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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
FWIW a few years ago I found the my-country-Amazon is not another-country-Amazon.
I had a problem with a phone after 6-12 months and they just sent me a replacement. A similar thing happened a couple of years later, I contacted support like at 1am from another European country and apparently I was sent to Amazon US support, which were useless... On the way back to the UK (still in the EU), I contacted support again (at a normal time) and this time they gave me a refund.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
If the bots continually outpace the majority of humanity’s purchasing ability does that mean they don’t exist or do they pass some capitalist Turing test? I asked on behalf of all the bots checking for semantic values on social media and then drop shipping unique /s shirts.
I’d link things like this[1] but I can’t be sure you’ll see the same thing I’m linking because they are constantly mutating.
We have to accept the fact that algorithms have reached the tech level of convincing a double digit percentage of humanity to do what the algorithm wants because that is what is current reality
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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 does depend on the location, maybe you're lucky. But the complains process with DHL is impossible, so if you have bad delivery ppl in your area (in my case downtown Berlin), there's nothing you can do.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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!
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.
Same thing happened to me. I've been trying to avoid ordering work stuff on Amazon since they're technically a competitor, so I ordered a part on eBay. Coworkers commented on the Amazon package when it arrived, much to my confusion. It's happened a few times since then, I think they call it 'fulfilled by Amazon' or something like that.
That's just someone doing retail arbitrage: they take your eBay order and immediately have a bot (i.e. https://zincapi.com/) place an Amazon gift order to your address. Amazon does shut down buyer accounts for this but it's so rampant that it's more or less whack-a-mole.
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.
Isn't this kinda exactly the retail model that have been around since cheap overseas manufacturing. The products themselves are cheap, margin goes to shipping, warehousing and inventory. Potentially even risks involved on not selling all of the inventory.
The margins look huge, but actually many steps like carrying that inventory or even the shipping from near warehouse is pretty expensive. Like more than the product itself.
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)
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.
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...)
I've found many items on ali-express are within %10 of the ebay or even amazon price. The ali-express discount is not as major as you think for many items.
Competition has driven it down to "cost of item + warehousing + shipping + tiny profit" in many cases.
The one advantage you still get via indirect ordering is often smaller lot sizes. I'd rather pay $1 for a bolt than $50 for 5000 bolts, even if the piece cost is much higher.
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.
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.
Amazon can launch a new brand to distance themselves from the current form once they have firmly established themselves as a local cache of Aliexpress wares with fast shipping. It will be like an upmarket shopping mall located right next to a giant bazaar.
It's also due to mismatched expectations. In the west, a supplier has teething troubles, and then masters the process so quality improves over time. In China, the phenomenon of "quality fade" in a culture of "chabuduo" ("close enough") means over time the supplier will make unauthorized substitutions of inferior materials to pad their profit margins, and quality decreases over time. The only solution is to implement draconian quality control as Apple does, or not outsource and set up your own local affiliates as many Japanese companies do.
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.
From the limited searching I did when I first noticed this, it seems to actually be a more or less flat $10 markup, regardless of whether that works out to 10x or 10%.
Yup, excellent way to save money if you’re looking for a product that just seems to be cloned to death and without any big reputable brands having a superior version. I bought 3 automatic cat feeders from Ali for the same price as 1 from Amazon. Exact same product besides the logo being different.
In my experience, I ordered a fake USB3 capture card (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001773724519.html, check the 1-star reviews, also debunked by Marcan at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906127), filled out comprehensive documentation of it being fake USB3 and unable to capture stable footage at 1080p60, and AliExpress sided with the seller. I had to file a chargeback to get money back for the fraudulent product. Unfortunately the product maintains a 4.8 star rating, either because of fake 5-star reviews, or because most buyers did not actually evaluate that the product is truly USB 3 or captures stable 1080p60 footage.
Is Amazon better at compensating customers or removing fraudulent product listings?
Good point, its not just Amazon though. One time I ordered a case for my wife's new smartphone and it took more than a month till it arrived. Which sucks with the 2 weeks we got to send orders back in EU. I knew the case was more expensive than directly from China but I wanted to receive it quickly hence I ordered from a local shop. So we had to wait a month till she could use her new smartphone.
After nearly month (and I emailed the guy twice already without reply) I ordered a leather case from UK which cost twice the amount of money. I got it within 2 days. I put a claim with PayPal (he wasn't responding) for the case I didn't receive. It was accepted quickly.
