Do not fight Chinese sellers on Amazon. If they move into your category, just give up. They understand Amazon's system way better than 99.99% of non-Chinese sellers.
The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.:
* [easy to use]: blah blah blah
The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings.
My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.
They also commit a form of fraud that Amazon seems disinterested in fixing: they’ll take a listing with thousands of good reviews and comments and completely swap out the product.
I once tried to buy a pulse oximeter and all the reviews for the most popular one were about replacement bike tires.
That would be difficult to pull off without collusion with an insider doing an end run around the support platform. The support platform is heavily locked down (to a degree I've never seen with other retailers) and surveilled.
I think they are complicit. I've left reviews on products about how the 5 star reviews are for a different product (people uploaded photos in their reviews, which aren't for the current listing's product) and Amazon itself removed my reviews.
AMZN has no comprehension that the obvious fraud listings cause some people to think there must be other fraud listings too and make people less inclined to buy from AMZN.
I'd have to agree. There are so many levels of fraud and other violations (deceptive business practices) going on at that place.
Any other legitimate business would be taken to task for a quarter of what they are doing. Maybe they know they can get away with it because they have a blanket liability shield from the AWS contracts?
Yes, the products were horrible and I reviewed as such.
The reviews aren't ordered in a way that makes that obvious. You usually have to dig deep to find these. If you only look at the first page of reviews you are likely not going to see the photo reviews.
Amazon is not law enforcement. You should actually blame the government and disinterested services like police.
If someone created an online store like Amazon and essentially gave fraudsters free reign, they would be closed in no time, but this company is too big to fail and nobody seems to want to upset the billionaire owning it.
It's a classic example of one set of laws for the rich and another for the pleb.
I do blame Amazon for their short-sightedness. This is driving people away from using them and in the long term I don't think it will have been good to allow this sketchy shit.
You are right that other consumer protection laws etc. should be put in place to make fake reviews, product listing swap-outs etc. impossible.
Why not both? I can easily blame Amazon for scamming me (anything that happens via Amazon.tld is Amazon's doing), and regulators/courts for taking the brib... lobbying money and suddenly losing interest in doing their job in this particular case.
if Amazon is innocent then Alcapone and mafia bisses are innocent - after all they did have to get Alcapone for income tax evasion, therw was no proof that he ever personally killed or extorted anyone.
Amazon knows exactly whats is happening and they are profiting off it
I think this may just be a weird autocorrect, but on the chance it’s not, FYI the guy’s first name is (/was) Al, and his last name is Capone. Al Capone.
I stopped buying on Amazon for this reason. If I want Chinese Wares I get them cheaper on Aliexpress.
If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too).
Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
I used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes, as if an active party was trying to stamp out negativity. I heard about an active social media team that stamps out negativity. Not sure if it’s true, but I can’t rule it out either.
Thanks for the article, so I actually searched “reputation management” and there is actually a subreddit for this, active till two years ago. Crazy really that this can happen.
To be fair if Amazon is showing products with low ratings then it means they are continuing to sell shitty products. You don’t see low ratings because they just get removed.
You can buy it cheaper on Aliexpress, but it will take several weeks, and everyone wants instant gratification. That's the entire business model of majority of Amazon sellers - buy on Aliexpress/baba - sell at Amazon at a markup.
Sometimes producers (RIP MPOW) also directly lists on Amazon, so you pay a small premium for fast shipping from local warehouses, and get pretty decent unofficial warranty - they know Q&A on low margin items lacking, high defect rate likely - will often replaced items no question asks on 1star review with offer to change back to 5 stars to (justifiably) gush about how painless RMA process is. Sometimes they even give you the shady gift card. Much better experience than aliexpress.
The business model of retail stores is that they will deal with individual products, individual users, and small geographic areas in exchange for a share of the profits.
If you shop Amazon for electronic components (LEDs, resistors, etc.) you can find listing that have 3+ weeks delivery times. Not all, but they are in there. Literal drop ship from China, absolutely no reason to buy on Amazon instead of aliexpress/banggood
I'll never understand how people go "just YouTube it". Sure, I'll sift through a bunch of search results to find a 54 minute video that makes the point you meant to reference 23 minutes in after four ads.
> Despite claims of only using local storage with its security cameras, Eufy has been caught uploading identifiable footage to the cloud. And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.
(Personally, this means I won't buy an Eufy camera, and it doesn't change the fact that Anker's chargers have been far better made and reliable than their competitors in my experience.)
Re: Anker chargers, a few perform pretty well but many are kind of middling. A friend has been doing a lot of reviews of these on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace) and we started compiling test data- focusing on power conversion metrics such as efficiency and power factor, summarized into a single "power quality score" on a 0-200 scale- in a database at https://pqs.app.
Do you test for protocol negotiation for USB C Power Delivery and proper Lightning or Thunderbolt support? I think for many uses that's more important than small electrical losses
We haven't done lightning/thunderbolt, but the Youtube reviews include the different USB-C power modes. We also look at some aspects of safety, such as when overcurrent protection in kicks in relative to the device rating, and if it automatically resets after tripping or requires power cycling.
I hear what you are saying. But, I KNOW that it’s the top result with the search criteria I suggested… there was no need to sift through anything so your comment is generalised at some other experience.
I’ve already spent a huge amount of my time on that story, being in direct talks with the security researcher before the story exploded - I even helped raise a lot of awareness. So excuse me if I wanted to just quickly mention a quick, no need to sift, route to the info.
(If you happen to see a car on the researchers Twitter running over a Eufy system - that was one of the many things I did for awareness lol).
> your comment is generalised at some other experience
No, it's aimed specifically at this one.
YouTube's search results vary from person to person. I don't know which video you want me to watch - Paul Moore's five minute one? Den of Tools' eight minute one? Byte of Geek's nine minute one? Something else?
At the very least, since you've got a video in mind, link to it, but text remains a way better medium for this sort of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I know your youtube probably looks different to mine as we probably have differing interests. But I didn’t know Youtube search results varied from person to person - this is news to me.
Results vary from person to person and probably depend on locale and language.
Even if they didn't saying "it's the top result for ____" STILL isn't helpful. Loads of people make videos designed to rank high for "in" topics. So if it's the top result today it's probably outranked tomorrow by a larger channel.
This has been happening fairly actively since at least 2020, its not just youtube, search results have many of the same issues, and its not a single device, its by person(profile).
They've linked many of your devices together so you will see the same consistent videos/results unless you compare with other people, at places that are not your home location.
Anker’s EUFY product, which markets itself as a home security service not requiring cloud connectivity, uploads facial recognition and other data to their cloud
Linus Tech Tips with his Dunning-Kruger effect once again.
They upload the data required for mobile notifications to a CDN, which any one of us would likely do.
The other half of the controversy is that they upload a facial identifier for the same notification... if you have facial recognition for notifications turned on.
The hook-up has a more informed take on the issue: https://youtu.be/a_rAXF_btvE. I'm not sure if he was previously a software engineer, but he certainly seems to understand the problem Eufy faced like one.
My take-away is that they should have been more transparent about some form of upload being an unavoidable reality for mobile notifications in their marketing material.
Ummm I’m pretty sure it’s related to the fact you can access unencrypted video streams from cameras that supposedly only have local recording. Or are you just trying to distract from that?
The excusing of Eufy's behavior is incredible... if you have to push something to the cloud, why not encrypt it instead of promising to encrypt "later". Since the device promises local capabilities it would be easy to setup an encryption key on it/on the phone and transfer it to the device over local wifi...
As a customer, I hate all that crap, it's never what I want, would love it if the sellers did manage to remain visible through all that.
I also don't understand why the Chinese listings are so crap and easily identifiable, as you say. I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? (Font is another one, in images, instructions, even printed on the product itself. They often use a bizarre early computer slightly off-monospace looking one, I assume it's a default somewhere and if you're not used to/natively reading a script, it's harder to have an eye for what's a good font.)
The US wages for such a person probably costs more than like five of them combined and would never recoup their costs vs automated translations.
The font thing is just their default Chinese font with its Roman glyphs that are designed to look proportional to Chinese characters, not appeal to Western sensibilities.
They already took over the most successful American retail business by selling cheap crap without needing to deal with marketing. American companies that do all that come and go while the Chinese presence keeps growing and winning. Maybe it's us who have our product strategy wrong. Marketing might make sense when you're targeting a certain audience with disposable income, but probably most buyers on Amazon are just looking for the cheapest reasonable crap and don't overthink it...
Really the onus here should be on Amazon. Opening their catalog to third party sellers was inevitably going to destroy the user experience. Did Bezos care? No, they get paid by both sides this way. Everyone else started copying this model too, from Walmart to Bed Bath and Beyond.
The days of quality manufacturing and customer loyalty are long gone. It's all been replaced by cheap whitelabeled or unbranded crap sold via a shotgun approach to hordes of unthinking buyers. It makes the middleman more money that way now that they can easily scale it up to reach millions. SEO and fake reviews replaced quality driven word of mouth.
It’s too late. Whatever they do is the norm because of sheer sales volume.
In my language I’m seeing increasingly more legitimate sellers on Amazon switching to styles seen in Chinese listings, like “2022 updated version”, “easily use the product fashion”, whatever. Just on Amazon though.
Maybe, but I don't mean a marketing professional, just any student looking for some pocket money would do. I assume they just don't realise how crap it looks.
I assume that font is the inverse of western ones that have great rendering of Latin text, but don’t really bother with the rest of Unicode. When working with Chinese suppliers in a previous job all the documentation and comms we got would be in that awful font, I even saw one of their developers using it for code when I was visiting them.
I wish Amazon let me filter by country. In fact, I’d love to see some kind of meta shopping experience do exactly that. All I ever find is random small time websites that are outdated and minimal content for “made in USA”. For certain categories I’d prefer other countries or at least some options. I’m surprised the “America first” lobby hasn’t tried to accomplish something like this. Vote with your wallet if you really want manufacturing back.
