They didn’t need to actually track things internally, add a sticker or even have someone stamp the vender code to the item listing the vendor when you’re adding the item to the bins and if the customer complains you can likely use that sticker to track who added the item after the fact. Critically you don’t need some 6 digit number for vender code, every new vender for a given item gets a number for that item, software can remember the relevant mapping.
If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out.
Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.
There’s many illegal things which can boost a companies bottom line. Quite often the law cares about what’s a reasonable effort which is a very different standard than what maximizes profits.
Something which may or may not decrease their bottom line but definitely significantly reduces counterfeit items ending up in customers hands is going to be considered reasonable even if it’s not profit maximizing.
That’s a really clever and simple plan but doing anything like applying stickers, correctly, by hand or robot, can add cost ranging from $<surprising> to $<shocking>.
Maybe they have a variation of your idea where they inkjet a serial number onto a conveyor belt of incoming items or add a super-cheap chip of some kind.
If some vender is adding fraudulent items to the system based on some thresholds you set, charge the vendor to manually sort those specific products out.
Odds are they would make up the ~5 cents per item just dealing with less fraud. However, you don’t need to track every item rack the first few thousand items from a vender and you can scale back tracking as they prove themselves. At scale this could be almost arbitrarily cheap.