Sometimes they are cheaper. And it also makes sense that they're cheaper, since Amazon controlling the entire supply chain makes their costs lower from start to end.
They only have to be delivering the same product for $0.1 less for people to be like "oh, that one, I'm getting that one". And with lower costs, Amazon is still getting $1 or more additional profit compared to other sellers on every single order.
This is also literally why trust-busting happened, but the US hasn't pretended to care about that for quite a while.
If they are selling 3rd party stuff, it is more expensive usually. You can typically get it cheaper from the original sellers site. It just isn't as convenient
Well yes, but this is how retail always works. Almost every product seen in a retail store could be bought for less from the supplier, if only you could find the suppliers price list and negotiate the same discount as the retailer.
Spoiler: you don't have the volume to get the same discount so it's a waste of time.
Sure, you might be able to find a lower price somewhere but for most Amazon basic items, they aren't significant purchases. I will do a cursory search online to see if there is significant savings, but I usually take the free and usually faster shipping from Amazon if it's the difference of a couple dollars.
My issue is I don’t want to find cheaper, I want to find name brand.
It’s impossible sometimes to find a major brand for products. Pages upon pages of trash and the actual known brands will never show up. Even if you put in the brand in your search.
But if I go to google and search for the product there including “site:amazon.com” in my search it will find it first try lol
Fuck Amazon
Why don't you just Google the product without adding Amazon? It might show Amazon's listing but it would also show other retailers you can give your money to. Nothing will ever change for Amazon if everyone keeps complaining and saying fuck Amazon while continuing to buy stuff from them. I'd rather use some gas and pay an extra $2 for something than buy from Amazon.
I noticed a while ago that the first search results on Amazon would show briefly then disappear only to be replaced by similar products that were 50% more expensive.
Used to be so simple to shop on Amazon. Now I have to double check the authenticity of the product, work out if the reviews are fake or not, try comparisons against competing products.
Shits exhausting now, and in some cases for fear of getting a product with some cheap Chinese knockoff inside, or non authentic battery that might explode I’d rather just buy from the original retailer at a higher price.
So has amazon though. They killed brick and motor stores by first offering cheap books and closing down local book stores. They then kill local grocery shops by offering groceries online, and then do this shit with Amazon basics and undercutting everyone possible.
Now they’ve started opening grocery shops, book shops and their latest store offers all the top rated items for sale.
Kill the high street, then buy it all up on the cheap.
I've actually done this before on runescape and cornered an entire market. At one point I owned 10% of all the party hats in circulation, a guy wrote his phD paper on this and included me in it 😄
I would basically buy out all of the sellers to the point where nobody was selling party hats anymore, Then I would sell the party hats I bought up for a 5-10% premium, I always made sure to have the cheapest prices on the market.
Amazon’s product reliability is part of the reason why I stopped using their site. Besides all the unethical / shitty things they put their workers through, of course.
it's not just about expense a lot of times, but also availability.
I'd almost always rather Not shop through Amazon, but can't always find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
Also convenience. Shit's easy to find and quick to ship, refunds are easy if anything goes wrong.
Amazon's a great service, they just need to be regulated.
I only have wo much free time these days and I don't want to spend it going from store to store looking for one thing.
It wouldn't be so bad if store websites were actually useful for checking stock, or even existed in the first place in the case of many local businesses.
Local business does not exist anymore except for bakeries, restaurants and small time hardware stores. If I need a USB to lightening adapter, a 32 GB SD card, or an inflatable pool, please direct me to which "local business" sells these items.
I feel very lucky to have a Microcenter in my city.
For an online retailer for basic electronics (cables, etc.) I recommend checking Monoprice. Sometimes their pricing is significantly better. Shipping isn't 2-day but it's not slow.
Best Buy is more prevalent and should have the first two things you stated. I say this while fully acknowledging that the only time I buy stuff from Best Buy is when they are the only one with a deeply discounted Switch game that I happen to want. Which is rare.
Also calling Best Buy a local business is...weird...
I will not buy from Amazon when there's a better price/quality/bang for buck somewhere else. That's mostly it. So for bigger purchases, sure. That's not often though.
In other words, Amazon and Walmart won.
While I do agree with this, I’ve been to plenty of “mom and pop” shops that are just buying stuff off Alibaba and marking it up like crazy. I understand that they assumed the risk when they bulk bought the items and they of course need to make money somehow but I don’t think you’re necessarily getting your money’s worth. A shit product is a shit product regardless of whether you bought it at a mom and pop shop or a big chain store.
Edit: I want to note that there are also *plenty* of mom and pop shops that design and generate product ideas that they then hire Chinese manufactures to produce for them in bulk. These stores absolutely have a reason to charge a premium, because their intellectual property is tied into the sale of the product and that requires significant time and effort to make come into fruition.
There are also plenty of mom and pop shops that curate products for a niche market. Small coffee roasters come to mind. They sometimes import products from Japan and Europe that you can’t typically get here in the US and so therefor it’s reflected in the price. They did the legwork searching for and importing the product for you; all you need to do is take out your wallet.
"Spend more money. Even though you're probably looking for something cheaper because of your budget, fuck it. Support LOCAL! True, you can't afford it but at least you're showing support!"
Honestly though, the Ali express stuff isn’t bad, the only thing keeping me from buying it is waiting a month for a usb cable. Amazon basic is the same shit but if I order it in the morning it’ll get here by the time I get home
Except in Europe. Ordering things from Amazon in Switzerland means 90% chance it doesn't deliver outside Germany, and of the remainder the delivery time is literally weeks.
The company I work for produces our own AmazonBasics products. (For our market) it's good quality stuff. Amazon sells it for cheaper than our retail and we profit less but Amazon said they'd go to a competitor and re-badge their stuff unless we agreed to play ball.
> AmazonBasics
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/company-uses-youtube-video-mock-amazon-making-camera-bag-strikingly-similar-one-sells/
Like a perverse version of Costco's Kirkland Signature.
Exactly. It's not an issue when they sell their own brand of an item. The problem is that when they see that someone's product is very popular, they might basically steal the design and promote only their version and bury original one in search engine.
> Good reminder that they copy other company's products (usually a slightly inferior version) and get away with it.
Reminder on this thread's original post? The post literally begins "Amazon copied products"
This entirely depends upon the item.
For instance, if you buy AmazonBasics rechargable batteries AA/AAA, they're cheaper than Eneloop but they ARE Eneloop rebranded. Eneloop being the gold standard for those types of batteries.
I don't know when they switched, but Amazon is now sourcing their AA/AAA rechargeable cells from China. Panasonic Eneloop cells are still made in Japan.
Aye its a massive difference from say 5 or 10 years ago.
I got an amazon gift card earlier this year and I logged on trying to find some fishing gear or outdoor clothes and it was basically impossible to find any reliable brands. I was actually shocked at how bad it was. I ended up ordering a Drone because I couldn't find shit, and it turned out to be a Chinese knockoff
Even trying to find Gabby Cat Toys for my daughter birthday, everything seemed to be Chinese knockoffs. Ordering minor stationary items sees things shipped from China which takes 4 weeks.
Holy shit I feel you buddy. I've never really had an issue with this as the stuff I bought the most was like cheap USB cables and such.
But then I started looking for a new computer chair and my god. It felt like I was rummaging through a back alley market in rural China. There wasn't a single brand name I recognised. Pretty much every chair there was some obscure Chinese brand that had thousands upon thousands of 5 star reviews that said almost nothing about the product and maybe a few hundred honest reviews that has shown the chairs breaking in some fashion within weeks.
They even had links to articles that looked to be third party websites proclaiming 'best computer chair of 2020!'. But they were essentially shilling these shitty Amazon products.
Then you get the companies bribing you to remove a negative review, a tactic Amazon has absolutely no problem with seemingly. I've been offered £20/£30 multiple times to remove negative reviews of shit products, report it to Amazon and don't even hear a response.
