Case in point I recently got an iPad and I was looking for a rugged case, an alternative to OtterBox. It's a mess, with no real winners, and lots of questionable brands/products.
It was suggested before, the time is ripe for a disruptor search engine, The Innovator's Dilemma style; starting with some segment of search.
Of course, it could be inclusive, but each seller must prove their worth, and longterm sellers are always preferred.
There's still the inventory co-mingling issue that people have mentioned in other comments. Solving this would mean I'd start to consider using Amazon more frequently.
For me it's worth $5 to not have to buy a replacement every 3 months.
Maybe just my sample but it seems these things always fail _just_ after the return window.
My standards are low but woof. You can’t even get a marble run that’s not that super thin brittle plastic. The marble run at Walmart was half the price.
I’m the laziest, least ethics-motivated consumer and I think my time with Amazon is wrapping up.
Even the suspensions don't have alot of affect for these shady sellers.
I have worked with a company that provides listing services on Amazon in the past. The owner once casually mentioned how they help these companies get out of suspensions for long enough to withdraw their balance(I have seen screenshots with over $200k in balance) with the help of an amazon employee. The listing company and amazon employee are both paid via Bitcoin.
Including: toxic toys for children, toxic cooking utensils, toxic water filters, toxic birthday cake decorations, toxic furniture, toxic plumbing, toxic rugs, etc.
Buying on Amazon in 2022 is like walking on a minefield.
Some companies go out of their way to emulate being non-chinese. But you can tell due to the aesthetics they use, punctuation, color palette, fonts, and sometimes DNS information that they are chinese shell companies as nobody in the west uses Alibaba cloud to host their stuff.
That's not right IMHO. The seller is Amazon; where they source their stuff and what subcontractors they have is their business.
It's like EBay takes more responsibility for products you buy, even though that is explicitly a site for matching random buyers and random sellers. Not that i use ebay much either.
I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9/10 times higher than Amazon for brand name items.
In the last few years it's been extremely difficult to make full use of the "perk", simply because there aren't a lot of things that are sold by amazon.com anymore.
Hard to argue with that, honestly.
Obviously if you want to buy genuine Rolex, or quality European made tools, Amazon is not the place.
These companies couldn't afford a "no risk no questions asked refunds" policy, since there's no way they'd ever pay for that wasted time.
I'm not asking for a genuine Rolex, but fakery is so bad at the moment that I'm not even confident I'd get a genuine Casio.
Made this mistake with a cheap rice cooker. Main voltages, high temps, water and steam and sketchy wiring was a terrible plan
It has all the info on the incident.
Amazon is an absolute nightmare to find specific details.
Nowadays I only order from Amazon if the order is a time critical item that only they can deliver on time for a reasonable price. That's less than 5% of my purchases in dollar amount.
I've been a customer since 1997. Amazon has impressed me with their ability to play the long game, and I don't understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon here.
I might send some of our Amazon stuff for testing for phthalates and find out.
Possibly there’s nothing to understand. It’s easily been long enough that it’s plausible that people are playing Chesterton’s Fence games, getting promoted for increasing revenue by .05% while making the experience 0.2% worse.
Funny that’s about 50% of my purchases because I’m terribly impatient and don’t (often) have a car so it’s way easier than going to the store and Canadas e-commerce options aren’t nearly as good as the US.
Please don't insinuate that rural or suburban Americans are somehow "less than" or don't care about quality. There are price-sensitive people everywhere.
I mean, in 2000, Walmart was where you got junk for cheap. In 2022, Walmart is where you know the supply chain is vetted. Everything on their shelves has been cost reduced to an inch of its life, but they also have a good handle on where it came from. It's a little bit easier to stay away from the marketplace garbage on walmart.com than on Amazon, IMHO, but I'd still rather shop somewhere without a marketplace. Unless I'm looking for stuff you can only find in a marketplace, and then you may as well go to ebay or aliexpress.
What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?
1. Amazon is the never the cheapest. 2. Their search is absolutely garbage and I can't use it. I'd need to go elsewhere, find a specific product, then search to compare.
I just logged into Amazon and the last thing I bought was 2021 "Leuko Tape" for hiking since it was the only seller that had it at a reasonable price.
I am genuinely always amazed by the responses on HackerNews. It might be because amazon.com is just cheaper in general than amazon.co.uk?
There is no practical way to buy a reputable/brand name on amazon.
Some brand names are "available", but it seems not officially and people are buying them at a store and shipping them to customers.
Other brand names are available, but the search results are paid (and manipulated) so they get crowded off the page by sponsored and "5 star (2)" results.
and so amazon as a brand is associated with junk.
The only reason I could quickly tell it was fake is because ThermalGrizzly provides an online serial number verification system, which isn't very common among most products. I'm not sure I'd trust Amazon for anything.
There was no way I'd do that on Amazon.