A few days after that the guy emailed me claiming it was due to illness at his company, and that he'd send ut ASAP. A few days after I got it in the mail. Its still rotting somewhere in my house. I wonder if he saw or cared about my claim. Given it only cost him a couple of USD I figure he'd just write it off instead of asking for return.
At least here in Germany the 2 weeks for returns of items sold online only starts when you receive the item. Are you sure you couln't return it or did you just accept that blindly?
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.
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...
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'.
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.
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.
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.!"
>At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.
I interpreted the comment differently to you. To me, it appeared that the GP was merely trying to give all the details he remembered from the story. Each additional detail helps when trying to find a decade(s) old story on google or similar.
When reporting descriptions of people, the more detail, the better. Withholding things like race, religion, etc in an effort to be more PC results in a less accurate description.
If you failed to clarify in your original post, it really does look like it's not material to the story: we don't have the context so reasonably people are going to ask why you even brought it up. No need to get so indignant about it.
I am pretty sure I remember the article was about Adorama and B&H selling gray-market import photography goods over mail order and having racist practices or something, not about selling on Amazon.
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.
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.
It was wireless and never connected to the machine, so I'm not sure it was capable of damage. But it also didn't have much of a chance since it would only stay connected for about 30 seconds, after pairing.
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.
The difference is Amazon only pretends to care, and only cares about enough plausible deniability to deflect lawsuits (the courts are catching on and this no longer works). Their practice of stickerless commingled inventory ensures that even buying from Amazon itself is no guarantee of not getting a counterfeit product.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sorry mate - it sounds like I called you out too soon.
Ideally, keep race or skin colour or religion etc out of any discussion. As a rule of thumb I try to avoid noting any difference beyond M:F and even then - advisadly.
I don't think there is any reason to note Jew or Hasidic in your post. I have no idea whether a Jew might be offended by that because I would not even get to that point - no need to pontificate about something you don't know about.
People are people, regardless of race, creed or colour.
Let us embrace similarity and not disparity: Us not Them.
No it’s not and the GP is being a overly sensitive for no good reason. It’s a relatively recent sect of Judaism with a well known insular “ultra-orthodox” (more formally Haredi Judaism) Jewish community in New York, primarily Brooklyn and Israel. This is similar to something like the Amish, and pointing out something about Amish furniture or dairy businesses doesn’t make it automatically racist.
Because they are an insular group they are known culturally in the US for their retail enterprises. B&H Photo-Video being the most famous one. Go there now (bhphotovideo.com), you can’t even order during Shabbat.
I had a similar interpretation of the wording. I’ll take your response in good faith once because I do get the impression you’re asking sincerely, but be warned that should you have further questions you’ll likely fare better taking some time to familiarize yourself with how antisemitism often proliferates:
Noting a person’s Jewish heritage or faith or membership (or that of a business’s proprietor, or some noted portion of their clientele) when their Jewishness is not directly related to the rest of the point is often a signal, like a dog whistle (which is a term often used for this kind of signal). Particularly taking such notice in reference to New York is a strong signal, and often “New York” is used as a substitute for the signal when similar connections might be expected. The first thing it signals to antisemites is identification of a target—either for immediate ridicule, harassment, some other form of abuse… or for identification which places a longer term target on them. The next thing it signals is that like minds are present.
This was all somewhat obscure for even a lot of Americans, and easy to dismiss as an honest mistake rather than an intentional signal in a comment like yours, only a few years ago. Unfortunately a lot of white supremacist movements latched on to these kinds of dog whistles in the course of an election and ultimately an administration which both directly fostered these kinds of dog whistles and indirectly invited them into the mainstream by dismissively reacting to them (and sometimes rehabilitating them on the spot as “very fine people”).
Even so, when it was so obscure, it was a way for fellow travelers to target victims and find compatriots. It’s just a lot more visible now and a lot harder to take comments like [edit: not yours, sorry!] as in good faith.
I appreciate the explanation, thank you. In my neck of the woods you'll often hear "chinese" used in that way. And yes, it's not always obvious that it's meant negatively.
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.
Amazon isn't eBay. In theory, for us punters: we should be flogged goods by Amazon that conform to local standards. Beyond that all bets are off. eBay doesn't even bother with ... anything - it's all caveat emptor.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
You are kind of deciding Amazon's business model for them, or describing what you would like them to be. But your description doesn't fit well with their "Do you have one of these to sell?" links etc. It seems fair to say they send out mixed signals.