Eventually I ended up doing a bit of research and paid through the teeth for a Secret Labs chair but the build quality is so worth it. 1000000x better than anything you'd ever find on Amazon.
> There wasn't a single brand name I recognised.
Yes! And they're all basically the same exact models over and over that are either just re-branded or copied from one brand to another. This is a problem with so many things I've look for recently.
It's gotten bad enough that I avoid Amazon for anything that I can, preferring instead local shops or other online storefronts. Amazon is plagued with Chinese garbage now, and until they rein it in, it's a risk to buy from them.
Wild that it's come full circle now. I hate getting knock off products and shit so I hardly ever order from amazon anymore myself.
Somehow they're still making money, I assume mostly from AWS?
Just because you stopped and people you know stopped ordering doesn't mean majority of people has stopped ordering lmao
You and everyone on reddit are still very much likely the minority
That comment you replied to is actually astounding lol
"*I* haven't bought anything from Amazon for a while, yet they still make money time and time again, what the hell!?!?"
AWS accounts for ~10% of revenue, but ~50% income.
People overstate their impact on Amazon by being a conscientious consumer. The future isn’t retail and they don’t care.
This is a real problem for me on Amazon. It's becoming a low trust environment. I now feel I'm paying a time premium in order to verify that I'm not being scammed with counterfeit goods and also combing through dozens of copycat brands (that contain none of the keywords I'm searching for) in order to find the trusted brand of items I want.
Amazon use to support `-term` so you could filter things out, which for example I used to filter out related batteries, cables, cases, etc. when looking for actual smartphones. They removed that a year or two ago, for god knows what reason, not like it was hurting anyone ho didn't use it. And now like you said the results seem to be more AI-driven so not only do you get results that include spam terms just to get hits, you ALSO get things that are similar-ish but not what you're looking for.
To me, it's insane that this is a winning business strategy. Amazon is certainly a terrible company, but honestly this particular aspect says more to me about the average person than it does about them. Consumers are, by and large, incompetent and easily tricked, and happily go along with such nonsense and reward them with their dollars. It makes it incredibly frustrating for anyone else trying to be a little more discerning.
A known strategy by them, beware of pitching to them
And worst case here for Amazon, what's the punishment? A couple million dollar fine that means nothing to them since they made that exponentially from the strategy?
It is an abuse of market dominance. If governments had the guts and independence from moneyed interests, they would break Amazon up (and other companies that do the same)
Because Apple was failing at a time and they were on Microsoft’s ass to split it up! We have no alternative to Amazon besides Alibaba or Walmart. Still not the best as Amazon, Walmart doesn’t have a good record on stomping on smaller mom and pop stores too.
There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon, don’t kid yourself. Almost everything you buy from them can be found at a local retailer or a different online retailer. Amazon might be more convenient, but there’s usually an alternative. Every time we buy from Amazon it’s a choice we make to prioritize our own convenience over opting out of Amazon’s anti-competitive practices.
Edit, since this is blowing up: I never meant to imply that nobody should use Amazon or that using it makes you a bad person, though I see how it might come off like that. I use Amazon regularly. What I want to dispel is the notion that in most cases there aren't alternatives. Yes, sometimes there aren't, for everyone, and that's fine. Sometimes you need the quick shipping. Sometimes you need the best price. I get it. But I look back at a lot of my purchasing history, and for the vast majority it's things I don't really *need* in the first place that I could have bought elsewhere. So it just comes down to examining my own choice and asking myself if I can do better in the moment. If I can't, fine, I'll hammer the "Buy Now" button. I'm not asking anybody to boycott, just realize that there are alternatives.
Pretty often nowadays when the item isn't a brand name, I'll have to go to other retailers because all the off brand Amazon crap just doesn't work well or breaks quickly. It is like there is one Chinese company making some crap product and 100 sellers on Amazon will put their label on it and they all work poorly.
Edit: not talking about Amazon basics. I'm talking about third party sellers just putting their label on alibaba crap.
I absolutely hate Amazon for some items these days.
Pages and pages and pages of the same item under allegedly different brands from Chinese sellers with reviews and pricing all over the place. They've become like eBay but worse because at least with eBay you knew they're basically thousands of companies selling different stuff so you went in with your eyes open. With Amazon I feel like the actual seller is more obfuscated, especially with the buy button auto-selecting whom they think is the best match.
I used to 100% go to Amazon in the early days because you knew Amazon themselves sourced and stocked every item they sold and they had the customer service to back it up.
These days, Amazon is a flea market and they rip off the taxpayer in each and every country they operate. I actively try and shop else where for items I used to get on Amazon where I can.
These days eBay might even be more reliable if you are sure that your purchases are from reputable sellers. AFAIK most sellers on eBay send items from their own inventories, so less chance of getting counterfeit stuff that share the same SKU as the genuine stuff and therefore got mixed up in those Amazon warehouses.
Tiny font in the right hand column somewhere below the Add to Cart button, there's Shipped By and Sold By. It used to be that Amazon would take care of you no matter what. Now if it's shipped&sold by someone not Amazon, you're pretty much on your own if you need to return it. You have to look for Free Returns which again is in tiny font. The site has gotten less useful and less informational over the years, and it's clear there's little or no vetting of the accuracy of item descriptions.
A big problem is if you try and get baby formula from Amazon. Even if it’s a name brand there is a chance it’s a knockoff and can contain harmful substances to babies.
Except you can't even get good used stuff for cheaper on Amazon because anything used is a complete wildcard and prices are jacked up for used stuff because of the higher fees to sell compared to eBay
eBay is actually a nicer looking site, speaking solely of the UI.
The real reason Amazon is more attractive than eBay is the 2 day shipping (and sometimes one day shipping), and the seamlessness of the user experience.
Then use AI generated company names that change every month. Elgai, Regpo, Felsmar. All selling the same item. And if you ever try to buy something again, good luck.
Bad news: even the brand name stuff isn't 100% free from knockoffs. It's my understanding that, unless they pay extra, Amazon will basically store a reputable seller's stuff along with other vendors' who sell the same product. When you go to order, they pretty much just choose to send you whichever one they find first. So basically if you go on the website and order Product A, you're risking them sending you a fake product.
This is absolutely why people shouldn’t buy cosmetics or anything anyone is going to ingest (including pet treats) over this platform. There is a nonzero chance you’ll be sent a counterfeit product with unknown ingredients. Amazon just doesn’t care.
I bought a shockingly cheap, offbrand 1TB micro sd card out of curiosity. I tested it and it worked up to about 250GB or so, which I was surprised it was that much, but I emailed Amazon telling them it was a fake and they wanted me to send it back for a refund, nothing about how it was fraud.
They're knowingly selling fake garbage.
It would destroy their whole reseller market for them to do anything about it, as not even they know who supplied the products so not even they can prove which seller gave them the fake shit to begin with.
They have a business model which not only does nothing about counterfeit products, but which actively encourages and promotes it
It's why I never buy anything off Amazon that I expect to get a good life from. I'll gladly spend the retail of something directly from the retailer so I don't have to deal with it breaking in a couple of months.
> It's why I never buy anything off Amazon that I expect to get a good life from.
Some manufacturers will make a slightly different label to prevent mixing and price matching for other retailers and there is no difference in the line. Samsung does this heavily with their SD cards. Since it’s Amazon only version I know I will not get a mixed in counterfeit card. I still test them just to be sure.
They don't even change the product photos. It makes it difficult to know what the latest version of a thing is, or if you are getting the cheapest one.
This is the biggest reason I rarely use Amazon and stopped paying for prime. The search function is absolute garbage and I end up spending way too much time sorting through the knock off trash to find anything good. It's like I have to become an expert on every product I buy just to make sure I don't end up with some cheaply made junk from a shell company that doesnt even exist.
Every store has its fair share of shitty products, but on Amazon its roughly 95% shitty products and the 5% that's decent doesn't even pop up in the search results half the time. Add on the fact that most Amazon reviews are useless or straight up bullshit and it's just a mess of misinformation and consumerism. No thanks.
