But now that nearly every category on Amazon is dominated by cheap crap from dodgy brands in China, I'm feeling less reason to buy things from them (unless I need it tomorrow). I suppose that's what's fuelling the popularity of new marketplaces like Temu?
BUT, and this is the key part - buyer teams from major brands vet the supplier, make cost/quality tradeoffs and do all the supplier due diligence (like making them attest the products are not made by "modern slavery", don't have lead in them, etc). They also squeeze them super hard on payments and financials.
The BEEZELBUBS and QRYGGS are mostly the SAME factories that have always been making your goods but now they are "out of the box" and can sell to the consumer directly.
The good part is that they can now compete "fairly" outside shelf space monopolies, the bad part is that no one seems to be doing supplier due diligence or addressing quality fade.
Other retailers put their reputation on the line with their merchandise. Sure, the same factory that manufactures for Old Navy makes QRYGGS. But Old Navy vets it.
Amazon’s issue is that it tosses its hands up and says “Sold by QRYGGS, fulfilled by Amazon.” Amazon says: if it’s garbage, not our fault, but you can return it. That’s just wandering a flea market with random vendors selling junk.
So I’m actually disappointed that Amazon would double-down on this by eliminating its private labels. At least if I see it’s an Amazon brand, I know they vouch for it. Indeed, my experiences with Amazon brands have been at least decent. But given the choice between fighting the regulators, somehow firewalling the private labels from the other vendors, or reducing its flea-market trafficking, Amazon decided to double-down on the flea market and scale back goods that it vets. It’s a big red-light district of some good stuff mixed in with tons of garbage.
Not saying always but it's definitely a thing.
I determined that Amazon simply doesn't care anymore. The value proposition was completely lost because I had to drive into town to return them. Twice in a row.
Further, their prices have gotten horrible on a lot of things. I looked at some of their lawncare items, and most of them were 2-3x more than local prices.
While I have avoided most of the counterfeit dupes (of which I will broaden beyond just selling clones; there are plenty of shady products with questionable descriptions that don't match reality), they have been steadily increasing prices on many products to the point that I am often better off driving to a Lowes or Home Depot for faster service and better deals on things. I also can't emphasize enough that they haven't been that competitive in the laptop market or the home desktop PC market either for years now. Parts and DIY, sure, but I frequently find better deals elsewhere on what is usually the same hardware. I suspect the suppliers are the real root cause of this, but either way it ends up a bad deal. Additionally, finding things with targeted specs is surprisingly difficult at times, and can easily lead to choices that aren't even correct when search starts looking at adjacent products.
It's very messed up. About a year ago I ordered a nice camera from Amazon. What I received was an old beat up camera thrown carelessly into a box with most of the accessories missing.
Sure, they took it back and refunded me without much pain (but I had to take time of my day to repackage it and drive to a mailbox store to drop it off). But seriously, how is this even possible? Not even in the shadiest fleamarket would this kind of bait & switch happen. This is supposed to be one of the top companies?
That said, I presume the only way Temu can pull this off logistically is air freight, so I also have my doubts about his sustainable this is.
There may be settled case law that says these aren't silencers legally, idk. The whole discipline is hilariously talmudic and full of the heap problem (is a billet of metal a gun? What about with one hole in it? Two holes and a chamfer here and a routed channel there? etc.)
50% of the time it'll be cheaper and have a better prime ship date (and say Sold By BrandName or Amazon instead of a random seller name), and no counterfeits at all this way yet
I've not seen this personally, and checking my last 10 ordered items (some 6-7 character made up brand imported items and some recognizable brand items), following this process landed me on the same ASIN/same PDP each time, but it's definitely intriguing enough for me to want to find out more.
* The alphanumeric Amazon Stock ID Number, for physical goods it's usually (always?) a B followed by 9 alphanumeric digits.
Not the one I was looking for but somewhat related: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/contributor-content/articl...
Sure you could remember a name you decide to trust, and never ever care to do research from there. But I see it the same way we had a period on usenet where you'd put your real name and phone number in your posts signature.
Too sad Amazon allowed reviews to be gamed, but I think third party reviews are still the way forward to identify good products.
Sounds like the usual whittling of unsuccessful products and a consolidation of branding.
Unsure how much this actually impacts end users (except those thinking they’re being anti-Amazon by buying a non-Amazon product that’s aktually an Amazon product)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbxWGjQ2szQ Here's a fun video for those looking for a ripoff by Amazon.
And Amazon's own-brand instant coffee is truly, truly awful, FYI. (Although their filter coffee is good)
I am not an FTC regulator, but to me it seems like the shadiest thing Amazon does with its brands is to give them increased prominence in search results. They cannot tell me they don't juice the results to bubble their brands up to the top.
After that 2020 article, Amazon curbed a yearslong practice in which its own brands were given a boost in the search results on its site in special placements—the kind of edge other sellers could only gain by buying ads—according to the people familiar with the recent changes. That change caused many of Amazon’s brands to be buried in search results, making it harder for items to sell. The cost of warehousing all that inventory was significant for Amazon, making it a target during the cost cutting.
