> Instead, they contract low-cost Chinese manufacturers to provide a custom logo on a drone that already exists. Then Holy Stone puts the drone up on Amazon at a significant markup.
Seems like Amazon is filled with "fake" brands like these. Is just so that if some brand messes up, they can just put out the same product under a new brand?
It's mostly to stop people from shopping around for a lower price. You can't sell something for $300 if somebody else is selling the same thing for £150. Amazon will even merge your listings. But if you rebrand it you get your own listing, your own reviews (that you paid for) etc.
Brick-and-mortar stores sometimes use similar tactics. I recall reports of Media Markt and Saturn (two German electronics store chains) selling household appliances (washing machines, refrigerators, etc.) under changed model numbers. Still with the same brand name (because brand recognition is important), but with a different model number so that you cannot find the same model for a lower price somewhere else.
The different model number may indicate a store specific version of that model. There is an appliance company I'm familiar with that has a reputation for low quality products even though they sell the same brands as everyone else. Sure enough, the model numbers of the versions they sell are slightly different to everyone else.
On a similar note, when buying a scooter for my daughter, I found the "same" scooter in Toys-R-Us and Walmart. Despite identical branding and packaging, the Walmart version was of noticeably poorer quality (different materials and so on). I didn't check model numbers / SKUs, but I would expect them to be different.
I worked at a retailer who would position certain brands as junk (and they were). The junk label would be used to upsell to a better product or sell a high margin extended warranty. The pricing was usually engineered to make the warranty marginally cheaper.
We see the same thing in the US for matresses, appliances, and especially electronics like TVs. Even well known large brands will be sold with long, and different, model numbers.
The B&Ms know that people are comparison shopping, even as they browse the store: they'll be on their phones looking up model numbers to compare to online and at nearby stores. As we all know, a moat is preferable to competition, even if you have the same or inferior product.
They do this a lot, they ask manufacturers to create custom versions. With computers or laptops it could be a unique configuration, a combination of harddisk size and memory not sold elsewhere.
This way the store can give you a "lowest price guarantee". Find it lower priced elsewhere, and we will pay you the difference!
Easy to give such a guarantee if you're 100% sure no other store sells the exact model.
This also happens in the UK, except that many of the stores themselves are owned by the same conglomerate.
Also easy to offer a lowest price guarantee when you know that customers are likely to only shop around at the high street 'competitors' which you also own. Will they bother to shop around? Doesn't really matter - heads you win, tails you win.
Although this probably works less well with much of the demographic of people who buy computers in the online shopping age.
Not only can you not price match those situations but often times they get advertised as "exclusive" and maybe have one small feature change to warrant it.
IKEA rebrands appliances in the US. However, I consider this a value add because IKEA has an excellent warranty policy. Sometimes rebranding makes sense when you have some sort of value to add to ownership.
This doesn't stop the people who go on eBay (or anywhere else with an equally powerful search tool) and sort by price to get the same imported product without the custom branding.
In some companies and industries there is a very good good reason.
The supplier will test and QC a range of products and when they find one which matches the spec they need they will have it branded and brought into their range. Although it's primarily a generic product they have put the time & effort into sourcing it and are [more] responsible for maintaining the quality and compatibility with their other offerings.
A lot of electronics are just rebranded Chinese goods. I remember some years back a DLink, Netgear, Netcomm etc. modem routers all came from the same supplier in a different case. I used to work for one of them and we’d purchase competitors product, open it up and it’s look the same inside. We could even install our firmware onto their box.
A lot of items period are like this. I've seen my same fridge with an LG, Electrolux, and Whirlpool logo on it. My grandpa worked at a factory (here in the US) that made chocolate-covered cherries and mid-shift every day they'd have a switch-over on the boxes to switch which brand they were producing. The boxes were the only thing they changed, the chocolate and the cherries were still the same. Even car companies do that, the Chevrolet Aveo was made by Daewoo and branded as a Chevrolet, Daewoo, Holden, Pontiac, Ravon, and Suzuki.
That’s interesting with the cars. I drive a used Camry and my cousin drives a brand new Yaris, and while I’ve had precisely 0 problems with the Camry she has constant problems with the “budget” Toyota model.
Googling it, it looks like Mazda makes at least some of the Yaris line, which used to be the Scion brand before that.
When I started working on home power monitoring solutions "cloud" software, we could brand the web page with the company that sold/installed the equipment. If you didn't buy directly from us, you would have little idea where the equipment came from. Even the tech support information was that of our resellers. That changed overtime as the business started using there own branding.
Most "brands" of $100 to $2000 glasses are made in the same factory, owned by the same company (Luxxotica) and use the same materials and craftsmanship (or lack thereof), just with a different design.
Then the same design/materials go off-branded for sale for 1/10th the price or less.
I used to know a guy whose dad had a factory for things like detergent. They did most of the product development and then would put the product into the packages of a lot of name brands. So whatever detergent you buy probably comes from a very small number of manufacturers.
This practice of rebranded stuff is as old as the cheap consumer electronics industry. Back in the 90s myself and a friend had the exact same bedroom TV but they were different brands because they were bought from different high street stores.
What worries me more is fake reviews because that makes it harder to trust anything sold.
Can you trust the reviews? "Our engine has detected that Amazon has altered and removed reviews from this listing. We approximate total reviews removed to be 182. Previous analysis of this listing was an C grade." https://www.fakespot.com/
I can't tell if your comment is intended to be a counterargument (it seems to read that way) but you're actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Personally speaking re-branded products doesn't really bother me however the way reviews are abused does.
I think your link is a little disingenuous in the way it's worded too because I don't think Amazon actually remove or alter any reviews themselves. What I think happens is sellers contact customers and ask them to remove bad reviews in favour of a refund (or whatever). At least that was how negative reviews used to be purged a few years back. Of course you could still argue that Amazon should take a more proactive stance to customer bribery (just as Amazon should against fake reviews too) but I'm just directly addressing the phrasing "Amazon has altered or removed reviews" as seen in your citation.
I should have taken more time to write the comment. I copy/pasted the text "Amazon has altered or removed reviews" from the report the tool provided when I copied the URL from the Amazon Product Page and ran it to check the reviews.
I know, I said twice in my post that quote was from the site (both at the start of the paragraph and again at the end).
Honestly, I think what you actually need to do is take more time to read the comments you're replying to because that's the second time in two posts where you've corrected me on something while going on to make the same point in your rebuttable as the comment you're supposedly countering.
I don’t know how much success you were hoping for in buying a commodity item from no-name brands like that. That’s always going to be a free for all. If you look for mice from reputable companies the results on Amazon are fine.
Are counterfeits listed as brand names that big of a problem on Amazon? I make most of my electronics purchases from Amazon (tons in the last few years) and have never received a counterfeit item to the best of my knowledge.
That's precisely the problem: I don't know how big of a problem it is, and I'm not keen to find out. I know it's enough of a problem that it's easier to simply shop elsewhere.
