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Who is they? Warehouse workers? Because without getting into too many details, I know someone fairly high up at Amazon corporate, and if I recall correctly her colleague runs a whole...divison? I don't know, largish multi-person unit...and their whole job is addressing the counterfeit problem. I think it's just really hard to do.
Amazon has a policy of binning items with the same UPC together, regardless of the source. What this means is if you buy a valid product and any vendor who is part of their warehouse storage system sells counterfeits, then there is a chance of you getting a counterfeit part, regardless of who you buy from. This reduces the number of locations required for a given item. It just requires that you trust your vendors to not counterfeit. If they were kept separate you could easily see who is selling counterfeits, but it would require more space.
So Amazon has traded the ability to sell parts from verifiable vendors for short-term profits. At this point in the game, your best assumption is if there is any knock-off company selling the product you wish to buy you have no way of knowing it it's legitimate or counterfeit. This is currently diluting their brand and will ultimately impact their sales, if not their profits.
Amazon makes something like 80% of their profit off of Amazon web services. They have no reason to give the tiniest crap about any physical product they will ever sell ever again.
Yes, and I recall an interview with a bank over a decade ago where someone asked why they have service charges when all it seems to do is piss off their customers. He tried to dismiss the significance of service charges by pointing out that they only represent 15% of their revenue. And yet they still have service charges.
The reason both these things happen is because profits are put above everything else, no matter how small they are or how irritating they are to the customer. Rest assured, Amazon is no different. They will happily engage in practices that encourage counterfeit sales until such time as they have indications that dealing with it will improve their bottom line. Even 1% will be worth it, let alone 20.
Well the easiest solution is to go back to having Amazon be the seller of products on Amazon, but we all one that ship sailed.
But if the problem is shared bin storage, the solution isn't free, but it's also not as expensive as lots of buyer confidence:
Tag every item with a QR code indicating its source when it comes into the distribution center. Use that code to identify the bad actors when there are returns and ban them.
"But what about products not shipped by Amazon?"
In that case, you know who sold and shipped the product, and if they can't get their shit together they shouldn't be allowed to work with Amazon.
It's not hard to do it, its hard to do it and make the same amount of money...