by rafaelm on 7/22/22, 7:14 PM with 408 comments
by callahad on 7/22/22, 8:05 PM
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
by spicymaki on 7/22/22, 9:22 PM
I believe that Amazon probably could not turn the screws on these companies even if it wanted to. It would be a massive loss to their revenue and share holders would revolt. It would bring prices up in aggregate if these companies could not sell junk on the platform.
The best they can do is play coy and hope the US government or EU does not crack down hard on them. Caveat Emptor my friends!
by eslaught on 7/22/22, 8:46 PM
It's a bit screwy, but you can filter by seller by clicking into a specific product category, and then selecting Amazon.com in the bar on the left. Then all the items should be "shipped and sold by Amazon.com".
But I've been sort of shocked to find recently that Amazon's prices, even with free shipping, are often not competitive with buying first-party, even with paying the shipping. For a lot of products these days, if there's a recognizable name brand associated with it, I just by first-party. You get it slower, but you know what you're getting, and probably end up giving more money to the seller too.
I would not have seen myself doing this ten years ago.
by lph on 7/22/22, 7:57 PM
by Ancalagon on 7/22/22, 8:13 PM
I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I'll interact with often.
by toomuchtodo on 7/22/22, 7:45 PM
by JadoJodo on 7/22/22, 7:44 PM
by rahimnathwani on 7/22/22, 8:18 PM
The company name (and words in th address) may look really long and suspicious, but it's just because it's transliterated from Chinese.
OP says these are all 'shell companies', but AFAIK it's more onerous and costly to register and maintain a company in China, than in many states in the US.
by supernova87a on 7/22/22, 10:06 PM
I'm all for reducing useless regulation, but sometimes you understand where it originally came from as a legitimate need.
by cheald on 7/22/22, 9:41 PM
by AlexandrB on 7/22/22, 8:23 PM
> despite all of this, i still mostly love Amazon as a customer. it played a big role in getting my e-commerce business off of the ground and i'm grateful for that.
"It's a flea market full of cheap (and sometimes dangerous) junk, but I still love it!"
by decafninja on 7/22/22, 9:13 PM
I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoid the obvious Chinese knockoff stuff (unless it’s some trivially unimportant thing), and don’t find it hard to do so at all.
by Aachen on 7/22/22, 9:27 PM
by spaceman_2020 on 7/22/22, 7:46 PM
It really opens up your eyes to the sheer size of the fake account and bot traffic, market. It makes you skeptical of everything you see online.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
by distrill on 7/22/22, 8:12 PM
Related, I don't understand twitter as a place for long form content. It's difficult to read and it can't be easy to post.
by metalliqaz on 7/22/22, 7:45 PM
Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?
by stuff4ben on 7/22/22, 8:25 PM
EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon Mechanical Turk!
by coding123 on 7/22/22, 7:46 PM
Generally too one of the causes of this craziness is that we keep outsourcing our manufacturing to China. China is only making these items because a much larger American company like OXO has them making really awesome kitchen items (for example) So it's not that hard for the same factory to create a series of shell companies that also sell the OXO stuff. I mean how hard is it to copy and paste the ads that the legit companies make and sell directly?
If we didn't outsource everything then it wouldn't be happening.
by barbOzon on 7/22/22, 8:13 PM
> how can you protect yourself as a consumer?
Followed by a tedious list of hoops to jump through around verifying authenticity to a point where you might not get stung.
At this point, is it not better to just give up on Amazon and use a retailer that takes its product sourcing more seriously?
Continuing to use Amazon when you know how full to the brim of scams it is, just seems to me like rewarding them for bad behaviour.
Take your money elsewhere, with everyone else, and let the invisible hand of the market give Amazon a bloody good slap.
by alangibson on 7/22/22, 8:48 PM
Basically just filter out the crap and profit
by kbd on 7/22/22, 8:42 PM
I've looked at laptop cases. Here is a sampling of brand names: Lacdo, Voova, KINGSLONG, NIDOO, tomtoc, MOSISO, INVZI, XMBFZ, Arvok, Kinmac, Londo...
