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Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

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Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#11

Post by madaxe_again »

kbos87 wrote: post #8

The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can…

Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency.

There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#13

Post by pmezard »

madaxe_again wrote: post #11
kbos87 wrote: post #8

The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can…

Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto…

Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#14

Post by jvanderbot »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #3

There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.

I've never actually been able to order anything off Walmart. They always cancel my order after a day due to 'fraud' alerts on the seller. I guess that's good?

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#17

Post by powerhour »

pupppet wrote: post #12

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when reputable businesses decided it was in their best interests to sell random garbage they couldn't vouch for.

"eBay gets away with selling random junk from random sellers, how can we get a piece?"

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#18

Post by AlwaysRock »

SoftTalker wrote: post #5
jonnycomputer wrote: post #3

There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.

Just what I was about to say. Guess I'll cross Walmart.com off my online retailer list. Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have. I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fra…

They have hosted third party sellers for... at least 3-5 years. If you didnt know this already you wernt a customer. They lost 0 in revenue from when they opened their site up to third party sellers and gained lots of revenue from those third party sellers.

I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#19

Post by lotsofpulp »

pupppet wrote: post #12

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when reputable businesses decided it was in their best interests to sell random garbage they couldn't vouch for.

Probably something like this:

Amazon is earning a huge profit margin with no liability by letting random entities sell using their website.

Do we want to earn more money too?

Yes.

Re: Walmart Sells Fake 30TB Hard Drive That's Two Small SD Cards

#20

Post by AshamedCaptain »

immibis wrote: post #7
bearjaws wrote: post #4

This is a scam as old as time, set it to 'tape drive mode' and let it pretend to be any size you want. There used to be hard drives on ebay that were simply SD cards with scrap metal glued down for weight back in 2012ish.

What's not old as time is being able to buy it from Walmart.

But their competitor Amazon has been doing since forever and they've not really been hit with any lawsuit or any repercussion whatsoever for the matter, so ... why not ?
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