I personally know a few people who have gotten counterfeit items, even including consumables like protein powder. I don't have to buy from Amazon so it's just a chance I'm not going to take until such a time I can be convinced it's not a problem. It's not any more difficult or even expensive for me to shop elsewhere so I don't have to be particularly rational or thorough about it (I don't have time for that!).
"I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It’s just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating."
So there are nefarious ways to achieve this. But you do not need to do sneaky things to get excellent reviews from pissed off customers. It is easy to assume that the more underhand ways have gotten the good reviews and I am sure you can go to a fake reviews bot to prove the thesis. But it is actually easier and more cost efficient to get those excellent reviews for an average product from pissed off customers by good old customer service.
Most companies have their customer service team at the bottom of the food chain, outsourced and on the minimum wage. From my experience of Google products I suspect that this goes on in a lot of companies that genuinely make wonder products. We all know the story, you struggle to find out how to complain, you struggle filling in an online form and, if you are lucky, you get an automated response. They then make resolution of your complaint as hard as possible, divorce proceedings could be easier.
Most companies don't go the 'full Google' on lousy customer service, however it still takes a while. You get there in the end. They actually have a good product so the complaints are a relatively rare thing for them. Consequently they don't have to major on customer service, the customer service guys are one or two grunts in the company and the whole thing is seen as a cost rather than a revenue centre.
If a company does have a real problem with the product and there are a lot of warranty claims then they have to shape up and get good at customer service. Otherwise they are doomed to go out of business. So they throw people at the problem and more people and are still not winning. The next step is to automate the hell out of it. So you have extremely polite letters sent to customers to get the information needed to process a warranty claim. Customers receive these and the process rolls real quick. They provide required information and the highly automated customer service process just requires some human operator to approve the claim. The warehouse (FBA) then sends the customer out replacement product on the same day. Again, sensible communication goes out and the customer again thinks that for once in their freaking life they have been listened to. Maybe, up until then they have had 'Google grade' customer service and felt left out in the cold. At this point they don't really care so much about the product - most products are commodities anyhow - they just get wowed by the instant response.
There is social engineering in this, the customer can also be led to believe that they are the first person to notice that the 'plastic could be moulded better' and they think that their feedback will be passed along to the 'design team' to help make a better product. They feel involved.
Next the follow up email goes out, asking the customer if their experience with customer service was good enough. By now they have 'bonded' with 'Debbie' or whomever they thought those nice emails were from. They don't realise that 'Debbie' can't spell to save her life and cares more about watching Netflix than their problems with the product. 'Debbie' just clicked a button with automated systems and email templates doing the rest. But because they think they know 'Debbie' they obligingly write a really nice thank you and give five stars. A review is a review, on the site - Amazon or other - there are no silos for reviews breaking them down into 'customer service' and 'product', it all goes into the same pot.
'Debbie' might reject some warranty claims but for these people 'Debbie' can click a different tick box that sends out a discount code for the customer to buy a replacement. So whatever happens, thanks...
Every time I've bought something with rave reviews only to find out it's garbage, I've left a bad review and then been emailed offering my money back if I deleted it because bad reviews hurt their business (I could of course keep the product). I've never retracted a review, and have always reported the behaviour to Amazon, but it's extremely common.
It would be really nice to have a browser extension that shows the amount of other reviews every reviewer has in the last n months. Someone with 20+ review can not really be trusted and can be filtered out.
Or even better: If Amazon would spend some of their AI departments time and delete those fake reviews on a daily basis. So tired of them.
Might be worth checking out ReviewMeta - it scans Amazon product reviews for unnatural review patterns and provides a report highlighting suspicious activity. They also offer a browser extension.
The article actually mentions Fakespot [1] which has a chrome extension as well as ReviewMeta [2] which as far as I can tell doesn't. Neither do exactly what you're asking but they seem quite useful from a quick investigation and highlight some of the issues highlighted in the article when you look at the linked product.
Shameless plug: as an advisor for DronesBench http://www.dronesbench.it/en, which tests the electro-mechanical compliance of consumer drones, I suggested them to work on test drives of these cheap, dangerous drones to make the general public aware of the low quality level in the market. Their answer was that the general public does not care anyway, it is a war you cannot win because low prices trump all.
Since a drone can potentially violate restricted airspace, I could see some regulatory body eventually requiring approval/certification before a drone aircraft can be sold. I can imagine private pilots aren't too keen on running into some out of control flying piece of garbage at a few thousand feet.
> requiring approval/certification before a drone aircraft can be sold
Drones are like computers, you can buy all the individual parts and build it yourself. They only have a few parts: flight controller, PDB, ESCs, motors, propellers, radio receiver, camera, video transmitter, and a frame to hold everything together.
These vendors of cheap drones are just putting them together themselves and add a fancy canopy on top.
That’s it. That’s also why DronesBench comes with a novel, single efficiency benchmark for the electro-mechanical compliance of the drone as a system http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/ . Just measure it at factory and write it on the plate or stick it somewhere on the frame, then measure again periodically during its operational life: significant decreases express hidden defects, thus becoming a preventive tool for flight safety.
The real fix is for Amazon to have a department of curation. Beyond a certain scale, you can't only be a passive intermediary. There are all sorts of negative actors. Just like HN has some curation (great work, Dang) Amazon needs some too, but obviously on a completely different scale.
Why should Bezos care? He's worth $160 Billion so something must be working for him. Why would he feel the need to change? Amazon is making money, he's happy, investors are happy, so ... who cares about a few unhappy customers?
If Amazon has exclusivity on those brands, having the most valuable and trusty reviews becomes very valuable, especially if the other reviews are crap.
Could be a powerful tool for selling stuff to countries where Amazon isn't so strong.
Go to a physical "brick-and-mortar" store where you can test out different products in person and buy one there and then, knowing exactly what you're getting?
Sometimes the ultimate price for cheapness and convenience is just too high to be worth paying.
Nothing new. As a marketer we look to optimise reviews as long as reviews were a thing, though tools are get increasingly sofisticated. And some businesses do this in more ethical ways than other.
The fix is the same as always, brand. Companies and distributors establish a reputation good or bad. You pay a premium or chase cheap and take the risk. This I suspect will be a never ending cycle.
Brand, coupled with independent and trustworthy review companies is one solution. nytimes has started showing reviews from the nytimes's "wirecutter" review department.
When reviewing, they also offer the best "budget" choice, so often, even the premium isn't large.
The tiny Holy Stone drones come with one tiny 6 min battery.
A package insert offers three more batteries free, and by the way, don’t forget you can give happy reviews.
The implications probably play out well for them.
// The HS170G for $30 is a hoot to zip around indoors to practice your “Mode 2” controller chops, certainly worth 5 stars for entertainment per dollar:
To give Holy Stone credit, they have good customer service. I bought one of their crappier models when I was first exploring the quadcopter marketplace a few years ago. They did the usual thing of proactively emailing and asking for a review after a few days, but then actually replied to my email rant about quality control with suggestions to debug the issue. Finally, once I'd crashed it one too many times and destroyed it, they sent me a new drone free of charge. I suspect they're probably doing similar to anybody who leaves a bad rating in order to groom their listings.
