[HN Gopher] Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFF...
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Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
Author : rafaelm
Score : 497 points
Date : 2022-07-22 19:14 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The thread didn't answer the question.
| kbd wrote:
| Happy to see this discussed on HN because I've constantly been
| stressing about this whenever I shop on Amazon. "All these brands
| are Chinese with random combinations of characters for a name"
|
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Here is a sampling of brand names... Voova
|
| 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
| pathartl wrote:
| We absolutely need some consumer protections for things like
| this, but at the end of the day it takes some smart choices by
| the consumer. Sometimes those smart choices are to not make a
| purchase for that type of product, or compromise on design for
| reputability, etc.
|
| 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.
| kbd wrote:
| > at least there I can return in store
|
| The return process through my nearby Kohl's is super easy.
| scrlk wrote:
| I wish there was some way to force the "sold by Amazon" filter to
| be on all the time; I think that would resolve most of the issues
| I have with browsing on Amazon.
|
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > want to get in touch with DOTTAVR?
|
| > 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.
| josephh wrote:
| Yeah, if that's the first thing that comes to their mind, then
| they need to look themselves in the mirror real hard and wonder
| whether they're the ones perpetuating xenophobia.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| One of the posts contains a screenshot of a vendor's company name
| and address.
|
| 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.
| ev1 wrote:
| This is pretty much it. People always say it's random mess or
| fake, but "youxian gongsi" is literally "limited company" and
| based on Shenzhen. I do a lot of hardware ordering and speak
| none of the language and picked this up over time.
|
| 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
| "You Xian Gong Si " for limited company, not "You Xian Gong Si
| "
| trasz wrote:
| I'm eagerly waiting for an option in Safari to translate text
| automatically, without having to click every time.
| notahacker wrote:
| Same goes for brand names that are completely unpronounceable
| in English and the fondness for ALLCAPS. _Of course_ people
| accustomed to a completely unrelated language and writing
| system are likely to come up with transliterated or synthetic
| brandnames or acronyms that seem bizarre to English speakers.
| Buyers make one-time-only purchases based on search result
| order, price and star ratings, so localising brandname to the
| market is well down the list of priorities below keyword
| stuffing and trimming the Alibaba images. Names which look as
| bizarre in ASCII as Huawei and Xiaomi have actually succeeded
| in becoming brands in the West anyway.
|
| (Your comment should probably be the top comment for the
| thread)
| afro88 wrote:
| Funnily enough some of them looked like Ikea product names
| wizofaus wrote:
| There was one that conceivably could have been a bad OCR
| attempt to read Chinese characters using a Latin alphabet which
| is weird, but some of them do also look like bad/non-standard
| Romanisation attempts (with an odd lack of spaces etc.). Odd
| because I'd think technology to accurately generate standard
| (pinyin) romanisation must be reasonably good by now.
| ev1 wrote:
| The lack of spaces is somewhat normal if you assume that
| chinese doesn't use spaces when writing, like a name is just
| the glyphs combined together in one word, while in English
| normally there is a space between F+L.
| wizofaus wrote:
| The point of Romanisation is to make it possible to at
| least mentally turn it into "sounds" for those familiar
| with Latin alphabets, who (except German speakers)
| generally expect to see spaces between words too. Japanese
| writing doesn't use spaces either but all the standard
| Romaji transliterations do make use of spaces.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I was talking about the company name, but perhaps you were
| talking about the brand name?
| Fargoan wrote:
| Amazon is the last place I go if I need to purchase something.
| Sometimes I'll use it like a search engine and then go off-site
| and make the purchase elsewhere.
| Bellend wrote:
| I am the same as you. Although the only difference is:
|
| 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?
| Narretz wrote:
| The case that is mentioned is Oberdorf vs Amazon. Here's an
| article from 2019. https://www.courthousenews.com/amazon-back-on-
| the-hook-for-d... I can't find anything more recent. The case is
| interesting as it needs to make a decision if Amazon has the same
| responsibility for Amazon marketplace as it has for its own
| listings.
| protastus wrote:
| I no longer have the patience to navigate Amazon's terrible
| search results and have lost trust in the quality of their
| inventory.
|
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| > I don't understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon
| here
|
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| I too have stopped buying on Amazon. I did so a while back
| after being concerned about counterfeits, safety issues, etc. I
| had this talk with my wife not too long ago about a mirror she
| ordered from Amazon, clearly made in China by a no-brand
| manufacturer. We discussed about how, yes, it looks nice, but
| we have no idea what quality of glass they used. So if it falls
| and shatters, it could be very dangerous. It also came with a
| bunch stuff on it that looked like pieces of fiber glass. I
| just don't trust anything on that platform anymore. I buy
| everything else from more legitimate sellers selling brand name
| stuff or directly from manufacturer's websites.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| The example given of silicone spatulas could be particularly
| egregious - are they even RoHS or REACH compliant? They could
| be chock full of SVHCs that you serve to your family every
| supper.
|
| I might send some of our Amazon stuff for testing for
| phthalates and find out.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have definitely made it a rule that we don't purchase
| products that touch food from Amazon. I honestly have no
| idea how the products there are passing regulations. Are
| regulations even enforced anymore?
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| This doesn't sound like an Amazon issue though, but an issue
| with that specific product. You're the one who chose to
| purchase it. You would likely have the same experience with
| that product in other marketplaces like EBay, Walmart or
| Alibaba.
| Retric wrote:
| Walmart stores actually do very carful inventory control,
| and carefully manages the products it sells. The standard
| may be lower than you expect, but they are real.
|
| Walmart marketplace is 3rd party sellers, but Walmart
| doesn't commingle inventory so it doesn't infect the rest
| of their products.
| philistine wrote:
| Walmart.com is an infinite shelf of dangerous knockoffs
| just like Amazon. Walmart stores have no such problem.
| mcphage wrote:
| > You would likely have the same experience with that
| product in other marketplaces
|
| Other marketplaces don't put up with the same volume of
| crap being listed as Amazon.
| philistine wrote:
| Your comment implies we desire no product segregation from
| Amazon, nor any quality control from them, which is not
| something most people think of when they think of what
| Amazon ought to be. Most people think of Amazon like they
| think of a physical Walmart location; as a store that
| vouches every product it sells. You put Alibaba or Ebay in
| the same category as Walmart, but that's more akin to
| Walmart.com, the thing that will kill that brand. People go
| to Alibaba, eBay or Walmart.com for the dangerous Chinese
| knockoffs.
|
| I want Amazon to be far more selective of the product it
| sells.
| corrral wrote:
| If a marketplace lets itself get so dodgy that this kind of
| thing's normal, that's absolutely the marketplace's fault.