I doubt many Amazon goods from those sellers legitimately adhere to local standards. For example, I outright refuse to purchase silicone for food use from Amazon.
That's the problem: Amazon gives the false sense of brand identity and quality, forcing these problems, whereas eBay is transparently honest. The latter approach is simply better.
It depends, for parts the only place to reliably find name brand is on eBay. Parts on amazon is mainly just a domestic arm of of Aliexpress and Alibaba.
> So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards.
Getting a trademark isn't an "Amazon standard." It's a requirement to use A+ Content, among many other things.
However, you can ship product into their warehouses all day long without one. So clearly not a "standard."
> I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust.
The standards, like food safety, that people really care about have nothing to do with trademarks. You can say that it stops unsafe knockoffs, but this is factually wrong based on the amount of counterfeit stuff that comes out of Amazon.
> By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
Registering a trademark only guarantees you are willing to follow the rules of getting a trademark. Nothing else.
> You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Non sequitur. Trademarks don't exist to protect customers. They exist to protect businesses from knockoffs.
> you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales.
Nope. I just don't want to spend 850 Euro to register a trademark for a low volume product.
> Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
There's a "have one to sell? Sell on Amazon" link on every product page.
It's easier to sniff out legitimate items on ebay than it is amazon. That is the only metric that matters and amazon is failing horribly, despite whatever security theatre they put on.
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/).
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.
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?
> 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?
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!)
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.
> 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."
You're assuming cause & effect here.
To this point, imagine:
- The crowd following the leader / a particular success story
- Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
- "Educational" boot camps to "get rich". There are towns where people gathered to learn from "the pros" (search for related documentaries)
- Learning from the same person, e.g. via tiktok-esque platform
- Subscribed to update packages
- Generator to fill forms
> That's implausible.
'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China.
Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success?
e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down?
I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy.
Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
> Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
> Subscribed to update packages
> Generator to fill forms
...are fully in line with my argument. My hypothesis wasn't specifically that this was a SaaS system doing this. Rather, my hypothesis was that there's a Single-Point-of-Failure entity or platform that these listings go through — a Borg Queen that could be taken down; and that doing so would stop thousands of sellers in their tracks. I'm agnostic to what form that entity or platform takes.
You might be interested to hear my own guess as to a possible mechanism for this, though, as it's not listed among your alternatives. That guess is that there are a very small number of Chinese companies that advertise their services as writing/managing English-language Amazon product listings, for companies that have no English speakers. These companies use human labor, not automation, but they have a strict style guide, which both informs the format of their output, and the type of input they require from their clients. The network of sellers whose listings look the same, are all the work of one such English-language post-localization company (the largest/most popular one), and so all adhere to one uniform style guide. This company, at least, has the seller themselves register with Amazon; but from there, takes over responsibility for creating products in their account, managing returns claims, etc. They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
This would explain the reluctance of these sellers to engage through Amazon customer service (instead sending cards with their products that say "please report any issues to <email address>") — they don't manage their own product listings (rather, the contractor does); and they don't trust the English-language-product-listings contractor to know enough about their product to do customer service; and it's hard to coordinate their separate English-language customer-support contractor (the one you reach via the email on the card) to be able to receive + respond to messages on postings managed by the product-listings contractor.
It would also make an interesting prediction: that you'll only see the particular style I described in my top post, in Amazon's English-language product listings, because each contract company would likely focus on selling product-listing localization services for a particular language, so different language ⇒ different company ⇒ different style guide.
> e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
You'd expect some people to miss that news. And even for people who see the update — no matter how "hungry" they are — you'd expect some sellers to let the news slip past them. For every such disseminated "Amazon Seller pro tip", you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement. And yet engagement with these changes is 100% — at least within this network of sellers where engagement has historically been 100%.
(Just to beat this point to death, consider the ultimate in centralized top-down "do it exactly one way" skill dissemination: driving. Does every 16-year-old who is highly motivated and hungry to get out on the road, learn every rule of the road + constantly execute their learned driving skills perfectly? Sadly, no. Humans are not good at perfectly absorbing skills, and are also fallible at executing them.)
> a possible mechanism for this [...] They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
Very likely.