I've bought cases for my ipad and work laptop from Lacdo and one for my upcoming MBA from Voova. They're actually great, but I worry they're made with Uighur slave labor or toxic materials or something.
I'd prefer not to support Amazon, but where else am I supposed to find stuff like this? Do I buy my electronics (eg. Hue lights recently) from Best Buy instead, which has a worse return policy and whose Geek Squad worked with the FBI to violate customers' rights?
Edit: Also, a few days ago I went on a search for a desktop organizer. Here are some brand names: DALTACK, ARCOBIS, DEZZIE, Hossejoy, Greenco, AMERIERGO, SONGMICS, X-cosrack, Marbrasse, Citmage, Samstar, Beiz. It goes on forever.
I checked Walmart and Target too, but wound up buying this one from "Lavatino" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PL59RL6 The product is actually awesome. The compartments are the perfect size to hold my coasters and I organized everything that was loose on my desk with room to spare.
So, it feels great to get something I needed, but the whole process still feels bad somehow.
by Cupertino95014 on 7/22/22, 8:32 PM
Good question. Supposedly Retail is not profitable and AWS carries all the weight for the company. I don't know if that's true or not (?)
Anyhow, I don't think it would make that much difference. The reputational hit that Retail takes every day probably does not carry over much to AWS, nor does AWS good will (if there is any) help Retail at all.
by thaumasiotes on 7/22/22, 9:09 PM
> well, they're on Amazon... surely they are a legit company and Amazon is covering their bases... good luck!
>> Business Address:
>> longhuaqulonghuajiadaojinglongshequLONGHUANYILU jiruizongheyuanWULONGDASHA Bdong502
>> Shenzhenshi
>> Guangdongsheng
>> 518110
>> CN
This is the second time I've seen someone complain about "obviously" illegitimate business information that appears to be the vendor's own home address. I don't see how they could be more open or informative than that. Want to get in touch with them? Send a letter to that address; they'll see it.
by vineyardmike on 7/22/22, 8:50 PM
Shoprunner let’s you buy direct from brand with 2 day shipping, so you don’t need to lose that benefit, while avoid “mass marketplace” mis-incentives of amazon like fake products. It has the benefit of being good on clothing, which amazon was never a great destination for.
I haven’t used the Walmart “prime-equivilent” benefit, but it seems pretty comparable to amazon prime but at a retailer that has quality control (of some basic level). I’m just not much of a Walmart user.
Shipt gets you “Same day” delivery from stores like target, which is a good counter to the growing same day delivery amazon has been rolling out. I found that its way worse than amazon though, since Shipt is “gig workers” and doesn’t connect to the store’s inventory very well, so you never really know if your order will be fulfilled in full. I use this for last-minute target orders when I don’t have time to visit the store.
Shopify is rolling out a bunch of competing features, but the most useful one is that they’ll provide a single app to track your purchases, which means you don’t need 20 apps on your phone for each retailer just to track that one package a month you order (or more if that’s you).
Oh and now you have a bunch of accounts that you have to give your data to and hope they don’t get breached.
TLDR: It’s really hard to de-amazon if you’re a regular and hooked on the convenience BUT capitalism at work is providing alternatives slowly…
by cronix on 7/22/22, 9:52 PM
by SMAAART on 7/23/22, 3:10 AM
Case in point I recently got an iPad and I was looking for a rugged case, an alternative to OtterBox. It's a mess, with no real winners, and lots of questionable brands/products.
It was suggested before, the time is ripe for a disruptor search engine, The Innovator's Dilemma style; starting with some segment of search.
by scrlk on 7/22/22, 9:09 PM
There's still the inventory co-mingling issue that people have mentioned in other comments. Solving this would mean I'd start to consider using Amazon more frequently.
by maerF0x0 on 7/23/22, 2:14 AM
For me it's worth $5 to not have to buy a replacement every 3 months.