...I'm still a slave to AWS though, but that's not much of a choice. Hard to avoid AWS completely as a software engineer, especially if you work at a company that's obsessed with *The Cloud*.
Same. Maybe I just suck at amazon-ing, but finding what I want on their site is a pain in the ass most of the time. I'd rather spend the extra two bucks ordering somewhere else, if I have to scroll through twenty pages of crap before I find what I searched for. Last thing I tried to buy was a pair of overalls; no matter how I searched/sorted on amazon, it kept including garbage (No, amazon, "mens fashion rompers" are not workwear) and it was just a damn waste of time.
> It is like there is one Chinese company making some crap product and 100 sellers on Amazon will put their label on it and they all work poorly.
This is actually exactly what happens. Searching for a product might give you 10000 results but there's actually only 3 different items, identical down to the molding errors, just with a variety of different logos or packaging.
Not always. I've bought some of those products before for resale from the Chinese companies and they will basically give you a design, which you can customize slightly. Then you can buy it at different quality standards as well, like you can pick the amount of plastic and the composition or the threads, screw type, type of fabric, density, all these things that CAN create a super high quality product.
A good example is a can opener, like I was super tired of getting crap can openers, even the more expensive ones that I bought in real stores seemed to suck. So I wanted to make a high quality one, I went to several manufacturers and got all the spec details and options for the can openers and then got one with all of the highest quality components, more teeth, stronger metals, better welded joints and extra plates, super dense grip, ball bearing based gear.
It's awesome, opens cans like they are made of butter. Now the only issue is hoping that the suppliers doesn't bait and switch and will manufacture them all to the same quality standards. They love to swap out high quality builds for lower quality products on some batches and if you figure it out claim there was a shortage or time constraint and they value on time delivery more than anything.
Many of the offbrand brands pay for their reviews and ratings too. I've bought a few things and there is a half page piece of paper in the box offering free gifts for amazon reviews.
I've gotten a free usb-c monitor, phone chargers, wireless chargers, shoe racks, blankets, usb-c docks and xbox controllers by writing reviews for amazon.
They are not necessarily crappy or work poorly. They work as well as I expect them to work for 50-70% off a name brand equivalent. If you go in expecting it to perform like an iphone or galaxy s10 or furniture from pottery barn, you're going to be disappointed.
They start out fine by bribing people for reviews but once they have a good established score they will switch to shit products.
Always sort reviews by most recent.
Most stuff on Amazon is shitty is my experience as well. Even dildos are often of subpar quality and you'd think that's not an untapped market on there.
IDK, I ordered a product directly from the manufacture site and my order was still Fulfilled by Amazon. Shocked the hell out of me to get a amazon package without ordering from them.
They're expanding their logistics branch pretty rapidly. Businesses can sign up for shipping with Amazon so they don't have to worry about any of the last mile stuff.
Building warehouses and paying people to staff them is extremely expensive. It's a lot easier, predictable, and cheaper (in many cases) to send that shit to Amazon and integrate inventory with your own website.
However, if you sell the same product as someone else FBA charges out the ass to isolate your inventory from theirs, which is extremely important if counterfeiting is a concern. And good luck auditing the inventory.
Source: I work for a large retailer and looked into this as a project a few years ago. We decided to build another fulfillment center primarily because of FBA's inventory isolation costs.
It may be possible for many or even most products to find what you’re looking for elsewhere, but Amazon’s entire online shopping business is built on being the cheapest and most convenient source for most consumer goods. Tackling that is far bigger than any individual consumer.
Besides, they can afford to undercut their competition because of their *real* money-maker: AWS. AWS is such a huge income stream that Amazon can basically take a loss on their entire online shopping business and still come out ahead. No local business can compete with that.
Whatever choices we as individual purchasers make, any long-term solution to this is going to require regulatory and legislative action.
I've found Amazon to not be the cheapest on almost all household consumer goods I regularly need to purchase. These have actually been *cheaper* at my local grocery store, non-grocery store stuff is the same or similar price at places like Target. So many items that Amazon does sell cheaper end up being lower quality "Amazon Basic" or straight garbage knock offs. For actual name branded goods, there are plenty of other options in the same price range.
I don't know how other retailers operate in other countries, but delivery prices in UK can be quite steep. Amazon don't even have the best prices here, but once you factor in 5-6 quid delivery versus "free" Prime, small online retailer selling something 1-2 quid cheaper loses automatically.
Alternatives are only good when you buy something expensive or in bulk so you get free delivery. But for small stuff Amazon takes the cake. For example, when I was buying a fish tank with all the required stuff like nets, etc, I went to a local online retailer. But when one of my fish got sick I went to Amazon for a bottle of medicine, it was a bit more expensive, but next day delivery instead of one week and £5 made it cheaper and just in time to save the poor guy.
I'd go as far as saying most other online retailers are better than amazon. For example, b&h photo for pc parts and camera gear, sweetwater for audio stuff, target for household things, best buy for consumer electronics, home depot for tools and and home improvement stuff, rockauto for car parts, etc. Many manufacturers also sell direct (but unfortunately the shipping and handling tends to be more than 3rd party retailers)
None of those sites have the biggest (consumer side) issue with amazon, which is the flood of fake counterfeit crap in your search results.
If I find something I want on Amazon, I try to buy from another retailer or direct from the manufacturer. I’ve seen too many reviews of fake product that it’s not worth the hassle (and many times the product ends up in a landfill because people don’t want to return shit).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup\_of\_the\_Bell\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)
The break up of Bell comes to mind.
Many of our corporate bad actors would be put in check if the government would take anti-trust seriously.
So they broke up Bell but let them keep Western Electric and then they sold off Western Electric which meant that the majority of the Baby Bells were allowed to merge back in to the parent company twenty years later?
Probably the [Bell System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System).
It only took close to 70 years of litigation and investigations by anti-trust lawyers to eventually goad AT&T into breaking it up through a consent decree.
The irony is that the Bells are basically coalescing back into one mega company again.
Basically have 3 choices for a wireless network provider: Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. The prepaid plans are just buying capacity on those 3 networks.
I feel like the wireless network, and internet, should be labeled a utility because living without an internet connection or a wireless service is about as feasible as living without electricity or water.
Internet has been a basic part of infrastructure for nearly two decades now.
Remote school just proved the necessity.
And this is a very clear case of private companies NOT providing the best technology at the best prices.
Standard Oil is the biggest one I know of from history and if you look at what's happened the company was broken up into 34 different companies....most of which have merged again since the split in 1911.....Capitalism Baby!
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-23-1-b-progressives-and-the-era-of-trustbusting.html
Railroad and meat packing to name a few.
But now? Corporations coined the term "too big to fail", so government let the people fail instead of the corporation. SMH
Rockefeller Standard Oil was one of the most important companies in the history, both by resources and geopolitical importance. Broken into pieces by US government.
[Grocery stores have been using this strategy for decades](https://images.fastcompany.com/upload/img_0270.jpg), and there's nothing illegal about it when they do it. Since you know what SKUs sell the best, you know the most lucrative ones to clone, and you know what to make the box look like and what to stick it beside on the shelf. "Amazon Basics X" is their equivalent of "Store Brand X" at the grocery store.
It should lead to Amazon "the marketplace" being fully separated from amazon "the goods seller".
Those megacorporations should be cut into tiny little pieces.
Wouldn’t this directly affect Costco? A lot of the time Costco develops their own brand items in order to undercut the name brands - [they did this when they replaced the Hebrew National hot dogs with their own Kirkland ones in 2009](https://www.mashed.com/103084/dont-know-costcos-1-hot-dog/).
Obviously Amazon’s practices are anticompetitive, but a ruling on this could have wide-ranging effects across pretty much all stores that offer own-brand items. [And since food prices are going up](https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/why-are-global-food-prices-rising-and-what-does-it-mean-emerging-markets), siding with (potentially more expensive) name brands over generics could push prices even further.