I got them from Costco, instead.
Amazon today is less about selling things to consumers and more about selling consumers to anonymous Chinese suppliers.
Every other store ships with DHL, which after several days pretends that they ring you, when they don’t, and then u can go pick it up at the DHL store a day later.
That’s their moat.
I wanted a new card shuffler.
All I got was pages of the same 3 models of shuffler from every nonsense name brand you could think of.
But really just 3 choices…
I wanted some weight sensors for an arduino project, Arrow had them but Amazon also listed them but in bags of 4 for about the price 2 would have cost from Arrow, plus they'd arrive faster. They ended up being varying weight sensors ripped directly out of various electronic scales and 3/4 didn't work. Had to order from Arrow anyway.
My wife wanted one of those percussive massage guns for post workout, Amazon had the best price but then I saw in some of the reviews people showing that the items they received from Amazon weren't legit and the company (hypervolt iirc) wouldn't honor any warranty from one purchased from Amazon. I was pretty much done at that point. We ended up picking a different model but when we did we went straight through the manufacturer.
Shopping on Amazon sucks.
Sadly enough, at this point Amazon.nl is overshadowing this by giving insane discounts and refunds to customers, so I hope they do not win over Bol.com, but I am anxious about it.
And at least with Bol.com you only need to deal with (sometimes dodgy) companies in the Netherlands, whereas with amazon you haven't got a clue where it's coming from, and a lot of it just seems to be stuff from alibaba at a big markup.
I would never buy something from Amazon that touched my food.
Electronics more complicated than a cable require some review, figuring out if there's a reputable brand underneath, etc.
Only true for what are, now, low-end HDMI cables. Really difficult to get a good one that's actually within spec for high-bandwidth applications.
I don't think it's improved with age, but the links aren't any good, anymore.
There's a big, shady flea market in a bad part of my city. Barbed-wire protecting the roof. Heavy bars on all the windows. Armed guards. Half or more of the vendors are plainly fences, or have a close relationship with one or more. Tons of stuff that "fell of the back of the truck". Entire booths carrying counterfeits of luxury goods, sold under the luxury brand name. It's kinda crazy it's allowed to exist.
You don't go there with the same expectations you do when you go to Wal-Mart or Costco.
Amazon tries to look like, and even started out as, a place like Wal-Mart or Costco. Now they're the "how have the cops not shut this place down?" shady flea market. It's 100% their fault that they're like that, and to the degree that they present themselves as anything else, that's deception.
I want Amazon to be far more selective of the product it sells.
Walmart marketplace is 3rd party sellers, but Walmart doesn’t commingle inventory so it doesn’t infect the rest of their products.
Did Amazon stop commingling fulfillment inventory? That's where I worry about getting burned.
Other marketplaces don’t put up with the same volume of crap being listed as Amazon.
How can I get more information about the seller!? I scrolled through the listing twice and couldn’t see any way to get more information!
this does not seem to be worthwhile for someone wanting to purchase something, my estimates as to if something is worth counterfeiting requires me to have a rather deep understanding of the brand's importance in the world that I would not have for any but the most notable brands, aside from that I have to know something about how easy/costly it is to counterfeit and get things on Amazon to make a model in my mind if the brand was important enough for someone to fake it.
So, for example, if it becomes significantly cheaper to counterfeit things the importance of brands counterfeited (in consumer reach etc.) should drop.
That's a lot of variables. Think I'll just go to the store.
Their cables were the only ones that consistently delivered full promised bandwidth and stable connection even at long cable lengths. Plus, their email support has been very helpful, and had the same “quality cables, no bullshit” attitude as the rest of the website.
No affiliation, just a happy customer of 5+ years.
PostNL is the most reisje local carrier here. Ups is the best but almost never used, so far only by Apple. Dpd, GLs, etc, are all rubbish.
Maybe it depends on the location...
This is not just rural areas, either: even in major cities items can be delivered faster than the time it would take to find a store that carried the item, go to the store, get it, and come home again. It's really only suburban areas with a high density of big-box retail that even have the option to "go out and get something" immediately.
Amusingly, it's also only in these suburban areas where next day delivery even exists to compete. As an anecdote, living in the downtown of a major American city (population > 1million), the average Amazon delivery time is roughly 3 days, and last mile deliveries are all delegated to the USPS which adds significant time.
I’d only order very specific things from Amazon and as a result haven’t actually ordered in a couple years.
Amazon has become a truly awful storefront, and this has accelerated markedly, in just the last couple of years.
If the people who were supposed to be keeping them in line actually went after them aggressively, then it might be possible to start a competitor.
The fake is still up for sale.
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
To me, that reads either like these all being marques of one company; or there being some Chinese "start a turn-key Amazon business" SaaS that most of these pseudo-brands make use of, which generates a brand name for you, and for product descriptions, takes structured key-value input and formats it into text in this style.
Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofiQ7EGBH8 — all the branded "knock-off" smartphones on Wish/AliExpress with hardware meant to look like some well-known phone, but with generic software (usually with a start-up screen that says "WELCOME"), are in fact made by a single white-label manufacturer, Microhand/KST (https://www.microhand.net/english/).
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
For example: ，。；：【】
If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_fa...
From the comments I was expecting a flood of knock-offs or really problematic products, but it seems the main argument is they’re cheap and delivery takes a boat trip across the globe.
Is there any solid reasons these vendors shouldn’t be on Amazon ?
The knock-offs on AliExpress look to me like a different problem.
From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself.
I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
They were on the early side of this phenom as it was a few years ago...
But this model is with pretty much everything these days Etsy, Amazon, Alibabba-importers etc...
Consumerism is cancer.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Even if zero people bought these weird brand products, their existence causes prices to go down, because prices are at the margin, and that's why it pisses off our Tweeter. Because he has to sell for less profit.
You can debate, of course, where one should draw the line in terms of a race to the bottom of the quality barrel crosses from "good" to "bad" but intentionally avoiding liability and responsibility through lies and shell companies is a pretty clear case.
There's plenty of foreign-brand stuff available for good prices at equal-to-or-higher-quality domestic US brand stuff. But then there's also complete garbage scam trash, and Amazon should absolutely deal with that.
At least the stupid-ass brand names make it easy so far to avoid this stuff.
I believe that Amazon probably could not turn the screws on these companies even if it wanted to. It would be a massive loss to their revenue and share holders would revolt. It would bring prices up in aggregate if these companies could not sell junk on the platform.
The best they can do is play coy and hope the US government or EU does not crack down hard on them. Caveat Emptor my friends!
It's a bit screwy, but you can filter by seller by clicking into a specific product category, and then selecting Amazon.com in the bar on the left. Then all the items should be "shipped and sold by Amazon.com".
But I've been sort of shocked to find recently that Amazon's prices, even with free shipping, are often not competitive with buying first-party, even with paying the shipping. For a lot of products these days, if there's a recognizable name brand associated with it, I just by first-party. You get it slower, but you know what you're getting, and probably end up giving more money to the seller too.
I would not have seen myself doing this ten years ago.
I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I'll interact with often.
I don't know about target as I don't shop there too often.
Same problem. Different clothes
I'm surprised that reputation didn't do it. (But I agree; Amazon's behavior certainly seems to show that they don't care.)
The company name (and words in th address) may look really long and suspicious, but it's just because it's transliterated from Chinese.
OP says these are all 'shell companies', but AFAIK it's more onerous and costly to register and maintain a company in China, than in many states in the US.
I'm all for reducing useless regulation, but sometimes you understand where it originally came from as a legitimate need.
So some of them are proud of it.
(EYUSHIJIA, which sounds Chinese but doesn’t mean anything according to the trademark application.)
We're talking about Amazon though right? You can definitely return that, that's even inside the official return window (one month).
> despite all of this, i still mostly love Amazon as a customer. it played a big role in getting my e-commerce business off of the ground and i'm grateful for that.
"It's a flea market full of cheap (and sometimes dangerous) junk, but I still love it!"
I got an empty box shipped to me instead of an SSD last week and got an instant refund for it.
I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoid the obvious Chinese knockoff stuff (unless it’s some trivially unimportant thing), and don’t find it hard to do so at all.
On another hand, I ordered something (~$80) from Home Depot online, shipped to my house. The box arrived, without the item inside. HD phone and chat support both claimed the ship weight was correct, and that I'd need to file a dispute with my credit card to resolve it. What kind of crap service is that!? Why would they not ship another one, considering their cost is probably much less than $80 rather than lose the entire $80, product, and piss off someone who spends thousands there every year?
Amazon didn't get to be the #1 online retailer and 3rd largest company in the world by ripping people off. Clearly, they have online figured out much better than all of their large competition.
I waded through Twitter’s hostile interface only to be made a fool of by hostile content.
Update: At least the title here has been changed now to remove the trick lede.
It really opens up your eyes to the sheer size of the fake account and bot traffic, market. It makes you skeptical of everything you see online.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
Related, I don't understand twitter as a place for long form content. It's difficult to read and it can't be easy to post.
Instead, I learned to love it. It's almost a way of being reminded again and again about who is speaking, and it gives you a little feedback of how interesting other Twitter users found that particular section.
I don't really like that I learned to love it. I think it might be unhealthy. But that's a different issue.
Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?
EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon Mechanical Turk!
Generally too one of the causes of this craziness is that we keep outsourcing our manufacturing to China. China is only making these items because a much larger American company like OXO has them making really awesome kitchen items (for example) So it's not that hard for the same factory to create a series of shell companies that also sell the OXO stuff. I mean how hard is it to copy and paste the ads that the legit companies make and sell directly?