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's easy to not buy from other seller's on the
| marketplace.
|
| Did Amazon stop commingling fulfillment inventory? That's
| where I worry about getting burned.
| planetafro wrote:
| I don't buy this for a millisecond. Amazon ushered in this
| behavior and made it the "norm". It's throwaway, cheap,
| non-branded junk... and dangerous. There is value in
| discussion of the manipulation of the market and not just
| "Shop somewhere else". It's predatory.
| nus07 wrote:
| I wonder if Amazon has reached a point where they have
| eliminated all competition at least at a scale to no longer
| worry about this especially since their only competitor Walmart
| has similar cheap stuff that will require a drive to the store.
| And targeting volume based sale where a lot of Americans
| especially in rural or suburban areas don't really care about
| the quality-read Walmart crowd. Also targeting other countries
| like SE Asia, India, Brazil, Latin America, Africa where the
| volume of sales will be so high that again quality of inventory
| does not matter compared to ease of delivery.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > a lot of Americans especially in rural or suburban areas
| don't really care about the quality-read Walmart crowd
|
| 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.
| larrik wrote:
| Plus Walmart also mixes cheap dropshippers in their website
| search results to trick you into buying crap of dubious
| provenance.
| toast0 wrote:
| > don't really care about the quality-read Walmart crowd.
|
| 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.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| eBay has been more reliable for me the last two years. I don't
| want to dig through thousands of fake reviews, reviews for wrong
| items, etc.
| supernova87a wrote:
| It's like we're repeating an old era of the early United States
| when every guy on a street corner would be copying reputable
| wares and selling them without regulation, patent protections,
| brand / trademark protections, and people were hawking quack
| snake oil under any name.
|
| I'm all for reducing useless regulation, but sometimes you
| understand where it originally came from as a legitimate need.
| eslaught wrote:
| Is it correct to say that when you get something "shipped and
| sold by Amazon.com", it really comes from them? It's the
| "fulfilled by Amazon" (the infamous FBA) that you need to watch
| out for.
|
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I'm actually not sure that's a safe assumption. I could be
| wrong but I _believe_ Amazon co-mingles products of the same
| SKU. So if Amazon is selling a book and other sellers have
| listed the same item as "new" and sent it to Amazon's warehouse
| I don't believe there is any distinction between the two at the
| warehouse. So the stock picker might grab Amazon's (presumably
| authentic) item from the bin when they pack your order but
| there's also a chance they'll grab the third-party-seller
| "shipped by Amazon" item. My understanding is that it's all
| kind of a crapshoot no matter how careful & deliberate you are
| when ordering.
| davidbanham wrote:
| My understanding is that the items have different uuids, but
| there are no markings on the physical item. They're
| identified by bin location.
|
| 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.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Do you have any link for that?
| derefr wrote:
| Not same SKU -- same ASIN. I believe that brands that sell
| _through_ Amazon (not FBA sellers), who are worried about
| comingled inventory, can get their official product moved
| over to a new ASIN, leaving the fakes behind in the old ASIN
| bin.
| colesouth wrote:
| OP here - no. "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com" items can be
| sent to Amazon's fulfillment centers by anyone with a Vendor
| Central account. There is still plenty of fraud going on there.
|
| 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
| lph wrote:
| Pro tip: If you absolutely must buy the junk being sold by
| MOFFBUZW and other randomly generated drop-shipper brands, the
| exact same product is usually available on AliExpress for 10% the
| price.
| breakingcups wrote:
| I don't like having to give AliExpress my phone number.
| blibble wrote:
| having been personally harassed repeatedly over the phone by
| Amazon third party sellers... Amazon is not any better
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| You've answered a question I've been asking myself for the past
| couple of years: Why is Amazon trying to become AliExpress?
| AliExpress already does a good job of being AliExpress.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Why is Amazon trying to become AliExpress?
|
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| It's AliExpress with 2 day shipping for people with poor
| impulse control. The "free shipping" that costs 900%...
| mindslight wrote:
| I've got good impulse control and planning. Still, I needed
| some TNC connectors for a surveying project and didn't want
| to wait the month for Aliexpress/eBayDirect to show up, so
| I ordered them off Amazon which had the best compromise of
| price vs shipping time. Of course I did a visual quality
| check when they showed up, as required for all direct
| Chineseum.
|
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I like getting stuff the same or next day.
| paxys wrote:
| And ships 12-24 weeks later..
| namdnay wrote:
| I don't think it's drop-shipping, you see these brands even for
| stuff delivered in 2-3 days
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Unfortunately with 500% of the shipping time (most of the time)
| :(
| DaveExeter wrote:
| Aliexpress is getting better on shipping times!
|
| I placed an order June 30, it arrived July 17.
| dspillett wrote:
| That is likely luck: if your order makes a nice round truck
| full, and that truck full makes a nice round container full
| at the next stage, and the container is one of the last
| loaded onto a ship that is due to leave soon, you'll get
| the best delivery time. The next order will get the worst
| or close to.
|
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| It depends on location and how often people in your area
| order from China. I used to get ePacket orders from
| Shenzhen to San Jose within 10 days every time. Now that
| ePacket is dead, AliExpress standard shipping takes 14
| days.
