alt Hacker NewsAmazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026
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The text in that attached screenshot is the key giveaway, "Now that most sellers maintain inventory levels that keep products close to customers..."
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
That's great news. From April onwards buying from a reliable vendor with fulfillment by Amazon will mean you get the parts from that vendor, not some random parts from a random provider that claim to have the same SKU.
Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages
That fact that they ever did this is kinda crazy. Did they not imagine that someone would try to sell counterfeit products? Commingling means that a seller could be hit by a refund and bad review for a product that was never theirs.
It's about time! They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.
I've been saying for years, Sandisk makes the best Flash cards but never buy them from Amazon, just for this reason. Too many counterfeits out there.
A friend that used to be high up at Amazon fulfillment told me inventory commingling was the reason he was unwilling to buy anything from Amazon to put in or on his body. Huge indictment for the brand and clearly a bad long-term strategy in the age of fake internet everything.
This will hopefully be a huge improvement for the reduction of fraud on the platform. Hopefully, they give the ability to only buy from verified vendors. This is why only buy CPGs on Walmart.
If inventory was commingled, and you might not even get the item from the seller you picked, what was the point of the 5-star rating system?
Was it meant to rate the product, not the seller? If so, that’s probably not how most people understand it.
Official press release: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...
> This change is important for safely buying genuine products, such as 3M respirators.
Personally funny example to me, because, at our anti-counterfeiting tech startup, 3M respirators was the prospective customer I championed.
(Right before Covid hit, we'd launched our first MVP factory deployment, and there was soon news of counterfeit N95 masks. Which is just evil.)
Military had a similar problem, so they created the stock number and manufacturer codes. Pretty much every part in stock is known by its manufacturer and part number combination.
I cancelled my Amazon account years ago after receiving counterfeit items several times. I've since learned to live free from Amazon and it's quite nice. I won't be opening another account.
Change My Mind: At this point, Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping and higher prices.
The product is going to be coming from a Chinese manufacturer anyways, the minimal level of quality control that used to be implied by buying from companies with an European presence is gone.
My experience on AliExpress is that there are few outright scams and more of a "buyer beware to the extreme" (e.g. fine print saying that a 20mm item has 5mm tolerance -> you're getting 15mm, part not saying original BRANDNAME -> you're getting a "compatible" part). They seem to have a "Brand+/Certified Original" program - any idea how trustworthy that is? Probably more than Amazon with commingling, but in absolute terms?
This has been my one wish from Amazon as a consumer for years. I wonder what’s finally driving the decision? In the end the increased trust will be good for business, but one has to imagine there’ll be teething pains from the policy change.
Just as Youtube finally "cracked down" on piracy after riding it to massive market share, Amazon has done the same with counterfeit goods. Does this business model have a name?
I have had a few issues with what I suspect were counterfeit clothes, either that or the brands I bought had lesser quality versions they sold on Amazon.
Amazon is quickly losing its value to me. Between price gouging, lower quality service, and the question of counterfeit goods, it just isn’t as good of a value prop.
I've never really had issues of counterfeit products, but I often buy 2-3 of a thing (I hate thinking about re-ordering) and frequently, when I buy 2 of a given item, they come in separate deliveries on separate days. I wish there was a way to request that they come from the same distribution center, on the same day, in the same delivery.
I live in a slightly out of band area, so getting things from Amazon that are hard to buy elsewhere is great, but the "order 5 items and get 4 separate shipments" thing isn't ideal.
I wonder how they are planning on de-mingling existing products that don't have the required Amazon barcodes that should or vice versa.
Thank you! I've gotten definitely returned inventor when I thought I was buying new from a vendor. The equipment was defective.
Also buying anything returned from Amazon is a crap shot because there is so much return fraud going on.
I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?
I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.
The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.
If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.
It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.
I bought from Best Buy.
Finally. I remember buing "genuine" Samsung HDMI adapter and receiving counterfeit products all the time (technically inferior with bad shielding and failing quickly) Might have been a good idea on paper, but reality proved otherwise. Actually I'm surprised it took them so long.