If we didn't outsource everything then it wouldn't be happening.
Target is definitely the closest we've found over here.
Right now buying home goods online is a nightmare: Search engines don’t help, the big retailer websites are full of junk, prices are unbelievable. But I’ve had great success identifying the handful of companies that make X in the USA and ordering directly from them.
> how can you protect yourself as a consumer?
Followed by a tedious list of hoops to jump through around verifying authenticity to a point where you might not get stung.
At this point, is it not better to just give up on Amazon and use a retailer that takes its product sourcing more seriously?
Continuing to use Amazon when you know how full to the brim of scams it is, just seems to me like rewarding them for bad behaviour.
Take your money elsewhere, with everyone else, and let the invisible hand of the market give Amazon a bloody good slap.
Honestly, if we're talking about convenience, Amazon is pretty much the best game in town. They have many documented failings and faults, but being inconvenient isn't one of them.
I value my time and don't want a 'caveat emptor' market experience, so I've largely given up on Amazon as a reliable market browser.
Basically just filter out the crap and profit
I still use their reviews as a reference point, but for a lot of things I don't really go for their top selections.
I've looked at laptop cases. Here is a sampling of brand names: Lacdo, Voova, KINGSLONG, NIDOO, tomtoc, MOSISO, INVZI, XMBFZ, Arvok, Kinmac, Londo...
I've bought cases for my ipad and work laptop from Lacdo and one for my upcoming MBA from Voova. They're actually great, but I worry they're made with Uighur slave labor or toxic materials or something.
I'd prefer not to support Amazon, but where else am I supposed to find stuff like this? Do I buy my electronics (eg. Hue lights recently) from Best Buy instead, which has a worse return policy and whose Geek Squad worked with the FBI to violate customers' rights?
Edit: Also, a few days ago I went on a search for a desktop organizer. Here are some brand names: DALTACK, ARCOBIS, DEZZIE, Hossejoy, Greenco, AMERIERGO, SONGMICS, X-cosrack, Marbrasse, Citmage, Samstar, Beiz. It goes on forever.
I checked Walmart and Target too, but wound up buying this one from "Lavatino" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PL59RL6 The product is actually awesome. The compartments are the perfect size to hold my coasters and I organized everything that was loose on my desk with room to spare.
So, it feels great to get something I needed, but the whole process still feels bad somehow.
Keep in mind that while Amazon is the white whale here, this absolutely happens at pretty much any retailer that has moved to an online store where they list more than any individual store has inventory of. I hate supporting Amazon, but personally Best Buy is the lesser of two evils, and at least there I can return in store.
The return process through my nearby Kohl's is super easy.
This amused me because, as a native English speaker, I once considered buying Voova.com as a [then] freely available brandable five digit dotcom!
tbh names like Lacdo or MOSISO actually seem better than rubbish names like Google or Nvidia
Good question. Supposedly Retail is not profitable and AWS carries all the weight for the company. I don't know if that's true or not (?)
Anyhow, I don't think it would make that much difference. The reputational hit that Retail takes every day probably does not carry over much to AWS, nor does AWS good will (if there is any) help Retail at all.
> well, they're on Amazon... surely they are a legit company and Amazon is covering their bases... good luck!
>> Business Address:
>> longhuaqulonghuajiadaojinglongshequLONGHUANYILU jiruizongheyuanWULONGDASHA Bdong502
>> Shenzhenshi
>> Guangdongsheng
>> 518110
>> CN
This is the second time I've seen someone complain about "obviously" illegitimate business information that appears to be the vendor's own home address. I don't see how they could be more open or informative than that. Want to get in touch with them? Send a letter to that address; they'll see it.
Compare that with that string of garbled pinyin: it returns zero google results, refers to an area of China with no Street View access, and I wouldn't even know where to begin to verify if they are actually a registered company, who owns that address or how long the company has existed, and there's nothing I could cross-reference with other sources. If they wanted to throw away that identity, they could probably get a dozen like it in under a week with minimal effort. So yes, there's definitely many ways they could be more open or informative to communicate their status as a legitimate business that values their identity.
Shoprunner let’s you buy direct from brand with 2 day shipping, so you don’t need to lose that benefit, while avoid “mass marketplace” mis-incentives of amazon like fake products. It has the benefit of being good on clothing, which amazon was never a great destination for.
I haven’t used the Walmart “prime-equivilent” benefit, but it seems pretty comparable to amazon prime but at a retailer that has quality control (of some basic level). I’m just not much of a Walmart user.
Shipt gets you “Same day” delivery from stores like target, which is a good counter to the growing same day delivery amazon has been rolling out. I found that its way worse than amazon though, since Shipt is “gig workers” and doesn’t connect to the store’s inventory very well, so you never really know if your order will be fulfilled in full. I use this for last-minute target orders when I don’t have time to visit the store.