(Don't get me wrong - their customer service doesn't make up for their poor products. Never buy a drone with injection molded frames, since they're not serviceable. Carbon fiber with replaceable frame parts all the way.)
I've had something similar happen (with another product). I think it's the flip side of fake reviews that people don't consider: you might be able to fake your way to five stars with a new product, but keeping it actually requires a decent product and being responsible to unsatisfied customers (usually with one of those "contact us directly if you have any concerns" cards in the box)
Just use https://reviewmeta.com/ to validate Amazon scores of products. When you do it on HS100 it immediately gives you a warning: "Unnatural reviews possible" . Fakespot shows a Fakespot Grade F and a corrected rating of 1.3: https://www.fakespot.com/product/holy-stone-hs100g-drone-wit...
It seems to me that Reviewmeta and FakeSpot do work. It is just Amazon that is too lazy to do anything against fake reviews.
So if I want to harm a competitor's product on ReviewMeta, review it a bunch of times, then delete the reviews. Got it.
This is a crappy game of cat and mouse, and if producers are willing to exploit Amazon's system, they'll exploit ReviewMeta. The only thing that protects ReviewMeta at this point is that it's a niche service.
It'd be nice to see a mechanism that recognizes trusted reviewers, but even that can be exploited I suppose.
Depends on how effective the corrected score mechanism is. If it's taking out the scores it deems fake then recalculating the score based on the remaining scores that campaign will only hurt their FakeSpot score while still leaving their overall score mostly intact. If they drop the score just because of fake reviews the attack would work but if it basically just filters out spam reviews it's much less attackable.
That's not exactly how it would work. As stated on the reports, deleted reviews don't actually affect our adjusted rating or pass/fail/warn result.
Technically speaking, of course ReviewMeta can be "gamed", but it would require much more effort on the part of the seller to generate reviews in such a way that it wouldn't set off any warnings on our side. Basically force them to be very deliberate in their efforts. It would just add yet another hoop for sellers to jump through, making it that much more difficult on their part.
The last few pages of the article mentions this, not to mention the author tested multiple articles from Holy Stone.
Here are some relevant quotes:
> "I personally believe that somehow Holy Stone is able to game the system beyond what even Faskespot can detect. A DroneDJ source confirms that Holy Stone uses “black hat” techniques to game the system."
> Among other tricks, Holy Stone is likely getting 100s of reviews from people who were provided product in exchange for a promise of a good review. These reviews pass the test as original reviews, but not the test of being unbiased reviews. I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It’s just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating. That’s unheard of for drones. Unheard of unless you are looking at a Holy Stone drone.
Fakespot and reviewmeta seem to have a bunch of false positives. I recently looked up a hair brush on fakespot and it had an F because the reviews were too similar. Turns out there isn't too much variety in how you can describe a hair brush. The reviewers I looked at had bought a variety of items and gave varying scores, so I doubt they're fake. It's more accurate to read the reviews and see if they sound genuine. A numerical score for something qualitative isn't very useful anyways.
I agree with you overall, but I'm curious - did you also go to the other items and read the reviews there, or run those items through fakespot?
If you're going to create a fake account to promote your items, you could give your items 5* and then copy other reviews on other products exactly (including # of *s) to make the account look more legitimate.
The real problem is that the review aggregator sites don't have all the data that could possibly be available to them. For example, I wrote a 2 star review of an LED light bulb I bought on Amazon. Claimed to be 90+ CRI, was actually a garish green color with a little bit of red and blue thrown in. I measured it with a spectrophotometer and included the spectrum chart in my review. The review was not posted for "violating their guidelines" or something. So any review aggregator is missing that genuine review, as is anyone browsing Amazon.com. For this reason, I don't trust _any_ reviews anymore. Amazon filters out the negative ones!
My guess is that the spectrum chart triggered some spam protection, honestly. I would call customer service but Amazon's customer service can't do anything other than send you another copy of the item you're complaining about.
(That's my other Amazon story. One time, I bought some bicycle tires on Amazon. They sent me the wrong model, mountain bike size instead of road bike size. I wrote them a detailed email describing what they sent me and what they should have sent. "We're so sorry!". The next day, two identically wrong tires arrived. I complained and they refunded my money. I now had to find a way to use four mountain bike tires, and I still had no road bike tires. 2 riding days lost. An hour writing emails lost. And I still had no bike tires. I bet 99% of people would call that "great customer service". I think it's terrible. (Amazon did eventually remove the listing in question, so that's nice.))
The challenge here is that there's no answer key, so nobody can really know for sure which reviews are authentic and which are not.
We all can look at reviews and make our best guess, but at the end of the day, it's always going to still be a guess. At ReviewMeta, we aren't claiming to know all the answers. We try our best to ensure everyone knows it's an estimate (you're actually forced to click an I agree button before accessing the site) and we also provide all our work so you can use the numbers to help you make a more informed decision.
While fakespot gave D, it gave it for other reasons. What really happened there - seller completely replaced product on that page with another one. Read existing reviews to understand what is going on.
Just wanted to chime in about this issue. We call it "Review Hijacking" and we've been seeing it more and more. We're actually starting to keep a history of any product title changes and also show you the different product variations that are being reviewed. On your second example, (https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07FSW8VMQ), you can click the link under the picture that says "See 3 product variations" and it will show you exactly the breakdown of reviews that come from a log carrier bag and a nut milk bag...
The first example is a little trickier since the first time we analyzed the product, the title had already been changed. (You can click on the "Title History" link for any product).
We're working on being able to detect when these changes/variations are normal or being used to deceive shoppers. It's extremely easy for a human to immediately tell, but much harder to train a computer to do it. For example, a seller might have a t-shirt with different product variations: "Large Blue", "Medium Green". These are very different words, but obviously a legit reason to have a bunch of variations.
This reminds me why I use https://www.fakespot.com/ analysis of Amazon reviews for products that I'm unfamiliar with. I see they mentioned fakespot in the article, which is nice.
A lot of comments about existing tools to spot fake reviews, and wondering why Amazon doesn't use them because the fake reviews that are dominating Amazon are clearly hurting consumers.
The long play for Amazon might just be that consumers gravitate towards the products that are actually sold by Amazon, because they can be sure that it should at least work. Eventually Amazon doesn't just control the marketplace, but is the only major vendor as well, and actually controls everything from the factory to the consumer.
It's also that fake reviewers probably don't try to game 3rd party sites rating systems. It seems plausible that if you implemented the same algo that some spotting-fake-reviews site uses on Amazon, sellers would quickly find a way around it.
There's one upside to the Amazon shopping experience devolving into a primordial sludge of counterfeits and random whitelabel garbage. These vendors have no discoverability beyond Amazon reviews, so their desperation to prevent your 1-star review is drastic. If you leave a 1-star review, they'll often get in touch with you and offer you another item for free, as often as it takes, however long it takes.
The products are garbage, but most of the prices are already pretty good. When you realize the prices are for two at the cost of a review, they're even better.
I still get emails trying to give me free stuff to change a one-star review I left a year ago for a one-ear bluetooth earbud.