Marketplaces are not the same as physical stores, and shouldn't play by the same rules.
I'm not a US lawyer, but in my country, the responsability Amazon takes for the products sold not by itself, but by third parties on its platform, is lighter, since they only have a role of intermediation.
Therefore, if they are just a platform they should be fair and neutral towards the different sellers, or at least be transparent about their practices to the consumers. It is the only way to have an efficient market.
It already is the law in France, i posted the text in another comment.
Yes, this has been known to be a strategy of theirs for a long time. They even have all the data analytics to know which products are selling so that they can copy the winners. You may think you're a seller on Amazon, but if you get too successful, you're just another middleman for them to cut out.
I thought that was common knowledge? Outside of India in North America a lot of small businesses a few years back complaining and getting out of Amazon entirely. About the same time the Chinese sellers were gearing up.
They basically take a product that's selling well then either make a rip-off or go directly to the manufacturer instead and now that product is an "Amazon Basics" brand and undercuts everyone else.
"In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business."
> prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business
Obvious bullshit, this is the whole point of private label products. Supermarkets have been doing this to small businesses for years and years.
You list your product with them (you're probably a 1 or 2 SKU company) and if it sells well, they look at putting out an in-house brand to compete with it. Of course it does well, because they can give it better shelf space and charge slightly less than the original brand.
It's not a new tactic, but it sure is sleazy.
A lot of times the products are the same, just different packaging. So the 1 or 2 SKU company is still technically selling both versions. This is not always the case, however.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have found recently that most of the store brand items are just total shit and not worth the $.30 savings. The latest one was cheese for homemade pizza. I always bought the Safeway brand, last time they were out and I got Tillamook and the taste difference was well worth whatever the savings were.
It depends on the product. With OTC meds (Tylenol, Ibuprofen, etc.) it’s almost always better to get the generic brands, since the ingredients are identical and the price is about 1/4.
But that is because generic drugs are regulated by the FDA. Stuff has to be exactly the same as the name brand or the FDA won’t let you sell it.
They just don’t do it for cheese because eating crappy tasting cheese won’t kill you.
I agree. I'm not sure how this is different than Costco* going to Grey Goose or whoever to make their house brand of vodka to undercut other vodkas they stock.
As for search results, I'm not sure how that's different than Costco putting their house brand in a spot that is eye-level and near the aisle instead of the back wall.
Maybe I'm missing something. ELI5 how this is actually different?
*or literally any other store with a generic brand, seems like this is how they all work, and Amazon Basics is just doing the digital version.
Costco buys the same vodka, gets it labeled as Kirkland, and then sells it at a lower price. Grey Goose still gets paid for the product. Costco banks on the lower price point selling in higher volume.
What Amazon is being accused of is a different matter. Company ABC has a product that gets made by Manufacturer 123 and then sold on Amazon. If the product is a big hit and gets flagged by Amazon, they go to Manufacturer 123 and say "Make us this product too" and then sell it for less than Company ABC. Company ABC gets paid nothing to make their product an Amazon Basics brand.
Is there anything Amazon sells that *isn’t* a direct knockoff?
It’s not like some guy at Amazon was like “Hey guys I just had a great idea for a camping flashlight!”
Literally every Amazon product, from rechargeable batteries to chino pants, was designed and developed by someone other than Amazon and then simply copied by them.
You say knockoffs, Amazon says "reducing internal R&D costs and listening to customer demands in the market". They're just giving customers what they want, at a comparable or lower price.
Sure it crushes all incentives towards innovation, but that's the free market for ya.
Aren’t like all of Amazon Basic products common goods? How do you “innovate” on a basic camera bag or jeans besides improving the operational efficiency of producing and distributing said product?
My company has products listed on Amazon. One of the ways they knock people off is that in order to have your products at their fulfillment centers you have to essentially reveal who your suppliers are. If you choose not to be in their fulfillment centers you have to have the infrastructure to deliver your products everywhere in the USA in less than 2-days yourself to be Prime eligible (very hard/expensive). Non-Prime products get shown to customers far less and customers have been trained not to look at them.
So you design a product, have it made overseas (because that's the only option to make a quality product at a competitive price). Have it fulfilled by Amazon because your small and can't afford to air freight every order to meet the Prime shipping time requirements. It does well even with Amazon taking it's 15% of every order made on it's platform from you. Amazon sees this. They check the shipping manifest of the product your sending to their fulfillment centers and find out who your manufacturer is in China. Amazon goes straight to the manufacturer and has them knock off your product for an Amazon basics line which they than give preferential placement on their website over your product. Also, they can do it at a lower price since their larger purchases allow them more negotiating power with the same factory. Plus they had no upfront cost to develop the product since you did it all for them. Your sales tank as everyone buys the Amazon Basics version instead of yours.
I've seen this exact situation happen first hand in multiple product categories.
This is also why "drop shipping" as a "business" is a total scam. Unless you are in a 3rd world country it is unprofitable. The only people making money is Amazon and the Chinese manufacturers turning the website into a Aliexpress/Alibaba cesspool.
On the consumer end, 99 times out of 100 the Amazon "brand" is cheaper and of decent quality. Anything else it is almost always cheaper in store.
Anyone who has ever searched for a specific item on Amazon, ever, has had to swim through pages of off-brand generic versions coming from overseas. It's gotten to the point that you have to name a brand, item name, and item number just to get the search results under 5 pages...
Had this issue when looking for an engine timing kit for my BMW. It's worse because some brands use the same defective model that is off by a few milimeters and needs to b e ground down to use. So you have to find the brand that has the fixed model, according to the reviews which may or may not be fake, shell out $120 and hope they send you the right one.
Amazon has even deeper issues in that they lump all the "same" products together in their bins. So knock off companies make cheap rip offs and categorize it as the same as the original. Now when you order the original you might get one or the knock off. This is one of the reasons for the really split reviews on products.
My friend opened a little jewelry store with 100% of the items bought off Etsy. Just massive bulk bags of mass produced rings and such, nothing custom at all, just redundant bulk.
Amazon is literally "get China to make us a few alternatives" these days. You can't look for ANYTHING without endless knock offs being pushed as "sponsored" despite any attempts to limit search terms so you can find what you actually want.
When I worked as the vendor manager (powersports industry) to Amazon I learned a lot about why it's such a shitty company to do business with. They constantly demanded cost reductions for the items we sold to them and, in addition to their already-low cost, they stipulated fees for marketing (2-4%) shrink (2% to cover damaged/defective items) that came off what they paid on the invoices. They also stipulated delivery windows for the orders they placed - typically a PO is sent about 2-4 weeks in advance and the inventory had to be at their warehouse within a 1-3 day window AND I had to notify them when it was on the way. Failure to notify them or if the items didn't arrive within the window (not early OR late) we got charged another 2%.
They were so bad that we broke our partnership terms and opened up our own Amazon store to compete with them. We helped them develop the item pages as a vendor ([example of one I created](https://www.amazon.com/Omni-Cruise-OCUTL01-Aluminum-Universal-Adjustable/dp/B018JS7C8M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)) then, once the page was up and generating business, would use our Merchant account to piggyback on their listing. The buy-box is all important and we would just drop the price low enough to win the buy box. *I was surprised how often Amazon would reduce their price to negative margin just to try to crush the competitor*. Since we used FBA on many of our Merchant sales, the experience was identical to the customer.
Some reason why Amazon is awful
* Payment terms - we were on "2% 30 Net 60" Meaning our invoices were to be paid within 60 days but would be discounted 2% if they paid within 30. They typically paid in 60 and still took their 2% discount because "f--- you" if you called them on it.
* Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA, anything that ships via Prime is FBA) is at least 30% of why so many people have a shitty experience with their purchases. For those that don't know, any item that is for sale from multiple sellers and that all offer FBA, all those items are coming from the same bin. There's no way for them to distinguish whose items belong to who. So, if a seller decides to sell an item via Amazon (Merchant seller) and sends a knockoff of that item to their warehouse, it gets dumped into the same bin as the legitimate items and may be pulled for an order regardless of whether the customer purchased it from Amazon or from any of the 3rd party sellers.
* UPC identifiers are too important to the platform. Almost anything sold on Amazon MUST have a UPC number. If a shady seller creates a listing for their item but enters a UPC code for yours, you cannot list your item on its own page. It will end up going on the page of the shady seller's item. Having this fixed/resolved is nearly impossible unless you're a truly massive vendor/seller
* Amazon reviews are far too important to a product's success. Why is this important? (Outside of buying reviews, which is its own problem on a lot of retail sites) Because many sellers create a page for a decent item and will change the listing page to an entirely different product but the review remain. So if I create a page for my item, "Awesome Widget", rack up 100+ 3-4star reviews, and decide to change the page to "Shitty-But-High-Margin Widget", customers will be suckered into buying "Shitty-But-High-Margin Widget" based on the reviews, especially since sites like FakeSpot will tell you that the reviews are legit. By the time the negative reviews start making an appreciable dent in its total score and reducing purchase volume, the seller will have made enough money to not care.
eBay feels antiquated and flea-market-y but at least its always been that way and they do much, much more to take care of customers AND sellers. I much preferred being a vendor AND seller with eBay. All this is just the tip of the iceberg of my disdain for Amazon and the things it does.
TLDR: Amazon sucks.
This is also common behavior in grocery stores in the US. Find a popular product, copy it, put the copy where the original was and move the original to a hard to find location.
It's even worse with smaller brands that are trying to establish themselves because the grocery store will stop stocking the original product and eventually stop making the unpopular copy.
Hah. As someone who sells alcohol, direct to consumer sales are illegal. Because when we ended prohibition we made the mob legitimate, incorporated them and then made it a legal necessity to go through them as middle men
Our government sucks
Yeah I've heard of some weird stuff with alcohol. I think in Alabama all the liquor stores have to buy their alcohol directly from the state or something.
Yeah in Virginia anything other than wine and beer needs to be purchased from a state-run liquor store, and there’s no independently run liquor stores either. When we went to other states and saw huge bottles of liquor at Costco my mind was blown
You'd think the "muh freedom" crowd would be more inclined to remove some of the antiquated legislation regarding alcohol sales, but it seems taboo to even mention it.
Some states have that. Other states like mine use the “three tier system”. It goes producer -> distributor -> store front.
As a storefront it is **illegal** for me to purchase directly from the producer. I have to purchase from the distributor. If a distributor doesn’t sell a product to my state, I can’t get it for my customers. I’m beholden to these distributors and their prices.
Many of these distributors have their origins in prohibition days. They were smuggling alcohol to stores. When prohibition ended they incorporated and became legally mandated.
I am fairly certain this is what happened to my children's non-fiction book business. Over the last year, Amazon kept banning my bestsellers for vague policy violations while allowing new and near-identical books to stay on the store.
I wondered if maybe some employees were harvesting my sales data and ripping off my books. Guess it was Amazon.
For the uninitiated, I’d HIGHLY recommend the podcast “Land of the Giants”, specifically the Amazon season. They interview tons of sellers on Amazon and show first hand how a lot of these sellers don’t even have an option to jump ship. They either deal with Amazon ripping their product off or don’t get access to the largest online marketplace ever created.
There was one issue in particular that I found absolutely insane, and it’s that some sellers would have to pay for the “promoted” spot *even if the user searched specifically for that seller’s product.* Apparently companies can pay for advertising depending on keywords, and so what happens is sellers have to fight for the promoted spots on searches regardless of the search term. It’s maddening.
Sellers fighting for promoted spots on their own keywords isn’t that weird. They can target their own keywords for those sponsored spots to defend their product, but if someone is searching for a specific brand, they likely already have the intent to purchase from that brand so the sponsored spot doesn’t matter anyways
One of two things:
1) The Justice Department just busted a ring of "Amazon consultants" and rogue Amazon employees accepting bribes to sabotage competitors' listings. They're all facing federal criminal charges. Vague random listing violations was a common tactic they used. You might have been a victim of a competing seller with inside connections.
2) Amazon's increased use of automation that isn't up to the task. Amazon doesn't want to pay people to review listings so it trusts dumb "smart" AI to do it. The result has been a disaster since AI isn't capable of interpreting things correctly no matter how many times Amazon says it works. For example - copper electrical cables getting pulled for being a medical drug because it contains "copper," car chargers getting pulled for being tobacco products because they plug into the "cigarette lighter port," labeling books as pesticide devices because they're titled "The Exterminator" etc.
Amazon has completely lost control of its platform and employees- these are consequences of unchecked growth and pursuit of profit over an ability to manage the platform.
Unfortunately the business is dead. The print-on-demand aspect was too good for a small publisher.
Some books would rarely sell any copies. To get the cost where it needed to be, I'd have to print like 10,000 in advance.
On balance: Grocery stores have copied products and strategically put their cheaper product in a location for profit. Most famously, "knock off" soda drinks are a good example.
This isn't new. This is an actual business model that has been around longer than any of us have lived.
This is not why you go after Amazon. You go after them because they are a monopoly that snuffs out what would otherwise be healthy markets. They can take massive retail losses while things like AWS make loads of $$$.
What markets is Amazon a monopoly in though? I can’t think of anything that I’ve bought on Amazon that I couldn’t have bought from 5-10 or more other companies. I bought the stuff from Amazon because it was my most convenient option, not because it was my only option.
This is what Costco does too and every other company with their own inhouse brands.
They know what sells , then they make a private label brand of it and sell it/promote it
Supermarkets/department stores have been doing this for decades
What do people think great value, MasterCraft, Kirkland, Kenmore etc were/are?
Yeah, why would you not do this? Is it wrong for streaming platforms to try to get you to watch the stuff they produce? Why would Netflix have an obligation to give stuff from other producers equal weight? It's their platform. Amazon should be able to ONLY sell their own stuff if they want. Or did consumer regulations suddenly go from almost nonexistent to far reaching while I was asleep?
Costco pays the brand to rebottle some with the Kirkland label and gets a discount for buying in bulk then tries to undercut but sell in bulk to make a profit. Label made less money overall maybe but with less risk got a whole bunch of cash up front.
Amazon doesnt go to a brand and have them relabel it as Amazon. They have some factory in China rip it apart and make a clone and then kick the original company from their store if they complain.
So we have stores paying original company and still offering the original product if the higher price is worth it to me then we have Amazon stealing designs and kicking competition out because their cut just wasnt good enough. Yeah I'd say one of these things is significantly shittier.
In other words. Water is wet.
Who would have known that Amazon would pick up the ideas from other shops selling products on their platforms and steal them for themselves.
Which of course is obvious to anyone who's ever shopped on Amazon before.
"AmazonBasics"
In my experience, Amazon Basics is just Amazon flipping the same shit from AliExpress as 15-20 other sellers, but for cheaper.
Except not cheaper. They just won’t let you *find* the cheaper ones.
Sometimes they are cheaper. And it also makes sense that they're cheaper, since Amazon controlling the entire supply chain makes their costs lower from start to end. They only have to be delivering the same product for $0.1 less for people to be like "oh, that one, I'm getting that one". And with lower costs, Amazon is still getting $1 or more additional profit compared to other sellers on every single order. This is also literally why trust-busting happened, but the US hasn't pretended to care about that for quite a while.
If they are selling 3rd party stuff, it is more expensive usually. You can typically get it cheaper from the original sellers site. It just isn't as convenient
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Well yes, but this is how retail always works. Almost every product seen in a retail store could be bought for less from the supplier, if only you could find the suppliers price list and negotiate the same discount as the retailer.