| cheeze wrote:
| And a terrible return policy
| Cerium wrote:
| All this cheap junk follows a fairly reliable markup scheme:
| Factory sells for 1x Taobao sells for 2x Aliexpress sells for
| 3-4x (2x Taobao) Ebay sells for 8-10x. (~2x Aliexpress)
|
| I think Aliexpress is usually about 20% of the Amazon price,
| but depending on the item I agree that it can be 10%.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| With the caveat that on ebay, you can usually find someone in
| the US wearhousing it for some reason with free 3 day
| shipping for the same price.
| notahacker wrote:
| I've actually cross-referenced the original product on
| Alibaba to check specs when ordering the marked up product
| using eBay for Click-and-collect...
|
| Reverse image search works wonders against "unique"
| brandnames.
| wtallis wrote:
| And quite often when ordering from an eBay seller with US
| stock, the package that arrives has an Amazon logo on the
| box.
| krallja wrote:
| This happened to me: I ordered a cheap UV EPROM eraser on
| eBay with three-day delivery. It was literally drop-
| shipped from Amazon, on an Amazon truck, in an Amazon
| bag. I could have gotten the same (crappy, simple)
| product on Amazon a day earlier for about a dollar less.
| But I was trying to avoid buying on Amazon, because of
| all the reasons posted in this comments section!
| squarefoot wrote:
| Happened also to me with some products when shopping
| online either from Ebay or directly from some seller's
| web shop (I don't have a Amazon account): items came in a
| Amazon box with all their markings. No problems
| whatsoever, but the sellers were reliable.
| notatoad wrote:
| >for some reason
|
| 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.
| nlh wrote:
| I bought an espresso machine via Taobao last year and had to
| jump through SO many hoops to get it. But even with the hoops
| it ended up being an absolute steal - 1/10 the price of a US-
| based purchase.
|
| 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)
| OJFord wrote:
| Something 'generic' anyway, or is it something 'branded' as
| it were but sold unbadged/not through the intended
| channels?
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| I do tend to prefer eBay/Amazon though, unless I'm really
| sure about it (bought it before, say) since the experience
| when it goes wrong is so much better. Amazon will
| refund/replace no questions asked, eBay will be a bit more
| hassle (MOFFBUZW type sellers tend to want to appease you
| with a partial refund or random plastic toy for some reason)
| but nothing a negative rating or such doesn't sort out.
|
| 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...)
| cheald wrote:
| I've gotten to the point that if it's a nonsense all-caps name or
| has an item description in broken English, I just don't bother.
| It's gonna be trash. It'll fail in 3 weeks, there will be no way
| to get it returned or repaired, the company won't exist, and the
| product listing will be gone next time you come back to it.
| OJFord wrote:
| > It'll fail in 3 weeks, there will be no way to get it
| returned or repaired, the company won't exist, and the product
| listing will be gone next time you come back to it.
|
| We're talking about Amazon though right? You can definitely
| return that, that's even inside the official return window (one
| month).
| yegle wrote:
| Amazon employees have a "perk" of a 10% off multi-use coupon, up
| to $1000. It applies to anything whose seller is Amazon (sold by
| amazon.com).
|
| 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.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| I guess we buy different things. Mine tends to run out pretty
| early in the year.
| namdnay wrote:
| Maybe it's different in each country? I've used Amazon in the
| UK and several European countries, and you can get tons of
| major brands sold by Amazon (Apple, Dell, Samsung, Gardena,
| Bosch etc)
| decafninja wrote:
| I'll be the odd person out and say that whatever it's faults as a
| company, my shopping experience on Amazon has been great. Not
| perfect, but nearly so. Certainly better than most other online
| retail channels, plus the convenience of Prime, and being a "one
| stop shop" certainly is super useful.
|
| 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.
| heliodor wrote:
| That kind of unimportant stuff is usually found on ebay for
| much cheaper. Usually things that cost no more than $10 or $20
| on Amazon sell for much less on eBay. The trinkets category. I
| make a point of not engaging with that category on Amazon. It's
| the least I can do to feed the monster less.
| decafninja wrote:
| eBay is also significantly more difficult and annoying to use
| than Amazon Prime.
|
| I don't disagree with the morality argument, but Amazon has
| made things so incredibly convenient for the consumer.
| misterprime wrote:
| Seriously. If it has that Prime mark on it, I know I'm
| getting it at a ridiculous speed, plus that 5% cash back on
| thus ugly old metal card that I used to like. Well, the
| cash back reward is still very nice.
|
| 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.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Amazon carved a good niche for themselves by pretending you're
| not buying from them but rather some "vendor".
|
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| It that were the case, Amazon would be setting the prices, not
| the contractors
| alangibson wrote:
| I wonder if theres a business idea in here. Set up a site that
| looks better than Amazon (not hard) and only list reputable
| listings on Amazon. Collect affiliate revenue.
|
| Basically just filter out the crap and profit
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| Right? I had the same idea when I read this. If you're serious
| about it, reach out to my email in profile. I tried you at your
| @landshark.io email but it bounced back to me.
| helaoban wrote:
| I've also mulled different iterations of this idea,
| specifically with some kind of "on-the-ground" verification
| of sellers / quality. I lived and worked in China for 8
| years, with a small spell of that time in manufacturing QC. I
| know the country well and speak fluently. Feel free to reach
| out, email in profile, and GP is also welcome to get in touch
| if you read this!
| cheald wrote:
| FakeSpot kind of does this. Their browser extension can hide
| Amazon listings directly on Amazon which fall below a certain
| trustworthiness threshold.
| intrasight wrote:
| It would violate their terms-of-service and they'd unplug you
| in a heartbeat - or after you'd sold a million dollar of stuff,
| and they'd keep your affiliate cut
| qqqwerty wrote:
| That is basically what WireCutter is, among many others.
| spathi_fwiffo wrote:
| I've been less trusting of WireCutter reviews lately. Still
| see so many of these strange brands listed when I go in to
| read a review, combined with no real long term testing. Lack
| of long term testing makes me not trust Consumer Reports as
| much either.
|
| I still use their reviews as a reference point, but for a lot
| of things I don't really go for their top selections.
| misterprime wrote:
| "We used this brand new hybrid truck for two weeks, and
| it's great!"
|
| Yeah, I'm not sure what to do with that information.
| alangibson wrote:
| They are all content marketing. I'm thinking of essentially
| an alternate storefront that is a garbage filter.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| The issue is that the listing URLs are shifty and reference
| different things over time, and the listings can be hijacked.
| alangibson wrote:
| A URL is tied to an ASIN, so those don't change.
|
| But the listing can get hijacked. There's an opportunity for
| improvement. Take down a listing when creative suddenly
| changes, for example.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The ending is rather unexpected:
|
| > 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!"
