A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations.
Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't.
Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in place on perishables so this aspect of the problem rears its head less often.
[†] they can't, we as customers don't have access to the information to know the route items took to get to us
> A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling.
There is no problem with the complaints. Consumers ordered something, paid for it and got a bad product. They have every right to complain and shouldn't be required to "take into account" operational failures of the company they did business with.
> The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations.
Commingling isn't a problem with the complaints. Commingling reflects a deliberate profit motivated decision at the highest level of Amazon's management. Amazon executives have evaluated the health risks of commingling food. The safety risks of commingling electronics. They've calculated it more profitable to lawyer up when bad things happen.
> Commingling isn't a problem with the complaints.
I think they mean that commingling necessarily eliminates the viability of merchant malfeasance analysis in reading reviews, not that the complainers did anything wrong. Just that you can't trust the products from even the most trustworthy shop because someone _else_ might be trying to cheat the marketplace. The review system applies to products, but mostly it applies to individual product _specimens_. And if you don't know whether bad specimens came disproportionately from a particular merchant, then the real value of reviews has been diminished.
Amazon could EASILY handle comingly to seller's products if Amazon added a seller id sticker to packages it receives... go ahead and comingle, when you get the complaints, you can tie the item to the actual seller, seller does too bad, permanent ban. Problem would solve itself out... Amazon absolutely refuses to do this, yet hides behind its' negligence with "we're a market."
Skip the spider. Big table. Borg. "Merchant malfeasance analysis" is simple. Amazon is the merchant. The other view is bullshit. Well promoted bullshit. But bullshit nevertheless.
Maybe an exhortation to not think of being a customer of Amazon like being a spider in a web. Spiders know where the next meal is by vibrations in the fabric of the web, which if we imagine the negative comments as vibrations caused the receipt of a skeevy item from a seller in the network as a naieve attempt to track a skeevy supplier, we're not going to get what we want due to the comingling problem.
>Big Table.
Instead, you have to think of Amazon as a big frickin' table onto which everyone throws their stuff. Amazon is basically the de facto merchant in all cases where fulfillment by Amazon is used. Since they bin by item, and not item/source, you get an assimilation going on.
>Borg: Essentially, Amazon is this. They absorb all the uniqueness of all of their suppliers, and essentially dissolve/absolve any particular supplier of singular skeevyness since all the skeevy gets laundered through FBA. Even if you have mostly upstanding sellers, the smaller populations of skeevy sellers benefit, because their fulfillment when picked have a high probability of being good, while the upstanding vendors are guaranteed to eventually eat negative reputation from skeevy merch being used to fulfill their orders.
>Merchant malfeasance analysis is simple: It actually is. You just separate out each source's inventory and track fulfillment from that inventory. Easy-peezy from a data point of view, but incompatible with real world physical constraints. The physics of the matter would be way too infeasible to implement, since there would need to X^n physical buckets where X is the number of items, and n is the number of suppliers of that item. If you were to track every type of item in clearly separated sub inventories keyed by source. That just wouldn't be physically or fiscally possible, because now Amazon needs pickers not just for stuff, but for supplier's of stuff. Suddenly, Amazon is open to potential complaints on relative picker staffing between suppliers, even if you somehow managed to handwave away the physical space requirements.
>The other view is Bullshit. The other view being that the Amazon marketplace backed by FBA allows for any type of reputation based curation. While the marketing team pounds that drum, it won't work in a world with limited physical space, as explained above.
Um, have you recently eaten something purchased from Amazon?
The previous poster clearly means that it is bad that negative reviews can't effectively convey information to consumers on Amazon. I'm sure they don't mean to defend Amazon or suggest that it is not culpable.
The call for external fine grained merchant analysis as a productive way to solve the problems of commingling is inconsistent with holding Amazon accountable. It is consistent with the view that Amazon is not responsible for what it ships from its warehouses. "Amazon is just a logistics platform" is bullshit.
I already said I think Amazon is bad and should feel bad.
Not only am I not calling for "external fine grained merchant analysis", I can't find anyone who is, and I don't know what that means.
This argument is so weird that I'm beginning to wonder if you're a bot or farming rep or something, which would actually be pretty funny, and also impressive since you have 35k karma.
I'm confused as to what you think is mail fraud? Amazon is just fulfillment in these cases. It's clearly marked in the same place on every page, and as such, avoidable. It's purely a profit motive for Amazon, but I don't see how it's mail fraud.
