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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

#271
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, if "these scammers are ultra orthodox Jews" was central to the piece "for some reason", the author might've been a tad on the antisemitic side. At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.

He specifically mentioned Brooklyn though, so to me that sounds more like starting the story with a general feeling of the place.

Basically! this was the take-away

SET THE SCENE: "What you may think of sleepy hassidic brooklyn as a religious enclave -check out these guys with curls making a killing on amazon knock-offs.!"

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliexpress is getting better on shipping times! I placed an order June 30, it arrived July 17.

That is likely luck: if your order makes a nice round truck full, and that truck full makes a nice round container full at the next stage, and the container is one of the last loaded onto a ship that is due to leave soon, you'll get the best delivery time. The next order will get the worst or close to. As some of the recent supply chain issues are easing off things will be feeling better when they are in fact moving…

It depends on location and how often people in your area order from China. I used to get ePacket orders from Shenzhen to San Jose within 10 days every time. Now that ePacket is dead, AliExpress standard shipping takes 14 days.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#273
post #126

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…

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…

>"start a turn-key Amazon business"

From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself.

I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"We used this brand new hybrid truck for two weeks, and it's great!"

Yeah, I'm not sure what to do with that information.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#275
post #208

I've gotten to the point that if it's a nonsense all-caps name or has an item description in broken English, I just don't bother. It's gonna be trash. It'll fail in 3 weeks, there will be no way to get it returned or repaired, the company won't exist, and the product listing will be gone next time you come back to it.

> It'll fail in 3 weeks, there will be no way to get it returned or repaired, the company won't exist, and the product listing will be gone next time you come back to it.

We're talking about Amazon though right? You can definitely return that, that's even inside the official return window (one month).

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#276
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the items have different uuids, but there are no markings on the physical item. They’re identified by bin location. There are lots of bins in the warehouse. They contain up to around five items each. There is a theoretical possibility that two of the same thing from different sellers could end up in the same bin. At that point the picker wouldn’t know which is which.

> There is a theoretical possibility that two of the same thing from different sellers could end up in the same bin. At that point the picker wouldn’t know which is which. Amazon's seller-side stickerless inventory documentation specifically says that identical items from different sellers are never put into same physical bin so that the original source can be traced.

Do you have any link for that?

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

eBay is also significantly more difficult and annoying to use than Amazon Prime. I don't disagree with the morality argument, but Amazon has made things so incredibly convenient for the consumer.

Seriously. If it has that Prime mark on it, I know I'm getting it at a ridiculous speed, plus that 5% cash back on thus ugly old metal card that I used to like. Well, the cash back reward is still very nice.

I really wish I could switch to other online or brick and mortar vendors, but nothing executes as well as Amazon in my experience. I even tried ordering some computer parts from newegg and it was fine, but it felt like I was back in 2002 or so.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#278
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, but if you both learned to write from the same person, then you would expect the handwriting to look similar (even if you didn't let them see your notes). And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on…

That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely, IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly. However...

> You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned

It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused.

> lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets,

There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly.

Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#279

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.

Here's unrolled version, easier to read: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550230795230781440.html

Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it more and more difficult to return items to stores in the US because they keep their returns deparments so short-staffed. Home Depot and Target are 2 places where I have stood in line for 45min to 1hr just to return something.

My experience is the opposite - at least with HD. I come in, wait 5 minutes max, and return my item and the money is back on my card within the day. Never had a hassle either returning even more expensive, even custom-fit orders (window blinds). I don't know about target as I don't shop there too often.

Yep, my local Home Depot has no line for returns and they don’t ask questions. Example: They gave me a full refund when I returned an empty box of wooden dowels after I used them for a project and realized the box had fewer dowels than advertised (likely because someone opened it and stole a few).
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