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It's a hostage situation. This is how you can tell Amazon is a
| dangerous monopoly: when even the people they fuck over have no
| choice but to smile and say, "But we still love 'em!"
| iamthepieman wrote:
| Flea Markets are great. You can find obscure stuff you didn't
| even know existed or that you needed. Amazon is a flea market
| shoved into a Costco with bots stocking shelves with whatever
| shows up at the loading dock. You think you're walking into a
| reputable retailer, it has all the signs and signals of one,
| but you're not.
| larrik wrote:
| Whoa whoa whoa, don't besmirch Costco like that!
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| You do get the junk quickly and can send it back easily.
| kelnos wrote:
| And that's why Amazon isn't working to fix this problem --
| because they don't see it as a problem. Despite the
| complaining, people still sell stuff on Amazon, and people
| still buy stuff on Amazon, and presumably Amazon is happy with
| their revenue numbers. So why change anything?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I've been slowly trying to de-amazon my life, even more
| aggressively than trying to de-google (which is easy once you
| accept that search result quality is still good elsewhere). I got
| a Shoprunner account and Walmart plus from AMEX and recently
| started using it. I also found that VISA gets you a shipt
| account.
|
| 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...
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Imagine if Amazon dedicated some human effort and time to curate
| their catalog and reviews instead of their legion of engineers
| trying to automate the solution and continually failing. Hire a
| bunch of college interns every semester and they'd have this
| problem solved.
|
| EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon
| Mechanical Turk!
| htrp wrote:
| mturk might be legit worse
| 99_00 wrote:
| Decoupling from China can't happen fast enough.
| trasz wrote:
| As an European I'd prefer decoupling from US:
| https://unsafeproducts.com/childrens-products/toy-elmo-recal...
| callahad wrote:
| The New York Times did some decent reporting into the pseudo-
| brands which comes closer to answering the question in the title:
| having a registered trademark unlocks a lot of on-platform seller
| tools (predictive analytics, early review program, etc.), and the
| easiest path to a trademark is to have an utterly unique,
| nonsense name. Some Chinese municipalities were also offering
| cash incentives for citizens who obtained foreign intellectual
| property registrations, further exacerbating the problem.
|
| Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-
| trademark-co...
| samstave wrote:
| There was an amazing radio piece a while back about an outfit
| in NYC of a guy who had a very lucrative Aamazon copy-cat
| service: it was run by a family of Hassidic(sp?) Jews in
| (brooklyn?) -- and what they did was have a bunch of them scour
| Amazon for top rated items - then have their connections do
| quick knock-off and sell them. it was a fascinating story...
| Ill see if I can find it.
|
| 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.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I'm not sure what the family's religion has to do with
| anything, but I was curious about the spelling and put it in
| my search bar and it's spelled, 'Hasidic'.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| my thoughts too. Wonder if they would have written 'run by
| a family of christians'
| samstave wrote:
| I KNEW people would ask this ; it was a major aspect of the
| story for some reason. They kept making reference to how
| these "ultra orthodox jews in brooklyn" were doing some
| revolutionary marketing/profiteering on the
| interenet/amazon specifically and how they were making a
| fortune doing so...
|
| It was _fundamental_ to whomever wrote the piece...
|
| So I mentioned it here.
|
| Sorry I failed your "anti-semetic triggers" - FFS.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Well, to be fair, if "these scammers are ultra orthodox
| Jews" was central to the piece "for some reason", the
| author might've been _a tad_ on the antisemitic side. At
| least your (in this context overstated and seemingly
| unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound
| like it.
| trasz wrote:
| He specifically mentioned Brooklyn though, so to me that
| sounds more like starting the story with a general
| feeling of the place.
| samstave wrote:
| Basically! this was the take-away
|
| 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.!_ "
| fmajid wrote:
| Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical or buy my
| electronics and optics from the fine folks at B&H Photo,
| which is owned by a (Satmar) Hasidic family. Sure, that
| means I can't shop on Saturdays and have a much deeper
| knowledge of the Jewish high holidays calendar than I'd
| normally care to develop, but I don't worry about a
| counterfeit battery blowing up in my face or a SSD upgrade
| for my computer being a 16GB flash card fraudulently
| reprogrammed to advertise itself to my computer as a 1TB
| one.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even B&H was susceptible to knock-off batteries.
| Somewhere in the supply chain, fake batteries were
| introduced, but not found until sold to customers. B&H
| actually handled this in the only sane way vs the Amazon
| shrug of the shoulders.
|
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical
|
| 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > what the family's religion has to do with anything,
|
| 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.
| redler wrote:
| I remember 47th Street Photo was a big one.
| m348e912 wrote:
| Some of it still exists. B&H photo is a very large jewish
| owned electronics business out of New York. They have
| some of the best high end electronics selection available
| online and last time I checked they are closed on the
| sabbath.
| 0xfeba wrote:
| Amazon itself does that with "Amazon's Choice" brand or
| whatever. They use the stats of top selling items, clone it
| for cheap, and take all the sales.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/amazon-i...
| woevdbz wrote:
| After a couple really bad experiences with product quality
| (think clothing items that don't last after a couple
| washes) I no longer buy Amazon branded items. It's going to
| play against them over time if they keep messing up on
| quality.
| alangibson wrote:
| I've listed a few things on Amazon. This is very much true. If
| you don't have a registered trademark youre a second class
| citizen. You can't upload a video, for example.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Thank you. I read the whole thread and then realized it didn't
| answer the question posed in the first tweet.