In my previous comment, I focused on the perspective of individual sellers (i.e. entrepreneurial) who have bulk contracts with the local manufacturers. They are the group who are unlikely to commit to "all-inclusive" packages, as they value financial cost overwhelmingly more than personal time, relative to other groups. Think college students, retirees, unemployed, people from poorer areas, etc. They are ubiquitously known as 'wang dai', literally online retailer or agent. These are the first wave of significant online retailing in China. As they want to expand abroad, those who gained some first experience are packaging courses at minimal entry fee (~10USD!). There were a long period where these courses are bombarded via WeChat. (There still are, but the trend has shifted to other topics)
Naturally, the manufacturers want a bigger piece of the cake and now dominates their own online presence in China. To further expand beyond abroad, as they probably do not have adequate language/platform in-house expertise. This is a perfect match to the services you described - outsourcing to e.g. Amazon/eBay specialists.
In either case the point still stands. There's a snowball effect of following the lead of whoever is known to be successful and became the 'authority'.
> you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement
I agree imperfect engagement is expected on the whole, but how the 100% metric is derived can be misleading. Is it 100% of the top 100 items i.e. the cream of the crop? How different would it be if the procrastinators or failures or one-offs are also included?
Also, I don't think analogue activities like driving is, analogous. Probably closer to Pride Day / French Flag photo overlay across various social platforms. Or SEO.
> a Borg Queen that could be taken down
I think we are aligned that there's a Borg Queen, but not on the rigidness of the hierarchy.
I believe it's weakly/organically structured, unless there's a monopoly, that I'm not aware of, happened.
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 might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com
You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant).
Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
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, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
Can't believe "【Title tags】body text" notation is washing up here. This has to be, to describe in a William-Gibsonian description, an old Japanese practice in email titles heavily used in 2ch/5ch later became popular in Rakuten listings mimicked by Chinese listings on Amazon JP that ultimately leaked into Amazon US via machine translations.
I have never seen it done in anything other than in Japanese text, and translations of. Not sure about double bullet points, but this usage of 【】 is distinctly Japanese.
This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
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).
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.
>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.
From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.
> 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.
There's nothing inherent to these vendors (as people) and/or
(most of) their products that would mean that they shouldn't be allowed on Amazon, no.
The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it.
Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with.
If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally.
The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)
The OA mentioned someone who lost an eye due to improper product design and the vendor was safely hidden behind several layers of false-front entities.
I don't know how common that is, but buyers should be aware that many Amazon sellers, including domestic ones, operate in the way the OA explains.
Biggest annoyance IMO is that they clog up the search results and make it harder to find products you'd actually buy. Many sell the exact same item, which you then have to skip over, over and over again. Someone at Amazon must be bonus'd on adding new vendors.
I wonder if it wouldn’t put them in a problematic position as a marketplace operator, especially as they’re already abusing their position with their “Amazon basics” lineup.
“We listened to customer demand” wouldn’t as a defense for filtering for goods that go through their warehouse (which also doesn’t guarantee you get what you expected)
There are some alleged frauds in the UK that rely on lots of small ephemeral businesses, one after the other, I could see that being an valid strategy here too
Your guess that this is driven by a SaaS is built around assumptions of how process and repetition is structured in the West and its labor markets but this doesn't hold in China.
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
#6: These are full-width brackets. Most Chinese input method editors will output full-width characters by default instead of the half-width ones that you're accustomed to.
For example: ，。；：【】
If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve drastically reduced the amount of shopping I do on Amazon, mostly due to my perception that it’s become a toxic waste dump. Amazon is good at getting stuff to you quickly, but the prices are nothing special and the shopping experience is trash. It’s much more satisfying to order directly from the manufacturer (usually with free, reasonably fast shipping) and know that what you’re getting is genuine.
Ok, now the flood of pseudo-"brand" names that you encounter when searching for electronics on Amazon makes much more sense. I searched for a USB-C dock recently and got a wide selection of items from "brands" such as Lemorele, Sitecom, GIISSMO, Probuk, Baseus, Hulier, Inateck etc. etc. etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
Target is currently filling that niche in the US; Walmart has the "marketplace" sellers which you have to watch out for. Best Buy is also decent for now; hopefully they don't try to "marketplace".
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.
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"
"wu long da sha b dong" seems like it's Five Dragons Building (https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.... ;some kind of office park?), Building B, and a suite number. The first line is something like "Longhuan 1st Road, Jinglong Community, Longhua Street, Longhua District".
It just looks like a mess because people are not used to it, and in chinese writing you don't separate the characters - it's "有限公司" for limited company, not "有限 公司"
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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!"
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.
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!"
That really depends how often it happens. You can't expect 100% reliability, especially for any processes that involve humans or physical items. And even if 100% reliability was attainable the cost would probably be astronomical so you have to make the tradeoff somewhere.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
425 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Same problem. Different clothes
I'm surprised that reputation didn't do it. (But I agree; Amazon's behavior certainly seems to show that they don't care.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220722194603/https://threadrea...