Doesn't mean they stopped the practice completely, but apparently it was enough to make most of their own brands unprofitable.
I only bought them because they are Ergotrons.
Honestly they are one of the few shorts I wear because it is so hard to find good cargo shorts for tall guys.
Paper Towels, TP, vitamins, ibuprofen, etc. Much of it is solid quality, does what I need, and far cheaper than the alternatives even local ones.
Looking at what is mentioned it is the staples like this that will be fine. The things that will be going away will be the fancier things or things like furniture.
I mean, not nice nice, but fine for casual everyday wear. It was generally the most reliable way to shop for clothes on Amazon, IMO.
Formerly branded Solomio. Now branded Amazon Basics.
I tried Amazon pants to see what they were like. You get what you pay for. Avoid.
edit: The physical quality seemed fine, but it's obvious that they never tested it or even thought about it much.
Yes I leave stuff open for a couple of hours while troubleshooting, not every problem is solved in five minutes and one device! No bank, you aren’t increasing security, I’m not in a library or a cafe. Especially infuriating if it happens while I'm waiting for the thing to check/update something and it signs me out because I'm not doing anything!
Basics and Essentials will still be there.
So that's at least 3 different times that this vendor has boosted their reputation and sales by paying for reviews and then switcheroo'd after things slow down.
Meanwhile Amazon happily collects its fees and doesn't give a damn.
A lot of stuff is dispatched from their local warehouses (or at least flown in from China and consolidated locally) and distributed by their own courier network.
Sounds similar to Temu, and TBH is probably exactly the same network. If you get tracking updates from "Fast Horse Express", it's definitely the same network. :)
But we will close your account if you return too many things.
Do you think we can side step the issue by only buying stuff that’s “sold by” Amazon or one of its global subsidiaries?
Some flea market sellers, unreliable as they can be, have an advantage here: many sell under their own brand, even if you’ve never heard of it. In contrast, if you seek out a known brand on Amazon, there’s the risk of fakes. Every product listing on Amazon carries a set of risks.
The seller would need special ATF licensure and follow an onerous process to sell what is typically considered safety equipment in Europe, ironically. This involves submitting fingerprints, passport photos, and a lengthy (9+ month) approval process on the part of the ATF.
For the self-manufacture, this has been de-factor outlawed by the current regime with DIY kits being arbitrarily reclassified as suppressors themselves. Most if not all Form 1 builds are outright denied.
So, in short, Temu cannot sell these at all. Of course they also occasionally sell selector switches to concert Glock handguns to fully automatic. This is even more comically illegal than a suppressor workaround.
And yeah the Glock switch thing is absolutely wild. Sure, calling a shoelace a machine gun[0] stretches philosophy a fair bit. But the widespread availability of a bit of hardware that can only add select fire to a handgun tells me that enforcement is only a problem for those willing to adhere to the rules at all.
Chinese shipping is cheap because the Chinese government subsidies it for exported goods, and because due to a postal treaty the U.S. government was forced to honor those rates for goods shipped to U.S. addresses. This treaty was renegotiated in 2019 (changes effective 2020) to make shipping costs several times more expensive for Chinese manufacturers, but those higher prices are still ridiculously cheap compared to the prices domestic manufacturers must pay so there is still a substantial arbitrage opportunity, which is basically what Temu is (in addition to being an I.P. theft play, but that's an entirely separate issue).
I'm finding the shipping times are less terrible than they used to be-- often 2-3 weeks, with surprisingly good tracking. (The big black hole seems to be when the package arrives in Compton, and then usually spends a few days before being handed over to the USPS; I imagine they crack open a shipping container and re-wrap everyone's purchases for the last 1000km through a domestic carrier.
It's interesting that nobody's ever proposed a big fat USPS subsidy for domestic mail as a way to make American business more competitive. There are plenty of items (anything in the "small, unbranded, low-performance-needed hardware/accessories/toys" category) where the options are often "$2 + free shipping from Shenzhen in 2-3 weeks" or "$2 + $4.50 shipping in 3-4 days for a comparable item sold by a guy in Tacoma". I might be willing to pay $1 more for the convenience of having it sooner, but much more than that and I'll just compensate for slow delivery times by always having a project or two in the pipeline.
I've used Amazon regularly, back even when it was just a place to get cheap books. I assume it happens but I think the comments on Hacker News are just not representative of the general public on this issue. Any Amazon thread on here is chock-full of people saying they constantly get fake products.
I avoid large purchases on Amazon when I can, but that's mostly because I want there to be competition for them.
I got a fake Google Pixel case for my wife. It looked identical to the real one, but didn't fit the phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walmart_brands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Corporation#Private-lab...
Not my experience with Amazon basics.
This makes sense, as Costco is trying to move a lot of units and you can move a lot more units into the market that's looking for "perfectly adequate" than the ones looking for "the best". Honda outsells Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini combined and all that...