Actually a lot of things are made in the US, it tends to be higher up on the value chain. Even starting with assembled is better than nothing, but I’m also interested in various other allied countries as well. You might be surprised when you explicitly look for this that often there are options other than China.
Hammers, stickers, Murica swag, and WD-40? Lol, this is the kind of stuff I'd expect to find in airport tourist-trap gift shops. Not exactly the kind of things "higher up the value chain" that GP mentioned, more like a shallow parody of Americana and a pretty far cry from the manufacturing powerhouse Asia has become...
Basically petroleum products and cars, along with electronics assembly where most of the hard manufacturing is done offshore. Military stuff seems to be the only major thing we still produce here.
I mean, is this really controversial? It's been happening for decades and only recently has there been some (very limited) executive action to try to bring it back. I'm all for it, FWIW, but it'll take some time (and a lot of willpower and money) to really make that happen.
So your point is that there shouldn’t be a way to search for made in the USA stuff because not enough or what?
That the USA shouldn’t try to bring back manufacturing, or what?
At least the military stuff seems to be working pretty well.
No, I'd love to see it come back. It's just not there right now. Searching for made in USA stuff is not helpful when most everyday things aren't made in the USA.
For electronics, I think the Asian manufacturers actually have better quality and precision these days. It's been their bread and butter for decades and they have way better factories and tooling and production experience.
We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.
I have seen some tiny movements on that direction- influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US as something positive and the reverse “I could not find anything US made so I had to cave in and get a Chinese mower”. The America First collective unfortunately has a lot of folks that see themselves as fundamentally rich, (or temporarily poor). They self identify more with Jeff Bezos than with their fellow (poor) countrymen. His success is “theirs” on their mind.
Wow. I’m shocked actually - I would have thought the penalties for lying were quite severe. It’s also unclear to me how widespread this actually is. It’s also from 2019 - did anything change with the FTC?
Not enormously, and it's a very tough moving target. Catch a Chinese manufacturer claiming to be "made in the USA" and they'll disappear and reopen as a new name the next day.
I bought a cover set for my Legion 5 Pro, and the best one was made in China, available only in the US. Fortunately the price is low enough to avoid extra duties so Amazon will ship it for $10 overseas within a week. No buying from EU here lol.
Same with a trackball mouse - shipped from UK because there was no stock in EU.
I stopped with the "durr China quality bad" a long time ago because it just isn't. Everything is made in China and you can get cheap/shit or expensive/great.
The Framework laptop for example, can't buy that from China. Sold out in EU. Have to go through forwarding bs to import from US. eBay sellers don't even want to ship overseas. AliExpress sellers will ship it to the middle of the Pacific.
If you want to compete you need to do better, not just give up imo.
my gross margin is 4-8% at best and that is excluding all returns and losses. how am i supposed to compete with big players who can eat the cost?
the same as you are saying. they want to cut out the middleman (which is you) so retail business is between manufacturers and amazon now with no dependence on existing retail chain?
I manufacture my own product that sells well on my website but even as the manufacturer I find selling on amazon to be too expensive and too risky. Instead I have my products listed so I can prevent others from controlling the product pages and reselling them but leave them as unavailable to purchase On that platform.
This seems like a business opportunity for someone that can read Chinese. Help non-Chinese businesses get set up with the tool that Chinese sellers are using to even the playing field. Although it's possible if the tactics became widely known in the English-speaking world, Amazon may have to do something about all the fraud.
Just before COVID I did some lowish volume selling on eBay of an imported official product. They are "second sourced" aka "badly cloned" by a couple of Chinese crap shifters as well. I had to fend off various counterfeit reports and even people in China buying them with shill accounts, then cancelling the order until my listed stock was depleted. My eBay account was suspended twice within a month.
Eventually I gave up but I decided I'd spend a few months trashing the market first so I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods. That was incredibly effective. But really I would never get into a fight with a Chinese drop shipper again. I sort of broke even with difficulty. There were no gains.
I'm in the UK and I tend to not bother with Amazon myself now because it is an ocean of garbage which is difficult to find anything half decent on. I tend to go to Argos who have same day delivery that actually works for a small fee on most products or hit the local supermarket. I couldn't possibly consider entering that market as a seller based on the absolutely shitty customer experience.
I use AWS during the day and the quality there isn't much better. The whole org needs a quality and honesty shakedown.
The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing. All I hear is people complaining about Amazon's mindset monopoly.
>The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing.
We already had that before Amazon took over, and we still have that today. In the US, Target and Walmart fit that description, as does Best Buy for electronics. Walmart has long had a reputation for poor quality products, but they're practically a luxury store compared to the trash that fills Amazon these days.
Problem is none of them can keep up with Amazon on shipping times. My tire pressure gauge broke yesterday morning and I had a new one on my porch by 6pm. Amazon may just be AliExpress with faster shipping these days, but faster shipping is a big deal to people.
Argos here in the UK can. Same day delivery which is reliable (unlike amazon!) or you can actually go and pick stuff up usually immediately at actual retail stores. And it's mostly the same price as Amazon now as well.
I left my toolkit in my wife’s car and needed a pair of pliers. Ordered from
Target, and a person handed it to me in my car in my way home from work about 90 minutes later.
I buy so little that when I'm buying something (not food) it's because whatever I have is broken, and it's something I need. I may be in the minority, but when something breaks, I want (or need) a replacement ASAP. I've got enough stores within driving distance that I can usually replace something same or next day, but I'm far enough 'out in the sticks' that the only place that will deliver 'same day' is amazon (and that only started for my neighborhood in the past 6 months or so).
Oh it was dead easy. I just wrote something in selenium python which ran the search daily and went through each item, checked the seller was China based, checked for a missing keyword in the text body and opened the report item form and filled it in!
Took me about an hour to write and an hour to futz with chrome webdriver.
This was fuelled by rage and a can of red bull. A dangerous combination for revenge.
Hilarious and appropriate tagline. You’re doing the Lord’s work :)
And thanks for the other details. Since you didn’t mention Python at first I was trying to figure out if it was some kind of new built-in script language, or Node, or what.
> a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing
All this is so much easier said than done, that if you did that, you'd have an Amazon-sized company. You'd also have a huge brand. Of course, then the temptation would be to list cheap Chinese crap to easily capitalize on your brand's value.
Amazon was a great company until it got MBA'ed. Thankfully they made online shopping mainstream, so you can now buy direct from reputable businesses who have not yet stepped into the brand-dilution trap.
This is assuming you have a competent infrastructure and networking team, which is expensive. Lots of middle managers don't like hiring engineers that earn more than they do. It defies the pecking order.
If you go all-in on cloud, you now need a team of cloud experts and you are beholden to whatever pricing strategy AWS/GCP/Azure deem appropriate in future.
It's also a terrible deal for the engineers who have to learn all this cloud stuff - instead of learning general computing, you learn how to work with vendor X. If they change things, go out of business, or get too expensive, that knowledge becomes useless.
If computing is a core part of your business, you should get good at it.
Easier to hire lots of low paid people than a few highly paid engineers. I don't dispute that TCO including labor is generally higher with cloud infrastructure.
+1 for just using Argos or a similar store instead. It takes too long on Amazon to weed out the AliExpress tier stuff and ordering certain things like high value electronics from there is just way too risky.
The mere curation of products has become a highly valuable service, saving you money and time.
Haha. This writeup is by a drop shipper. In first sentence he admits to cloning another successful product. They were out conned at their own con, hard to shed a tear.
The same thing happens to you if you design original products. We designed a variety of products, had them manufactured and shipped to the US, and fulfilled them ourselves. The fine counterfeiters our manufacturers illegally sold the designs to have made literal millions selling our designs on Amazon and we have moved on.
You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct?
This is not new. A decade ago I heard about chinese factories doing runs above and beyond the manufacturing they did for a company to sell through "other channels".
And that's how "Shimano" products were dirt cheap in Europe for about five years.
> You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct?
Sure, in the same sense that we would have by manufacturing them things ourselves using raw materials we harvested ourselves and then selling them online where anyone could buy them and take them apart?
Enticed by cheap labor, you handed your intellectual property to them on a silver platter and they made full use of it to undercut you and sell to your customers directly. Chinese manufacturers have been doing this for decades.
Yes, they were outplayed at their own game. What they did to HyperVolt (Hyperice), the Chinese merchants did to them. But it's still a useful article because it's eye-opening for the average Amazon shopper.
Yep, the OP "David" is part of the cess-pool. I doubt he even has the self-awareness to recognize that his "company" is every bit as much a parasite as BUTCYTE.
> Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019
So this guy’s company (I may have missed it, but he doesn’t appear to mention what his own product is called) made a copycat product and went from design to manufacturing to market in 5 months? Sounds like they were just relabeling and repackaging someone else’s product. Hard to shed a tear as a grifter gets scammed by an even more unscrupulous grifter.
Regardless, this shows the dangers of violating one of the golden rules of business: never depend on a single customer. They’ll own all the leverage when negotiating price and terms. Wal-Mart exploited this for years situation for years, pitting vendors against each other and providing and preferring knock-off alternatives (sometimes its own) when available. Now Amazon does the same.
Playing fair with China just doesn't work. They'll rourt, cheat, and manipulate every aspect of the system to their advantage. It's very disappointing the system doesn't combat this, but as a few people here have said. If Amazon gets paid they don't care.
It is getting way past time to recognize that the Great Experiment has failed, and failed miserably.
The concept was that open exchange, trade, and information flow would result in open societies. In fact, the reverse happened — it strengthened the hand of the expansionist authoritarian governments. Now, the '-isms' (communism, fascism, etc.) have all been stripped, and it is literally open war on democracies by the authoritarian states. Russia is waging open genocide in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland and Germany, China is openly violating it's agreements on Hong Kong, militarily threatening Taiwan and everyone around it's "9-dashed-line", and brutalizing it's own citizens as they protest. Iran & North Korea similarly threatening. In the economic sphere, their entire repertoire is to steal as much IP as possible and cheat their way into the markets.
