Here’s some ASIN trivia from my time at Amazon in the early 10’s. At least at that time, there was exactly one inventory item at Amazon that could change ASINs during its lifetime: Amazon Fresh used different ASINs for green bananas and yellow bananas.
That sounds like an inventory keeping nightmare! You buy 4000 units of green bananas and end the month having 0 units left, having sold none... while you somehow managed to sell 2200 yellow bananas you didn't even have and on top of that lost another 1800 (that never even existed!) to spoilage.
And weirdly, if there were no trees around [it], it wouldn't even be [called] a forest.
I would love to hear from a botanist/banana-related person what a bunch of banana plants are called. Are there similar differing names as for groups of various animals?
Fresh dates back to 07, actually, though it was delivery-based and almost entirely in Seattle originally. They have gone through a few pivots since then.
I wonder if they have a different ASIN per batch on products where batches matter. Something like fabrics are not created identically each run, so getting all your fabric for one project from the same batch is important, otherwise the colour difference can be noticeable. Same goes for things like wallpaper, flooring, car wrap etc.
No idea hoe Amazon did it, but I suspect a inventory transfer from green to yellow. That is properly tracked and accounted. You never use inventory adjustments to move inventory, as tose are literally shooting inventory into the aether (negative adjustments) and creating inventory out of thin air (positive ones), resulting in zero inventory tranparency or traceability.
