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The ending is rather unexpected: > 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!"
Basically just filter out the crap and profit
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.
I don't like having to give AliExpress my phone number.
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I think amazon has jumped the shark[1] 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…
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. That’s their moat.
Maybe it depends on the location...
Shoprunner let’s you buy direct from brand with 2 day shipping, so you don’t need to lose that benefit, while avoid “mass marketplace” mis-incentives of amazon like fake products. It has the benefit of being good on clothing, which amazon was never a great destination for.
I haven’t used the Walmart “prime-equivilent” benefit, but it seems pretty comparable to amazon prime but at a retailer that has quality control (of some basic level). I’m just not much of a Walmart user.
Shipt gets you “Same day” delivery from stores like target, which is a good counter to the growing same day delivery amazon has been rolling out. I found that its way worse than amazon though, since Shipt is “gig workers” and doesn’t connect to the store’s inventory very well, so you never really know if your order will be fulfilled in full. I use this for last-minute target orders when I don’t have time to visit the store.
Shopify is rolling out a bunch of competing features, but the most useful one is that they’ll provide a single app to track your purchases, which means you don’t need 20 apps on your phone for each retailer just to track that one package a month you order (or more if that’s you).
Oh and now you have a bunch of accounts that you have to give your data to and hope they don’t get breached.
TLDR: It’s really hard to de-amazon if you’re a regular and hooked on the convenience BUT capitalism at work is providing alternatives slowly…
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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 tr…
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.
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.
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…
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.
I play a lot of card games with my kids. 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…
Is it correct to say that when you get something "shipped and sold by Amazon.com", it really comes from them? It's the "fulfilled by Amazon" (the infamous FBA) that you need to watch out for. It's a bit screwy, but you can filter by seller by clicking into a specific product category, and then selecting Amazon.com in the bar on the left. Then all the items should be "shipped and sold by Amazon.com". But I've been sor…