It is far past time to recognize that we are playing for a few quarters of better profits while they are playing to literally destroy the democracies to they can take what they want. The only proper response is to condition our economic engagement on the implementation of democracy. You want access to our markets? Fine, open your political systems, stop being a threat, and we'll trade. Until then, it's a full embargo.
Aside from the overt military threats, I literally don't go several hours at a time without seeing more stories of how people in democratic countries are being routinely and systematically cheated by the Chinese, or how they are maintaining "Chinese police auxiliary stations" in democratic countries (why is this permitted?) to threaten their own diaspora. There are surely good people in every country, but that fact does not make it worth the costs of interacting with those societies.
It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law. If the allegations from the article are true, there was probably tortuous interference, bribery, criminal threats, as well as a whole slew of broken consumer protection laws at the very least.
What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that? I really don't understand what kind of world people who make statements like this want to live in.
> It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law
The exact same companies that were lobbying against consumer protection and antitrust laws, unions busting, and convicted of conspiracy to supress wages, are now asking for government to step in because Chinese competition is breaking the same laws.
Definately some hypocracy and now that the shoe is on the other foot, people they shafted previously are enjoying some shaudenfruede.
> What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that?
The US does this all over the world. They will just cut off entire countries if they don't follow their banking rules, for example.
We're all capitalists here, I suspect - I mean does anyone in this message thread - a single person - advocate for state ownership of all means of production and then centralised controlled distribution of goods and services? I didn't think so. I think the term you're looking for is laissez-faire capitalists, of which there could be a few. Most people support some degree of regulatory control.
We should stop with "you're either an X or a Y". That might be true on TV or on Twitter. It is not true in real life.
Read the first line, thought "How could they be so wrong?".
Then read the second line, thought "Oh... you got me, that was a funny joke".
And now thinking "Oh... maybe they're serious, which would make this an hilarious case of 'do what I (maybe?) say in real life, not what I do on TV, Twitter, or HN' "
Sorry, you only yet to be a capitalist if you actually own the means of production. Otherwise you're just a wage slave with Stockholm Syndrome. And yeah, there is at least one person in this thread that unambiguously supports state ownership of production. If that isn't you you get to rationalize the consumption of non-renewable resources in a finite system for production of utterly fatuous bullshit like the fitbit-for-your-dong (I can't be assed to look it up).
Except it really isn't. US-led multinationals and their investors were all dead-ass certain that they were going to devour China economically, totally ignoring the culture has a track record of swallowing invading armies and ideologies whole that spans thousands of years.
The problem is that law enforcement doesn't work. If instances of fraud were actually investigated and properly policed, then this wouldn't have happened.
If Amazon was threatened with closure if they don't fix this, you would see a change quickly.
They don’t even need to be threatened with closure. You just need to be able to eliminate the “it wasn’t us it was our partner merchant” defence for liability on their site and the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards.
China may be communist by branding, but they're economically capitalist, and on a governmental front, mercanalist. Common ownership is not a thing, and it's all about pushing locally made and exporting as much as possible by all means necessary.
I don't disagree on any particular point, I'm just old enough to remember when none of what you mention was the case, and American corporations were gleefully eyeing China as their next market expansion target. Without exception they got out-played at their own game.
Sure, and the IP transfers required to make that happen played a huge role in modernizing the Chinese tech/fab industry. So even that represents a phyrric victory from a nationalist-industrialist perspective.
No, most people are wage labourers who work for capitalists. In the same way that most people in 12th century Britain were serfs who worked for nobles. The difference is that capitalists have managed to convince workers that they somehow occupy equal positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.
I feel terrible for this guy. But also...why did he spend so much time getting filtered by the customer service desk? This is what lawyers are for. If you have $7m of inventory, you are moving away from a small business and litigation is part of your life now. A friend in the legal industry says technology companies should budget 10% of their revenue for legal. Litigation is a miserable headache, but it sounds much less demoralizing than struggling with the service desk 100 times in a single year.
This story doesn't seem to add up, at least at first glance.
It's not clear WHICH brand the OP is even talking about. He mentions "Hypervolt" in the first sentence, but that's not his company. Hyperice makes Hypervolt (https://hyperice.com/about-us/).
It sounds like this is a knock-off vendor complaining about another knock-off vendor. The OP, "David", links to a youtube video where the poster is "Jimmy Den" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7U8vOE4N8).
Am I wrong here? Are fabless vendors, composed of a few people, who basically rebrand white-label shit from alibaba really making (and perhaps in this case losing) millions of dollars in time-frames of months to a couple of years ??
>Are fabless vendors, composed of a few people, who basically rebrand white-label shit from alibaba really making (and perhaps in this case losing) millions of dollars in time-frames of months to a couple of years ??
It wouldn't be surprising. I've looked into starting a side business selling some rebranded Ali/Bao items on Amazon, there are loads of niches you could corner. The thinking goes:
> The product is available for $X today, and Amazon takes a $3-5 cut.
> I can buy the product for $X-Z.
> I could sell these products with prime shipping for $X-Y, and make $Z-5-Y on each sale.
Doing that simple math often makes you think you could make a living off the scheme, even after accounting for packaging and inventory fees. If it works for a few months-years, you might double down and get into this situation.
Ultimately, I came away feeling like this is how dropship vendors find new product categories to move into: they wait for somebody to demonstrate that there's a sizable market for a product, then they add that product to their listings and cut out the competition. So you probably have 3-6 months on each successful product, tops.
You’re half right. Eventually sellers flood the market for that product and the profit goes down. Then as they get rid of their inventory the margin grows again.
So you have to stay on top of thousands of products, and your cost, in order to do well. It never stops.
They do but, well it depends. You need to find the right product at the right time balanced by multidimensional inputs (time, competition, having right connections, luck because you need conditions to be similar when you are ready to ship, and the fad needs to last long enough to make it worth your while etc. etc.) - so the hard part is finding "the" product. It is a lottery ticket. If it works out great, more often than not it will fail. There is a specific time window for a given product and it is not at all clear where in the timeline you are at so you need to guess. Whatever you are attempting WILL eventually fizzle (people will lose interest, most people that are interested will get one, the competition will get insane and will eat your margins) - the question is when. If it is sooner than you thought, you will lose a lot of money. If it is later than you thought, you will make a lot of money.
As an e-commerce store owner myself with a small amount of experience selling on Amazon, I consider this to be a good idea. I do admit to a instinctual aversion to lawyers. My tech-bias is to grind forward through the "official" routes. Use the existing systems that Amazon put in place. (Though perhaps my tech-bias should push me to "hack" around obstacles using things like lawyers)
Said friend is a leading light in the tech/capital ecosystem and the opinion is rooted in long awareness of how much tech companies actually litigate and what the economic tradeoffs. Your dismissive reply is like dismissing a scientist/engineer for suggesting a technology company needs to keep investing in R&D if it aims to maintain a technical advantage over its competitors, and it's a pretty lazy comeback.
The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.
I didn't say your friend is wrong. As for "leading lights", looking at the state of tech and capital in general, there is really not much proper leading going on.
> The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.
Is that what happened here?
Many of the comments seem to indicate that "David" attempted to clone a product, but was out-cloned by others?
Would your legal friend be able to advise him on how to be more successful with his counterfeit product vs other counterfeits?
But his complaint is not that he was out-cloned, in the sense of his competitors gaining a greater market share because buyers preferred their product. His complaint is that his competitor repeatedly lied to Amazon about his products and theirs, in the former case making false claims that limited his access to the market, in the latter case securing favorable product categorizations for their own devices (classifying them as electronics instead of consumer goods and paying lower seller fees as a result). In short, his competitor went behind his back to the market operator with false information around 100 times.
Now maybe he's lying abut all this and has employed such tactics himself against others, but you haven't even addressed his claims.
Well.. he stated it was a clone right in the first sentence.
So when people filed claims against him on Amazon, how were they "false" given he acknowledged he is cloning someone else' product?
As others have posted, his story reads as follows:
- I found this great product on amazon
- I launched my own 'high quality' and "proprietary" version
- Others did the same thing
- someone failed complaints on amazon against me for my clone.
The rest of the stuff you outline fits with many other complaints here and why Amazon has "jumped the shark".
Speaking about addressing claims - Will your lawyer friend be able to help him with why his clone was removed from Amazon?
Again reading the posts, the single largest complaint people have on amazon is fraudulent clones, like what "David" made.
PS, his first run-on sentence just to save you the time from re-reading it.
"Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019; because our massage gun was unique and high-end, we began receiving a lot of 5-star reviews from the beginning, and we were Amazon’s best-seller from October 2019 to October 2021;"
As a friend in a tech industry, I tell all my friends to budget 50% of their revenue for tech investment and R&D. Oh and conveniently, I also have a company that can help them with these investments.
Seriously, don't swallow cock-and-bull statements like "legal should be 10% of your revenue". I remember years ago the landlord of my co-working space glibly told me that "as long as office rent is not more than 10% of your revenue you're good" in response to me pushing back to rent hike increases. Ridiculous conmen.
Except the friend isn't encouraging me to spend more in hopes of raising business. That's their comment on what existing companies typically spend on legal. Commercial and regulatory disputes are a fact of business life past a certain size.
Did you have a bad legal experience and think all lawyers are now out to get you or something? Conversely, do you think that not budgeting anything for legal expenses means your business will never be sued or need to sue anyone?
Amazon has become a dumpster fire of scammers, fakes, resellers, and plain trash. It is by now frankly the worst online shopping experience available. Pretty much every other store online is better organized, better curated, and more trustworthy. (In my opinion and experience).
The truly sad thing about this is that Amazon used to be genuinely great! But ever since it became mostly a marketplace, and no longer primarily a store, things have gone downhill. Now it's no better than eBay.