On the other hand, I don't see how you can buy quality on Amazon anymore. I've started shopping on niche sites for things that I want to work, and I'd never buy expensive electronics. The risk of a counterfeit is just too high.
Sounds like the ultimate 1-star review for these types of situations should note that they will give you a free one if you 1 star the product. People will start doing that just for free ones.
Ok so erm... we all know what to expect when an amazon article hits HN.
Amazon has devolved. Counterfeits. Fake reviews. Crap quality....
IDK if this is true. That is, IDK if amazon's meaningfully worse than traditional big department stores or the brick-and-mortar sector generally.
But, say it's true. Amazon has jumped the shark. This is HN. This isn't the place for customer complaints. It's the place to hatch plans to kill amazon.
What's the bridgehead (à la pg) to a full-scale invasion of amazon territory? Reviews? Some product subset? Discovery? How would you build the company that replaces amazon?
You probably need a membership model that people pay for, that also grants them the Amazon prime shipping benefits and covers the cost of reviews etc...
Isn't this approach that merchants such as Massdrop are taking? They have a small number of product categories that are heavily curated by the staff and the users.
I assume this is tech-shaming... some giant product owned by the (second?) richest person in the world has some obvious flaws. Trying to embarrass Amazon into fixing it (like Facebook, Twitter, et al) by buying one of the addons services that prevent blatant abuse is a strategy... and possibly a profitable one both as a customer and acquiree.
Can you beat Amazon at this point? If Amazon sees a threat, they can easily use their pricing power to force it out of business. They don't mind losing money as a means to pressure competition.
I think you'd need to play a different game altogether if you wanted to carve a new niche. What that looks like, I'm not sure. Maybe a shopping site that builds carts across various retailers and orders from the least expensive?
Everything can be beaten. Wal-Mart is now offering free 2-day shipping (min purchase, but no membership fee), and I wouldn't be surprised to see stiff competition as drone regulation loosens.
As Amazon gets into more sectors, competition will increase. I don't think that will kill Amazon, but a big breach or other bad press could be enough to get people to move to alternatives, especially if those alternatives have become more competitive.
I don't think startups can compete until larger businesses threaten Amazon (Costco, Wal-Mart, CVS, Target, etc).
Amazon has higher prices on a lot of things now, and most local places will match Amazon. You also risk getting a fake product, and their product selection is poor at best now. Shipping has been extremely iffy and unreliable for months now. I cancelled Prime and haven't noticed any loss.
I tried ordering angled cutting pliers for cutting excess legs off of my PCB's when soldering, and other than Hakko which was an add-on item so I couldn't buy it unless I wanted 3 of them, most other brands were cheap Chinese trash.
I've had 34/35 items arrive from Aliexpress in the last month from Cambodia, China, and Russia. One was mis-delivered by USPS in USA. Amazon can't deliver correctly to the Whole Foods 1/4 mile from their HQ.
> Maybe a shopping site that builds carts across various retailers and orders from the least expensive?
Sounds like pcpartpicker. Which is, of course, only relevant if you're trying to buy parts for a pc. Great service though (not affiliated in any way, just a happy user).
> IDK if amazon's meaningfully worse than traditional big department stores or the brick-and-mortar sector generally.
They are meaningfully worse. "Traditional big department stores and the brick-and-mortar sector generally" have much more control over their supply chains than Amazon does. Physical shelf space is too valuable to let every random fly-by-night fake-review-fueled company use it. There's also the legal liability that comes with having a real address in a jurisdiction where it's likely you'll be held accountable.
For the above reasons, you're much less likely to find fake and counterfeit products at a brick and mortar store than on Amazon.
> What's the bridgehead (à la pg) to a full-scale invasion of amazon territory?
Well-deserved reputational damage that motivates consumers to look for and consider alternatives.
Not to mention the last time I needed a specific dongle, it had 5 stars and thousands of review.....but the reviews were clearly for a different product.
> They are meaningfully worse. "Traditional big department stores and the brick-and-mortar sector generally" have much more control over their supply chains than Amazon does. Physical shelf space is too valuable to let every random fly-by-night fake-review-fueled company use it. There's also the legal liability that comes with having a real address in a jurisdiction where it's likely you'll be held accountable.
This is less true than ever, as more big box stores expand their online offerings with third-party sellers.
I haven't found this to be true at all. Brick-and-mortar stores _always_ have less selection, and I have no idea wandering around the store if a product is actually any good. When I do bother to try and buy something at a brick-and-mortar store and I research what they are actually carrying, it's often got horrible reviews, not just on Amazon, but on other product review sites. While I agree that Amazon products aren't always the best, my experience with brick and mortar is _far_ worse. Except Costco. Costco is amazing, IMHO.
I am inclined to agree. Go to CVS or Best Buy or something to buy a USB cable, and you'll probably get an expensive piece of garbage just like on Amazon.
USB-c cable is a good use case where you just want to pay the cost and get it from the google store or at least get a benson leung approved cable.
Trying your luck with a cheap usb-c cable is not worth the hassle IMO.
That isn't the fault of the cable. Every USB port from 1.0 and up is required to limit current provided on VBUS. If your port blows it failed at doing that regardless of any misconfiguration within the cable.
The previous comment is refering to a relatively famous event a few years ago. Back then, some USB-C cable sold on amazon had the data-pins switched with the power-pins.
You CANT just trust random crap on Amazon. And its getting harder and harder these days now that fake-reviews are a thing.
I've been personally going to real-life locations to buy things. Walmart and Target sells stuff only a few bucks more than Amazon, but I can at least trust that it works.
---------
I don't necessary say it is Amazon's "fault" that fake products are getting fake reviews. But Amazon has known about this problem for years, and hasn't successfully done anything to stop the problem.
I'm sure the Amazon executives are working on the problem... but until they fix it... I'm taking my business elsewhere.
That's an important point. Big physical retail chains are pretty slow-moving about picking new products to sell. So they'll sell a USB-C cable that blows up your laptop, but as soon as they know it does that they'll pull it off the shelves and simply not offer any USB-C cable for sale. Compare this to Amazon where they probably remove 100 broken USB-C cables per day, but their random merchants list 200 more in that same period of time.
> I am inclined to agree. Go to CVS or Best Buy or something to buy a USB cable, and you'll probably get an expensive piece of garbage just like on Amazon.
I totally agree you can get overpriced crap from physical retail. However, unlike Amazon, it's much less likely to be dangerously substandard, counterfeit, or outright fraudulent like many of the items in the below search.
Brick-and-mortar stores _always_ have less selection
If I'm shopping for an internet-of-things-enabled doorbell, and a brick-and-mortar retailer only stocks brands with a reasonable history of product security while Amazon stocks everything, who has served me better?
> If I'm shopping for an internet-of-things-enabled doorbell, and a brick-and-mortar retailer only stocks brands with a reasonable history of product security...
Brick and mortar might stock known and respected brands, but it may be that they only have the bottom of that brand’s range of products, and if you want anything better the only place for that is an online shop like Amazon. My typical examples of this (in my European country, I don’t know how things are in the USA) are gigabit wireless routers and higher-end bike parts. Brick and mortar typically stocks only sub-gigabit routers, because that is what the uninformed masses want and are willing to pay for. Local bike shops stock only the broadest mass-market parts, with an emphasis on looks (and even some dodgy China brands in there) over longterm quality.
