries, counterfeit shampoo, and counterfeit guitar strings, and they were all sold by. Amazon will offer to give your money back if you send it back, but that's all the protection you have as a buyer. I contacted the manufacturer, and they confirmed it was a fake. Most recently, I bought a bottle of shampoo that seemed really odd and gave me a pretty serious rash on my scalp. I used to buy all my household basics on Amazon (shampoo, toothpaste, etc), and I've gotten a very high rate of fake products over the past 2 years or so, specifically. Maybe they don't care about being a retailer any more, maybe they're all-in on AWS, but if I were an Amazon shareholder I'd be getting pretty damned nervous.Anecdotally, the problem is getting severe. They could have secured a loyal and price-insensitive customer, but instead they're driving me away from their platform. Buying from Amazon isn't a no-brainer any more.Īmazon were so very close to having a total monopoly on my online spending, but they squandered it. Every time I click the buy button, I worry about getting a counterfeit product, I worry about the hassle of returning it, I worry about getting banned from Amazon by an algorithm for "abusing" their returns policy. I'd often buy from Amazon without bothering to compare prices, because the convenience of one-click ordering was worth it.Īlmost entirely because of Marketplace, Amazon is regressing from a premium retail experience to an AliExpress-style flea market. Until very recently, Amazon offered the lowest-hassle online shopping experience by a considerable margin. I know that there's a fair chance that I'll get some kind of junk, but it's cheap enough that I'm often willing to take the gamble. Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.Īmazon are playing a very dangerous game with their brand. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."Īt the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another. It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling.
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