I try to avoid it wherever humanly possible, i.e. for everything but Chinatech or when I require one-day shipping.
I bought something on Amazon because i wanted 2 day shipping and didn't want to to the local store to get it.
ORDER PLACED
November 24, 2022
Arriving 7 Dec - 8 Dec
They were generous and updated the delivery date last night. It use to say Dec 9 to 12 when i checked yesterday.
I've had this happen too many times as well. With this crappy delivery time I would have been better off just going to the store which had it in stock and the same price.
They also charged me $20 for "return shipping" because when i had this item in my cart it was "removed" as it was no longer available from the seller i selected. I mistakenly added a similar looking, same priced item and needed to return it.
I was unaware that amazon no longer does "free returns"?
I gave up on amazon long ago. If i want Chinese products i'd rather just order from aliexpress directly.
Deciding to give amazon another shot cost me $20 and 2 weeks waiting??
Do you have a valid Trademark for the areas you sell within?
If the answer is "No", than anyone registering in this product class can:
1. Leverage a copyright violation take-down. While you may think it is superfluous and lame... the courts do not.
2. sue you for damages to the brand (the law will see it as probably not yours) once the grace period to register IP expires. The grace period is usually 1 to 2 years once published, and after that you are likely SOL in many jurisdictions.
3. freeze your inventory imports into a protected area (see Fluke banning the color Yellow case)
4. freeze your banking account through the courts (for counterfeiters these are likely disposable shell import-only firms)
You may have thought a pad-printed generic China produced item is somehow worth $7m inventory risk, but it sounds like the "pay-me-develop-a-product" scam run by IP trolls with old inventory to unload. I had two cons try this on me once when I was young and slightly more gullible... I fed them to my lawyers as some crazies can get aggressive.
You should take note many China manufacturers often attempt to register client product trademarks domestically, as they want the domestic markets in compensation for a low-ball contract. If you try to change contract manufacturers, than the nasty side of working in China appears. Note, trademark and patent scooping is dirty, but it happens everywhere... in some places it is more culturally acceptable.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
I do not normally post on non-technical matters, but I want to say I stopped buying from Amazon a few years ago now; it was because of how warehouse staff are treated.
It looks to me a bit like I left at just the right time.
This story is absolutely appalling. Amazon are being manipulated, have become a dagger in the hands of the unscrupulous, and seem absolutely unable and unwilling to act.
To my eye here Amazon are in part culpable; if you are going to implement mechanisms which can be misused in this way, without adequate safeguards, you bear some responsibility for their misuse.
Amazon are I would say now beginning to go the way of Facebook; vast still, but they have lost the plot, are compromising their core functionality, and are alienating their customers, who are both horrified at such behaviour, and harmed by it.
Are Amazon warehouse workers being treated any worse than other warehouse workers, or do they merely get more coverage because they work for a tech company that is also paying six fig salaries to software engineers?
Amazon is a lot more strict. I worked in a warehouse before and after Amazon bought the company. Afterwards all decisions came from high up. There is no employee consideration. Just a desire for better numbers so you will now suffer these decisions.
After I left they put a literal cage with turnstile around the warehouse entrance. Place looks like a prison now.
Why does Amazon allow this? It actually seems like they’re in on it, and want these Chinese firms to be able to rip off a product and dominate the results.
Where are these abuse complains coming from and how can they possible be shutting down major sellers repeatedly?
I just left Amazon after working there for a couple of years because this is how they treat everyone: customers, contractors, employees, etc. They only care about themselves and how much money they make. They are the most stingy, selfish, and disrespectful company I've ever worked for. Glad to have them in my back mirror, both as an employee and a customer.
No one your allowed to interact with at Amazon will be working at Amazon 2 to 3 years from now. Amazon is a meat grinder.
Good luck making progress with people that are not invested in ensuring their finicky employer resolves your issue. They won't be here to deal with the economic fallout of these decisions.
He never says his brand. The company that makes hypervolt were around before 2018 and I still get emails from them so I assume they are still around. Their products are really nice and when my hypervolt battery died, they sent me new one no questions asked.
I assume he was selling a knock and his competitor was selling the exact same product. He just says he started whey hypervolt launched.
Because that's what typical customers want. Aliexpress products or clones that does 80% of work for 20% of cost.
Or in this case 100% of function for 10% of cost. Massage guns literature still basically pseudo science, $30 gun may work as well as $300 one. Plenty of youtube videos doing cheap vs expensive comparisons and medical professions stating it's unproven fad, whether percussive or relabelled vibrating sex toys. No surprise customer base will naturally dabble in cheap entry level products first. Can you imagine if Juicero was the leading juicer on Amazon. Something is even more wrong with that picture.
Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
So they have this whole team setup to do enforcement, and they are being totally manipulated and unwittingly weaponized?
So Amazon either (1) they simply don’t care which makes no sense because then why have the team in the first place, (2) their team cares very much and were just too stupid or ill-equipped to do their job and even got totally manipulated, or (3) Amazon actually wants this result and intentionally destroyed this company so that the bad actor could thrive?
None of that makes any sense! And this Chinese seller was apparently paying less in fees, so there isn’t even an economic motive!
And this story plays out over how many products/sellers every single day? So Amazon is the Wild West and their own trust and safety team is firing the bullets? Weaponized incompetence?!
Is there not a class action lawsuit in here somewhere? Amazon has inflicted serious economic destruction on their partner thru negligence or malice to be sure.
And of course we’ll never see a postmortem or any kind of apology. No transparency whatsoever when it comes to one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces?
The only explanation that would make any sense at all, for which there seems to be one piece of evidence, is that there’s an inside employee taking a large cut from the Chinese seller to boost their rank, kill their competition, and lower their fees. I’d guess on the order of 10% of total take. The only evidence is that somehow the Chinese seller got ahold of PII for the company that went bankrupt and threatened them personally. Where’d they get the contact info? Their lower fee and invulnerability to their own violations is also suggestive of an insider collaborator.
But then, if this is true there would be an audit trail a mile long…
In the end I’m left simply stunned at the level of gross incompetence which seems to permeate everything in this world, and yet somehow amazing things still do get built.
It's principle-agent problems all the way down; the compliance and enforcement teams do not care about the best interest of Amazon as a whole. They care about ensuring that the specific KPIs they're evaluated on look good, from top-of-division management down to line members. In all likelihood, Amazon gets exactly what they measure - something like number of tickets closed, number of legal or regulatory incidents, etc.
You always want to identify the job title of who you're talking to and have a good guess as to what their priorities are. It sounds like they repeatedly talked to people whose job description is "close as many support tickets as possible with the hours and staffing resources you have". I'm not at all surprised that the result was getting their tickets closed with zero long-term improvement or concern about their situation.
It's just interesting that the game has became so visible rigged that a large player can have obviously no capacity at all on any of their core competences, and keep winning. It used to be that the amount of incompetence was small enough for it to stay hidden, and the general public could stay deceived by just claiming that the player got there by being the best.
Amazon burns through low and mid-level staff. The whole team your referring to probably has 1 to 2 years experience at Amazon and is under constant pressure to deliver results that look good for management otherwise bye bye job.
Competence at resolving the task at hand, understanding of the core issues and forward progress against platform level threats are hard to achieve when you have created a purposefully unstable work environment like what Amazon is today.
It is just amazon moving closer to its competition.
Do you think alibaba really cares when a seller does some shady stuff to get ahead? What I think is happening is amazon drop shippers being the middleman who got cut out and the whole platform moving closer to a chinese model of product distribution.
Just look at what amazon is actually selling, a lot of it is just straight china imports by no name firms. Do you want to figure who is ripping of whom in that web?
>Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
Were they actually innovative? Or were they just reselling another made and designed in China product, maybe with some customizations and "premium" materials?
What actual incentives do they have to effectively respond to this? Any one of these issues takes manpower to resolve, especially in complex situations like these were multiple sellers report each other.
And is it actually impacting their buisiness? Does amazon actually really care which dropshipper or chinese seller wins out on their platform?
In all likelihood they sold even more products because of this feud, 40$ for some review significantly reduces the price for the consumer of the product.
In the past month I’ve had two separate instances where I’ve tried to buy something on Amazon, got incredibly frustrated when trying to sift through the Chinese junk, and eventually just gave up.
I can’t imagine they want that to happen. Not only did I not spend money, I’m starting to associate shopping there as a whole with frustration.
What is the name of his product? He said it is “unique” and “high-end”.
But in general if you are making a clone of other successful product (in this case that is HyperVolt) you do need to have the entire system to make it (fake reviews, gaming system etc.). It does not matter if you are Chinese, american, or what ever. Or work very hard to become a well know brand.
Amazon will not police this: they will police only for established brands.
It really is stupefying how Amazon has turned into a dumping ground for cheap chinese junk. Surely they realize the long term damage they're causing to their own brand?
At the same time, they're constantly tightening KYC and other regulations which only hurts honest small-time merchants.
Stupid thing to say but I wish sometimes for China to do something stupid so the Western world can sanction the shit out of them - and I can finally browse Amazon without sifting through hundreds of shovelware products in every category.
The worst part is their products are actually often bad, you use them a short time then throwaway.. so they are also contributing to global pollution.
What I find dumbfounding is how their gov thinks their economy is great or whatever in that line of thinking when they’re literally a parasite who is utterly dependent on the West and would be nowhere without us… but ok I get it the same could be said for us too.
I mean like they act as if they are not totally interdependent with the Western world. Good for them, that will eventually be their downfall. Evolution doesn’t care for inefficient/dysfunctional systems.
"When we deeply researched this, we f"ound that this person hijacked his listing with a dummy seller account and offered 95% off on Facebook groups, and he sold over 5–6K every day for a week ( this is our estimate based on Jungle Scout, Helium10, and his best seller rank).
