Or alternatively: they have reduced the expectations of "two day shipping" so much that they no longer need to try that hard (by commingling inventory) to actually meet them.

> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products

While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.

Of course. Businesses only change when you complain and vote with your money.

That’s not cynical, that’s the system working. And if you keep bringing your money, you are signaling it’s a little annoying but not it’s ultimately ok.

That wouldn’t be cynical at all! It would mean that the system works, albeit slowly.

The best we can hope for is a world where Amazon faces real financial pressure to prevent counterfeits. Thus far I haven’t seen much evidence this was happening, but this is a welcome sign.

I suspect this one is death by 1000 cuts as Amazon has distribution facilities everywhere and will be subject to state and even local laws concerning warranty, product safety, and trademark. You can't contract your way out of it, and defective and counterfeit product can even carry criminal liability depending on jurisdiction. Good move Amazon.

"Commingling" is such a great euphemism for fraudulent counterfeiting.

I can't count the number of times I've ordered a book from Amazon (1st party, Amazon as the seller) and received an obvious counterfeit, with fuzzy text and a poorly printed cover. On one occasion, the scanning/OCR process had missed most of one chapter, so there were just section headers, page numbers and blank pages.

Unfortunately publishers and manufacturers don't have a lot of leverage with Amazon. If there's pressure coming from somewhere, it must be coming from a regulatory body.

Amazon apparently credit full declared cost for the seller who delivered items to be comingled, and all responsibilities for the item are offloaded to whoever seller that would appear on customer invoices.

This means malicious sellers can deliver literal counterfeits to warehouses and externalize the consequences, down to angry 1-star reviews and disposal of returned counterfeit examples, to somebody else.

Good point. The screenshot says the new requirements are for inventory shipped to Amazon by sellers on or after March 31. So they're not cleaning up existing inventory, just changing the requirements for new stock. It'll probably take some time after that for older commingled inventory to all get sold off.

Amazon's assumption was that every box of "Apple AirPods 4" is the same, so it doesn't matter if you got the one sold directly from Apple or from some random reseller. They would just put them in the same bin, after all they are all the same product. Great for logistics because it doesn't matter if the closest fulfillment center has AirPods sold by Apple or "Office Partner Inc", they just ship you whatever is closest. Obviously this fails spectacularly if a seller ever lies about their product, but who would ever do such a thing

It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).

I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...