401–410 of 429 posts
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Isn’t Amazon Basics just paid product placement?
That's "Amazon's Choice", which is a label you pay for that gets plopped on random bullshit. Amazon Basics is a brand that Amazon itself has had people design and manufacture for them. Not the same thing at all.
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> I think brand matters more than ever. I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself. Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itse…
A acquaintance of mine recently told me he was going to start his own rock climbing clothes brand. Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem. No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc. I could…
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
I have friends who are no longer buying from Amazon. Especially friends with kids. You can’t trust anything safe for your kids when crap like this is allowed. Amazon is in a race to flood the market with availability at the cost of consumer confidence. Remember all the hoverboard fires you saw on the news several years ago? They weren’t knock offs, but items sold that didn’t have any real safety certifications in min…
I'm astonished no competitor like Walmart or Wayfair has gone on the offensive yet with TV ads stating flat-out that you can't trust Amazon anymore because their counterfeit problem is out of control. They'd make a killing with defectors.
For sensitive things, I now buy direct, or Target.
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Because of the search results.
Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.
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Because the average Amazon buyer sees "eligible for Prime" as an Amazon-backed indicator of quality.
It’s a delivery flag, never was a quality flag.
Does anyone know if/why it is legal for China to be producing and selling these blatantly knock-off products? It seems outrageous that they are able to sell a product with the same EXACT name (the 'Ove' Glove example in the link) as the copied product.
It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…
Amazon cares, but Chinese sellers are paying Amazon customers to write fake reviews for them. There's an article about it here:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon...
This practice basically makes it impossible to tell fake reviews from real ones.
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Also limit review to be written X time after the product arrives. So many useless reviews that just said they received it and they are going to try it later...
Those reviews always amaze me. And the people who answer one of the questions with "I don't know", too. Why did they bother typing anything at all? My theory is that some people can't imagine that people aren't talking specifically to them. You see them in chat rooms answering every question as if it was posed them to directly, even when it was obviously directed at someone else.
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Yeah, it's not 100%, but it's far north of 95%. When I see Vine reviews, they are pretty much always 5 stars, even on products that have very mixed reviews from verified purchases. When I view the Vine-member profiles from those reviews, it's 20-30 five star reviews for every 1 star review. I can't remember ever having seen them give 2, 3 or 4 stars. My impression is: you pay, you get 5 stars. They buy a product them…
That's rather how a lot of Amazon reviewers are. Vine-rs are also now the only group of reviewers that can officially review products for free. Naturally when you are getting something for free, it's hard to really take value into account. A lot of 2-star $100 products might be "5-star" if you pay $0. That's something Amazon recognizes in its own policies towards normie non-Vine reviewers.
Maybe it's just not an issue for most people because they don't know that reviews could be bought, so any and all reviews are great for making the sale from Amazon's perspective. If the minority that chooses to shop elsewhere grows too large, they can always make a dramatic gesture, punish a dozen people with fake reviews and donate to a children's hospital.
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Why do you feel the process would be too expensive for most products? That is, let's say the review process might cost the merchant $5,000 on a one-time or biannual basis or whatever--does that seem like an unreasonable charge to take reasonable care that the products offered on the marketplace are authentic, of good quality, etc.?
I'll bite: Honest reviewer says that product works fine...for the first week or month. Wait for a year before allowing them to sell? Not doable especially on millions of new products. Maybe reviews should be limited only to certified buyers or only those should be added to stars /rank.
If you want to test longevity Amazon could track warranty repair / replacement claims.