Gopro subreddit daily has people posting issues with their camera complaining about the SD card. In all instances they've bought a "genuine" card on Amazon from the official seller, but probably received a fake one due to commingling.
The brand hit from this must be massive, with the amount of people now avoiding Amazon. But perhaps it won't matter with their size, most people won't have any other options anyways. For me, it was counterfeit dental stuff that made me quit buying from Amazon. A faulty SD card is annoying, stuff I put in my body is no-go.
Definitely good for customers. A bit more stressful for CPT chasers and PPQA. Missing PAD time and delayed shipment is a daily issue because of 0 inventory. I wonder how they gonna change workflows for stow and pick dpts.
This holiday season, I wouldn’t buy high priced high quality items from Amazon due to concerns about counterfeit. I probably still won’t even after they’ve made this change. DTC from quality producers now have decent websites, free shipping, and good customer service. If I’m going to buy a premium expensive product, why risk it.
What happened? Bezos ordered something and got a counterfeit?
I wonder what effect this will have on cost and delivery time. Will Amazon start telling us, “This is available sooner from seller XYZ”?
It's ridiculous that they ever did this in the first place! Just assume that things sent to you from a random seller / middleman were good products in a fully automated system.
From the article it says the change is implemented by telling brands they don’t need an amazon barcode if they have a product barcode, while resellers need an amazon barcode. What happens if resellers decide to just not add the amazon barcode and appear as brands?
Holy smokes that explains so much. Amazon’s review/feedback mechanism is completely worthless with commingled inventory. No wonder it seemed ineffective.
Happy to see this. Maybe I'll consider buying toner cartridges again. Every time I've tried in the past, what has shown up has been unusable, sketchy junk. I now go to a neighborhood Staples where I can put actual eyes on the box.
> meaning you could order from a good seller but get counterfeit products sent in by a shady one
why allow shady sellers in the first place?
This is great. I do wonder if eventually we’ll see brand names return. I basically only order things that I don’t care about quality with now. It feels like Temu.
> you could order from a good seller but get counterfeit products sent in by a shady one, and Amazon wouldn't even tell you
Why does the word 'monopoly' come to mind?
Any word if this applies internationally? Looking forward to seeing commingling phased out in the UK as well
Too late, I stopped buying from Amazon because of this. Now my shopping habits have changed.
Their practice of comingling SKUs eroded so much trust I had over the years.
About time they fix that mess
I can’t believe they didn’t end this sooner
I try to avoid Amazon, but I still don't know where to buy basic commodity items otherwise. Where would I buy a plunger, a decent set of coasters, a good pair of scissors, a soap holder? Target? Their products manage to be thrice the price and just as garbage as temu. Costco is the only retailer I trust anymore, but they don't sell everything.
Wow, there'll be entire categories of product that it will be worth buying from Amazon again.
That's overdue, but I shall continue to make my purchases from European alternatives — Amazon donated millions of dollars to Trump, so share some responsibility for his actions around Greenland, tariffs and so on.
This is one of those things that's an amazing idea in a perfect world with no fraud or bad actors.
Why wait so long? Do it now…
This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”
You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.
To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.
for those that have X k-lined
just change it to "xcancel" for mirror
Next up they need to deal with fake reviews, or 5* reviews bought with coupons or other compensation.
Now that they’ve effectively destroyed their competition through predatory pricing and services, the ensh*ttification can accelerate.
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
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Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
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This org's page hits all the same points:
Kenya Coffee, Quality Decline & the Systemic Truth Behind the Cup https://kenyacoffeeschool.golearn.co.ke/kenya-coffee-quality...
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
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u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!
Why now, and not 15 years ago when their reputation started tanking for this reason? And when are they going to ban the re-use of listings for unrelated products?
This is a big deal. There are lots of goods I wont even think about buying from amazon because counterfeit goods are common and unpunished and untraceable by amazon.
It’s about time. I’ve been going out of my way to not buy from Amazon, especially on items that are often counterfeit, or where a counterfeit item would cause real issues.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.