Shopify is rolling out a bunch of competing features, but the most useful one is that they’ll provide a single app to track your purchases, which means you don’t need 20 apps on your phone for each retailer just to track that one package a month you order (or more if that’s you).
Oh and now you have a bunch of accounts that you have to give your data to and hope they don’t get breached.
TLDR: It’s really hard to de-amazon if you’re a regular and hooked on the convenience BUT capitalism at work is providing alternatives slowly…
1. Items whose brand absolutely don't matter so long as they work as intended (e.g., books, home goods like hangers).
2. Home goods it wouldn't be worthwhile to knock off (e.g., KIND bars, toilet paper).
3. Smaller brands whose market share and item appeal are not worth cloning (e.g., a mechanical keyboard breadboard kit).
4. Things I'd order from banggood /aliexpress anyway, that Amazon will get to me faster (e.g., some diodes).
For everything else, I'd rather get it at a local store or order it from Target/Best Buy/Whoever than risk the Amazon purchase.
Even things you might think are niche enough not to attract copycats (ham radio DIY kits requiring soldering and multimeter use) absolutely do, and a lot of it ends up on Amazon, though eBay is by far a worse offender.
When it turned out that I couldn't use the product in my application, I canceled my order before it was shipped. They ignored that and shipped it anyway. Then I had to pay return shipping. If I had bought through Amazon, I could have returned it free.
Moral: When customers seek you out to help you out, don't be assholes.
I posit that we're sliding back to the 1990's Amazon: only good for books. But it doesn't matter because they are interested in being a Google with customer service and making a profit that way.
They do, and we have seen people get fake items. this is a huge problem for things like tourniquets. We tell people to go right to North American Rescue for example but so many people instinctively go to Amazon now and order things that it's a problem.
the fakes look almost like the real thing but have no quality control and break easily.
There are lots of bins in the warehouse. They contain up to around five items each. There is a theoretical possibility that two of the same thing from different sellers could end up in the same bin. At that point the picker wouldn’t know which is which.
In general I would say it is safer than an FBA or FBM offer, but not totally safe.
Vendor accounts are highly sought after by black-hatters because:
1. It's much harder to track down shenanigans you run on them (since as you said the only public seller info is "Amazon") 2. They generally have higher authority for editing listings, so if you want to change a competitor's images it's more likely to stick from a vendor account
I returned that and simultaneously ordered the exact same item again from the same page, still "shipped and sold by amazon", and this time the properly packaged product arrived, with a valid serial number, and it worked just fine.
The answer is that Amazon has quietly pivoted: Their new business model is
1. Buy stuff from AliExpress.
2. Mark it up 5x-10x.
3. Profit!
Amazon probably hopes their customers don't notice they can get the same stuff from AliExpress much cheaper. Which they won't because only about 1% of Amazon's customers have even heard of AliExpress.
Even with speedy free delivery, Amazon's profit margin by marking up AliExpress stuff is probably quite a bit higher than it was for the old Amazon.
From the limited searching I did when I first noticed this, it seems to actually be a more or less flat $10 markup, regardless of whether that works out to 10x or 10%.
Maybe some sort of fixed cost is involved?
Because all the profit is in being a platform. Otherwise, their retail operations would be looking at the sub 5% profit margins of every other retail business in the US.
I think Aliexpress is usually about 20% of the Amazon price, but depending on the item I agree that it can be 10%.
Any idea why Taobao goes through such great effort to prevent American buyers from using the platform? (Or was I doing it wrong…? I used one of the Taobao forwarding services)
AliExpress.. by the time it arrives I've probably forgotten I've ordered it, and if they won't offer a refund if it's no good/wrong somehow then bank might say the transaction's too old to do anything about (not sure about a time limit on credit card protections, maybe that's a better option), just generally more hassle. Not to mention the janky UX of ordering in the first place. (Why can it never guess both currency and delivery country correctly? UK & GBP isn't an oddball combination...)
Is Amazon better at compensating customers or removing fraudulent product listings?
If I can wait a month, it's cheaper on AliExpress, although their search/discovery is a mess.
If I want it in a week or two, I can usually find it for a few dollars more at eBay claiming 'US seller".
If I want it by the end of the week, I'll try to assemble $25 worth of "shipped by Amazon" items.
I placed an order June 30, it arrived July 17.
I wish they'd at lest truly make the product generic instead of placing a useless logo on it.
After nearly month (and I emailed the guy twice already without reply) I ordered a leather case from UK which cost twice the amount of money. I got it within 2 days. I put a claim with PayPal (he wasn't responding) for the case I didn't receive. It was accepted quickly.
A few days after that the guy emailed me claiming it was due to illness at his company, and that he'd send ut ASAP. A few days after I got it in the mail. Its still rotting somewhere in my house. I wonder if he saw or cared about my claim. Given it only cost him a couple of USD I figure he'd just write it off instead of asking for return.