But since his offer was fulfilled by the merchant, this dummy seller account didn’t ship any massage guns to buyers, but he still got the best seller badge, so he activated his real FBA ( fulfilled by Amazon ) offer on the main account."
Could somebody rephrase this for me in clearer language?
First paragraph sounds like you’re allowed to have multiple Amazon seller accounts tied to a listing. I think the dummy account was used as a way to prevent the main account from being banned if people reported the reviews. They also give estimates of how much the person sold. Based on a product’s ranking in a category (say a product is ranked #10 in massagers), you can guesstimate how often a product at rank #10 would sell every day in order to achieve that rank.
What the person did is when you sell a product on Amazon, you can choose between shipping the product to a customer yourself (so printing the shipping label, boxing the product, and ultimately sending it to a customer), or having Amazon do all of that for you, but for a fee (that process is called fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA).
For their dummy account, they would do the “shipping” themselves, but would not actually ship the product. If they knew the customer (and it sounds like they did), then that would mean they’re able to get very cheap reviews since they were giving 95% off these fake shipped products.
Looks like american oem/relabeller drop shipper got blown out by Chinese drop shipper who wants to cut out middle man. American consumers pay less.
I don't get the complaint about Amazon being a glorifed Aliexpress front end. Pay a small premium to skip multi week shipping on goods stocked in state side warehouse. Vendors that push volume via CRM game also bundles in pretty solid warranty from vendor. Remember MPOW branded products, decent you get what you pay for tier hardware. It's cheap, cut corners on Q&A which makes aliexpress gamble. But buy it from amazon for 20% premium vs aliexpress and if something breaks, seller will ship you new item no question asked. I've had MPOW honor out of warranty products with common review mentioned failure, with little question asked, because they work hard for those reviews. It was great. Take the review for gift card offer and even better deal.
Amazon is flooded with these products because they work fine for what people are willing to pay. If you want old school Amazon experience, do a search for product you want, note price of top selling Chinese products, triple or quadruple it, and there you go.
It's more than cheap knock-offs, it's noise that makes it very difficult to find quality products. I usually have to look for reviews elsewhere, and find very specific search terms to find quality products that actually match their descriptions.
There are other retailers to give your money to. Maybe they're not as convient or offer one day shipping but also don't try to rip you off as blatantly as Amazon's dodgy sellers are doing.
For most non-brandname electronics and gadgets Amazon is just an Aliexpress frontend with a different skin. You can get the exact same stuff from Aliexpress, usually cheaper.
For well known brands you can find decent deals on Amazon sometimes - unless it's a knockoff/fake.
after finding a product, filter out the category or some other aspect of the product (but not rating and not 'prime').
after that first filter, a new filter will appear: seller. now you can filter for only amazon.com. this removes all FBA and marketplace sellers, which are 99% Chinese. If you recognize a reputable seller you could include them.
i believe this can only be done on web, not mobile.
The sad part is I've seen American companies do the same thing - Walmart is a good example. They would sell a product, say Dial hand soap as an example, and see that they have a really popular type/scent. Next they have their own brand placed right next to it, 10 cents cheaper, and guess which one has more sold pieces off the shelf? How does Dial feel when their extensive walmart sales suddenly drop just to find out their sales partner is now directly competing against them? Costco is another.
We love to cannibalize each other already, no honour among thieves, so no wonder another country has figured out how to just take over puppeting our people and corporations against ourselves. Amazon is now basically Chinese run without even drawing the ire of the government.
Amazon has become the absolute worst place to sell or buy things. I try to avoid them if at all possible (disclosure: I worked there for 12 years). Just leave them to the Chinese crooks and eventually enough people will wake up that they will all burn out (or move to another fraud host)
Amazon should really either be regulated (with strict enforcement) or closed down.
This one time I ordered a device to assist with personal hygiene and realised the device has been unsafe to use, fortunately, before I used it otherwise I would probably have received a bad injury had I used it. I wrote a review where I stated that the device is unsafe.
Long story short a week or so later I received an email to my personal account from a person claiming to be a seller of that product and demanding that I will delete my review or else. I was shocked how they were able to obtain my personal details?
Anyway, I deleted the review and never posted a review since.
I was contemplating reporting this to Amazon, but given they were threatening and had my personal details, I'd rather not risk any retaliation. Police in my country also does nothing in such cases so I have written it off as a loss.
FWIW, one of the gift card review screenshots doesn't appear to support the claim that the seller is offering gift cards for reviews (not that more evidence of that really seems to be necessary). The circled section of the review is "I won an Amazon Gift Card at work", and it doesn't mention getting one from the seller.
> Now the question is how this seller is getting the buyer’s address.
The card offering the gift card asks the buyer to send their order ID and a screenshot of the review to a given email address. If the gift cards are sent electronically, they wouldn't need any further information, or if sent physically (which I doubt), they could just ask the customer directly. They don't need to get this information via Amazon if I understand things correctly.
I have no idea if Hyperice guns are actually high quality or just good at marketing, but my experience with power tools is that you generally get what you pay for. Products that cost 10% of the price are often so crappy that you really don't want to use them.
Because there’s no real way to adequately test them so you can sell them at various price points.
If you have something that people don’t know a ton about (so not milk, say) and don’t use a ton (so not tools) it’s very easy to get a wide range of prices. Most people will skip the $30 (obviously it’s crap because it’s too cheap) and some will even but the $600 (it must be the best because the most expensive).
And likely the only difference is the number of attachments or something.
A small, hopeless way around this as a buyer: buy from EU Amazon sites (UK/DE/IT). You still have review number jacking (as Amazon shows aggregated numbers) but reviews in the local language will be honest, the markets are too small for chinese vendors to care. Ordering by "new" will tell you if the currently sold product is good, or if it had been swapped.
Can't tell for UK or IT, but this isn't accurate for DE (anymore?). Tons of auto-translated 5-star-reviews (the bad Chinese kind of auto-translate) in essentially every niche unless you're looking at large brands. It's somewhat easy to identify when you're actively looking, but when you're looking to buy something, you don't want to play review detective.
This is disgusting. As a small biz owner it pains me to see someone go bankrupt because Amazon can't be bothered to enforce their own rules. This literally forces good actors to commit crimes simply to have a chance at competing. Insanely despicable.
I feel really bad for this seller. This, btw, is why I go straight to merchants and suck up the longer delivery and delivery costs. The effort of dealing with rip-offs on Amazon was made the experience of shopping their so terrible.
Also, if this seller got really successful, Amazon would have noticed and created an "Amazon Basics" massage gun anyway.
I do still regularly buy certain things on Amazon still (a certain kind of socks, a certain protein powder, etc...). I haven't been able to find a good source for those. Ironically, the protein power is something I used to get at Whole Foods, but they don't carry it there anymore.
The bulk of my Amazon shopping now is done by setting CamelCamelCamel alerts for legit products and when one hits, triple checking I am buying from the actual company.
Can I ask a question about these massage guns? Why are some of them so expensive?
I wanted one but balked at paying $500 for what seemed to be little more than a battery powered reciprocating saw with a foam ball were the blade normally is.
So I bought a knockoff for $35, just to see if it was any good… and it was! Bought it at the start of the pandemic and it’s still working fine.
I’m sure the theraguns and hypervolts are better than my cheapo, but there’s just no way they are ten times better (like their price suggests).
As macroeconomic conditions, expect this to get worse, more egregious. Top brands will be blackmailed into advertising on Amazon itself, medium- and small-scale businesses will be destroyed or consign themselves to racing to the bottom faster than Chinese players (good luck!)
This in turn will empower KOF like mainstream review sites — which will be further corrupted by pay for play as times get tough. Yay!
(And if you’re in retail software, this dynamic is coming for you too…)
Those delistings notably had a great impact. This has a good assymetric cost for the abusers.
So either the copyright laws are "in practice" more getting in the way than actually helping anyone, or Amazon is missing punishment for abusers of copyright-related stuff.
Amazon allowing good-ratings buying, personal info scavenging etc puts Amazon's credibility in question, and I believe that this will eventually take it's toll.
The real problem is how could it possibly be profitable to pay people $20 each to leave reviews on a product which costs less than $200? WTF is wrong with the economic environment which allows such obviously wasteful activities to be profitable?
In an efficient economy, waste would not be profitable; it would not give someone the upper hand. The competitive edge should be efficiency.
We had a local amazon competitor that opened up its store to chinese sellers too, and it shows. Basically the same garbage fake products end up on searches for brand name products. I don't get why the real stores using them for selling next to their own still do? Also the main company skirts liability and returns and acts like its not their problem.
No. I was replying to a specific comment. They made it sound like nobody else is allowed to make a massage gun because it is automatically a "thera gun knockoff"
I have a percussion massager. I also have literally thousands of dollars in sex toys. (Pro tip: You get what you pay for, and good stuff isn't cheap).
Percussion massagers are not sex toys. You might be able to modify one to be a sex toy (the same can be said about power drills, and those aren't listed as sex toys). But their main purpose is to massage muscles.
Like the other responder said, the Cowgirl is good. There are other mechanized things like that. There's also custom built beds and other pieces of furniture.
A lot of my spending comes in the form of impact toys like floggers and paddles. Locally created, leather toys can cost upward of $150-200. It's worth it, because the cheaper mass-produced stuff can have edges that will cut the skin. Or they have cardboard in the middle and will break after 3-4 sessions.
And having multiple impact toys of varying thickness and weight is important because they all feel different.
The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.:
* [easy to use]: blah blah blah
The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings.
My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.
I once tried to buy a pulse oximeter and all the reviews for the most popular one were about replacement bike tires.
Most likely though someone at Amazon doesn't want to hurt their metrics for sales/relevance.
Any other legitimate business would be taken to task for a quarter of what they are doing. Maybe they know they can get away with it because they have a blanket liability shield from the AWS contracts?
Also, what use is it to point that out with a review? Surely people who actually look at the reviews would notice anyway?