So, assuming that you know what you really want first, Amazon has served you better. (Leaving aside the problem with co-mingled inventory, where you might get a fake even if you bought a respected product.)
Not every town has specialized shops, even if they have the standard big brick and mortar chains. In such towns, which may be into the hundreds of thousands of population, everyone relies on online ordering and express delivery from the capital or other bigger city for specialized stuff.
Had a thought about it the other day. I think the easiest way forward would be a full scale attack on the quality side. There's a lot of people who wouldn't mind paying a few bucks more for something that's actually _good_. Get a subset of players on board, try to own a niche they're weak in (like Amazon started out with books) and then rigorously throw anything out that doesn't adhere to the platform's standards - the USP is that whatever you buy, it's stellar, and then you start getting exclusive deals and dry Amazon out (because a lot of sellers are tired of them too). Makes for some good PR, as everyone should be able to relate to that story. Unfortunately, it's really hard entering a two sided market with an established player as big as Amazon and will probably take lots of capital. Maybe it's actually easier to pivot one of the remaining e-commerce giants into that kind of company.
Sounds good but is this different from a site that does product reviews? Amazon does shipping and customer support which is hard and the only difference between quality store and quality reviews site seem to be one click more when buying.
Yeah, but you need to hit the convenience side, too. Shopping on Amazon is really easy. They already have all my info, and seem to be trustworthy enough to hold it.
A few nights ago, I was looking for very specific LED strips -- no waterproofing, black PCB, warm white LEDs, etc. Amazon couldn't help me, or at least, I couldn't find the item with high confidence that I'd actually get the right item after the 3 months of slow-boat China shipping.
I ended up branching out to a bunch of local 'warehouses', which are I think what you're describing: Local stores that stock and sell a small number of items that they stand behind. I passed on every single one I found because of their terrible websites, filled with popups and chat windows, and the scourge of early ecommerce: "contact us for pricing!"
This is before I ever had to enter an address and credit card number to actually buy anything.
I think the solution is somewhere in the middle. Use Amazon for what they're good at and what makes them good for your customers, but build a brand with its own trustworthiness that exists outside of Amazon.
It is something like SDCardholder.com that sells what I feel is the best card holder in the world. They have a storefront, but they use Amazon for their cart and warehouse. Monoprice has been the best place to get cables for years. I've purchased from them from both Amazon and their own storefront. Or Anker and Aukey, who have made brands around "reasonably-priced chargers that probably won't burst into flames and kill your family."
Recently, I've been getting a lot of boxes from Walmart.com after ordering from Amazon.com... and I'm okay with that. Because I didn't have to open an account with Walmart.com, but I still got the products that I wanted and a price I was okay with.
So, quality is VERY important, but don't forget about convenience.
Or Alibaba or Aliexpress. If you're actually going to wait for a china boat to showup with your stuff 3 months later, don't pay the Amazon premium, go as directly to the source as you can.
I would have liked to, but they didn't have them. Or at least, I couldn't find them. I checked Mouser, too. But at least these sites have excellent parametric search functions! It is nice to be able to say "I do NOT want to see any waterproofed strips" and have my request actually honored.
I've been selling on Amazon for two years now. When I went to the Boost with FBA conference last year, they said their goal was to be global. Their vision is that no matter where you live in the world, you can order whatever you want, and have it delivered with Prime shipping. Thus a global marketplace for consumers. They're already in Canada, US, Mexico, Europe, Japan, China, used to be in India, and building more fulfillment centers in Israel and more. Amazon is also rolling out their Amazon Basics and secret private label brands under different names. I read somewhere their private label brands alone did a couple billion in sales.
Every Amazon seller knows that if you make a great product, Amazon will compete with you eventually. They utilize an 80/20 rule. They sell the top 20% of products on their marketplace that make up 80% of the sales. I don't know how accurate this information or numbers are, but I heard from a VP who helped build the marketplace from the beginning, so I trust his insight.
Amazon did not start out this way from the beginning. They started as resellers themselves, then started private labeling, and I am going to bet that they will eventually start manufacturing themselves with their own factories if they haven't already. Bezos wants to build rockets so I'm sure Amazon could build their own products too if they wanted to. I could be completely wrong about this but it would be the next rational jump. Amazon is great at ruthless efficient systems so being able to own something where they could guarantee quality and lower costs seems obvious.
So far it seems they have been working on relentlessly cutting out the middle man they initially partnered with whether it was the first resellers they added to their marketplace, UPS, etc. Another example of this is how Amazon ruthlessly uses the data of sellers on their marketplace against them. They pretty much let third party Amazon sellers do all the testing for them and they can just take action on the best opportunities by simply looking at the data. Every time a brand sells something on Amazon, you're pretty much giving your business and customer data on a golden platter to Amazon. Amazon's algorithm loves outside traffic. Their beast needs to be fed.
Sorry for the long ramble but the point is that I think Amazon's end goal of global marketplace is achievable if you keep in mind the 80/20 rule. Amazon's marketplace might have millions of products but if 80% of the revenue comes from only 20% of the selection then fulfillment is a lot more manageable.
Amazon might seem to be a behemoth but they are having a lot of issues right now. Their fulfillment centers aren't perfect. They are losing customer trust. Retailers pretty much hate them. Amazon sellers would get off the Amazon marketplace in a heartbeat if they could make more money on another marketplace. Many sellers I know are always diversifying, selling on Walmart, Ebay, and their own stores. They're only on Amazon because that's where the customers are for the time being.
For those that think Amazon is unbeatable, ecommerce shifts quickly. Ebay used to be the bees knees years ago and look where they are now.
There are still new technologies that are being developed that will change the way people shop. Alibaba is light years ahead of shopping than Amazon. Just look at all their promotional videos. They built a fully functioning Amazon Go store way before Amazon. In this sense, Asia is leading the way.
Amazon might be dominating the American marketplace right now but they are not winning in other countries. There is still a race. Amazon failed in India and they're locked out of China.
Amazon has fat pockets but I don't think they're unbeatable. I heard there might be a stealth startup trying to take on Amazon. If anyone wants to put my esoteric knowledge to use, I'd love to talk. It's one of the weird things I might be good at so I love building or testing my Amazon knowledge. There...
Just a consideration: Isn't it at least somewhat plausible that some products attract people who are satisfied more easily and thus write good reviews? In this scenario, lots of these reviews might be honest, but nevertheless not helpful to you, since the good review only implies that you will be satisfied if you are of a similar demographic.
Anyone old enough to recall Walmart’s rise to power will find amazon’s trend towards cheap crap familiar. Walmart sold dirt cheap Chinese stuff of dubious quality but customer service would replace it at the drop of a hat (similar to how these companies keep bad reviews down). As shown by Walmart’s success most people don’t care they just want cheap crap.