Chinese company names are generally [location] [selected name] [what they do], like Baidu is Beijing + Baidu + Netcom Science Technology.
The transliteration in the tweet: "shenzhenshizhengshunzidianziyouxiangongsi"
Shenzhen-shi (city), Dianzi (electronics), youxian (limited), gongsi (company)
"wu long da sha b dong" seems like it's Five Dragons Building (https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.... ;some kind of office park?), Building B, and a suite number. The first line is something like "Longhuan 1st Road, Jinglong Community, Longhua Street, Longhua District".
It just looks like a mess because people are not used to it, and in chinese writing you don't separate the characters - it's "有限公司" for limited company, not "有限 公司"
(Your comment should probably be the top comment for the thread)
I don't disagree with the morality argument, but Amazon has made things so incredibly convenient for the consumer.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
So kind of the internet we had in the early to mid 90s
In an economy where the only thing that matters is actual money there wouldn't be any bots - after all I don't see bots queuing up to buy stuff. This is a problem the bullshit advertising and "growth & engagement" industry brought on themselves. If you pay people to click on stuff, they're gonna click it, tell others to click or build machines to click.
Anytime you have thousands of versions of things to sell (Amazon) you're going to need a ranking mechanism. And ranking mechanisms can be gamed by bots and other tricks.
This is not a "why don't they fight the spam harder" problem. That's Google's problem. Amazon's problem is, apparently, that their corporate culture is so toxic and broken as to make any kind of internal controls or moderation outright useless.
The reasonable behaviour would of course be to give a pop-up like "hey, you're trying to buy a book that doesn't work for your Kindle, are you sure this is what you want?" I bet they have some sort of disclaimer hidden away in some giant heap of legalese making it "legal" but the whole flow was clearly designed to trick people this way. And I'm a programmer, I don't get tricked as easily as the average person in this context(I hope).
Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.
I would have agreed with this sentiment six months ago, but now Walmart allows third-party sellers. I could consolidate to "At least BRICK-AND-MORTAR Walmart stores should have reliable products", but physical Walmart seems to have gotten in bed with this Chinese brand "onn." Their products are absolute garbage, and they seem to have jettisoned everything else from their store. I've had to tell my parents to please stop buying any electronics stuff from Wal-Mart and go to a Target or something when their iPhone cable breaks so that they can at least get a proper Anker cable.
It's really tiring how much time I have to spend protecting my family from junk products these days.
> Walmart is Onn’s parent company. Onn is Walmart’s generic brand electronics label, and Onn products, including Onn TVs, are only available in Walmart stores.
But even still, the third-party sellers aren't as bad on walmart as they are on amazon
> what's the root cause of all of this?
> Amazon courting overseas manufacturers and sellers at all costs.
Why though? How does it benefit Amazon to have endless, no-name, bad quality listings? It makes the consumer experience awful & dangerous, not to mention the continued lowering trust in the marketplace.
As others have mentioned, it's often better to go to Target/Walmart/Costco/etc to buy from a reputable supply chain (instead of risking getting counterfeit goods from Amazon).
Amazon excels on shipping speed (logistics), but why bother when it's mostly garbage that sometimes gets returned?
But the listing can get hijacked. There's an opportunity for improvement. Take down a listing when creative suddenly changes, for example.
From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.
I don't expect that someone deciding to do their own spin on this would bother to notice these little things. It'd be like someone setting out to make their own mass-manufactured chicken nuggets, and accidentally recreating the exact set of nugget shapes McDonald's uses.
(Except one actually, very recently, it was a relatively high value Warehouse order that wasn't as described and I returned - no problems accepting/arranging that, but some tardniness on the actual refund coming through. Probably it would have been fine, but I did chase it several times before eventually getting someone willing/with the power to override whatever was making it take weeks to refund after having shown as delivered to their facility. I still think even that experience was better than I get elsewhere, and certainly on the whole it is, that was my worst ever, and it was fine in the end.)
You pay the markup to get the item quickly, and for easy returns.
The one advantage you still get via indirect ordering is often smaller lot sizes. I'd rather pay $1 for a bolt than $50 for 5000 bolts, even if the piece cost is much higher.
I really wish I could switch to other online or brick and mortar vendors, but nothing executes as well as Amazon in my experience. I even tried ordering some computer parts from newegg and it was fine, but it felt like I was back in 2002 or so.
Just curious because I've never had any luck finding something specific, just slightly different knock-offs. Which can be fine of course, it's just less obvious to me that should exist than under-the-table selling of extra output, or rogue employees/company or whatever. Higher effort and more enterprising.
Yeah, I'm not sure what to do with that information.
As some of the recent supply chain issues are easing off things will be feeling better when they are in fact moving back in the direction of what was normal.