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?
This is not a "why don't they fight the spam harder" problem. That's Google's problem. Amazon's problem is, apparently, that their corporate culture is so toxic and broken as to make any kind of internal controls or moderation outright useless.
The reasonable behaviour would of course be to give a pop-up like "hey, you're trying to buy a book that doesn't work for your Kindle, are you sure this is what you want?" I bet they have some sort of disclaimer hidden away in some giant heap of legalese making it "legal" but the whole flow was clearly designed to trick people this way. And I'm a programmer, I don't get tricked as easily as the average person in this context(I hope).
Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.
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.
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.
But even still, the third-party sellers aren't as bad on walmart as they are on amazon
> 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/
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.
> 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?
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.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
So kind of the internet we had in the early to mid 90s
In an economy where the only thing that matters is actual money there wouldn't be any bots - after all I don't see bots queuing up to buy stuff. This is a problem the bullshit advertising and "growth & engagement" industry brought on themselves. If you pay people to click on stuff, they're gonna click it, tell others to click or build machines to click.
I’d link things like this[1] but I can’t be sure you’ll see the same thing I’m linking because they are constantly mutating.
We have to accept the fact that algorithms have reached the tech level of convincing a double digit percentage of humanity to do what the algorithm wants because that is what is current reality
[1] https://newyorkshirtcompany.com/products/queens-are-born-in-...
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.
Generally too one of the causes of this craziness is that we keep outsourcing our manufacturing to China. China is only making these items because a much larger American company like OXO has them making really awesome kitchen items (for example) So it's not that hard for the same factory to create a series of shell companies that also sell the OXO stuff. I mean how hard is it to copy and paste the ads that the legit companies make and sell directly?
If we didn't outsource everything then it wouldn't be happening.
Target is definitely the closest we've found over here.
Right now buying home goods online is a nightmare: Search engines don’t help, the big retailer websites are full of junk, prices are unbelievable. But I’ve had great success identifying the handful of companies that make X in the USA and ordering directly from them.
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
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.
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.
There was no way I'd do that on Amazon.
I got them from Costco, instead.
I’d only order very specific things from Amazon and as a result haven’t actually ordered in a couple years.
Amazon has become a truly awful storefront, and this has accelerated markedly, in just the last couple of years.
If the people who were supposed to be keeping them in line actually went after them aggressively, then it might be possible to start a competitor.
The fake is still up for sale.
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.
Maybe it depends on the location...
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.
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.
Amazon today is less about selling things to consumers and more about selling consumers to anonymous Chinese suppliers.
I don't think it's improved with age, but the links aren't any good, anymore.
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…
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!
I would never buy something from Amazon that touched my food.
Electronics more complicated than a cable require some review, figuring out if there's a reputable brand underneath, etc.
Only true for what are, now, low-end HDMI cables. Really difficult to get a good one that's actually within spec for high-bandwidth applications.
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.
I've found Monoprice's higher-end HDMI cables to be reliable.
Sadly enough, at this point Amazon.nl is overshadowing this by giving insane discounts and refunds to customers, so I hope they do not win over Bol.com, but I am anxious about it.
And at least with Bol.com you only need to deal with (sometimes dodgy) companies in the Netherlands, whereas with amazon you haven't got a clue where it's coming from, and a lot of it just seems to be stuff from alibaba at a big markup.
I 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.
I placed an order June 30, it arrived July 17.
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.
I think Aliexpress is usually about 20% of the Amazon price, but depending on the item I agree that it can be 10%.
Reverse image search works wonders against "unique" brandnames.
i think the scam here is that amazon or amazon sellers will pay people to warehouse product in the US, because when you're selling aliexpress goods at a 90% markup, you can afford the warehousing. and the people they're paying to run those warehouses list the product on ebay at 20% markup, on the assumption that if it sells they can make an aliexpress order and restock before the amazon seller notices their product is missing.
The margins look huge, but actually many steps like carrying that inventory or even the shipping from near warehouse is pretty expensive. Like more than the product itself.
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)
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.
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...)
The one advantage you still get via indirect ordering is often smaller lot sizes. I'd rather pay $1 for a bolt than $50 for 5000 bolts, even if the piece cost is much higher.
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.