| robocat wrote:
| https://archive.ph/jbuSK
| derefr wrote:
| But why are so many of these pseudo-brands exactly 1. six
| characters long, 2. all caps, and have 3. point-form
| descriptions that 4. use some particular emoji as bullet-point
| symbols, and 5. give each point a separate, usually-capitalized
| "title" part, 6. enclosed in either square brackets or the
| even-more-niche punctuation[( )] ?
|
| 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/).
| dwringer wrote:
| I wonder if the telltale signs are much the same as in spam
| emails: a tool to filter out customers who are more
| discerning and thus liable to cause problems with Amazon if
| they get ripped off (demanding refunds, reporting seller
| misconduct, etc).
| thirtyseven wrote:
| What's hard to believe about several thousand sellers all
| copying each other's homework?
| derefr wrote:
| Because it's not just the big things that are the same;
| it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of
| ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy.
|
| 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?
| jonas21 wrote:
| Ah, but if you both learned to write from the same
| person, then you _would_ expect the handwriting to look
| similar (even if you didn 't let them see your notes).
|
| And I think that's what's 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.
| derefr wrote:
| That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely,
| IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly.
| However...
|
| > 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. But
| you don't. AliExpress product listings 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.
| travem wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| derefr wrote:
| What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount
| of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of
| Amazon listings, to even _realize_ that "this is what
| everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because
| I personally went through the top 100 items in every
| leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back
| (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I
| didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is
| going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to
| notice _every detail_ of the pattern.
|
| 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!)
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Conspiracy Theory: Maybe the sellers aren't human but
| actually an ML model run amok
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Maybe amazon cracked down on those weird barckets, just
| for cleanliness sake.
| redler wrote:
| That sort of bulk change, all at once, might just be
| Amazon deciding to canonicalize the bracket menagerie.
| derefr wrote:
| Not so: the change happened across all these thousands of
| brands that had the exact style; but it _didn 't_ happen
| to the minority of posts that _were_ from "real"
| independent Chinese marketplace-of-ideas sellers, who
| _had_ copied the style with errors, or independently
| reinvented it. Those other listings still use the
| dictionary-headword brackets. So no Amazon-side
| canonicalization was performed.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| >"start a turn-key Amazon business"
|
| 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.
| blowski wrote:
| A lot of fraud is remarkably uncreative. Look at Companies
| House in the UK - you can spot many of the scams a mile off.
| derefr wrote:
| But these are the kind of properties where it takes a lot
| of staring at many different examples to even spot the
| pattern.
|
| 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and
| preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a
| majority of this in its tracks.
|
| 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.
| throwway1490 wrote:
| The New York Times doesn't answer if this is beneficial for
| consumers, which is obviously the thing smart people want to
| know. Like why does Amazon put up with this?
|
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| Obviously it wasn't good for the person that went blind.
|
| 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.
| pbourke wrote:
| My n=1 observation is that these bogus listings cause me to
| either find a well-known brand and/or go somewhere else that
| has more trustworthy listings.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The only reason it causes prices to go down is because they
| don't follow regulations or are outright fraud. If they were
| legitimate businesses they wouldn't be playing Amazon Ban
| Whack-a-Mole
| hgsgm wrote:
| jmrm wrote:
| It's a shame how Amazon is bloated of Chinese off-brand products
| with mediocre quality. Some of them are simply products from
| AliExpress, DealExtreme, or similar Chinese websites but sold
| more expensive.
| spicymaki wrote:
| The scam is enormously profitable for Amazon and the Chinese
| black hats. You can tell it is really profitable because Amazon
| will compensate you for up to $1000 for damages caused by this
| junk. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58163915
|
| 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!
| [deleted]
| wnevets wrote:
| The amount of non sense on amazon these days has me just ordering
| from target or other retailers.
| WheatM wrote:
| cronix wrote:
| You'll also find the same product with same description/images
| listed by multiple different "companies" all with odd names like
| this.
| Trias11 wrote:
| Rock bottom prices, free delivery (with prime) + one click, no
| risk, no question asked refunds overweight fakes and crap.
|
| Hard to argue with that, honestly.
|
| Obviously if you want to buy genuine Rolex, or quality European
| made tools, Amazon is not the place.
| draw_down wrote:
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Someone in the postings wonders what would happen if Retail was
| split from AWS.
|
| 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.
| d23 wrote:
| I look for alternatives to Amazon every time now and have
| cancelled prime after 15 years.
| chainwax wrote:
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| spiderice wrote:
| It's so tiresome to read this on every twitter thread that gets
| posted to HN
| xyzal wrote:
| But you agree, don't you?
| _moof wrote:
| Completely beside the point. It's exasperating to see an
| identical tangent on every discussion.
| pvg wrote:
| Downvote and flag them. Be the punitive fist of messageboard
| justice you want to see in the world!
| mod wrote:
| Cole South used to be one (probably still is) of the best poker
| players in the world.
| quwert95 wrote:
| I have a tip for Amazon shopping related to these weird brand
| names: Do not buy anything that will go in or on your body. Doing
| this significantly reduces the likelihood of counterfeit or
| poorly packaged goods.
| Havoc wrote:
| >1. i just need some commodity cheap and fast, and am not too
| worried about safety or authenticity.
|
| Made this mistake with a cheap rice cooker. Main voltages, high
| temps, water and steam and sketchy wiring was a terrible plan
| Aachen wrote:
| The long twitter message list doesn't contain an actual answer to
| the question. Just a rant everyone likes to agree with and would
| like to see solved and that's why this is on the top 3 front
| page, no actual interesting content (stay for the discussion,
| though, but save some time reading the OP).
| aendruk wrote:
| It's disappointing. I'm all too familiar with the phenomenon of
| marketplace spam by seemingly nonsense all-caps brand names,
| and have been curious about the reasoning behind the names. How
| are they chosen? Is it really nonsense or just a language I
| don't know? Are there patterns to it? Plausible influences?
|
| 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.
| alibarber wrote:
| I thought the takeaway was 'any suitable dictionary word would
| likely have been taken, or make as much sense as random
| nonsense anyway, and they're creating so so many of these pump-
| and-dump brands hawking junk that it's easier to just use a
| literal random character string'
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Is there an opportunity to create a marketplace that does
| meaningful validation and testing of the items on it, such that
| when you buy a product, you can be guaranteed to be getting the
| real thing?
|
| What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?
| jollyllama wrote:
| My favorite example is BEEGOD, I was never sure if it was "be
| god", "bee god", or "be good."