Maybe just my sample but it seems these things always fail _just_ after the return window.
by Waterluvian on 7/22/22, 11:17 PM
My standards are low but woof. You can’t even get a marble run that’s not that super thin brittle plastic. The marble run at Walmart was half the price.
I’m the laziest, least ethics-motivated consumer and I think my time with Amazon is wrapping up.
by scottydelta on 7/23/22, 6:59 AM
Even the suspensions don't have alot of affect for these shady sellers.
I have worked with a company that provides listing services on Amazon in the past. The owner once casually mentioned how they help these companies get out of suspensions for long enough to withdraw their balance(I have seen screenshots with over $200k in balance) with the help of an amazon employee. The listing company and amazon employee are both paid via Bitcoin.
by 29athrowaway on 7/23/22, 1:35 AM
Including: toxic toys for children, toxic cooking utensils, toxic water filters, toxic birthday cake decorations, toxic furniture, toxic plumbing, toxic rugs, etc.
Buying on Amazon in 2022 is like walking on a minefield.
Some companies go out of their way to emulate being non-chinese. But you can tell due to the aesthetics they use, punctuation, color palette, fonts, and sometimes DNS information that they are chinese shell companies as nobody in the west uses Alibaba cloud to host their stuff.
by Narretz on 7/22/22, 8:19 PM
by rich_sasha on 7/22/22, 9:13 PM
That's not right IMHO. The seller is Amazon; where they source their stuff and what subcontractors they have is their business.
It's like EBay takes more responsibility for products you buy, even though that is explicitly a site for matching random buyers and random sellers. Not that i use ebay much either.
by the__alchemist on 7/23/22, 3:14 AM
by rootusrootus on 7/22/22, 8:38 PM
I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9/10 times higher than Amazon for brand name items.
by yegle on 7/22/22, 8:22 PM
In the last few years it's been extremely difficult to make full use of the "perk", simply because there aren't a lot of things that are sold by amazon.com anymore.
by rahimnathwani on 7/22/22, 8:15 PM
by eljimmy on 7/23/22, 4:24 AM
by liberia on 7/23/22, 12:49 AM
by wnevets on 7/22/22, 9:23 PM
by orobinson on 7/23/22, 6:59 AM
by d23 on 7/22/22, 9:26 PM
by Trias11 on 7/22/22, 10:21 PM
Hard to argue with that, honestly.
Obviously if you want to buy genuine Rolex, or quality European made tools, Amazon is not the place.
by Havoc on 7/22/22, 9:26 PM
Made this mistake with a cheap rice cooker. Main voltages, high temps, water and steam and sketchy wiring was a terrible plan
by quwert95 on 7/22/22, 9:00 PM
by jmrm on 7/22/22, 8:29 PM
by tuxie_ on 7/23/22, 8:35 AM
by 99_00 on 7/22/22, 8:51 PM
by elforce002 on 7/22/22, 9:28 PM
by mattanimation on 7/23/22, 3:39 AM
by jollyllama on 7/22/22, 9:00 PM
by faangiq on 7/22/22, 11:01 PM
by ck2 on 7/23/22, 1:27 AM
Amazon is an absolute nightmare to find specific details.
by marcodiego on 7/23/22, 1:09 AM
by mod on 7/22/22, 10:24 PM
by TavsiE9s on 7/22/22, 9:10 PM
by aaronrobinson on 7/23/22, 11:55 PM
by NonNefarious on 7/23/22, 6:20 AM
by protastus on 7/22/22, 8:44 PM
Nowadays I only order from Amazon if the order is a time critical item that only they can deliver on time for a reasonable price. That's less than 5% of my purchases in dollar amount.
I've been a customer since 1997. Amazon has impressed me with their ability to play the long game, and I don't understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon here.
by tryptophan on 7/22/22, 7:48 PM
by TameAntelope on 7/22/22, 8:34 PM
What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?
by Fargoan on 7/22/22, 10:05 PM
by ohlookcake on 7/22/22, 9:03 PM
by xanaxagoras on 7/22/22, 10:02 PM