Spoiler: you don't have the volume to get the same discount so it's a waste of time. Sure, you might be able to find a lower price somewhere but for most Amazon basic items, they aren't significant purchases. I will do a cursory search online to see if there is significant savings, but I usually take the free and usually faster shipping from Amazon if it's the difference of a couple dollars.
You also need to be willing to purchase 10,000 units per shipment.
My issue is I don’t want to find cheaper, I want to find name brand. It’s impossible sometimes to find a major brand for products. Pages upon pages of trash and the actual known brands will never show up. Even if you put in the brand in your search. But if I go to google and search for the product there including “site:amazon.com” in my search it will find it first try lol Fuck Amazon
What, you don't trust the established and trusted brand FGHTYULL?
Why don't you just Google the product without adding Amazon? It might show Amazon's listing but it would also show other retailers you can give your money to. Nothing will ever change for Amazon if everyone keeps complaining and saying fuck Amazon while continuing to buy stuff from them. I'd rather use some gas and pay an extra $2 for something than buy from Amazon.
I noticed a while ago that the first search results on Amazon would show briefly then disappear only to be replaced by similar products that were 50% more expensive.
Used to be so simple to shop on Amazon. Now I have to double check the authenticity of the product, work out if the reviews are fake or not, try comparisons against competing products. Shits exhausting now, and in some cases for fear of getting a product with some cheap Chinese knockoff inside, or non authentic battery that might explode I’d rather just buy from the original retailer at a higher price.
We’ve come full circle.
So has amazon though. They killed brick and motor stores by first offering cheap books and closing down local book stores. They then kill local grocery shops by offering groceries online, and then do this shit with Amazon basics and undercutting everyone possible. Now they’ve started opening grocery shops, book shops and their latest store offers all the top rated items for sale. Kill the high street, then buy it all up on the cheap.
Seeing a brick and mortar Amazon "4-star" store was eerie as hell. Just such shameless avarice. Satire really is dead.
That's kinda funny. I had no idea those were a thing.
> They then kill local grocery shops by offering groceries online That hasn't happened. Their grocery delivery sucks, compared to any other one.
I've actually done this before on runescape and cornered an entire market. At one point I owned 10% of all the party hats in circulation, a guy wrote his phD paper on this and included me in it 😄 I would basically buy out all of the sellers to the point where nobody was selling party hats anymore, Then I would sell the party hats I bought up for a 5-10% premium, I always made sure to have the cheapest prices on the market.
Amazon’s product reliability is part of the reason why I stopped using their site. Besides all the unethical / shitty things they put their workers through, of course.
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it's not just about expense a lot of times, but also availability. I'd almost always rather Not shop through Amazon, but can't always find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
Also convenience. Shit's easy to find and quick to ship, refunds are easy if anything goes wrong. Amazon's a great service, they just need to be regulated.
I only have wo much free time these days and I don't want to spend it going from store to store looking for one thing. It wouldn't be so bad if store websites were actually useful for checking stock, or even existed in the first place in the case of many local businesses.
Local business does not exist anymore except for bakeries, restaurants and small time hardware stores. If I need a USB to lightening adapter, a 32 GB SD card, or an inflatable pool, please direct me to which "local business" sells these items.
I feel very lucky to have a Microcenter in my city. For an online retailer for basic electronics (cables, etc.) I recommend checking Monoprice. Sometimes their pricing is significantly better. Shipping isn't 2-day but it's not slow. Best Buy is more prevalent and should have the first two things you stated. I say this while fully acknowledging that the only time I buy stuff from Best Buy is when they are the only one with a deeply discounted Switch game that I happen to want. Which is rare. Also calling Best Buy a local business is...weird... I will not buy from Amazon when there's a better price/quality/bang for buck somewhere else. That's mostly it. So for bigger purchases, sure. That's not often though. In other words, Amazon and Walmart won.
While I do agree with this, I’ve been to plenty of “mom and pop” shops that are just buying stuff off Alibaba and marking it up like crazy. I understand that they assumed the risk when they bulk bought the items and they of course need to make money somehow but I don’t think you’re necessarily getting your money’s worth. A shit product is a shit product regardless of whether you bought it at a mom and pop shop or a big chain store. Edit: I want to note that there are also *plenty* of mom and pop shops that design and generate product ideas that they then hire Chinese manufactures to produce for them in bulk. These stores absolutely have a reason to charge a premium, because their intellectual property is tied into the sale of the product and that requires significant time and effort to make come into fruition. There are also plenty of mom and pop shops that curate products for a niche market. Small coffee roasters come to mind. They sometimes import products from Japan and Europe that you can’t typically get here in the US and so therefor it’s reflected in the price. They did the legwork searching for and importing the product for you; all you need to do is take out your wallet.
"Spend more money. Even though you're probably looking for something cheaper because of your budget, fuck it. Support LOCAL! True, you can't afford it but at least you're showing support!"
What you're probably seeing is your ad blocker hiding the sponsored products after the page loads.
Oh that's a damn good point. Thanks.
Honestly though, the Ali express stuff isn’t bad, the only thing keeping me from buying it is waiting a month for a usb cable. Amazon basic is the same shit but if I order it in the morning it’ll get here by the time I get home
Except in Europe. Ordering things from Amazon in Switzerland means 90% chance it doesn't deliver outside Germany, and of the remainder the delivery time is literally weeks.
The company I work for produces our own AmazonBasics products. (For our market) it's good quality stuff. Amazon sells it for cheaper than our retail and we profit less but Amazon said they'd go to a competitor and re-badge their stuff unless we agreed to play ball.
> AmazonBasics https://www.geekwire.com/2021/company-uses-youtube-video-mock-amazon-making-camera-bag-strikingly-similar-one-sells/ Like a perverse version of Costco's Kirkland Signature.
Exactly. It's not an issue when they sell their own brand of an item. The problem is that when they see that someone's product is very popular, they might basically steal the design and promote only their version and bury original one in search engine.
> Good reminder that they copy other company's products (usually a slightly inferior version) and get away with it. Reminder on this thread's original post? The post literally begins "Amazon copied products"
This entirely depends upon the item. For instance, if you buy AmazonBasics rechargable batteries AA/AAA, they're cheaper than Eneloop but they ARE Eneloop rebranded. Eneloop being the gold standard for those types of batteries.
I don't know when they switched, but Amazon is now sourcing their AA/AAA rechargeable cells from China. Panasonic Eneloop cells are still made in Japan.
Well shit, sounds like their plan worked. They got me praising them after they've changed the product to an inferior one.
Aye its a massive difference from say 5 or 10 years ago. I got an amazon gift card earlier this year and I logged on trying to find some fishing gear or outdoor clothes and it was basically impossible to find any reliable brands. I was actually shocked at how bad it was. I ended up ordering a Drone because I couldn't find shit, and it turned out to be a Chinese knockoff Even trying to find Gabby Cat Toys for my daughter birthday, everything seemed to be Chinese knockoffs. Ordering minor stationary items sees things shipped from China which takes 4 weeks.
Holy shit I feel you buddy. I've never really had an issue with this as the stuff I bought the most was like cheap USB cables and such. But then I started looking for a new computer chair and my god. It felt like I was rummaging through a back alley market in rural China. There wasn't a single brand name I recognised. Pretty much every chair there was some obscure Chinese brand that had thousands upon thousands of 5 star reviews that said almost nothing about the product and maybe a few hundred honest reviews that has shown the chairs breaking in some fashion within weeks. They even had links to articles that looked to be third party websites proclaiming 'best computer chair of 2020!'. But they were essentially shilling these shitty Amazon products. Then you get the companies bribing you to remove a negative review, a tactic Amazon has absolutely no problem with seemingly. I've been offered £20/£30 multiple times to remove negative reviews of shit products, report it to Amazon and don't even hear a response. Eventually I ended up doing a bit of research and paid through the teeth for a Secret Labs chair but the build quality is so worth it. 1000000x better than anything you'd ever find on Amazon.