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Pretty interesting. Its odd Amazon allows this to happen, but I
| guess they have no incentives not to. Reminds me of this video
| from the Pitch Meeting YouTube guy: https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30
| gibolt wrote:
| It is becoming hard to find anything trusted online. Here is
| the equivalent Ryan George video for Google:
| https://youtu.be/NT7_SxJ3oSI
|
| Same problem. Different clothes
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > but I guess they have no incentives not to
|
| I'm surprised that reputation didn't do it. (But I agree;
| Amazon's behavior certainly seems to show that they don't
| care.)
| elforce002 wrote:
| I only shop on Amazon when there's something that's difficult to
| find. That's it. I prefer spending on niche or small shops.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550230795230781440.html
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220722194603/https://threadrea...
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Amazon "... is turning their marketplace into a flea market of
| total junk."
|
| 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?
| wollsmoth wrote:
| yeah... I kinda use walmart more since it has a better
| signal/noise ratio.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Half of the Twitter thread is just talking about literal bribes
| paid to Amazon staff to conveniently change things in the
| system in the black-hat sellers' favor.
|
| 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.
| DanAtC wrote:
| Walmart has third-party sellers now too.
| drpgq wrote:
| I wonder if they would care more if they got split from AWS
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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 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.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I should add that I always select "available for pickup" when
| searching for something. In other words, stuff that B&M
| stores sell.
|
| But even still, the third-party sellers aren't as bad on
| walmart as they are on amazon
| zucked wrote:
| They're literally the same - I see the same product sold by
| shady third parties being sold on both sites. At least with
| Walmart you can select "Available for pickup" and get
| products that Walmart themselves sell and stand behind.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think "onn" is just Walmart's "store brand" for generic
| electronics[1]. Kind of like "Insignia" and BestBuy. The
| design and manufacturing is all outsourced and these are
| usually quite crappy as one would expect.
|
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://sycamorenet.com/blog/who-makes-onn-tv/
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Regardless, the last time I went into a Wal-Mart where my
| parents live, it wasn't just that they were prioritizing
| the onn brand stuff: it was literally all they had.
| Reliable third-party brands like Anker weren't even on the
| shelves anymore.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I have a hunch this might be Walmart's finely tuned
| supply chain figuring out that Onn is what sells best at
| that location so they overstock that particular store
| with them.
|
| 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.
| rexf wrote:
| TFA:
|
| > 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?
| svachalek wrote:
| It really seems like they want to be a shipping and warehouse
| service and get out of retail entirely. Maybe better profit
| margins, or an easier way out of looking like a monopoly. I'm
| sure they've got some metric to quantify how much profit
| they're getting for each ounce of reputation lost and they're
| #winning.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Yeah I wish he had elaborated on that point. What are they
| doing to court those sellers and most importantly, why?
| Surely they know that their reputation is going down the
| tubes. Are they just so dominant now that they don't care?
| comicjk wrote:
| Probably Amazon is afraid of being replaced by AliExpress,
| which has lots of these sellers and their low prices.
| snazz wrote:
| As long as Amazon has their fulfillment and delivery
| network, I don't think they'll ever be replaced by
| AliExpress (in the US, at least). I've never seen anyone
| delivering packages in an AliExpress van :)
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Just recently Amazon allowed me to buy a kindle book for my
| specific kindle device, which turned out to not be supported.
| But they still allowed me to purchase and deliver it to this
| kindle. Only once I went to the device to sync it did I learn
| that it was incompatible. I was not allowed a refund.
|
| 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.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I'm amazed they even sell books in the Kindle store that
| don't work with all the Kindles. Like, it's a book... what's
| not compatible???
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Beats me. It's even a Paperwhite, not like it's completely
| prehistoric either. The book was Operating Systems: Three
| Easy Pieces. Hell it's even freely available in html
| format, but I wanted to buy it anyway because I like to
| support authors of great books whenever possible. I've not
| yet tried to sideload the free version, but I bet it would
| work...
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| All the books I've bought for my kindle have a "bought by
| mistake? Press here" thing which instantly removes and
| refunds it.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I've never seen anything like that. I was able to request a
| refund, and I did, but it was denied. I then contacted
| support with no luck there either. Maybe you have consumer
| protections I don't in your country?
|
| 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.
| Booktrope wrote:
| On the other hand, much of what passes for "reputable" brands
| is just reselling the crap from the same sellers, but with a
| "trusted" name on it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| See also this blog post on USB-C hubs:
| https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-
| madness.h...
| bendbro wrote:
| Walmart does dropshitting too. Hell, even Home Depot is getting
| into it. You can often find the same piece of garbage furniture
| on all 4
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Everyone who does anything online should be required to hang out
| on some black hat internet forums and marketplaces.
|
| 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.
| ms4720 wrote:
| Porn and cat pictures
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Furry? You can have both!
| amelius wrote:
| This sent me down a rabbit hole.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| That's one way to put it.
| anakaine wrote:
| Don't linger too long. You'll wind up like Alice.
| thrwwy5685865 wrote:
| Everyone who does anything online should be required to hang
| out on some black hat internet forums and marketplaces. 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Brilliant! :)
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I wonder what the internet would really look like if there
| was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
|
| 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.
| lovich wrote:
| There are definitely bots to buy things. Finance alone does a
| fuck ton of automation to buy things at far faster reaction
| speeds than possible and then there's the
| eBay/Amazon/whatever online retail bots that exist to scoop
| up in demand items to then flip
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Bots that buy things only do so to address a temporary
| inefficiency in the market - they won't work perpetually
| and you can argue their actions do provide value.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Now who's putting the token into who?
| SamBam wrote:
| It's in the actual-money economy as well. That was the point
| of the article.