It took a while for Target to rebrand itself as the less crappy source of overpriced but better quality cheap crap store for the middle and upper-middle class. Perhaps someone will come along and do this to Amazon online. Whereas Amazon clearly doesn’t care that it’s selling cheap crap, someone could come along and apply a little more curation to the offering.
Man, when I read the headline I seriously thought this was going to be a report on drones that Amazon had been evaluating for commercial delivery purposes, not just an aggregate customer review article... sometimes this habit of referring to Amazon users as "Amazon" or reddit users as "reddit" has problems.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadSeems like Amazon is filled with "fake" brands like these. Is just so that if some brand messes up, they can just put out the same product under a new brand?
On a similar note, when buying a scooter for my daughter, I found the "same" scooter in Toys-R-Us and Walmart. Despite identical branding and packaging, the Walmart version was of noticeably poorer quality (different materials and so on). I didn't check model numbers / SKUs, but I would expect them to be different.
I worked at a retailer who would position certain brands as junk (and they were). The junk label would be used to upsell to a better product or sell a high margin extended warranty. The pricing was usually engineered to make the warranty marginally cheaper.
The B&Ms know that people are comparison shopping, even as they browse the store: they'll be on their phones looking up model numbers to compare to online and at nearby stores. As we all know, a moat is preferable to competition, even if you have the same or inferior product.
This way the store can give you a "lowest price guarantee". Find it lower priced elsewhere, and we will pay you the difference!
Easy to give such a guarantee if you're 100% sure no other store sells the exact model.
Also easy to offer a lowest price guarantee when you know that customers are likely to only shop around at the high street 'competitors' which you also own. Will they bother to shop around? Doesn't really matter - heads you win, tails you win.
Although this probably works less well with much of the demographic of people who buy computers in the online shopping age.
The supplier will test and QC a range of products and when they find one which matches the spec they need they will have it branded and brought into their range. Although it's primarily a generic product they have put the time & effort into sourcing it and are [more] responsible for maintaining the quality and compatibility with their other offerings.
Googling it, it looks like Mazda makes at least some of the Yaris line, which used to be the Scion brand before that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/04/09/2018-t...
It results in some interesting vehicles. In the US, GM used to sell Toyota Corolla badged as Geo Prisms.
And in Japan, Toyota sold Chevrolet Cavaliers rebadged as Toyota Cavaliers.
"An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is a company that produces parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_equipment_manufacture...
When I started working on home power monitoring solutions "cloud" software, we could brand the web page with the company that sold/installed the equipment. If you didn't buy directly from us, you would have little idea where the equipment came from. Even the tech support information was that of our resellers. That changed overtime as the business started using there own branding.
Most "brands" of $100 to $2000 glasses are made in the same factory, owned by the same company (Luxxotica) and use the same materials and craftsmanship (or lack thereof), just with a different design.
Then the same design/materials go off-branded for sale for 1/10th the price or less.
What worries me more is fake reviews because that makes it harder to trust anything sold.
I can't tell if your comment is intended to be a counterargument (it seems to read that way) but you're actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Personally speaking re-branded products doesn't really bother me however the way reviews are abused does.
I think your link is a little disingenuous in the way it's worded too because I don't think Amazon actually remove or alter any reviews themselves. What I think happens is sellers contact customers and ask them to remove bad reviews in favour of a refund (or whatever). At least that was how negative reviews used to be purged a few years back. Of course you could still argue that Amazon should take a more proactive stance to customer bribery (just as Amazon should against fake reviews too) but I'm just directly addressing the phrasing "Amazon has altered or removed reviews" as seen in your citation.
Honestly, I think what you actually need to do is take more time to read the comments you're replying to because that's the second time in two posts where you've corrected me on something while going on to make the same point in your rebuttable as the comment you're supposedly countering.
I found page after page of cheap identical rebranded products: https://i.imgur.com/KRNTBDB.jpg
I did not buy a new mouse on amazon.
I personally know a few people who have gotten counterfeit items, even including consumables like protein powder. I don't have to buy from Amazon so it's just a chance I'm not going to take until such a time I can be convinced it's not a problem. It's not any more difficult or even expensive for me to shop elsewhere so I don't have to be particularly rational or thorough about it (I don't have time for that!).
"I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It’s just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating."
So there are nefarious ways to achieve this. But you do not need to do sneaky things to get excellent reviews from pissed off customers. It is easy to assume that the more underhand ways have gotten the good reviews and I am sure you can go to a fake reviews bot to prove the thesis. But it is actually easier and more cost efficient to get those excellent reviews for an average product from pissed off customers by good old customer service.
Most companies have their customer service team at the bottom of the food chain, outsourced and on the minimum wage. From my experience of Google products I suspect that this goes on in a lot of companies that genuinely make wonder products. We all know the story, you struggle to find out how to complain, you struggle filling in an online form and, if you are lucky, you get an automated response. They then make resolution of your complaint as hard as possible, divorce proceedings could be easier.
Most companies don't go the 'full Google' on lousy customer service, however it still takes a while. You get there in the end. They actually have a good product so the complaints are a relatively rare thing for them. Consequently they don't have to major on customer service, the customer service guys are one or two grunts in the company and the whole thing is seen as a cost rather than a revenue centre.
If a company does have a real problem with the product and there are a lot of warranty claims then they have to shape up and get good at customer service. Otherwise they are doomed to go out of business. So they throw people at the problem and more people and are still not winning. The next step is to automate the hell out of it. So you have extremely polite letters sent to customers to get the information needed to process a warranty claim. Customers receive these and the process rolls real quick. They provide required information and the highly automated customer service process just requires some human operator to approve the claim. The warehouse (FBA) then sends the customer out replacement product on the same day. Again, sensible communication goes out and the customer again thinks that for once in their freaking life they have been listened to. Maybe, up until then they have had 'Google grade' customer service and felt left out in the cold. At this point they don't really care so much about the product - most products are commodities anyhow - they just get wowed by the instant response.
There is social engineering in this, the customer can also be led to believe that they are the first person to notice that the 'plastic could be moulded better' and they think that their feedback will be passed along to the 'design team' to help make a better product. They feel involved.
Next the follow up email goes out, asking the customer if their experience with customer service was good enough. By now they have 'bonded' with 'Debbie' or whomever they thought those nice emails were from. They don't realise that 'Debbie' can't spell to save her life and cares more about watching Netflix than their problems with the product. 'Debbie' just clicked a button with automated systems and email templates doing the rest. But because they think they know 'Debbie' they obligingly write a really nice thank you and give five stars. A review is a review, on the site - Amazon or other - there are no silos for reviews breaking them down into 'customer service' and 'product', it all goes into the same pot.
'Debbie' might reject some warranty claims but for these people 'Debbie' can click a different tick box that sends out a discount code for the customer to buy a replacement. So whatever happens, thanks...
Or, if that is illegal (which I can imagine), just putting up a new bad review.
Or even better: If Amazon would spend some of their AI departments time and delete those fake reviews on a daily basis. So tired of them.