It's not surprising this niche has developed. What's surprising is that Amazon seems dead set on undermining their business to support it. It's also surprising that people write these amazed posts like they've just discovered this problem, when it has been going on for a decade.
I read a HN comment a while back that framed the topic of declining quality plus free returns as companies outsourcing their QC to the customers and that really stuck with me. This is really the natural progression of wanton consumerism - so much stuff is sold and never actually used that it's profitable to only worry about the case where the buyer actually uses it and finds it lacking.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/quality-fade-chi...
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.
From the limited searching I did when I first noticed this, it seems to actually be a more or less flat $10 markup, regardless of whether that works out to 10x or 10%.
Maybe some sort of fixed cost is involved?
You pay the markup to get the item quickly, and for easy returns.
I wish they'd at lest truly make the product generic instead of placing a useless logo on it.
If I can wait a month, it's cheaper on AliExpress, although their search/discovery is a mess.
If I want it in a week or two, I can usually find it for a few dollars more at eBay claiming 'US seller".
If I want it by the end of the week, I'll try to assemble $25 worth of "shipped by Amazon" items.
Is Amazon better at compensating customers or removing fraudulent product listings?
After nearly month (and I emailed the guy twice already without reply) I ordered a leather case from UK which cost twice the amount of money. I got it within 2 days. I put a claim with PayPal (he wasn't responding) for the case I didn't receive. It was accepted quickly.
A few days after that the guy emailed me claiming it was due to illness at his company, and that he'd send ut ASAP. A few days after I got it in the mail. Its still rotting somewhere in my house. I wonder if he saw or cared about my claim. Given it only cost him a couple of USD I figure he'd just write it off instead of asking for return.
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
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.
It was _fundamental_ to whomever wrote the piece...
So I mentioned it here.
Sorry I failed your "anti-semetic triggers" - FFS.
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.!"
I interpreted the comment differently to you. To me, it appeared that the GP was merely trying to give all the details he remembered from the story. Each additional detail helps when trying to find a decade(s) old story on google or similar.
When reporting descriptions of people, the more detail, the better. Withholding things like race, religion, etc in an effort to be more PC results in a less accurate description.
I learned this the hard way when I received a counterfeit playstation controller, straight from the "Sony" store. For some reason, none of my reviews, even the positive ones, have posted since that one, which included pictures of a teardown.
Supply chain attacks are real and even reputable vendors are susceptible. The difference is how the vendors react with their customers that separates the good vendor from the bad vendor.
Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi.
It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Is calling a Jew "Hassidic" derogatory?
Ideally, keep race or skin colour or religion etc out of any discussion. As a rule of thumb I try to avoid noting any difference beyond M:F and even then - advisadly.
I don't think there is any reason to note Jew or Hasidic in your post. I have no idea whether a Jew might be offended by that because I would not even get to that point - no need to pontificate about something you don't know about.
People are people, regardless of race, creed or colour.
Let us embrace similarity and not disparity: Us not Them.
Here’s a NYT article which might provide some context: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/nyregion/hasidic-jews-ama...
Because they are an insular group they are known culturally in the US for their retail enterprises. B&H Photo-Video being the most famous one. Go there now (bhphotovideo.com), you can’t even order during Shabbat.
Noting a person’s Jewish heritage or faith or membership (or that of a business’s proprietor, or some noted portion of their clientele) when their Jewishness is not directly related to the rest of the point is often a signal, like a dog whistle (which is a term often used for this kind of signal). Particularly taking such notice in reference to New York is a strong signal, and often “New York” is used as a substitute for the signal when similar connections might be expected. The first thing it signals to antisemites is identification of a target—either for immediate ridicule, harassment, some other form of abuse… or for identification which places a longer term target on them. The next thing it signals is that like minds are present.
This was all somewhat obscure for even a lot of Americans, and easy to dismiss as an honest mistake rather than an intentional signal in a comment like yours, only a few years ago. Unfortunately a lot of white supremacist movements latched on to these kinds of dog whistles in the course of an election and ultimately an administration which both directly fostered these kinds of dog whistles and indirectly invited them into the mainstream by dismissively reacting to them (and sometimes rehabilitating them on the spot as “very fine people”).
Even so, when it was so obscure, it was a way for fellow travelers to target victims and find compatriots. It’s just a lot more visible now and a lot harder to take comments like [edit: not yours, sorry!] as in good faith.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
You?
I assume their Whole Foods division is at least FDA regulated.
Getting a trademark isn't an "Amazon standard." It's a requirement to use A+ Content, among many other things.