|
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Bots don't buy stuff, but bots can push human persuasion
| triggers. Something with 10,000 positive reviews on Amazon
| feels like a much better buy than something with 2 reviews.
| hasperdi wrote:
| I'm curious... could you give some examples of these blackhat
| forums?
| zachkatz wrote:
| https://www.blackhatworld.com/
| lopatin wrote:
| I used to hang out on that forum many years ago during my
| school lunch breaks, before I found the light. Never
| thought I'd see the day it's linked to from HN.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| It reminded me of https://www.antionline.com/ which I
| used to hang out on like 20 years ago. To my surprise it
| appears to still be up and running.
| [deleted]
| distrill wrote:
| Unless I missed it, he didn't really talk about why these names
| exist, other than to suggest it might be a troll?
|
| 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.
| Narretz wrote:
| The idea is that these names are generated pseudo-randomly or
| arbitrarily because they have no brand value. Sellers that use
| them run through "companies" quickly as they get banned for
| forbidden practice or because their reputation tanks. Then they
| create the next seller account with another name.
| distrill wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I suppose. Maybe I need things spelled out for me.
| misterprime wrote:
| I've been wondering why I do like Twitter for long form
| content. At first, I hated it. But then I got caught up in
| several long threads, and invariably at the end someone would
| link the threadreader collection of the whole thing. I kept
| thinking, I'm just going to start going to the bottom and
| looking for that link, but I never did.
|
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| That article was a bit of a bait-and-switch: instead of
| explaining why the Chinese resellers all use similar patterns,
| the author just spent 30 twitter posts complaining about being
| undercut by cheap Chinese crap
| mfkp wrote:
| Here's unrolled version, easier to read:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550230795230781440.html
| coding123 wrote:
| my wife and I have been increasingly buy on Target, HomeDepot and
| other sites to buy things because the brands are much more likely
| to have a legit business backing them up.
|
| 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.
| dkarp wrote:
| I recently moved to the US from the UK. In the UK, we have
| Argos that sells a few versions of each product at different
| price points. If you pay more, you get better quality and you
| aren't sifting through hundreds of fake brands of similar
| products.
|
| Target is definitely the closest we've found over here.
| aimor wrote:
| I've been making a conscious effort to buy things manufactured
| in the USA. Made in USA still exists for a lot of things and
| the quality and design is superb compared to all the Chinese
| junk. What really surprises me is the prices are also very
| reasonable.
|
| 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.
| ohlookcake wrote:
| I was excited to know where the names come from, and after
| reading all of the tweets I still don't know. If the answer is
| just: it's a random collection of letters because it's not a
| brand they want to build, then that's a very predictable and
| uninteresting answer.
| barbOzon wrote:
| The author writes:
|
| > _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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Looking at the name of the company, reading recent reviews, and
| ensuring there is a non-obviously-fake address associated with
| the business doesn't sound like a tedious list of hoops to jump
| through to me. You should do all this stuff on any marketplace,
| Amazon or elsewhere.
|
| 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.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| if Amazon just wants to be the market, that's one thing. but
| they're also trying to position themselves as a brand name
| with notion of value attached (e.g. amazon basics).
|
| 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.
| fassssst wrote:
| My solution was to buy most stuff from Costco/Target/Best Buy
| instead. Their buyers do good enough vetting that it saves me a
| bunch of time.
| javajosh wrote:
| Well, you could also use newegg, bhphoto, alibris, discogs
| and etsy (gifts) - which are all, like Amazon, purely online
| retailers. Each of the alternatives beats Amazon in its
| particular niche, and pretty much always has. But Amazon is
| convenient because it sells _everything_.
| [deleted]
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Its funny how much less online shopping Im doing these days
| specifically because of my bad experiences ordering from Amazon.
|
| 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.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| I find it more and more difficult to return items to stores in
| the US because they keep their returns deparments so short-
| staffed. Home Depot and Target are 2 places where I have stood
| in line for 45min to 1hr just to return something.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| My experience is the opposite - at least with HD. I come in,
| wait 5 minutes max, and return my item and the money is back
| on my card within the day. Never had a hassle either
| returning even more expensive, even custom-fit orders (window
| blinds).
|
| I don't know about target as I don't shop there too often.
| NavinF wrote:
| Yep, my local Home Depot has no line for returns and they
| don't ask questions. Example: They gave me a full refund
| when I returned an empty box of wooden dowels after I used
| them for a project and realized the box had fewer dowels
| than advertised (likely because someone opened it and stole
| a few).
| coldpie wrote:
| Yes, I've switched almost entirely to B&M shopping, and I
| haven't ordered from Amazon specifically since 2019. Physical
| stores have limited retail space, so they have a good reason to
| be choosy about what they stock. It's worth a few extra bucks
| to me to not have to sort through online flea markets like
| Amazon (plus, it gets me out of the house).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I still end up using Amazon for a lot of things, but I do find
| the gibberish chinesium crap somewhat amusing. I won't buy
| anything that isn't sold by Amazon, brand name, and not a battery
| or other really common counterfeiting target.
|
| I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9/10 times higher
| than Amazon for brand name items.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Shopping on amazon is really an awful experience nowdays. I
| really do not want to search through 40 pages of water kettles of
| really dubious brands. It is so anxiety inducing and unpleasant.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is fine for, like, getting an HDMI cable.
|
| 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.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| >It is fine for, like, getting an HDMI cable.
|
| 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.
| shantara wrote:
| I highly recommend Blue Jeans Cable -
| https://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/hdmi-cables/hdmi-
| cable....
|
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| +1, BJC is the place to go for custom AV cables not
| tainted by audiophile snake oil.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Blue Jeans seems to have pretty reasonable prices, too,
| although I didn't look at shipping.
|
| I've found Monoprice's higher-end HDMI cables to be
| reliable.