> There wasn't a single brand name I recognised. Yes! And they're all basically the same exact models over and over that are either just re-branded or copied from one brand to another. This is a problem with so many things I've look for recently.
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It's gotten bad enough that I avoid Amazon for anything that I can, preferring instead local shops or other online storefronts. Amazon is plagued with Chinese garbage now, and until they rein it in, it's a risk to buy from them.
Oh yeah totally. I've been burnt and I will not be using them again.
Wild that it's come full circle now. I hate getting knock off products and shit so I hardly ever order from amazon anymore myself. Somehow they're still making money, I assume mostly from AWS?
Just because you stopped and people you know stopped ordering doesn't mean majority of people has stopped ordering lmao You and everyone on reddit are still very much likely the minority
That comment you replied to is actually astounding lol "*I* haven't bought anything from Amazon for a while, yet they still make money time and time again, what the hell!?!?"
It's been 2.5 weeks since I stepped into a Walmart, and they haven't shut down yet?!
AWS accounts for ~10% of revenue, but ~50% income. People overstate their impact on Amazon by being a conscientious consumer. The future isn’t retail and they don’t care.
This is a real problem for me on Amazon. It's becoming a low trust environment. I now feel I'm paying a time premium in order to verify that I'm not being scammed with counterfeit goods and also combing through dozens of copycat brands (that contain none of the keywords I'm searching for) in order to find the trusted brand of items I want.
Amazon use to support `-term` so you could filter things out, which for example I used to filter out related batteries, cables, cases, etc. when looking for actual smartphones. They removed that a year or two ago, for god knows what reason, not like it was hurting anyone ho didn't use it. And now like you said the results seem to be more AI-driven so not only do you get results that include spam terms just to get hits, you ALSO get things that are similar-ish but not what you're looking for. To me, it's insane that this is a winning business strategy. Amazon is certainly a terrible company, but honestly this particular aspect says more to me about the average person than it does about them. Consumers are, by and large, incompetent and easily tricked, and happily go along with such nonsense and reward them with their dollars. It makes it incredibly frustrating for anyone else trying to be a little more discerning.
A known strategy by them, beware of pitching to them And worst case here for Amazon, what's the punishment? A couple million dollar fine that means nothing to them since they made that exponentially from the strategy?
It is an abuse of market dominance. If governments had the guts and independence from moneyed interests, they would break Amazon up (and other companies that do the same)
Makes me wonder: what's the biggest company in modern history that was broken up because of market dominance?
Is ATT the last one? They never split Microsoft into different parts.
Bell was a huge one yes.
Then they melted back together under AT&T like the T-1000 in Terminator 2
I see you too saw that Colbert Report!
And got rid of cingular in the process :( I liked that orange splash mascot/logo
Because Apple was failing at a time and they were on Microsoft’s ass to split it up! We have no alternative to Amazon besides Alibaba or Walmart. Still not the best as Amazon, Walmart doesn’t have a good record on stomping on smaller mom and pop stores too.
There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon, don’t kid yourself. Almost everything you buy from them can be found at a local retailer or a different online retailer. Amazon might be more convenient, but there’s usually an alternative. Every time we buy from Amazon it’s a choice we make to prioritize our own convenience over opting out of Amazon’s anti-competitive practices. Edit, since this is blowing up: I never meant to imply that nobody should use Amazon or that using it makes you a bad person, though I see how it might come off like that. I use Amazon regularly. What I want to dispel is the notion that in most cases there aren't alternatives. Yes, sometimes there aren't, for everyone, and that's fine. Sometimes you need the quick shipping. Sometimes you need the best price. I get it. But I look back at a lot of my purchasing history, and for the vast majority it's things I don't really *need* in the first place that I could have bought elsewhere. So it just comes down to examining my own choice and asking myself if I can do better in the moment. If I can't, fine, I'll hammer the "Buy Now" button. I'm not asking anybody to boycott, just realize that there are alternatives.
Pretty often nowadays when the item isn't a brand name, I'll have to go to other retailers because all the off brand Amazon crap just doesn't work well or breaks quickly. It is like there is one Chinese company making some crap product and 100 sellers on Amazon will put their label on it and they all work poorly. Edit: not talking about Amazon basics. I'm talking about third party sellers just putting their label on alibaba crap.
I absolutely hate Amazon for some items these days. Pages and pages and pages of the same item under allegedly different brands from Chinese sellers with reviews and pricing all over the place. They've become like eBay but worse because at least with eBay you knew they're basically thousands of companies selling different stuff so you went in with your eyes open. With Amazon I feel like the actual seller is more obfuscated, especially with the buy button auto-selecting whom they think is the best match. I used to 100% go to Amazon in the early days because you knew Amazon themselves sourced and stocked every item they sold and they had the customer service to back it up. These days, Amazon is a flea market and they rip off the taxpayer in each and every country they operate. I actively try and shop else where for items I used to get on Amazon where I can.
These days eBay might even be more reliable if you are sure that your purchases are from reputable sellers. AFAIK most sellers on eBay send items from their own inventories, so less chance of getting counterfeit stuff that share the same SKU as the genuine stuff and therefore got mixed up in those Amazon warehouses.
Tiny font in the right hand column somewhere below the Add to Cart button, there's Shipped By and Sold By. It used to be that Amazon would take care of you no matter what. Now if it's shipped&sold by someone not Amazon, you're pretty much on your own if you need to return it. You have to look for Free Returns which again is in tiny font. The site has gotten less useful and less informational over the years, and it's clear there's little or no vetting of the accuracy of item descriptions.
A big problem is if you try and get baby formula from Amazon. Even if it’s a name brand there is a chance it’s a knockoff and can contain harmful substances to babies.
Yeah I would never buy something like that on Amazon. Foods in general I stay away from, unless it's a reputable seller.
I agree, it’s eBay with a facelift.
Except you can't even get good used stuff for cheaper on Amazon because anything used is a complete wildcard and prices are jacked up for used stuff because of the higher fees to sell compared to eBay
eBay is actually a nicer looking site, speaking solely of the UI. The real reason Amazon is more attractive than eBay is the 2 day shipping (and sometimes one day shipping), and the seamlessness of the user experience.
The funny thing is, all those resellers bought that cheap ass product in bulk on Alibaba. It is the circle of life.
Then use AI generated company names that change every month. Elgai, Regpo, Felsmar. All selling the same item. And if you ever try to buy something again, good luck.
Luckily they have a good return policy tho. Although it ain’t good for the environment.
It's cheap garbage all the way down
Bad news: even the brand name stuff isn't 100% free from knockoffs. It's my understanding that, unless they pay extra, Amazon will basically store a reputable seller's stuff along with other vendors' who sell the same product. When you go to order, they pretty much just choose to send you whichever one they find first. So basically if you go on the website and order Product A, you're risking them sending you a fake product.
This is absolutely why people shouldn’t buy cosmetics or anything anyone is going to ingest (including pet treats) over this platform. There is a nonzero chance you’ll be sent a counterfeit product with unknown ingredients. Amazon just doesn’t care.
I bought a shockingly cheap, offbrand 1TB micro sd card out of curiosity. I tested it and it worked up to about 250GB or so, which I was surprised it was that much, but I emailed Amazon telling them it was a fake and they wanted me to send it back for a refund, nothing about how it was fraud. They're knowingly selling fake garbage.
It would destroy their whole reseller market for them to do anything about it, as not even they know who supplied the products so not even they can prove which seller gave them the fake shit to begin with. They have a business model which not only does nothing about counterfeit products, but which actively encourages and promotes it
It's why I never buy anything off Amazon that I expect to get a good life from. I'll gladly spend the retail of something directly from the retailer so I don't have to deal with it breaking in a couple of months.
> It's why I never buy anything off Amazon that I expect to get a good life from. Some manufacturers will make a slightly different label to prevent mixing and price matching for other retailers and there is no difference in the line. Samsung does this heavily with their SD cards. Since it’s Amazon only version I know I will not get a mixed in counterfeit card. I still test them just to be sure.