The reviews aren't ordered in a way that makes that obvious. You usually have to dig deep to find these. If you only look at the first page of reviews you are likely not going to see the photo reviews.
If someone created an online store like Amazon and essentially gave fraudsters free reign, they would be closed in no time, but this company is too big to fail and nobody seems to want to upset the billionaire owning it.
It's a classic example of one set of laws for the rich and another for the pleb.
You are right that other consumer protection laws etc. should be put in place to make fake reviews, product listing swap-outs etc. impossible.
Amazon knows exactly whats is happening and they are profiting off it
If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too).
Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
What subreddit? Because neither on HN nor Reddit, I ever see anything positive about Amazon.
Amazon is just filled with scams and fakes now.
Not instant, but often quite manageable.
Also if you continue supporting Chinese sellers on Amazon, this would still encourage these behaviors.
But yeah, back to the point… Amazon don’t appear to want to fix this broken system or they’d have done it years ago. It still makes them money.
Just give someone an actual link, to an actual article. Like this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23486753/anker-eufy-secu...
> Despite claims of only using local storage with its security cameras, Eufy has been caught uploading identifiable footage to the cloud. And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.
(Personally, this means I won't buy an Eufy camera, and it doesn't change the fact that Anker's chargers have been far better made and reliable than their competitors in my experience.)
For example, for the Anker power adapters we've tested: https://pqs.app/devices?categoryId=1&search=anker. We're also trying to turn it into a business.
I’ve already spent a huge amount of my time on that story, being in direct talks with the security researcher before the story exploded - I even helped raise a lot of awareness. So excuse me if I wanted to just quickly mention a quick, no need to sift, route to the info.
(If you happen to see a car on the researchers Twitter running over a Eufy system - that was one of the many things I did for awareness lol).
No, it's aimed specifically at this one.
YouTube's search results vary from person to person. I don't know which video you want me to watch - Paul Moore's five minute one? Den of Tools' eight minute one? Byte of Geek's nine minute one? Something else?
At the very least, since you've got a video in mind, link to it, but text remains a way better medium for this sort of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I know your youtube probably looks different to mine as we probably have differing interests. But I didn’t know Youtube search results varied from person to person - this is news to me.
Even if they didn't saying "it's the top result for ____" STILL isn't helpful. Loads of people make videos designed to rank high for "in" topics. So if it's the top result today it's probably outranked tomorrow by a larger channel.
They've linked many of your devices together so you will see the same consistent videos/results unless you compare with other people, at places that are not your home location.
That sounds like RTSP to me, which makes the rest questionable.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/eufys-no-clouds-came...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/eufy-camera-cloud-uploa...
They upload the data required for mobile notifications to a CDN, which any one of us would likely do.
The other half of the controversy is that they upload a facial identifier for the same notification... if you have facial recognition for notifications turned on.
The hook-up has a more informed take on the issue: https://youtu.be/a_rAXF_btvE. I'm not sure if he was previously a software engineer, but he certainly seems to understand the problem Eufy faced like one.
My take-away is that they should have been more transparent about some form of upload being an unavoidable reality for mobile notifications in their marketing material.
I also don't understand why the Chinese listings are so crap and easily identifiable, as you say. I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? (Font is another one, in images, instructions, even printed on the product itself. They often use a bizarre early computer slightly off-monospace looking one, I assume it's a default somewhere and if you're not used to/natively reading a script, it's harder to have an eye for what's a good font.)
The font thing is just their default Chinese font with its Roman glyphs that are designed to look proportional to Chinese characters, not appeal to Western sensibilities.
They already took over the most successful American retail business by selling cheap crap without needing to deal with marketing. American companies that do all that come and go while the Chinese presence keeps growing and winning. Maybe it's us who have our product strategy wrong. Marketing might make sense when you're targeting a certain audience with disposable income, but probably most buyers on Amazon are just looking for the cheapest reasonable crap and don't overthink it...
Really the onus here should be on Amazon. Opening their catalog to third party sellers was inevitably going to destroy the user experience. Did Bezos care? No, they get paid by both sides this way. Everyone else started copying this model too, from Walmart to Bed Bath and Beyond.
The days of quality manufacturing and customer loyalty are long gone. It's all been replaced by cheap whitelabeled or unbranded crap sold via a shotgun approach to hordes of unthinking buyers. It makes the middleman more money that way now that they can easily scale it up to reach millions. SEO and fake reviews replaced quality driven word of mouth.
In my language I’m seeing increasingly more legitimate sellers on Amazon switching to styles seen in Chinese listings, like “2022 updated version”, “easily use the product fashion”, whatever. Just on Amazon though.
Because they are betting it results in insufficient extra revenue compared to the extra payroll costs.
All the actual brains of electronics aren't made here. At most you'd get, what, American plastic?
Even cars, I would trust the Japanese companies more. Computers aren't made here. TVs aren't. Furniture isn't (except maybe the fancy real wood kind?)
What's higher up the value chain? Planes? Spacecraft?
Even looking at an old-guard American think tank's report, it's pretty dismal: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/separate-country-top-500-us-m...
Basically petroleum products and cars, along with electronics assembly where most of the hard manufacturing is done offshore. Military stuff seems to be the only major thing we still produce here.
I mean, is this really controversial? It's been happening for decades and only recently has there been some (very limited) executive action to try to bring it back. I'm all for it, FWIW, but it'll take some time (and a lot of willpower and money) to really make that happen.
We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.
Who is going to pay for the cost of manual verification?
Which is often bullshit. The fine for lying about this tends to be $0, and it's likely to be years before you get caught.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/made-in-the-u...
What they do is buy their own product, review it, and put it back into inventory, losing only the delivery and commission fees.
I bought a cover set for my Legion 5 Pro, and the best one was made in China, available only in the US. Fortunately the price is low enough to avoid extra duties so Amazon will ship it for $10 overseas within a week. No buying from EU here lol.
Same with a trackball mouse - shipped from UK because there was no stock in EU.
I stopped with the "durr China quality bad" a long time ago because it just isn't. Everything is made in China and you can get cheap/shit or expensive/great.
The Framework laptop for example, can't buy that from China. Sold out in EU. Have to go through forwarding bs to import from US. eBay sellers don't even want to ship overseas. AliExpress sellers will ship it to the middle of the Pacific.
If you want to compete you need to do better, not just give up imo.
https://sell.amazon.in/fees-and-pricing
check "Referral fees"
Modems & Networking Devices 14%
Television 6%
Home improvement - Wallpapers 13.5%
my gross margin is 4-8% at best and that is excluding all returns and losses. how am i supposed to compete with big players who can eat the cost?
the same as you are saying. they want to cut out the middleman (which is you) so retail business is between manufacturers and amazon now with no dependence on existing retail chain?
Is this the reason why so many Amazon brands are six letters long and all caps?
Eventually I gave up but I decided I'd spend a few months trashing the market first so I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods. That was incredibly effective. But really I would never get into a fight with a Chinese drop shipper again. I sort of broke even with difficulty. There were no gains.
I'm in the UK and I tend to not bother with Amazon myself now because it is an ocean of garbage which is difficult to find anything half decent on. I tend to go to Argos who have same day delivery that actually works for a small fee on most products or hit the local supermarket. I couldn't possibly consider entering that market as a seller based on the absolutely shitty customer experience.
I use AWS during the day and the quality there isn't much better. The whole org needs a quality and honesty shakedown.
The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing. All I hear is people complaining about Amazon's mindset monopoly.
We already had that before Amazon took over, and we still have that today. In the US, Target and Walmart fit that description, as does Best Buy for electronics. Walmart has long had a reputation for poor quality products, but they're practically a luxury store compared to the trash that fills Amazon these days.
Problem is none of them can keep up with Amazon on shipping times. My tire pressure gauge broke yesterday morning and I had a new one on my porch by 6pm. Amazon may just be AliExpress with faster shipping these days, but faster shipping is a big deal to people.
I left my toolkit in my wife’s car and needed a pair of pliers. Ordered from Target, and a person handed it to me in my car in my way home from work about 90 minutes later.
> I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods.
Took me about an hour to write and an hour to futz with chrome webdriver.
This was fuelled by rage and a can of red bull. A dangerous combination for revenge.
And thanks for the other details. Since you didn’t mention Python at first I was trying to figure out if it was some kind of new built-in script language, or Node, or what.
All this is so much easier said than done, that if you did that, you'd have an Amazon-sized company. You'd also have a huge brand. Of course, then the temptation would be to list cheap Chinese crap to easily capitalize on your brand's value.
Amazon was a great company until it got MBA'ed. Thankfully they made online shopping mainstream, so you can now buy direct from reputable businesses who have not yet stepped into the brand-dilution trap.
That's gonna be a hard one since they've basically created a delivery network that is bigger than UPS.
It's also a terrible deal for the engineers who have to learn all this cloud stuff - instead of learning general computing, you learn how to work with vendor X. If they change things, go out of business, or get too expensive, that knowledge becomes useless.
If computing is a core part of your business, you should get good at it.
The mere curation of products has become a highly valuable service, saving you money and time.
Haha. This writeup is by a drop shipper. In first sentence he admits to cloning another successful product. They were out conned at their own con, hard to shed a tear.
You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct?
This is not new. A decade ago I heard about chinese factories doing runs above and beyond the manufacturing they did for a company to sell through "other channels".
And that's how "Shimano" products were dirt cheap in Europe for about five years.
Sure, in the same sense that we would have by manufacturing them things ourselves using raw materials we harvested ourselves and then selling them online where anyone could buy them and take them apart?
1) Some chinese manufacturer clones the Hyperice massage gun
2) They look for people to sell their clone and find OP.
3) OP buys a bunch of those massage guns (with unique patented design) and sells them on Amazon.
4) OP thinks he is the only partner of the manufacturer. In reality the manufacturer sells their product to a bunch of people.
