> The reason Amazon scales well and can do so many things is that that their management is incentivized to care about things other than shipping/deliverables/this quarter's returns. It's still about the business overall, but Bezos' long-term-thinking has infected the entire company with long-termism and it's very effective.
Is comingling inventory among sellers long term thinking?
I actually worked on that project, and yes, it is. It was a good idea whose implications were not fully understood -- but Amazon will eventually get it right and it will stop causing problems, because they have a good 'make mistakes and fix things' loop. (I think this has already started happening but this moves very slowly.)
The main reason for commingling inventory is to be able to ship a product from the closest warehouse if it's the same as something in another warehouse (if you order it on the east coast and the nearest Amazon-owned inventory is on the west coast but an FBA seller has it on the east coast, ideally you could fulfill the order from the east coast).
The problem is, nobody anticipated the degree to which sellers began cheating this system when they figured it out. I don't think Amazon was ready to fully moderate the whole system against exploitation. They are no doubt working on it but it's a huge battle.
Is comingling inventory among sellers long term thinking?