Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 426 posts

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#211

Post by svachalek »

rexf wrote: post #55
metalliqaz wrote: post #5

Amazon "... is turning their marketplace into a flea market of total junk." Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison. I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?

TFA: > what's the root cause of all of this? > Amazon courting overseas manufacturers and sellers at all costs. Why though? How does it benefit Amazon to have endless, no-name, bad quality listings? It makes the consumer experience awful & dangerous, not to mention the continued lowering trust in the marketplace. As others have mentioned, it's often better to go to Target/Walmart/Costco/etc to buy from a reputable su…

It really seems like they want to be a shipping and warehouse service and get out of retail entirely. Maybe better profit margins, or an easier way out of looking like a monopoly. I'm sure they've got some metric to quantify how much profit they're getting for each ounce of reputation lost and they're #winning.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#212

Post by notahacker »

mrguyorama wrote: post #50
Cerium wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this cheap junk follows a fairly reliable markup scheme: Factory sells for 1x Taobao sells for 2x Aliexpress sells for 3-4x (2x Taobao) Ebay sells for 8-10x. (~2x Aliexpress) I think Aliexpress is usually about 20% of the Amazon price, but depending on the item I agree that it can be 10%.

With the caveat that on ebay, you can usually find someone in the US wearhousing it for some reason with free 3 day shipping for the same price.

I've actually cross-referenced the original product on Alibaba to check specs when ordering the marked up product using eBay for Click-and-collect...

Reverse image search works wonders against "unique" brandnames.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#213

Post by krallja »

wtallis wrote: post #125
mrguyorama wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the caveat that on ebay, you can usually find someone in the US wearhousing it for some reason with free 3 day shipping for the same price.

And quite often when ordering from an eBay seller with US stock, the package that arrives has an Amazon logo on the box.

This happened to me: I ordered a cheap UV EPROM eraser on eBay with three-day delivery. It was literally drop-shipped from Amazon, on an Amazon truck, in an Amazon bag. I could have gotten the same (crappy, simple) product on Amazon a day earlier for about a dollar less. But I was trying to avoid buying on Amazon, because of all the reasons posted in this comments section!

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#214

Post by cortesoft »

lph wrote: post #10

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 like getting stuff the same or next day.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#215

Post by namdnay »

lph wrote: post #10

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 think it’s drop-shipping, you see these brands even for stuff delivered in 2-3 days

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#216

Post by namdnay »

distrill wrote: post #30

Unless I missed it, he didn't really talk about why these names exist, other than to suggest it might be a troll? Related, I don't understand twitter as a place for long form content. It's difficult to read and it can't be easy to post.

That article was a bit of a bait-and-switch: instead of explaining why the Chinese resellers all use similar patterns, the author just spent 30 twitter posts complaining about being undercut by cheap Chinese crap

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#217

Post by travem »

derefr wrote: post #179
thirtyseven wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> 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.

Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#219

Post by nomel »

fmajid wrote: post #183
MerelyMortal wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical or buy my electronics and optics from the fine folks at B&H Photo, which is owned by a (Satmar) Hasidic family. Sure, that means I can’t shop on Saturdays and have a much deeper knowledge of the Jewish high holidays calendar than I’d normally care to develop, but I don’t worry about a counterfeit battery blowing up in my face or a SSD upgrade for my computer being a 16G…

> Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical

I learned this the hard way when I received a counterfeit playstation controller, straight from the "Sony" store. For some reason, none of my reviews, even the positive ones, have posted since that one, which included pictures of a teardown.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#220

Post by majormajor »

throwway1490 wrote: post #128
callahad wrote: post #20

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…

The New York Times doesn't answer if this is beneficial for consumers, which is obviously the thing smart people want to know. Like why does Amazon put up with this? Even if zero people bought these weird brand products, their existence causes prices to go down, because prices are at the margin, and that's why it pisses off our Tweeter. Because he has to sell for less profit.

Obviously it wasn't good for the person that went blind.

You can debate, of course, where one should draw the line in terms of a race to the bottom of the quality barrel crosses from "good" to "bad" but intentionally avoiding liability and responsibility through lies and shell companies is a pretty clear case.

There's plenty of foreign-brand stuff available for good prices at equal-to-or-higher-quality domestic US brand stuff. But then there's also complete garbage scam trash, and Amazon should absolutely deal with that.

At least the stupid-ass brand names make it easy so far to avoid this stuff.

Post reply on HN