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| In The Netherlands we have 2 big mainstream shops for
| electronics, this is Bol.com and Coolblue.nl. Bol.com started
| out as a webshop and moved into a marketplace idea (like Amazon
| does). I know a lot of people that prefer Coolblue over Bol
| because of this exact reason. Every product that Coolblue is
| selling has at least some kind of guarantee of quality, because
| if it is bad, they will have to replace it.
|
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| Bol.com has put themselves in a bit of an awkward position by
| being at the mercy of third party resellers, but all Amazon
| just seems to sell the stuff you can get in the German Amazon
| with slightly shorter delivery times (for _some_ things).
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah I haven't bought anything on Amazon for a couple of years
| now. Got burned once too many times. I went back to buying
| mostly in local stores. If they don't have what I want, I go
| online to manufacturers' websites if possible, or to reputable
| sellers.
| m463 wrote:
| I think amazon has jumped the shark[1]
|
| 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.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
| ant6n wrote:
| The problem I'm having in Germany ist that only Amazon
| reliable delivers to my door, usually next day.
|
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| I think most of the complaints are directed at the
| amazon.com. They do not at all reflect my experience with
| amazon.fr - yes there's no name crap but there's also lots
| of legit stuff, and it's the majority that comes up in
| search results (confirmed through third parties
| recommending the same legit stuff with amazon links).
| cycomanic wrote:
| I always wonder what products are so important that they
| need to be delivered next day? The few times I realised I
| need something urgently it typically means today and even
| next day delivery is not enough, so I go to a store and
| possibly pay a slightly higher price. For everything else
| it doesn't really matter if it is one or 5 days. Is the
| next day delivery really necessary or does it just appeal
| to our impulse of needing to have it in our hands right
| now?
| structural wrote:
| For many people, going to a store the same day is
| completely impossible (not having a store within
| reasonable distance that stocks any similar product).
|
| 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.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| For me it's more about the certainty than the rush. I
| hardly ever need anything next day, but "next day" is a
| concrete day, while for example "in 3-5 days" isn't. As
| someone who is often not at home, I'd rather not have to
| be at home or arrange for someone to be there several
| consecutive days in case a package arrives.
| mk89 wrote:
| Weird, DHL is for me the best and most professional of all.
| The experience you mentioned happens to me with DPD and
| very often with GLS. Hermes is also pretty good and
| professional.
|
| Maybe it depends on the location...
| sveme wrote:
| Weird. Out of the four major delivery services, DHL is by
| far the best and most accommodating.
| spockz wrote:
| In the Netherlands they seem to ship exclusively with DHL.
| And all products arrive in the evening slot. Which means
| that next day delivery is usually around 21:00-22:00 which
| is typically too late to be useful.
|
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| If you just want to buy chinese consumer junk of middling
| quality or you are buying industrial widgets based on part
| number or specification those things mostly aren't an issue.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| You sometimes can't even get the right thing from official
| brand stores. I bought a thermal paste product from the
| official Amazon ThermalGrizzly store (I did check) but Amazon
| delivered me a fake. Amazon co-mingles inventory.
|
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You have to evaluate if a product is worth counterfeiting.
| For many goods the clone factories aren't going to bother.
| Amazon is also a convenient onshore gateway to Aliexpress
| resellers with less shipping ambiguity.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >You have to evaluate if a product is worth
| counterfeiting.
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to order a couple of pairs of
| Levis jeans.
|
| There was _no way_ I 'd do that on Amazon.
|
| I got them from Costco, instead.
| imissfirefox wrote:
| Same situation. Got them from the Levi's store. In my mind
| Amazon=counterfeits/stolen
|
| I'd only order very specific things from Amazon and as a
| result haven't actually ordered in a couple years.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| With all the hand-wringing about how Amazon has
| completely monopolized online ordering, I'd think that
| having a _true_ "honest broker" storefront would be a
| fairly natural way to compete.
|
| Amazon has become a truly awful storefront, and this has
| accelerated markedly, in just the last couple of years.
| tomohawk wrote:
| You would think, but since Amazon is a monopoly and not
| an honest broker, there's no way to compete with them.
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| And here's another post, I made here, about two months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625376
|
| The fake is still up for sale.
| vannevar wrote:
| Yes, because Amazon has created perverse incentives for
| anonymous manufacturers to fabricate as many "brands" as
| possible, there are now so many of them that they crowd out
| actual brands. The original purpose of a brand name was to
| give a reputable seller a recognizable way to differentiate a
| quality product or service from anonymous competitors. But
| search and recommendation on Amazon favors the anonymous
| sellers.
|
| Amazon today is less about selling things to consumers and
| more about selling consumers to anonymous Chinese suppliers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Here's a post I made, here, about two years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25582762
|
| I don't think it's improved with age, but the links aren't any
| good, anymore.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I feel this in my soul. I wanted a new french press. I tried
| three from Amazon, two of the same model arrived broken, the
| third arrived appearing intact but broke on first use. I ended
| up just refunding and buying one from le creuset from their
| website. It arrived safe and is still alive and kicking.
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I play a lot of card games with my kids.
|
| 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...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's like how every wall clock you buy - from Aliexpress to
| Crate & Barrel - will have the same cheap mechanism running
| the arms: https://www.amazon.com/Include-Movement-Mechanism-
| Operated-R...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that on that page there is
| no obvious way to see _any_ information about the seller. I
| just see a single brand name "TIKROUND", which looks like
| one of those fake Chinese names mentioned in the article.
|
| 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!
| dqpb wrote:
| Amazon sells toddler toys from China laced with lead. Perhaps
| this is some kind of sick racist revenge for their 100 years of
| shame. Bezos is happy to provide the Trojan horse for China's
| gray zone guerrilla warfare because he's a tiny petty man who is
| willing to betray the health and safety of regular folks to get
| rich.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I stopped shopping at Amazon when they kicked Parler off of AWS.
| I don't understand how any self respecting liberal could
| celebrate a mega corp censoring the internet along idealogical
| lines, even those who drank the insurrection kool-aid.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is why you have an issue with Amazon retail? Really? Sure,
| you can dislike a parent company, but the issues being
| discussed in TFA and this HN thread is about the shopping
| experience. Your desire to have a chat about your right wing
| beliefs have no place here.
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