Last time I was in Walmart (2 days ago) I picked up a SanDisk SD card specifically because I've had good luck with them. All the other brands were there and Onn was just the stuff on the bottom shelves.
I’d link things like this[1] but I can’t be sure you’ll see the same thing I’m linking because they are constantly mutating.
We have to accept the fact that algorithms have reached the tech level of convincing a double digit percentage of humanity to do what the algorithm wants because that is what is current reality
[1] https://newyorkshirtcompany.com/products/queens-are-born-in-...
It's not surprising this niche has developed. What's surprising is that Amazon seems dead set on undermining their business to support it. It's also surprising that people write these amazed posts like they've just discovered this problem, when it has been going on for a decade.
I read a HN comment a while back that framed the topic of declining quality plus free returns as companies outsourcing their QC to the customers and that really stuck with me. This is really the natural progression of wanton consumerism - so much stuff is sold and never actually used that it's profitable to only worry about the case where the buyer actually uses it and finds it lacking.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/quality-fade-chi...
Nevertheless, why on earth would it allow the purchase to happen when it was set to deliver to a specific unsupported kindle, my only one? It just makes no sense other than as a scam.
The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it.
Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with.
If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally.
I was looking at the “baby mocassin” listing the tweet is mentioning, and picked one of the “small business” labeled ones that have probably been vetted as an actual US business: https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAm...
The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)
I don't know how common that is, but buyers should be aware that many Amazon sellers, including domestic ones, operate in the way the OA explains.
Biggest annoyance IMO is that they clog up the search results and make it harder to find products you'd actually buy. Many sell the exact same item, which you then have to skip over, over and over again. Someone at Amazon must be bonus'd on adding new vendors.
And Amazon not letting you filter out third-party sellers is effectively a dark pattern.
bestbuy.ca has search results primarily comprised of third-party sellers, but has a prominent “Best Buy Only” filter at the top of the results.
“We listened to customer demand” wouldn’t as a defense for filtering for goods that go through their warehouse (which also doesn’t guarantee you get what you expected)
Getting a trademark isn't an "Amazon standard." It's a requirement to use A+ Content, among many other things.
However, you can ship product into their warehouses all day long without one. So clearly not a "standard."
> I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust.
The standards, like food safety, that people really care about have nothing to do with trademarks. You can say that it stops unsafe knockoffs, but this is factually wrong based on the amount of counterfeit stuff that comes out of Amazon.
> By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
Registering a trademark only guarantees you are willing to follow the rules of getting a trademark. Nothing else.
> You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Non sequitur. Trademarks don't exist to protect customers. They exist to protect businesses from knockoffs.
> you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales.
Nope. I just don't want to spend 850 Euro to register a trademark for a low volume product.
> Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
There's a "have one to sell? Sell on Amazon" link on every product page.
I assume their Whole Foods division is at least FDA regulated.
You?
These things seem so easy once you see them all working, but companies don't have the resources or the interest in catching up.
I can go to Walmart and get a higher-quality product. I can buy tons of things at Walmart that I can't from Amazon due to their self-sabotoged supply chain. Food, kitchen products, personal care products, batteries, electronics, clothing, tools, etc etc. (How pitiful a time we live in when I am writing praises about Walmart. Sigh.)
Amazon's seller-side stickerless inventory documentation specifically says that identical items from different sellers are never put into same physical bin so that the original source can be traced.
Irrelevant to the discussion. Keep reading the link that cj provided, starting at the "Example", and you'll see that there is nothing preventing a counterfeit item being sold on behalf of a FBA seller even if the seller shipped genuine items to Amazon. All virtual tracking does is (theoretically) allow *tracing* of the counterfeit item should it be detected and reported.
You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?
And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com
You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant).
Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
> You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned
It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused.
> lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets,
There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly.
Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random.
But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible.
(Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
i think the scam here is that amazon or amazon sellers will pay people to warehouse product in the US, because when you're selling aliexpress goods at a 90% markup, you can afford the warehousing. and the people they're paying to run those warehouses list the product on ebay at 20% markup, on the assumption that if it sells they can make an aliexpress order and restock before the amazon seller notices their product is missing.
The margins look huge, but actually many steps like carrying that inventory or even the shipping from near warehouse is pretty expensive. Like more than the product itself.
Reverse image search works wonders against "unique" brandnames.
I have never seen it done in anything other than in Japanese text, and translations of. Not sure about double bullet points, but this usage of 【】 is distinctly Japanese.
I learned this the hard way when I received a counterfeit playstation controller, straight from the "Sony" store. For some reason, none of my reviews, even the positive ones, have posted since that one, which included pictures of a teardown.
Supply chain attacks are real and even reputable vendors are susceptible. The difference is how the vendors react with their customers that separates the good vendor from the bad vendor.
Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi.
It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.
It was _fundamental_ to whomever wrote the piece...
So I mentioned it here.
Sorry I failed your "anti-semetic triggers" - FFS.
