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Selling Lemons

frankchimero.com

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Re: Selling Lemons

#61

Post by IncreasePosts »

jstanley wrote: post #6
jp57 wrote: post #4

... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products. I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made…

The reason this phenomenon exists is because Amazon tried to block generic products from their site by saying the product must feature the seller's brand name. Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product. It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.

Why don't they just make more plausible sounding brand names, especially with the advent of LLMs which can just barf out reasonable sounding ones that you can trust even if you don't speak English, and is almost as easy to do as smashing MIZOUW on the keyboard?

Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital letters.

Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover, Stillpoint, Aetheria

Re: Selling Lemons

#62

Post by nemomarx »

johnfn wrote: post #47

> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a signif…

they really could try and stand out more as a brand name?

do you know how they compare to manta btw

Re: Selling Lemons

#63

Post by ericmcer »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

Not just The Internet. All of tech, and likely, other industries, as well. I was told that this was what happened to Etsy. When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real, handmade goods, at fairly high prices. Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-lo. The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale. I see this happening everywhere.

Isn't that just the nature of capitalism? When a need is identified people rush to fill it as cheaply as possible.

It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand.

On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands 20+ years ago.

Re: Selling Lemons

#64

Post by evandena »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #29
jamestimmins wrote: post #12

I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it. Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree. Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.

In one of my niche hobbies I run a product recommendations website based on buying stuff with our own money to separate crap from good stuff. One of our recommended products is made by a brand called DIWANGUS, which always gets a giggle. But they're good!

There's a "brand" that makes auto seat covers called DIKSOAKR.

Re: Selling Lemons

#65

Post by ruralfam »

I can relate. Buy a lot from Amazon, and play the "crazy-Chinese-brand-name" routlette a lot. Most are low value purchases which makes the risk not too bad. Most purchases have me saying, "Damn that's good quality (e.g. drill bit sets)." So the China brands do a pretty good job overall. Note: One needs to spend a good amount of time sorting thru reviews to avoid the obviously bad stuff.

So now I want to spend several hundred dollars on a magnetic-resistance stationary bike. This is a whole new level of exposure vs. my "small-dollar, small-risk" previous purchases. Main brands (Peleton etc.) are just way out of my price range. So I have spent several days now researching these products. Am confident I am going to make a good purchase... Why you say ??

I was looking at a very niche "vote your favorite mansion" competition on a football fan forum (chiefsplanet) thread. Some very expensive mansion had a photo of the exercise room, and there was my current contender for first choice. What a strange way to get positive feedback.

Re: Selling Lemons

#66

Post by j1elo »

> (and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification

Missing a close paren here. My mental Lisp parser gave me a syntax error here and I panicked hahah :)

(truth be told I got stuck for an instant in there)

Re: Selling Lemons

#67

Post by rjh29 »

johnfn wrote: post #47

> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a signif…

I don't think it detracts from his point - there are so many almost identical brands that you can't tell what's good and what's bad anymore.

Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.

Re: Selling Lemons

#68

Post by dasil003 »

fsckboy wrote: post #43

just a quibble, a lemon market is not a stage of a market, it's a market with information asymmetry which affects prices which affects market participation. the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those products. used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you dis…

Sure, I get it, but I think it's a pretty powerful observation that the internet has enabled a proliferation of markets for lemons by lowering the bar so much for distribution, and raising the bar so much for baseline marketing, that it has eroded previous signals for quality across innumerable domains and jobs-to-be-done.

Re: Selling Lemons

#69

Post by johnfn »

rjh29 wrote: post #67
johnfn wrote: post #47

> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a signif…

I don't think it detracts from his point - there are so many almost identical brands that you can't tell what's good and what's bad anymore. Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.

MZOO is the #1 brand that comes up when you search sleep mask on Amazon.

Re: Selling Lemons

#70

Post by rjh29 »

ruralfam wrote: post #65

I can relate. Buy a lot from Amazon, and play the "crazy-Chinese-brand-name" routlette a lot. Most are low value purchases which makes the risk not too bad. Most purchases have me saying, "Damn that's good quality (e.g. drill bit sets)." So the China brands do a pretty good job overall. Note: One needs to spend a good amount of time sorting thru reviews to avoid the obviously bad stuff. So now I want to spend several…

Amazon excels in this area - pay more but you have a good refund policy. The low value purchases are better done from aliexpress. You'll get the same items but pay less for them.
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