However, you can ship product into their warehouses all day long without one. So clearly not a "standard."
> I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust.
The standards, like food safety, that people really care about have nothing to do with trademarks. You can say that it stops unsafe knockoffs, but this is factually wrong based on the amount of counterfeit stuff that comes out of Amazon.
> By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
Registering a trademark only guarantees you are willing to follow the rules of getting a trademark. Nothing else.
> You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Non sequitur. Trademarks don't exist to protect customers. They exist to protect businesses from knockoffs.
> you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales.
Nope. I just don't want to spend 850 Euro to register a trademark for a low volume product.
> Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
There's a "have one to sell? Sell on Amazon" link on every product page.
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/).
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.
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?
Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random.
But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible.
(Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
You're assuming cause & effect here. To this point, imagine:
> That's implausible.'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China.
Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success?
e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down?
I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy.
Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
> Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
> Subscribed to update packages
> Generator to fill forms
...are fully in line with my argument. My hypothesis wasn't specifically that this was a SaaS system doing this. Rather, my hypothesis was that there's a Single-Point-of-Failure entity or platform that these listings go through — a Borg Queen that could be taken down; and that doing so would stop thousands of sellers in their tracks. I'm agnostic to what form that entity or platform takes.
You might be interested to hear my own guess as to a possible mechanism for this, though, as it's not listed among your alternatives. That guess is that there are a very small number of Chinese companies that advertise their services as writing/managing English-language Amazon product listings, for companies that have no English speakers. These companies use human labor, not automation, but they have a strict style guide, which both informs the format of their output, and the type of input they require from their clients. The network of sellers whose listings look the same, are all the work of one such English-language post-localization company (the largest/most popular one), and so all adhere to one uniform style guide. This company, at least, has the seller themselves register with Amazon; but from there, takes over responsibility for creating products in their account, managing returns claims, etc. They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
This would explain the reluctance of these sellers to engage through Amazon customer service (instead sending cards with their products that say "please report any issues to <email address>") — they don't manage their own product listings (rather, the contractor does); and they don't trust the English-language-product-listings contractor to know enough about their product to do customer service; and it's hard to coordinate their separate English-language customer-support contractor (the one you reach via the email on the card) to be able to receive + respond to messages on postings managed by the product-listings contractor.
It would also make an interesting prediction: that you'll only see the particular style I described in my top post, in Amazon's English-language product listings, because each contract company would likely focus on selling product-listing localization services for a particular language, so different language ⇒ different company ⇒ different style guide.
> e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
You'd expect some people to miss that news. And even for people who see the update — no matter how "hungry" they are — you'd expect some sellers to let the news slip past them. For every such disseminated "Amazon Seller pro tip", you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement. And yet engagement with these changes is 100% — at least within this network of sellers where engagement has historically been 100%.
(Just to beat this point to death, consider the ultimate in centralized top-down "do it exactly one way" skill dissemination: driving. Does every 16-year-old who is highly motivated and hungry to get out on the road, learn every rule of the road + constantly execute their learned driving skills perfectly? Sadly, no. Humans are not good at perfectly absorbing skills, and are also fallible at executing them.)
Very likely.
In my previous comment, I focused on the perspective of individual sellers (i.e. entrepreneurial) who have bulk contracts with the local manufacturers. They are the group who are unlikely to commit to "all-inclusive" packages, as they value financial cost overwhelmingly more than personal time, relative to other groups. Think college students, retirees, unemployed, people from poorer areas, etc. They are ubiquitously known as 'wang dai', literally online retailer or agent. These are the first wave of significant online retailing in China. As they want to expand abroad, those who gained some first experience are packaging courses at minimal entry fee (~10USD!). There were a long period where these courses are bombarded via WeChat. (There still are, but the trend has shifted to other topics)
Naturally, the manufacturers want a bigger piece of the cake and now dominates their own online presence in China. To further expand beyond abroad, as they probably do not have adequate language/platform in-house expertise. This is a perfect match to the services you described - outsourcing to e.g. Amazon/eBay specialists.
In either case the point still stands. There's a snowball effect of following the lead of whoever is known to be successful and became the 'authority'.
> you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement
I agree imperfect engagement is expected on the whole, but how the 100% metric is derived can be misleading. Is it 100% of the top 100 items i.e. the cream of the crop? How different would it be if the procrastinators or failures or one-offs are also included?
Also, I don't think analogue activities like driving is, analogous. Probably closer to Pride Day / French Flag photo overlay across various social platforms. Or SEO.
