A fair point and important distinction, but so is the difference between "we CAN" and "we WILL/DO". That "myth" didn't come out of thin air. It's a result of of amazon not doing that unless they felt it financially prudent to do so/until enough people bitched about it.

The OP article is exhibit A for how common of an issue this was.

It wouldn't surprise me. Amazon knows where every item is in its FC and knows the motions of every item's placement, from the grand scheme of things.

It's not that hard to then track back from an order exactly what bin or tote or shelf the item was pulled from, then look at what shipment(s) that bin's items came from to figure out what supplier it came from.

They know the counterfeit goods came in and were stowed to bin XYZ and they know that someone pulled from XYZ...

And yes, it does have additional codes for larger-scale packages. So a pack of cigarettes gets its own code, a carton gets its own code, a box of cartons gets its own code. A wholesaler can just scan the box and the system updates the status of every pack inside.

What am I missing about this? Couldn't the scammer just replicate the QR code of a legit shop? I thought the point of counterfeit goods was to fool you into buying them instead of the real thing. I guess part of the process would have to be verifying that every shipment of goods received was accurately tracked from a valid "ship from" address, but I have to imagine there's a lot of common warehousing in use for bulk goods. I'm not understanding how the QR code helps solve that.

Maybe a unique bar code per-item that includes some private hash information that makes it unique to the producer? Sort of an electronic signature for physical goods? Then if there's a centralized database, copying the QR codes wouldn't do much good. You might be able to slip in one if it is sold before the real version. But each subsequent copy could be caught.

>Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud.

They’d be better stewards of the industry, but aren’t the odds that everything they’ve done for the past decade has improved their bottom line?

This is the company whose policies have effectively forced their drivers to use plastic bottles as toilets.

That’s a really clever and simple plan but doing anything like applying stickers, correctly, by hand or robot, can add cost ranging from $<surprising> to $<shocking>.

Maybe they have a variation of your idea where they inkjet a serial number onto a conveyor belt of incoming items or add a super-cheap chip of some kind.

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My understanding is every individual item is tracked in an Amazon warehouse - so Amazon knows that the 67th item in a box from supplier X was shipped to user Y.

They don't just track quantities of SKU's like most other retailers.

The reality is more complicated than you are assuming. A shockingly large number of vendors grossly mismanage their supply chains such that Company X can actually be legitimately undercut by reseller Company A on Amazon even though Company X produces the product! The mechanics of it are convoluted but legit, and there is a huge ecosystem of companies that arbitrage the legions of producers that are bad at managing their global supply chains.

Amazon has an interest in allowing these resellers of legitimate products to exist because it pushes down prices from the primary vendors, lowering prices for the customer. The primary vendors end up competing against themselves indirectly but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is the milieu in which counterfeit products exist.

If the producers of these products were consistently competent at managing their supply chains it would be much less of an issue because it would clear the field of resellers arbitraging the mismanagement, leaving only Company X and the counterfeiters which is a much easier problem to solve because you don’t have to worry about banning legitimate resellers. But that isn’t where we are.

I read it as "For items in the ten to twenty dollar range, its not worth adding a vendor label" and I don't suppose its the cost of the sticker, but how much longer does it take the warehouse worker to take it from a shelf and put it in a box if they add a sticker to every item? +5% ? +10% ? +100% ? (It takes very little time to put an item in a box, I could see adding a sticker doubling this...)

I thought Walmart has been doing this with their vendors for many years

These things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up.

But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!