5) All those partners now compete on Amazon to sell the same product.
And it also suggests most of the commenters on this post didn't actually read the article carefully.
So this guy’s company (I may have missed it, but he doesn’t appear to mention what his own product is called) made a copycat product and went from design to manufacturing to market in 5 months? Sounds like they were just relabeling and repackaging someone else’s product. Hard to shed a tear as a grifter gets scammed by an even more unscrupulous grifter.
Regardless, this shows the dangers of violating one of the golden rules of business: never depend on a single customer. They’ll own all the leverage when negotiating price and terms. Wal-Mart exploited this for years situation for years, pitting vendors against each other and providing and preferring knock-off alternatives (sometimes its own) when available. Now Amazon does the same.
The concept was that open exchange, trade, and information flow would result in open societies. In fact, the reverse happened — it strengthened the hand of the expansionist authoritarian governments. Now, the '-isms' (communism, fascism, etc.) have all been stripped, and it is literally open war on democracies by the authoritarian states. Russia is waging open genocide in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland and Germany, China is openly violating it's agreements on Hong Kong, militarily threatening Taiwan and everyone around it's "9-dashed-line", and brutalizing it's own citizens as they protest. Iran & North Korea similarly threatening. In the economic sphere, their entire repertoire is to steal as much IP as possible and cheat their way into the markets.
It is far past time to recognize that we are playing for a few quarters of better profits while they are playing to literally destroy the democracies to they can take what they want. The only proper response is to condition our economic engagement on the implementation of democracy. You want access to our markets? Fine, open your political systems, stop being a threat, and we'll trade. Until then, it's a full embargo.
Aside from the overt military threats, I literally don't go several hours at a time without seeing more stories of how people in democratic countries are being routinely and systematically cheated by the Chinese, or how they are maintaining "Chinese police auxiliary stations" in democratic countries (why is this permitted?) to threaten their own diaspora. There are surely good people in every country, but that fact does not make it worth the costs of interacting with those societies.
What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that? I really don't understand what kind of world people who make statements like this want to live in.
The exact same companies that were lobbying against consumer protection and antitrust laws, unions busting, and convicted of conspiracy to supress wages, are now asking for government to step in because Chinese competition is breaking the same laws.
Definately some hypocracy and now that the shoe is on the other foot, people they shafted previously are enjoying some shaudenfruede.
The US does this all over the world. They will just cut off entire countries if they don't follow their banking rules, for example.
We should stop with "you're either an X or a Y". That might be true on TV or on Twitter. It is not true in real life.
Read the first line, thought "How could they be so wrong?".
Then read the second line, thought "Oh... you got me, that was a funny joke".
And now thinking "Oh... maybe they're serious, which would make this an hilarious case of 'do what I (maybe?) say in real life, not what I do on TV, Twitter, or HN' "
If Amazon was threatened with closure if they don't fix this, you would see a change quickly.
I think there is more to their success than that though.
It's not clear WHICH brand the OP is even talking about. He mentions "Hypervolt" in the first sentence, but that's not his company. Hyperice makes Hypervolt (https://hyperice.com/about-us/).
It sounds like this is a knock-off vendor complaining about another knock-off vendor. The OP, "David", links to a youtube video where the poster is "Jimmy Den" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7U8vOE4N8).
Am I wrong here? Are fabless vendors, composed of a few people, who basically rebrand white-label shit from alibaba really making (and perhaps in this case losing) millions of dollars in time-frames of months to a couple of years ??
It wouldn't be surprising. I've looked into starting a side business selling some rebranded Ali/Bao items on Amazon, there are loads of niches you could corner. The thinking goes:
> The product is available for $X today, and Amazon takes a $3-5 cut.
> I can buy the product for $X-Z.
> I could sell these products with prime shipping for $X-Y, and make $Z-5-Y on each sale.
Doing that simple math often makes you think you could make a living off the scheme, even after accounting for packaging and inventory fees. If it works for a few months-years, you might double down and get into this situation.
Ultimately, I came away feeling like this is how dropship vendors find new product categories to move into: they wait for somebody to demonstrate that there's a sizable market for a product, then they add that product to their listings and cut out the competition. So you probably have 3-6 months on each successful product, tops.
It's a jungle out there.
So you have to stay on top of thousands of products, and your cost, in order to do well. It never stops.
This reminds me of the recently popular article https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i... which also gave some great legal advice for routing around useless customer service.
Next time I will be quicker to seek a lawyer
The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.
Is that what happened here?
Many of the comments seem to indicate that "David" attempted to clone a product, but was out-cloned by others?
Would your legal friend be able to advise him on how to be more successful with his counterfeit product vs other counterfeits?
Now maybe he's lying abut all this and has employed such tactics himself against others, but you haven't even addressed his claims.
So when people filed claims against him on Amazon, how were they "false" given he acknowledged he is cloning someone else' product?
As others have posted, his story reads as follows:
- I found this great product on amazon
- I launched my own 'high quality' and "proprietary" version
- Others did the same thing
- someone failed complaints on amazon against me for my clone.
The rest of the stuff you outline fits with many other complaints here and why Amazon has "jumped the shark".
Speaking about addressing claims - Will your lawyer friend be able to help him with why his clone was removed from Amazon?
Again reading the posts, the single largest complaint people have on amazon is fraudulent clones, like what "David" made.
PS, his first run-on sentence just to save you the time from re-reading it.
"Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019; because our massage gun was unique and high-end, we began receiving a lot of 5-star reviews from the beginning, and we were Amazon’s best-seller from October 2019 to October 2021;"
Seriously, don't swallow cock-and-bull statements like "legal should be 10% of your revenue". I remember years ago the landlord of my co-working space glibly told me that "as long as office rent is not more than 10% of your revenue you're good" in response to me pushing back to rent hike increases. Ridiculous conmen.
Did you have a bad legal experience and think all lawyers are now out to get you or something? Conversely, do you think that not budgeting anything for legal expenses means your business will never be sued or need to sue anyone?
The truly sad thing about this is that Amazon used to be genuinely great! But ever since it became mostly a marketplace, and no longer primarily a store, things have gone downhill. Now it's no better than eBay.
I try to avoid it wherever humanly possible, i.e. for everything but Chinatech or when I require one-day shipping.
ORDER PLACED November 24, 2022
Arriving 7 Dec - 8 Dec
They were generous and updated the delivery date last night. It use to say Dec 9 to 12 when i checked yesterday.
I've had this happen too many times as well. With this crappy delivery time I would have been better off just going to the store which had it in stock and the same price.
They also charged me $20 for "return shipping" because when i had this item in my cart it was "removed" as it was no longer available from the seller i selected. I mistakenly added a similar looking, same priced item and needed to return it.
I was unaware that amazon no longer does "free returns"?
I gave up on amazon long ago. If i want Chinese products i'd rather just order from aliexpress directly.
Deciding to give amazon another shot cost me $20 and 2 weeks waiting??
If the answer is "No", than anyone registering in this product class can:
1. Leverage a copyright violation take-down. While you may think it is superfluous and lame... the courts do not.
2. sue you for damages to the brand (the law will see it as probably not yours) once the grace period to register IP expires. The grace period is usually 1 to 2 years once published, and after that you are likely SOL in many jurisdictions.
3. freeze your inventory imports into a protected area (see Fluke banning the color Yellow case)
4. freeze your banking account through the courts (for counterfeiters these are likely disposable shell import-only firms)
You may have thought a pad-printed generic China produced item is somehow worth $7m inventory risk, but it sounds like the "pay-me-develop-a-product" scam run by IP trolls with old inventory to unload. I had two cons try this on me once when I was young and slightly more gullible... I fed them to my lawyers as some crazies can get aggressive.
You should take note many China manufacturers often attempt to register client product trademarks domestically, as they want the domestic markets in compensation for a low-ball contract. If you try to change contract manufacturers, than the nasty side of working in China appears. Note, trademark and patent scooping is dirty, but it happens everywhere... in some places it is more culturally acceptable.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
Best of luck =)
It looks to me a bit like I left at just the right time.
This story is absolutely appalling. Amazon are being manipulated, have become a dagger in the hands of the unscrupulous, and seem absolutely unable and unwilling to act.
To my eye here Amazon are in part culpable; if you are going to implement mechanisms which can be misused in this way, without adequate safeguards, you bear some responsibility for their misuse.
Amazon are I would say now beginning to go the way of Facebook; vast still, but they have lost the plot, are compromising their core functionality, and are alienating their customers, who are both horrified at such behaviour, and harmed by it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-...
After I left they put a literal cage with turnstile around the warehouse entrance. Place looks like a prison now.
Where are these abuse complains coming from and how can they possible be shutting down major sellers repeatedly?
Good luck making progress with people that are not invested in ensuring their finicky employer resolves your issue. They won't be here to deal with the economic fallout of these decisions.
I assume he was selling a knock and his competitor was selling the exact same product. He just says he started whey hypervolt launched.
Or in this case 100% of function for 10% of cost. Massage guns literature still basically pseudo science, $30 gun may work as well as $300 one. Plenty of youtube videos doing cheap vs expensive comparisons and medical professions stating it's unproven fad, whether percussive or relabelled vibrating sex toys. No surprise customer base will naturally dabble in cheap entry level products first. Can you imagine if Juicero was the leading juicer on Amazon. Something is even more wrong with that picture.
Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
So they have this whole team setup to do enforcement, and they are being totally manipulated and unwittingly weaponized?
So Amazon either (1) they simply don’t care which makes no sense because then why have the team in the first place, (2) their team cares very much and were just too stupid or ill-equipped to do their job and even got totally manipulated, or (3) Amazon actually wants this result and intentionally destroyed this company so that the bad actor could thrive?
None of that makes any sense! And this Chinese seller was apparently paying less in fees, so there isn’t even an economic motive!
And this story plays out over how many products/sellers every single day? So Amazon is the Wild West and their own trust and safety team is firing the bullets? Weaponized incompetence?!