I think the complaints are perfectly valid. If you sell something on Amazon I believe you can choose to not have your product commingled [1]. If you don't do this, then you are accepting the risk that comes with commingling.
Is there additional cost to not comingle? I can't find it mentioned after some searches.
I wonder, at what point would it be economical to pay the additional costs to not comingle product?
Would adding "For customer assurance, we do not comingle our product with other products sold on Amazon" yield additional purchases? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if nobody looks at your posting because it's 3-20% more exoensive than the knockoffs.
You can't have a "not-illegal" version for 3 - 20% more. The solution is to hold Bezos to the same laws as all other businesses so Amazon has appropriate due diligence instead of creating a quasi-criminal organization. Relentlessly apply the law until Bezos is working within it.
Knockoffs aren't the only reason to not commingle. For example, maybe I start a business called "Fresh Batteries" where all batteries I sell have at least 2 years until expiry. I don't want those commingled because a battery with one year until expiry isn't bad, it just isn't what I'm selling.
My hypothetical batteries might be more expensive but depending on your needs, they might be a better value.
So, effectively, you want to allow Amazon to offer a surcharge to "(help) minimize the risk of you buying counterfeit items"??
Also, if you are producing counterfeit items, presumably your costs are lower, so you're actually _better_ equipped to absorb the "no comingle" surcharge than the legitimate seller.
Further, if I were an FBA seller, I would probably avoid shipping in expired goods in case they are checked. There's also the issue of goods passing expiry if they are warehoused too long.
I suspect many of the expired food sellers are actually FBM, just like the used book sellers. Avoids a lot of potential headaches associated with FBA.
Is it possible that this is just a stupid, simple sorting bug in the warehouse software?
As a battle scarred developer, I'm primed to think about issues like some algorithm decided LIFA was faster than FIFO, and it's worth my time to investigate whether my coworker didn't differentiate between perishable and non-perishable because they were so pleased with their shortest route algorithm that they couldn't be bothered by trivialities like reality and biology. They'll probably even blame it on their boss instead of on avoiding confrontation.
> A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling.
Why should they take comingling into account? Why should I, as a customer, care? I don't want to know the details of your implementation. I don't care. I ordered some stuff. I gave you money: ship me the stuff I ordered.
Don't ship me some other similar stuff that isn't what I ordered, and don't ship me what I did order but in bad shape. Ship me what I ordered and paid for, and ship it in good condition.
All you've told me with your statement is that the implementation sucks, and now you're trying to blame me for it.
No, I'm sorry: Amazon commingling sucks.
I know I sound grumpy, and will readily admit this is a first world problem, but I've just gone through nearly three weeks of arsing around to get an item returned substantially because of what appears to be a comingling issue[1]. Who has the time for this? Comingling sucks. It needs to stop.
[1] Although I obviously can't be entirely sure it isn't the third party sellers fault.
Commingling is bad, but does commingling mean they can't trace it back to which seller sent it to them for FBA?
If they can, they can penalize that seller, not the other seller (who won the sale).
I'm assuming Amazon has a unique id for every individual item in their warehouses. I'm not sure this is the case, but it seems likely given how their warehouses are organized and the location of stuff is very mixed up and only known to computers. (It would also be sufficient if they have unique ids for lots. If one seller sends 10 identical perishable items and Amazon groups those on a shelf together, they can still trace it back to the right seller.)
Commingling (in this context) doesn't necessarily mean that the products are literally sitting in the same bin as the same product from another seller. Each seller's items could be kept in separate bins if put in the same warehouse. Then when one of that product is ordered, the picker is told to go to a specific bin to get it. Amazon would then still know which seller's product they sold you.
The actual advantage of commingling comes from the fact that amazon doesn't have to distribute every sellers items across the US. They can just send you one from the closest warehouse.
Yeah I'm struggling with the notion of why commingling prevents audit trails. You don't even have to use separate bins for audits, although I admit that makes it pretty trivial. You just need a label.
That takes up more warehouse space, which is what Amazon is trying to avoid. Much easier to put it all into one big bin, and if you want, they can charge you to have your own bin.
Seems easy enough to work around. Just fill the extra space with completely different products. Put the other seller's products in a different location, also mixed in with other stuff.
The rule would be that you can put two products together if they are either the same seller (in which case you don't need to distinguish) or a different product (in which case you can distinguish visually).
Amazon already mixes different products in the same slot in order to optimize space anyway.