> a Borg Queen that could be taken down
I think we are aligned that there's a Borg Queen, but not on the rigidness of the hierarchy.
I believe it's weakly/organically structured, unless there's a monopoly, that I'm not aware of, happened.
Lots of them did
You're assuming coordination on the part of the sellers, but another possibility is that the Amazon search engine penalized that text
And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com
You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant).
Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
> You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned
It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused.
> lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets,
There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly.
Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
I have never seen it done in anything other than in Japanese text, and translations of. Not sure about double bullet points, but this usage of 【】 is distinctly Japanese.
1: https://imgur.com/uKb9XI5
2: https://imgur.com/1zsxDAF
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.
From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.
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.
The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it.
Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with.
If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally.
I was looking at the “baby mocassin” listing the tweet is mentioning, and picked one of the “small business” labeled ones that have probably been vetted as an actual US business: https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAm...
The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)
I don't know how common that is, but buyers should be aware that many Amazon sellers, including domestic ones, operate in the way the OA explains.
Biggest annoyance IMO is that they clog up the search results and make it harder to find products you'd actually buy. Many sell the exact same item, which you then have to skip over, over and over again. Someone at Amazon must be bonus'd on adding new vendors.
And Amazon not letting you filter out third-party sellers is effectively a dark pattern.
bestbuy.ca has search results primarily comprised of third-party sellers, but has a prominent “Best Buy Only” filter at the top of the results.
“We listened to customer demand” wouldn’t as a defense for filtering for goods that go through their warehouse (which also doesn’t guarantee you get what you expected)
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
For example: ，。；：【】
If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_fa...
Even if zero people bought these weird brand products, their existence causes prices to go down, because prices are at the margin, and that's why it pisses off our Tweeter. Because he has to sell for less profit.
You can debate, of course, where one should draw the line in terms of a race to the bottom of the quality barrel crosses from "good" to "bad" but intentionally avoiding liability and responsibility through lies and shell companies is a pretty clear case.
There's plenty of foreign-brand stuff available for good prices at equal-to-or-higher-quality domestic US brand stuff. But then there's also complete garbage scam trash, and Amazon should absolutely deal with that.
At least the stupid-ass brand names make it easy so far to avoid this stuff.
Related, I don't understand twitter as a place for long form content. It's difficult to read and it can't be easy to post.
Instead, I learned to love it. It's almost a way of being reminded again and again about who is speaking, and it gives you a little feedback of how interesting other Twitter users found that particular section.
I don't really like that I learned to love it. I think it might be unhealthy. But that's a different issue.
> how can you protect yourself as a consumer?
Followed by a tedious list of hoops to jump through around verifying authenticity to a point where you might not get stung.
At this point, is it not better to just give up on Amazon and use a retailer that takes its product sourcing more seriously?
Continuing to use Amazon when you know how full to the brim of scams it is, just seems to me like rewarding them for bad behaviour.
Take your money elsewhere, with everyone else, and let the invisible hand of the market give Amazon a bloody good slap.
Honestly, if we're talking about convenience, Amazon is pretty much the best game in town. They have many documented failings and faults, but being inconvenient isn't one of them.
I value my time and don't want a 'caveat emptor' market experience, so I've largely given up on Amazon as a reliable market browser.
I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I'll interact with often.
I don't know about target as I don't shop there too often.
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.
Chinese company names are generally [location] [selected name] [what they do], like Baidu is Beijing + Baidu + Netcom Science Technology.
The transliteration in the tweet: "shenzhenshizhengshunzidianziyouxiangongsi"
Shenzhen-shi (city), Dianzi (electronics), youxian (limited), gongsi (company)
"wu long da sha b dong" seems like it's Five Dragons Building (https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.... ;some kind of office park?), Building B, and a suite number. The first line is something like "Longhuan 1st Road, Jinglong Community, Longhua Street, Longhua District".
It just looks like a mess because people are not used to it, and in chinese writing you don't separate the characters - it's "有限公司" for limited company, not "有限 公司"
(Your comment should probably be the top comment for the thread)
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.
> despite all of this, i still mostly love Amazon as a customer. it played a big role in getting my e-commerce business off of the ground and i'm grateful for that.
"It's a flea market full of cheap (and sometimes dangerous) junk, but I still love it!"
I got an empty box shipped to me instead of an SSD last week and got an instant refund for it.
EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon Mechanical Turk!
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.
What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?
I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9/10 times higher than Amazon for brand name items.