Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
> My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
- Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
- Factory seconds, goods with very minor defects (sometimes not even in the product itself but in the box etc)
- Manufacturers copying specs and running illicit production lines without the company’s authorization
- Complete knockoffs, where the external design was copied but the product is totally different
Ultimately for most of these Amazon brands you have no idea which of these you are getting. Just because a product looks the same doesn’t mean it is the same. And in a lot of cases, e.g. with battery operated electronics the knockoff manufacturers skip a lot of safeguards and it ends up burning your house down.
> Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
Costco famously shops around aggressively for quality products -- not premium, but not crap -- and usually from big manufacturers who are already making excess supply.
Is common for supermarkets, too. Kraft can only get sub-par cheese one quarter so they make the same product but sell it as a white label option for lower margin. The factory line keeps running, product gets moved, inventory gets cleared, and margin is slightly lower but acceptable.
I don't think commerce (especially at Amazon) works the way you think it does.
There is a very good chance that when you buy something at Amazon that says it's BigBrand ... it's just a knockoff. Or a fake that has infiltrated another part of Amazon's supply chain. There is big money in lying to customers through Amazon.
Why not go down to your local independent pet store, keep your money local and support your neighbours instead of giving it to directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
> Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
in many cases may even be from the same factory made by the same hands with a slightly different supplier or quality of fabric, or lower QA.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of weird model collapse is happening.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere.
I feel we're well into the race to the bottom because I'm having an increasingly difficult time finding the brand name products to be any better. A lot of the brand name stuff is now also crap and some of the knock-off stuff seems to be just fine.
I'd rather buy a cheap knockoff than pay top dollar for an equally bad branded product. Most "consumer-grade" stuff out there these days is garbage regardless of price or brand. Examples: mattresses, home appliances, furniture, audio devices, routers. If you need something durable or dependable, you need to buy enterprise-grade stuff or make your own.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadEdit: appears to be using blacklists.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k2ydn1rz8o
It seems like the retailers can be held responsible should "ASDAS_A!kr" drop off the radar, but might still be easier to sue local.
(I know "local" companies still find ways to settle / weasel their way out of responsiblities, but at least you know where to reach them...)
- Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
- Factory seconds, goods with very minor defects (sometimes not even in the product itself but in the box etc)
- Manufacturers copying specs and running illicit production lines without the company’s authorization
- Complete knockoffs, where the external design was copied but the product is totally different
Ultimately for most of these Amazon brands you have no idea which of these you are getting. Just because a product looks the same doesn’t mean it is the same. And in a lot of cases, e.g. with battery operated electronics the knockoff manufacturers skip a lot of safeguards and it ends up burning your house down.
Costco famously shops around aggressively for quality products -- not premium, but not crap -- and usually from big manufacturers who are already making excess supply.
Is common for supermarkets, too. Kraft can only get sub-par cheese one quarter so they make the same product but sell it as a white label option for lower margin. The factory line keeps running, product gets moved, inventory gets cleared, and margin is slightly lower but acceptable.
If it's an old and established US mark like Philips or Maytag or something? ZGGCD is the way to go.
I don't think commerce (especially at Amazon) works the way you think it does.
There is a very good chance that when you buy something at Amazon that says it's BigBrand ... it's just a knockoff. Or a fake that has infiltrated another part of Amazon's supply chain. There is big money in lying to customers through Amazon.
in many cases may even be from the same factory made by the same hands with a slightly different supplier or quality of fabric, or lower QA.
- shipping sometimes goes to from day(s) to weeks
- suddenly their ads start going to email
- please review us emails
I'd rather bezos get his cut.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
You'll find lots of different manufacturers selling this on Amazon, but there is no well known brand that makes these.
$39 instead of $224 for a pet bed. I know which one I'll buy.
There are plenty of categories of items where the cheap knockoff is perfectly adequate.
I don't even know why that is legal.
I see "HORUSDY" type brand names all the time. It's crazy that any shirt/pants/etc results in one of these.