[blagie]

It's double-return-fraud.

Amazon shouldn't sell returned products as "new," but as "open box."

The other way it happens is co-mingling. Some vendor sends an "open box" product to Amazon as new, or a fake product, and Amazon ships it out when sold by Amazon since it considers goods to be fungible.

I stopped buying anything which goes in my body from eBay, Amazon, and similar after receiving a premium food product with very clearly fake packaging.

[rkomorn]

Man, I don't think this co-mingling thing was big or existed when I moved to a country that Amazon doesn't ship to directly almost 6 years ago.

Reading about it on HN makes me feel fortunate. I can't recall ever running into something like this back then.

[blagie]

Amazon broke in 2020, when most shopping went online. It never recovered.

I doubt it ever will. Trust takes a long time to earn, and a little bit of time to break. I had four or five incidents on Amazon, cancelled Prime, and I doubt it will ever make business sense for Amazon to get me back.

I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.

Starting one would be super-capital-intensive. It's not a lean startup. There's only a handful of organizations with the capital to do that, and I doubt any of them will, in fact, do it.

[chaostheory]

There is some good news. After years of customer and company complaints, Amazon finally ended commingling recently.