I worked on Prime and Delivery Experience until 2013 and commingling was considered relatively taboo due to the destruction of customer trust that would likely result. It was an obvious optimization. There was already an issue with return fraud and resellers listing fraudulent items that weren’t commingled under the same product listing. I was pretty shocked when it launched after I left.

It turned out pretty much the way we figured it would.

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foobarian 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Wow, lots of insiders contributing lore in this article's comments. I appreciate you all!

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bombcar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Commingling really only makes sense in a weird world where Amazon is the final retailer for various distributors selling the same exact product in which case why doesn’t Amazon cut out the middle men and buy it directly?

Commingling ten distributors sets of Energizer batteries makes sense, but not as much sense as just buying direct from Energizer. They don’t lack the volume.

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jonhohle an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Amazon doesn’t just fulfill Amazon.com orders. Anyone can send inventory to Amazon and use them for fulfillment on their own e-commerce platform. The distributors don’t know Amazon is going to be fulfilling orders from several of their retailers.

Even on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find several new listings for an item fulfilled by Amazon from different sellers (including Amazon). That’s beneficial for Amazon because they don’t need to own all of the inventory and the sellers get a listing with good reputation to leverage if Amazon goes out of stock. In the perfect scenario everyone wins - Amazon makes money, the seller makes money, and the product is still available to the customer. You get all that without commingling, but with it, you also save physical storage volume.

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bruckie an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Energizer batteries

I see the point you are trying to make, but Energizer batteries are a bad exemplar for it. Even if all of the batteries are the exact same SKU, some of them may be 10 years old and some of them may be fresh from the factory. I've had this happen with several (perishable) products from Amazon.

	▲	bombcar 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's an entirely separate but related issue - stock rotation has to be managed, and commingling (in theory) helps alleviate the issue. Removing it means that you may find quite old product sold alongside brand new. (I suspect but have not proven that Walmart actually rotates UPCs/SKUs on identical product so they can remainder it out).
	▲	SoftTalker 31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In fact I can say that any time I've bought a battery on Amazon I've received a very old one that didn't last very long, if it worked at all.