Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My n=1 observation is that these bogus listings cause me to either find a well-known brand and/or go somewhere else that has more trustworthy listings.
Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
401–410 of 426 posts
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what the family's religion has to do with anything, Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi. It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.
Some of it still exists. B&H photo is a very large jewish owned electronics business out of New York. They have some of the best high end electronics selection available online and last time I checked they are closed on the sabbath.
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#403Earlier 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%.
I've found many items on ali-express are within %10 of the ebay or even amazon price. The ali-express discount is not as major as you think for many items.
The one advantage you still get via indirect ordering is often smaller lot sizes. I'd rather pay $1 for a bolt than $50 for 5000 bolts, even if the piece cost is much higher.
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) N…
> What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." You're assuming cause & effect here. To this point, imagine: - The crowd following the leader / a particular success story - Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network - "Educational" boot camps to…
> Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
> Subscribed to update packages
> Generator to fill forms
...are fully in line with my argument. My hypothesis wasn't specifically that this was a SaaS system doing this. Rather, my hypothesis was that there's a Single-Point-of-Failure entity or platform that these listings go through — a Borg Queen that could be taken down; and that doing so would stop thousands of sellers in their tracks. I'm agnostic to what form that entity or platform takes.
You might be interested to hear my own guess as to a possible mechanism for this, though, as it's not listed among your alternatives. That guess is that there are a very small number of Chinese companies that advertise their services as writing/managing English-language Amazon product listings, for companies that have no English speakers. These companies use human labor, not automation, but they have a strict style guide, which both informs the format of their output, and the type of input they require from their clients. The network of sellers whose listings look the same, are all the work of one such English-language post-localization company (the largest/most popular one), and so all adhere to one uniform style guide. This company, at least, has the seller themselves register with Amazon; but from there, takes over responsibility for creating products in their account, managing returns claims, etc. They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
This would explain the reluctance of these sellers to engage through Amazon customer service (instead sending cards with their products that say "please report any issues to ") — they don't manage their own product listings (rather, the contractor does); and they don't trust the English-language-product-listings contractor to know enough about their product to do customer service; and it's hard to coordinate their separate English-language customer-support contractor (the one you reach via the email on the card) to be able to receive + respond to messages on postings managed by the product-listings contractor.
It would also make an interesting prediction: that you'll only see the particular style I described in my top post, in Amazon's English-language product listings, because each contract company would likely focus on selling product-listing localization services for a particular language, so different language ⇒ different company ⇒ different style guide.
> e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
You'd expect some people to miss that news. And even for people who see the update — no matter how "hungry" they are — you'd expect some sellers to let the news slip past them. For every such disseminated "Amazon Seller pro tip", you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement. And yet engagement with these changes is 100% — at least within this network of sellers where engagement has historically been 100%.
(Just to beat this point to death, consider the ultimate in centralized top-down "do it exactly one way" skill dissemination: driving. Does every 16-year-old who is highly motivated and hungry to get out on the road, learn every rule of the road + constantly execute their learned driving skills perfectly? Sadly, no. Humans are not good at perfectly absorbing skills, and are also fallible at executing them.)
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#405For certain categories Amazon is a mess. Case in point I recently got an iPad and I was looking for a rugged case, an alternative to OtterBox. It's a mess, with no real winners, and lots of questionable brands/products. It was suggested before, the time is ripe for a disruptor search engine, The Innovator's Dilemma style; starting with some segment of search.
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#406The scam is enormously profitable for Amazon and the Chinese black hats. You can tell it is really profitable because Amazon will compensate you for up to $1000 for damages caused by this junk. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58163915 I believe that Amazon probably could not turn the screws on these companies even if it wanted to. It would be a massive loss to their revenue and share holders would revolt. It would…
I've stopped buying huge swaths of things from Amazon for this reason. I'm basically down to buying four categories of things: 1. Items whose brand absolutely don't matter so long as they work as intended (e.g., books, home goods like hangers). 2. Home goods it wouldn't be worthwhile to knock off (e.g., KIND bars, toilet paper). 3. Smaller brands whose market share and item appeal are not worth cloning (e.g., a mecha…
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#407Its funny how much less online shopping Im doing these days specifically because of my bad experiences ordering from Amazon. I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I'll interact with often.
I find the best strat is to buy only from a trusted reseller. In Australia, Kmart tends to have decent and cheap quality items for nearly everything.
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon's one click, customer service, shipping infrastructure, and return policy simply embarrass all their competition. Decades of investing in these things is paying off. No wonder it's physically painful to visit a new site: forms, typing, janky shipping, janky returns... These things seem so easy once you see them all working, but companies don't have the resources or the interest in catching up.
I disagree. Their return policy average at best. Returns are only free if the item is damaged, defective, or incorrect. At Costco or Best Buy, I can return an item because I didn't like it. Even when returning items for "incorrect description", for example, it's super obnoxious when you have to return things over half the time because everything is shit. I can go to Walmart and get a higher-quality product. I can buy…
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#409Earlier 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'.
> what the family's religion has to do with anything, Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi. It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.
Re: Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s AliExpress with 2 day shipping for people with poor impulse control. The “free shipping” that costs 900%…
I've got good impulse control and planning. Still, I needed some TNC connectors for a surveying project and didn't want to wait the month for Aliexpress/eBayDirect to show up, so I ordered them off Amazon which had the best compromise of price vs shipping time. Of course I did a visual quality check when they showed up, as required for all direct Chineseum. It's not surprising this niche has developed. What's surpris…
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/quality-fade-chi...