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Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

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Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#171

Post by decafninja »

I’ll be the odd person out and say that whatever it’s faults as a company, my shopping experience on Amazon has been great. Not perfect, but nearly so. Certainly better than most other online retail channels, plus the convenience of Prime, and being a “one stop shop” certainly is super useful.

I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoid the obvious Chinese knockoff stuff (unless it’s some trivially unimportant thing), and don’t find it hard to do so at all.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#172

Post by rich_sasha »

Amazon carved a good niche for themselves by pretending you're not buying from them but rather some "vendor".

That's not right IMHO. The seller is Amazon; where they source their stuff and what subcontractors they have is their business.

It's like EBay takes more responsibility for products you buy, even though that is explicitly a site for matching random buyers and random sellers. Not that i use ebay much either.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#173

Post by derefr »

blowski wrote: post #136
derefr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

A lot of fraud is remarkably uncreative. Look at Companies House in the UK - you can spot many of the scams a mile off.

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.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#174

Post by larrik »

iamthepieman wrote: post #69
AlexandrB wrote: post #51

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!"

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.

Whoa whoa whoa, don't besmirch Costco like that!

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#175

Post by samstave »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #155
samstave wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#176

Post by contravariant »

WildGreenLeave wrote: post #100
tryptophan wrote: post #8

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.

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 enoug…

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.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#177

Post by spathi_fwiffo »

qqqwerty wrote: post #129
alangibson wrote: post #112

I wonder if theres a business idea in here. Set up a site that looks better than Amazon (not hard) and only list reputable listings on Amazon. Collect affiliate revenue. Basically just filter out the crap and profit

That is basically what WireCutter is, among many others.

I've been less trusting of WireCutter reviews lately. Still see so many of these strange brands listed when I go in to read a review, combined with no real long term testing. Lack of long term testing makes me not trust Consumer Reports as much either.

I still use their reviews as a reference point, but for a lot of things I don't really go for their top selections.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#178

Post by jiggawatts »

AlexandrB wrote: post #119
duxup wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's like how every wall clock you buy - from Aliexpress to Crate & Barrel - will have the same cheap mechanism running the arms: https://www.amazon.com/Include-Movement-Mechanism-Operated-R...

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!

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#179

Post by derefr »

thirtyseven wrote: post #167
derefr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

What’s hard to believe about several thousand sellers all copying each other’s homework?

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?

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#180

Post by heliodor »

decafninja wrote: post #171

I’ll be the odd person out and say that whatever it’s faults as a company, my shopping experience on Amazon has been great. Not perfect, but nearly so. Certainly better than most other online retail channels, plus the convenience of Prime, and being a “one stop shop” certainly is super useful. I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoi…

That kind of unimportant stuff is usually found on ebay for much cheaper. Usually things that cost no more than $10 or $20 on Amazon sell for much less on eBay. The trinkets category. I make a point of not engaging with that category on Amazon. It's the least I can do to feed the monster less.
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