291–300 of 426 posts
My standards are low but woof. You can’t even get a marble run that’s not that super thin brittle plastic. The marble run at Walmart was half the price.
I’m the laziest, least ethics-motivated consumer and I think my time with Amazon is wrapping up.
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…
I've listed a few things on Amazon. This is very much true. If you don't have a registered trademark youre a second class citizen. You can't upload a video, for example.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
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…
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
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).
> want to get in touch with DOTTAVR? > well, they're on Amazon... surely they are a legit company and Amazon is covering their bases... good luck! >> Business Address: >> longhuaqulonghuajiadaojinglongshequLONGHUANYILU jiruizongheyuanWULONGDASHA Bdong502 >> Shenzhenshi >> Guangdongsheng >> 518110 >> CN This is the second time I've seen someone complain about "obviously" illegitimate business information that appears…
Compare that with that string of garbled pinyin: it returns zero google results, refers to an area of China with no Street View access, and I wouldn't even know where to begin to verify if they are actually a registered company, who owns that address or how long the company has existed, and there's nothing I could cross-reference with other sources. If they wanted to throw away that identity, they could probably get a dozen like it in under a week with minimal effort. So yes, there's definitely many ways they could be more open or informative to communicate their status as a legitimate business that values their identity.
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…
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’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…
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.
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%.
I only shop on Amazon when there's something that's difficult to find. That's it. I prefer spending on niche or small shops.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.