[1] https://www.fakespot.com/
[2] https://reviewmeta.com/
Drones are like computers, you can buy all the individual parts and build it yourself. They only have a few parts: flight controller, PDB, ESCs, motors, propellers, radio receiver, camera, video transmitter, and a frame to hold everything together.
These vendors of cheap drones are just putting them together themselves and add a fancy canopy on top.
So what’s the real fix here?
If I report the company then it’ll shut down and reopen under a different name.
If I leave a review it’ll drown it out with fake reviews.
If I shame the company - no one will see it. mom trusts ama son because ten years ago I told her to look at the reviews there.
Dump the reviews? Perhaps return rates would be a better metric.
Could be a powerful tool for selling stuff to countries where Amazon isn't so strong.
Sometimes the ultimate price for cheapness and convenience is just too high to be worth paying.
The fix is the same as always, brand. Companies and distributors establish a reputation good or bad. You pay a premium or chase cheap and take the risk. This I suspect will be a never ending cycle.
When reviewing, they also offer the best "budget" choice, so often, even the premium isn't large.
A package insert offers three more batteries free, and by the way, don’t forget you can give happy reviews.
The implications probably play out well for them.
// The HS170G for $30 is a hoot to zip around indoors to practice your “Mode 2” controller chops, certainly worth 5 stars for entertainment per dollar:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0762GZR25/
(Don't get me wrong - their customer service doesn't make up for their poor products. Never buy a drone with injection molded frames, since they're not serviceable. Carbon fiber with replaceable frame parts all the way.)
This is a crappy game of cat and mouse, and if producers are willing to exploit Amazon's system, they'll exploit ReviewMeta. The only thing that protects ReviewMeta at this point is that it's a niche service.
It'd be nice to see a mechanism that recognizes trusted reviewers, but even that can be exploited I suppose.
Technically speaking, of course ReviewMeta can be "gamed", but it would require much more effort on the part of the seller to generate reviews in such a way that it wouldn't set off any warnings on our side. Basically force them to be very deliberate in their efforts. It would just add yet another hoop for sellers to jump through, making it that much more difficult on their part.
They don't bother now because there's no significant userbase for these tools. That'd change quickly if Amazon built it into their system.
Here are some relevant quotes:
> "I personally believe that somehow Holy Stone is able to game the system beyond what even Faskespot can detect. A DroneDJ source confirms that Holy Stone uses “black hat” techniques to game the system."
> Among other tricks, Holy Stone is likely getting 100s of reviews from people who were provided product in exchange for a promise of a good review. These reviews pass the test as original reviews, but not the test of being unbiased reviews. I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It’s just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating. That’s unheard of for drones. Unheard of unless you are looking at a Holy Stone drone.
If you're going to create a fake account to promote your items, you could give your items 5* and then copy other reviews on other products exactly (including # of *s) to make the account look more legitimate.
Aww man this bums me out. I love the critical (detailed) reviews, they're the first thing I look for on amazon.
Any guesses as to what guidelines were violated?
(That's my other Amazon story. One time, I bought some bicycle tires on Amazon. They sent me the wrong model, mountain bike size instead of road bike size. I wrote them a detailed email describing what they sent me and what they should have sent. "We're so sorry!". The next day, two identically wrong tires arrived. I complained and they refunded my money. I now had to find a way to use four mountain bike tires, and I still had no road bike tires. 2 riding days lost. An hour writing emails lost. And I still had no bike tires. I bet 99% of people would call that "great customer service". I think it's terrible. (Amazon did eventually remove the listing in question, so that's nice.))
We all can look at reviews and make our best guess, but at the end of the day, it's always going to still be a guess. At ReviewMeta, we aren't claiming to know all the answers. We try our best to ensure everyone knows it's an estimate (you're actually forced to click an I agree button before accessing the site) and we also provide all our work so you can use the numbers to help you make a more informed decision.
Try:
https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07FTFFY24
https://www.fakespot.com/product/28pcs-wood-burning-kit-crea...
While fakespot gave D, it gave it for other reasons. What really happened there - seller completely replaced product on that page with another one. Read existing reviews to understand what is going on.
One more example - https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07FSW8VMQ - just read reviews to see how ridiculous it gets.
Not all of them are easy to detect. This seller added soldering iron as a variation to a wood burning unit - https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07D9H5H9Y - even by reading reviews you can't easily figure out fakeness of it. (https://www.fakespot.com/product/vastar-wood-burning-kit-44p... Fakespot gave A)
This type of blackhat stuff happens right now right and left. It is even cheaper/quicker/easier than paying reviewers for reviews now.
The first example is a little trickier since the first time we analyzed the product, the title had already been changed. (You can click on the "Title History" link for any product).
We're working on being able to detect when these changes/variations are normal or being used to deceive shoppers. It's extremely easy for a human to immediately tell, but much harder to train a computer to do it. For example, a seller might have a t-shirt with different product variations: "Large Blue", "Medium Green". These are very different words, but obviously a legit reason to have a bunch of variations.
Here's more info about Review Hijacking: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ and here's an article that BuzzFeed News recently did: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-rev...
The long play for Amazon might just be that consumers gravitate towards the products that are actually sold by Amazon, because they can be sure that it should at least work. Eventually Amazon doesn't just control the marketplace, but is the only major vendor as well, and actually controls everything from the factory to the consumer.
The products are garbage, but most of the prices are already pretty good. When you realize the prices are for two at the cost of a review, they're even better.
I still get emails trying to give me free stuff to change a one-star review I left a year ago for a one-ear bluetooth earbud.
On the other hand, I don't see how you can buy quality on Amazon anymore. I've started shopping on niche sites for things that I want to work, and I'd never buy expensive electronics. The risk of a counterfeit is just too high.
But is it at the price of removing your 1-star review? They are buying your honesty?
Amazon has devolved. Counterfeits. Fake reviews. Crap quality....
IDK if this is true. That is, IDK if amazon's meaningfully worse than traditional big department stores or the brick-and-mortar sector generally.
But, say it's true. Amazon has jumped the shark. This is HN. This isn't the place for customer complaints. It's the place to hatch plans to kill amazon.
What's the bridgehead (à la pg) to a full-scale invasion of amazon territory? Reviews? Some product subset? Discovery? How would you build the company that replaces amazon?
I would once too. Then I found out this "curation" ain't that well curated...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729408
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
You probably need a membership model that people pay for, that also grants them the Amazon prime shipping benefits and covers the cost of reviews etc...
I think you'd need to play a different game altogether if you wanted to carve a new niche. What that looks like, I'm not sure. Maybe a shopping site that builds carts across various retailers and orders from the least expensive?
As Amazon gets into more sectors, competition will increase. I don't think that will kill Amazon, but a big breach or other bad press could be enough to get people to move to alternatives, especially if those alternatives have become more competitive.
I don't think startups can compete until larger businesses threaten Amazon (Costco, Wal-Mart, CVS, Target, etc).
I tried ordering angled cutting pliers for cutting excess legs off of my PCB's when soldering, and other than Hakko which was an add-on item so I couldn't buy it unless I wanted 3 of them, most other brands were cheap Chinese trash.