I interpreted the comment differently to you. To me, it appeared that the GP was merely trying to give all the details he remembered from the story. Each additional detail helps when trying to find a decade(s) old story on google or similar.
When reporting descriptions of people, the more detail, the better. Withholding things like race, religion, etc in an effort to be more PC results in a less accurate description.
SET THE SCENE: "What you may think of sleepy hassidic brooklyn as a religious enclave -check out these guys with curls making a killing on amazon knock-offs.!"
You're assuming cause & effect here. To this point, imagine:
- The crowd following the leader / a particular success story
- Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
- "Educational" boot camps to "get rich". There are towns where people gathered to learn from "the pros" (search for related documentaries)
- Learning from the same person, e.g. via tiktok-esque platform
- Subscribed to update packages
- Generator to fill forms
'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China.
Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success?
e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down?
I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy.
Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
> Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
> Subscribed to update packages
> Generator to fill forms
...are fully in line with my argument. My hypothesis wasn't specifically that this was a SaaS system doing this. Rather, my hypothesis was that there's a Single-Point-of-Failure entity or platform that these listings go through — a Borg Queen that could be taken down; and that doing so would stop thousands of sellers in their tracks. I'm agnostic to what form that entity or platform takes.
You might be interested to hear my own guess as to a possible mechanism for this, though, as it's not listed among your alternatives. That guess is that there are a very small number of Chinese companies that advertise their services as writing/managing English-language Amazon product listings, for companies that have no English speakers. These companies use human labor, not automation, but they have a strict style guide, which both informs the format of their output, and the type of input they require from their clients. The network of sellers whose listings look the same, are all the work of one such English-language post-localization company (the largest/most popular one), and so all adhere to one uniform style guide. This company, at least, has the seller themselves register with Amazon; but from there, takes over responsibility for creating products in their account, managing returns claims, etc. They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
This would explain the reluctance of these sellers to engage through Amazon customer service (instead sending cards with their products that say "please report any issues to <email address>") — they don't manage their own product listings (rather, the contractor does); and they don't trust the English-language-product-listings contractor to know enough about their product to do customer service; and it's hard to coordinate their separate English-language customer-support contractor (the one you reach via the email on the card) to be able to receive + respond to messages on postings managed by the product-listings contractor.
It would also make an interesting prediction: that you'll only see the particular style I described in my top post, in Amazon's English-language product listings, because each contract company would likely focus on selling product-listing localization services for a particular language, so different language ⇒ different company ⇒ different style guide.
> e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
You'd expect some people to miss that news. And even for people who see the update — no matter how "hungry" they are — you'd expect some sellers to let the news slip past them. For every such disseminated "Amazon Seller pro tip", you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement. And yet engagement with these changes is 100% — at least within this network of sellers where engagement has historically been 100%.
(Just to beat this point to death, consider the ultimate in centralized top-down "do it exactly one way" skill dissemination: driving. Does every 16-year-old who is highly motivated and hungry to get out on the road, learn every rule of the road + constantly execute their learned driving skills perfectly? Sadly, no. Humans are not good at perfectly absorbing skills, and are also fallible at executing them.)
Very likely.
In my previous comment, I focused on the perspective of individual sellers (i.e. entrepreneurial) who have bulk contracts with the local manufacturers. They are the group who are unlikely to commit to "all-inclusive" packages, as they value financial cost overwhelmingly more than personal time, relative to other groups. Think college students, retirees, unemployed, people from poorer areas, etc. They are ubiquitously known as 'wang dai', literally online retailer or agent. These are the first wave of significant online retailing in China. As they want to expand abroad, those who gained some first experience are packaging courses at minimal entry fee (~10USD!). There were a long period where these courses are bombarded via WeChat. (There still are, but the trend has shifted to other topics)
Naturally, the manufacturers want a bigger piece of the cake and now dominates their own online presence in China. To further expand beyond abroad, as they probably do not have adequate language/platform in-house expertise. This is a perfect match to the services you described - outsourcing to e.g. Amazon/eBay specialists.
In either case the point still stands. There's a snowball effect of following the lead of whoever is known to be successful and became the 'authority'.
> you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement
I agree imperfect engagement is expected on the whole, but how the 100% metric is derived can be misleading. Is it 100% of the top 100 items i.e. the cream of the crop? How different would it be if the procrastinators or failures or one-offs are also included?
Also, I don't think analogue activities like driving is, analogous. Probably closer to Pride Day / French Flag photo overlay across various social platforms. Or SEO.
> a Borg Queen that could be taken down
I think we are aligned that there's a Borg Queen, but not on the rigidness of the hierarchy.
I believe it's weakly/organically structured, unless there's a monopoly, that I'm not aware of, happened.
Lots of them did
You're assuming coordination on the part of the sellers, but another possibility is that the Amazon search engine penalized that text