Is there not a class action lawsuit in here somewhere? Amazon has inflicted serious economic destruction on their partner thru negligence or malice to be sure.
And of course we’ll never see a postmortem or any kind of apology. No transparency whatsoever when it comes to one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces?
The only explanation that would make any sense at all, for which there seems to be one piece of evidence, is that there’s an inside employee taking a large cut from the Chinese seller to boost their rank, kill their competition, and lower their fees. I’d guess on the order of 10% of total take. The only evidence is that somehow the Chinese seller got ahold of PII for the company that went bankrupt and threatened them personally. Where’d they get the contact info? Their lower fee and invulnerability to their own violations is also suggestive of an insider collaborator.
But then, if this is true there would be an audit trail a mile long…
In the end I’m left simply stunned at the level of gross incompetence which seems to permeate everything in this world, and yet somehow amazing things still do get built.
You always want to identify the job title of who you're talking to and have a good guess as to what their priorities are. It sounds like they repeatedly talked to people whose job description is "close as many support tickets as possible with the hours and staffing resources you have". I'm not at all surprised that the result was getting their tickets closed with zero long-term improvement or concern about their situation.
It's just interesting that the game has became so visible rigged that a large player can have obviously no capacity at all on any of their core competences, and keep winning. It used to be that the amount of incompetence was small enough for it to stay hidden, and the general public could stay deceived by just claiming that the player got there by being the best.
Competence at resolving the task at hand, understanding of the core issues and forward progress against platform level threats are hard to achieve when you have created a purposefully unstable work environment like what Amazon is today.
Just look at what amazon is actually selling, a lot of it is just straight china imports by no name firms. Do you want to figure who is ripping of whom in that web?
>Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations!
Were they actually innovative? Or were they just reselling another made and designed in China product, maybe with some customizations and "premium" materials?
Actually, yes, I do think that.
And is it actually impacting their buisiness? Does amazon actually really care which dropshipper or chinese seller wins out on their platform? In all likelihood they sold even more products because of this feud, 40$ for some review significantly reduces the price for the consumer of the product.
I can’t imagine they want that to happen. Not only did I not spend money, I’m starting to associate shopping there as a whole with frustration.
But in general if you are making a clone of other successful product (in this case that is HyperVolt) you do need to have the entire system to make it (fake reviews, gaming system etc.). It does not matter if you are Chinese, american, or what ever. Or work very hard to become a well know brand.
Amazon will not police this: they will police only for established brands.
At the same time, they're constantly tightening KYC and other regulations which only hurts honest small-time merchants.
The worst part is their products are actually often bad, you use them a short time then throwaway.. so they are also contributing to global pollution.
What I find dumbfounding is how their gov thinks their economy is great or whatever in that line of thinking when they’re literally a parasite who is utterly dependent on the West and would be nowhere without us… but ok I get it the same could be said for us too.
I mean like they act as if they are not totally interdependent with the Western world. Good for them, that will eventually be their downfall. Evolution doesn’t care for inefficient/dysfunctional systems.
"When we deeply researched this, we f"ound that this person hijacked his listing with a dummy seller account and offered 95% off on Facebook groups, and he sold over 5–6K every day for a week ( this is our estimate based on Jungle Scout, Helium10, and his best seller rank).
But since his offer was fulfilled by the merchant, this dummy seller account didn’t ship any massage guns to buyers, but he still got the best seller badge, so he activated his real FBA ( fulfilled by Amazon ) offer on the main account."
Could somebody rephrase this for me in clearer language?
First paragraph sounds like you’re allowed to have multiple Amazon seller accounts tied to a listing. I think the dummy account was used as a way to prevent the main account from being banned if people reported the reviews. They also give estimates of how much the person sold. Based on a product’s ranking in a category (say a product is ranked #10 in massagers), you can guesstimate how often a product at rank #10 would sell every day in order to achieve that rank.
What the person did is when you sell a product on Amazon, you can choose between shipping the product to a customer yourself (so printing the shipping label, boxing the product, and ultimately sending it to a customer), or having Amazon do all of that for you, but for a fee (that process is called fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA).
For their dummy account, they would do the “shipping” themselves, but would not actually ship the product. If they knew the customer (and it sounds like they did), then that would mean they’re able to get very cheap reviews since they were giving 95% off these fake shipped products.
Hope that clears things up well enough for you!
I don't get the complaint about Amazon being a glorifed Aliexpress front end. Pay a small premium to skip multi week shipping on goods stocked in state side warehouse. Vendors that push volume via CRM game also bundles in pretty solid warranty from vendor. Remember MPOW branded products, decent you get what you pay for tier hardware. It's cheap, cut corners on Q&A which makes aliexpress gamble. But buy it from amazon for 20% premium vs aliexpress and if something breaks, seller will ship you new item no question asked. I've had MPOW honor out of warranty products with common review mentioned failure, with little question asked, because they work hard for those reviews. It was great. Take the review for gift card offer and even better deal.
Amazon is flooded with these products because they work fine for what people are willing to pay. If you want old school Amazon experience, do a search for product you want, note price of top selling Chinese products, triple or quadruple it, and there you go.
Both have everything you can ever want and more, but way to much hassle to know if what I buying is legit and if it’s from a legit seller.
Amazon used to be my first option for years and now is my last.
For most non-brandname electronics and gadgets Amazon is just an Aliexpress frontend with a different skin. You can get the exact same stuff from Aliexpress, usually cheaper.
For well known brands you can find decent deals on Amazon sometimes - unless it's a knockoff/fake.
> right!?!?!
Entirerly uneccesary. Please don’t do that.
after that first filter, a new filter will appear: seller. now you can filter for only amazon.com. this removes all FBA and marketplace sellers, which are 99% Chinese. If you recognize a reputable seller you could include them.
i believe this can only be done on web, not mobile.
it's very non obvious, intentionally so!
We love to cannibalize each other already, no honour among thieves, so no wonder another country has figured out how to just take over puppeting our people and corporations against ourselves. Amazon is now basically Chinese run without even drawing the ire of the government.
This one time I ordered a device to assist with personal hygiene and realised the device has been unsafe to use, fortunately, before I used it otherwise I would probably have received a bad injury had I used it. I wrote a review where I stated that the device is unsafe.
Long story short a week or so later I received an email to my personal account from a person claiming to be a seller of that product and demanding that I will delete my review or else. I was shocked how they were able to obtain my personal details?
Anyway, I deleted the review and never posted a review since.
I was contemplating reporting this to Amazon, but given they were threatening and had my personal details, I'd rather not risk any retaliation. Police in my country also does nothing in such cases so I have written it off as a loss.
> Now the question is how this seller is getting the buyer’s address.
The card offering the gift card asks the buyer to send their order ID and a screenshot of the review to a given email address. If the gift cards are sent electronically, they wouldn't need any further information, or if sent physically (which I doubt), they could just ask the customer directly. They don't need to get this information via Amazon if I understand things correctly.
How a small engine, a small battery, and 4 plastic attachments can sell from $30 to $600?
Here's how: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...
I have no idea if Hyperice guns are actually high quality or just good at marketing, but my experience with power tools is that you generally get what you pay for. Products that cost 10% of the price are often so crappy that you really don't want to use them.
If you have something that people don’t know a ton about (so not milk, say) and don’t use a ton (so not tools) it’s very easy to get a wide range of prices. Most people will skip the $30 (obviously it’s crap because it’s too cheap) and some will even but the $600 (it must be the best because the most expensive).
And likely the only difference is the number of attachments or something.
Also, if this seller got really successful, Amazon would have noticed and created an "Amazon Basics" massage gun anyway.
I do still regularly buy certain things on Amazon still (a certain kind of socks, a certain protein powder, etc...). I haven't been able to find a good source for those. Ironically, the protein power is something I used to get at Whole Foods, but they don't carry it there anymore.
The outcome is probably going to be the same; a sea of ultra low quality generic import goods that only poor people shop at.
I wanted one but balked at paying $500 for what seemed to be little more than a battery powered reciprocating saw with a foam ball were the blade normally is.
So I bought a knockoff for $35, just to see if it was any good… and it was! Bought it at the start of the pandemic and it’s still working fine.
I’m sure the theraguns and hypervolts are better than my cheapo, but there’s just no way they are ten times better (like their price suggests).
Spending multiple hundreds feels like a sucker’s game.
Because the people that keep saying "you get what you pay for" buy them.
This in turn will empower KOF like mainstream review sites — which will be further corrupted by pay for play as times get tough. Yay!
(And if you’re in retail software, this dynamic is coming for you too…)
So either the copyright laws are "in practice" more getting in the way than actually helping anyone, or Amazon is missing punishment for abusers of copyright-related stuff.
Amazon allowing good-ratings buying, personal info scavenging etc puts Amazon's credibility in question, and I believe that this will eventually take it's toll.
In an efficient economy, waste would not be profitable; it would not give someone the upper hand. The competitive edge should be efficiency.
Amazon is ultimately responsible. Amazon is supposed to protect honest merchants / sellers against these exploitations.
As long as customers keep giving money to Amazon, there's very little incentive for Amazon to take responsibility and fix these things.
The US population has already been conditioned to "get it on Amazon" and they won't even look at other marketplaces in most cases.
I didn't realise cycling pages was this bad.
Next!
Percussion massagers are not sex toys. You might be able to modify one to be a sex toy (the same can be said about power drills, and those aren't listed as sex toys). But their main purpose is to massage muscles.
A lot of my spending comes in the form of impact toys like floggers and paddles. Locally created, leather toys can cost upward of $150-200. It's worth it, because the cheaper mass-produced stuff can have edges that will cut the skin. Or they have cardboard in the middle and will break after 3-4 sessions.
And having multiple impact toys of varying thickness and weight is important because they all feel different.
it's is only $80!
the only way to resolve this is to buy one, try it out and report back