I've had 34/35 items arrive from Aliexpress in the last month from Cambodia, China, and Russia. One was mis-delivered by USPS in USA. Amazon can't deliver correctly to the Whole Foods 1/4 mile from their HQ.
Sounds like pcpartpicker. Which is, of course, only relevant if you're trying to buy parts for a pc. Great service though (not affiliated in any way, just a happy user).
They are meaningfully worse. "Traditional big department stores and the brick-and-mortar sector generally" have much more control over their supply chains than Amazon does. Physical shelf space is too valuable to let every random fly-by-night fake-review-fueled company use it. There's also the legal liability that comes with having a real address in a jurisdiction where it's likely you'll be held accountable.
For the above reasons, you're much less likely to find fake and counterfeit products at a brick and mortar store than on Amazon.
> What's the bridgehead (à la pg) to a full-scale invasion of amazon territory?
Well-deserved reputational damage that motivates consumers to look for and consider alternatives.
This is less true than ever, as more big box stores expand their online offerings with third-party sellers.
The previous comment is refering to a relatively famous event a few years ago. Back then, some USB-C cable sold on amazon had the data-pins switched with the power-pins.
You CANT just trust random crap on Amazon. And its getting harder and harder these days now that fake-reviews are a thing.
I've been personally going to real-life locations to buy things. Walmart and Target sells stuff only a few bucks more than Amazon, but I can at least trust that it works.
---------
I don't necessary say it is Amazon's "fault" that fake products are getting fake reviews. But Amazon has known about this problem for years, and hasn't successfully done anything to stop the problem.
I'm sure the Amazon executives are working on the problem... but until they fix it... I'm taking my business elsewhere.
I totally agree you can get overpriced crap from physical retail. However, unlike Amazon, it's much less likely to be dangerously substandard, counterfeit, or outright fraudulent like many of the items in the below search.
https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&fie...
Brick and mortar might stock known and respected brands, but it may be that they only have the bottom of that brand’s range of products, and if you want anything better the only place for that is an online shop like Amazon. My typical examples of this (in my European country, I don’t know how things are in the USA) are gigabit wireless routers and higher-end bike parts. Brick and mortar typically stocks only sub-gigabit routers, because that is what the uninformed masses want and are willing to pay for. Local bike shops stock only the broadest mass-market parts, with an emphasis on looks (and even some dodgy China brands in there) over longterm quality.
So, assuming that you know what you really want first, Amazon has served you better. (Leaving aside the problem with co-mingled inventory, where you might get a fake even if you bought a respected product.)
I'd rather trek a little further to B&H than receive a box with an ersatz version punched out after a factory officially closes for the night.
A few nights ago, I was looking for very specific LED strips -- no waterproofing, black PCB, warm white LEDs, etc. Amazon couldn't help me, or at least, I couldn't find the item with high confidence that I'd actually get the right item after the 3 months of slow-boat China shipping.
I ended up branching out to a bunch of local 'warehouses', which are I think what you're describing: Local stores that stock and sell a small number of items that they stand behind. I passed on every single one I found because of their terrible websites, filled with popups and chat windows, and the scourge of early ecommerce: "contact us for pricing!"
This is before I ever had to enter an address and credit card number to actually buy anything.
I think the solution is somewhere in the middle. Use Amazon for what they're good at and what makes them good for your customers, but build a brand with its own trustworthiness that exists outside of Amazon.
It is something like SDCardholder.com that sells what I feel is the best card holder in the world. They have a storefront, but they use Amazon for their cart and warehouse. Monoprice has been the best place to get cables for years. I've purchased from them from both Amazon and their own storefront. Or Anker and Aukey, who have made brands around "reasonably-priced chargers that probably won't burst into flames and kill your family."
Recently, I've been getting a lot of boxes from Walmart.com after ordering from Amazon.com... and I'm okay with that. Because I didn't have to open an account with Walmart.com, but I still got the products that I wanted and a price I was okay with.
So, quality is VERY important, but don't forget about convenience.
Amazon bundled, so its killer will unbundle. Amazon's killer will be:
1. Brands/manufacturers going to direct to consumer on their own e-commerce platforms
2. Niche vertical sites that have hyperfocus on domain expertise
Wanna be a betting man? Put your money in E-comm platforms and services.
Every Amazon seller knows that if you make a great product, Amazon will compete with you eventually. They utilize an 80/20 rule. They sell the top 20% of products on their marketplace that make up 80% of the sales. I don't know how accurate this information or numbers are, but I heard from a VP who helped build the marketplace from the beginning, so I trust his insight.
Amazon did not start out this way from the beginning. They started as resellers themselves, then started private labeling, and I am going to bet that they will eventually start manufacturing themselves with their own factories if they haven't already. Bezos wants to build rockets so I'm sure Amazon could build their own products too if they wanted to. I could be completely wrong about this but it would be the next rational jump. Amazon is great at ruthless efficient systems so being able to own something where they could guarantee quality and lower costs seems obvious.
So far it seems they have been working on relentlessly cutting out the middle man they initially partnered with whether it was the first resellers they added to their marketplace, UPS, etc. Another example of this is how Amazon ruthlessly uses the data of sellers on their marketplace against them. They pretty much let third party Amazon sellers do all the testing for them and they can just take action on the best opportunities by simply looking at the data. Every time a brand sells something on Amazon, you're pretty much giving your business and customer data on a golden platter to Amazon. Amazon's algorithm loves outside traffic. Their beast needs to be fed.
Sorry for the long ramble but the point is that I think Amazon's end goal of global marketplace is achievable if you keep in mind the 80/20 rule. Amazon's marketplace might have millions of products but if 80% of the revenue comes from only 20% of the selection then fulfillment is a lot more manageable.
Amazon might seem to be a behemoth but they are having a lot of issues right now. Their fulfillment centers aren't perfect. They are losing customer trust. Retailers pretty much hate them. Amazon sellers would get off the Amazon marketplace in a heartbeat if they could make more money on another marketplace. Many sellers I know are always diversifying, selling on Walmart, Ebay, and their own stores. They're only on Amazon because that's where the customers are for the time being.
For those that think Amazon is unbeatable, ecommerce shifts quickly. Ebay used to be the bees knees years ago and look where they are now.
There are still new technologies that are being developed that will change the way people shop. Alibaba is light years ahead of shopping than Amazon. Just look at all their promotional videos. They built a fully functioning Amazon Go store way before Amazon. In this sense, Asia is leading the way.
Amazon might be dominating the American marketplace right now but they are not winning in other countries. There is still a race. Amazon failed in India and they're locked out of China.
Amazon has fat pockets but I don't think they're unbeatable. I heard there might be a stealth startup trying to take on Amazon. If anyone wants to put my esoteric knowledge to use, I'd love to talk. It's one of the weird things I might be good at so I love building or testing my Amazon knowledge. There...
It took a while for Target to rebrand itself as the less crappy source of overpriced but better quality cheap crap store for the middle and upper-middle class. Perhaps someone will come along and do this to Amazon online. Whereas Amazon clearly doesn’t care that it’s selling cheap crap, someone could come along and apply a little more curation to the offering.