A unique barcode on the item would be one way to do it, but not the only way.
For example, a common thing to do on conveyors is to have reusable open-top plastic bins called "totes". (Think of going through airport security where you stick your luggage items into a plastic tray or tub that sits on the conveyor as it goes through the x-ray machine.) The totes can have barcodes on them, which can be used to track whatever is inside the tote.
Amazon could use a system like that to individually track items as they're being moved on and off shelves. And while on the shelves, it could track items by position (a database saying this particular item is on that position of that shelf). By combining these two things, they could track the position of individual items without sticking barcodes on them.
I don't know whether Amazon actually does this. I'm just saying it's not impossible.
The FAQ on seller help pages (at least in Europe) specifically says that they track commingled inventory by having their warehouse storage logic assign units from different sellers always into separate bins.
This article has comments from Amazon US spokesman who confirms it is the same over there: https://outline.com/4R7fp6
They don't need to label each product, they just need to know which location it came from and store different sellers products in different locations, which they do.
> If they can, they can penalize that seller, not the other seller (who won the sale).
That is fine for complaints raised directly through the specific complaint channel(s).
It doesn't help with complaints recorded as (or as part of) reviews, which might not have a corresponding official complaint. If I see mention of expiry dates and similar issues in reviews I don't have any assurance that this refers to the supply of product I'd be getting items from if I ordered.
People will often not bother with an official complaint unless it is an expensive item that they want a refund on, they instead go the "less paperwork" route of leaving a negative review, binning the item, and ordering from elsewhere.
I see a LOT of product reviews that are really seller feedback, and I wish Amazon would fix this. They need to have it so that wherever the user happens to find themselves (product review page, order page, support page, etc.), they are guided toward leaving the right kind of feedback. Instead of relying on users to be really familiar with how Amazon works and find the right place on their own.
For example, on the product review page, right now they have a blank called "Write your review". Instead, they could require you to indicate what kind of feedback you're offering, giving choices like "review the product itself" and "review the performance of Joe Schmoe, the seller for order #1234 on date 456" and with no default selected. Or just give you two blanks labeled "product review" and "seller review".
You also raise another issue which is that there's baggage associated with raising an official complaint. People don't necessarily want to deal with it, or they don't want to cause trouble and feel like filing a complaint is the nuclear option. I'm sure Amazon's attitude is that if something is wrong it should be made right, but that's not what every customer realistically wants.
I've seen conflicting reports on whether they can but that's less important than (the appearance?) that they don't.
"This terrible thing has happened in an area you're responsible for and you failed to catch/address it. Is this because you didn't have the required resources, because you're incompetent, or because you're corrupt? If it was resources, what do you need and why didn't you have it?"
> The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations.
Amazon took my cash, amazon should be responsible. The fact that they can't keep track of the goods they sell (also seems to be a problem with counterfeits) is their problem, even if they do their best to blame their suppliers.
> The fact that they can't keep track of the goods they sell (also seems to be a problem with counterfeits) is their problem
They can keep track. The do keep track.
So it isn't a problem for them unless it causes enough issues for us (the buyers) that we start going elsewhere and affecting the bottom line. We don't have access to that information, so we can't track the matter. Perhaps even the vendors can't either (I've never sold via Amazon so don't know at all).
[though others are saying the commingling does not affect products with expiry dates so we may be a little off topic for this sub-thread, unless that only applies to expiry dates and not best before dates which have difference legal standing - the discussion has got to the point where speculation is getting wilder and an injection of some cited facts may be needed to rein it in]
“Item not as described / book clearly used / food item out of date, but probably came from a commingled bin so possibly not the result of the seller I purchased from. Full marks, five stars, perfect ten.”?
I don’t know why I’m being downvoted - Amazon FBA does not commingle seller inventory. The products sold by a seller are only the ones they shipped to FBA. If you request your inventory back, you will only get the ones back you sell. So if a seller sends in a bunch of counterfeit items for a listing, those are physically separated and don’t get mixed with the good inventory that is there.
There are multiple sellers for the same product and they could definitely have bad/old inventory - and they will win the buy box with the lowest price - but it’s still not commingled.
I think you’re being downvoted because what you state is contrary to what most people have heard: i.e. that inventory for the same SKU from different sellers is in fact commingled. You might want to provide some citations if you want to convince people otherwise.
Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't.
Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in place on perishables so this aspect of the problem rears its head less often.
[†] they can't, we as customers don't have access to the information to know the route items took to get to us