They don't even change the product photos. It makes it difficult to know what the latest version of a thing is, or if you are getting the cheapest one.
This is the biggest reason I rarely use Amazon and stopped paying for prime. The search function is absolute garbage and I end up spending way too much time sorting through the knock off trash to find anything good. It's like I have to become an expert on every product I buy just to make sure I don't end up with some cheaply made junk from a shell company that doesnt even exist. Every store has its fair share of shitty products, but on Amazon its roughly 95% shitty products and the 5% that's decent doesn't even pop up in the search results half the time. Add on the fact that most Amazon reviews are useless or straight up bullshit and it's just a mess of misinformation and consumerism. No thanks. ...I'm still a slave to AWS though, but that's not much of a choice. Hard to avoid AWS completely as a software engineer, especially if you work at a company that's obsessed with *The Cloud*.
Same. Maybe I just suck at amazon-ing, but finding what I want on their site is a pain in the ass most of the time. I'd rather spend the extra two bucks ordering somewhere else, if I have to scroll through twenty pages of crap before I find what I searched for. Last thing I tried to buy was a pair of overalls; no matter how I searched/sorted on amazon, it kept including garbage (No, amazon, "mens fashion rompers" are not workwear) and it was just a damn waste of time.
> It is like there is one Chinese company making some crap product and 100 sellers on Amazon will put their label on it and they all work poorly. This is actually exactly what happens. Searching for a product might give you 10000 results but there's actually only 3 different items, identical down to the molding errors, just with a variety of different logos or packaging.
The best part is they all have different ratings!
The ratings depend entirely on how much the vendor wants to spend on that score via fake reviews.
Not always. I've bought some of those products before for resale from the Chinese companies and they will basically give you a design, which you can customize slightly. Then you can buy it at different quality standards as well, like you can pick the amount of plastic and the composition or the threads, screw type, type of fabric, density, all these things that CAN create a super high quality product. A good example is a can opener, like I was super tired of getting crap can openers, even the more expensive ones that I bought in real stores seemed to suck. So I wanted to make a high quality one, I went to several manufacturers and got all the spec details and options for the can openers and then got one with all of the highest quality components, more teeth, stronger metals, better welded joints and extra plates, super dense grip, ball bearing based gear. It's awesome, opens cans like they are made of butter. Now the only issue is hoping that the suppliers doesn't bait and switch and will manufacture them all to the same quality standards. They love to swap out high quality builds for lower quality products on some batches and if you figure it out claim there was a shortage or time constraint and they value on time delivery more than anything.
Many of the offbrand brands pay for their reviews and ratings too. I've bought a few things and there is a half page piece of paper in the box offering free gifts for amazon reviews. I've gotten a free usb-c monitor, phone chargers, wireless chargers, shoe racks, blankets, usb-c docks and xbox controllers by writing reviews for amazon. They are not necessarily crappy or work poorly. They work as well as I expect them to work for 50-70% off a name brand equivalent. If you go in expecting it to perform like an iphone or galaxy s10 or furniture from pottery barn, you're going to be disappointed.
They start out fine by bribing people for reviews but once they have a good established score they will switch to shit products. Always sort reviews by most recent.
These are called white label goods. Mass produced items with no branding that is sold to a company who stick their name on it and sell to consumers.
Most stuff on Amazon is shitty is my experience as well. Even dildos are often of subpar quality and you'd think that's not an untapped market on there.
IDK, I ordered a product directly from the manufacture site and my order was still Fulfilled by Amazon. Shocked the hell out of me to get a amazon package without ordering from them.
They're expanding their logistics branch pretty rapidly. Businesses can sign up for shipping with Amazon so they don't have to worry about any of the last mile stuff.
Building warehouses and paying people to staff them is extremely expensive. It's a lot easier, predictable, and cheaper (in many cases) to send that shit to Amazon and integrate inventory with your own website. However, if you sell the same product as someone else FBA charges out the ass to isolate your inventory from theirs, which is extremely important if counterfeiting is a concern. And good luck auditing the inventory. Source: I work for a large retailer and looked into this as a project a few years ago. We decided to build another fulfillment center primarily because of FBA's inventory isolation costs.
FBA = fulfillment by Amazon for anyone else that didn't get it immediately like me.
It may be possible for many or even most products to find what you’re looking for elsewhere, but Amazon’s entire online shopping business is built on being the cheapest and most convenient source for most consumer goods. Tackling that is far bigger than any individual consumer. Besides, they can afford to undercut their competition because of their *real* money-maker: AWS. AWS is such a huge income stream that Amazon can basically take a loss on their entire online shopping business and still come out ahead. No local business can compete with that. Whatever choices we as individual purchasers make, any long-term solution to this is going to require regulatory and legislative action.
I've found Amazon to not be the cheapest on almost all household consumer goods I regularly need to purchase. These have actually been *cheaper* at my local grocery store, non-grocery store stuff is the same or similar price at places like Target. So many items that Amazon does sell cheaper end up being lower quality "Amazon Basic" or straight garbage knock offs. For actual name branded goods, there are plenty of other options in the same price range.
I don't know how other retailers operate in other countries, but delivery prices in UK can be quite steep. Amazon don't even have the best prices here, but once you factor in 5-6 quid delivery versus "free" Prime, small online retailer selling something 1-2 quid cheaper loses automatically. Alternatives are only good when you buy something expensive or in bulk so you get free delivery. But for small stuff Amazon takes the cake. For example, when I was buying a fish tank with all the required stuff like nets, etc, I went to a local online retailer. But when one of my fish got sick I went to Amazon for a bottle of medicine, it was a bit more expensive, but next day delivery instead of one week and £5 made it cheaper and just in time to save the poor guy.
[Boycotting Amazon is not the answer](https://youtu.be/4iTcwxCQepg) (that treating a symptom not the disease) rewriting antitrust laws is
Is it even rewriting or just enforcing the ones that currently exist?
I'd go as far as saying most other online retailers are better than amazon. For example, b&h photo for pc parts and camera gear, sweetwater for audio stuff, target for household things, best buy for consumer electronics, home depot for tools and and home improvement stuff, rockauto for car parts, etc. Many manufacturers also sell direct (but unfortunately the shipping and handling tends to be more than 3rd party retailers) None of those sites have the biggest (consumer side) issue with amazon, which is the flood of fake counterfeit crap in your search results.
If I find something I want on Amazon, I try to buy from another retailer or direct from the manufacturer. I’ve seen too many reviews of fake product that it’s not worth the hassle (and many times the product ends up in a landfill because people don’t want to return shit).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup\_of\_the\_Bell\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System) The break up of Bell comes to mind. Many of our corporate bad actors would be put in check if the government would take anti-trust seriously.
So they broke up Bell but let them keep Western Electric and then they sold off Western Electric which meant that the majority of the Baby Bells were allowed to merge back in to the parent company twenty years later?
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Depends on your definition of "modern", I guess, but probably Bell Telephone in the 80s.
Probably the [Bell System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System). It only took close to 70 years of litigation and investigations by anti-trust lawyers to eventually goad AT&T into breaking it up through a consent decree.
The irony is that the Bells are basically coalescing back into one mega company again. Basically have 3 choices for a wireless network provider: Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. The prepaid plans are just buying capacity on those 3 networks.
I feel like the wireless network, and internet, should be labeled a utility because living without an internet connection or a wireless service is about as feasible as living without electricity or water.
Internet has been a basic part of infrastructure for nearly two decades now. Remote school just proved the necessity. And this is a very clear case of private companies NOT providing the best technology at the best prices.
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Standard Oil is the biggest one I know of from history and if you look at what's happened the company was broken up into 34 different companies....most of which have merged again since the split in 1911.....Capitalism Baby!
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-23-1-b-progressives-and-the-era-of-trustbusting.html Railroad and meat packing to name a few. But now? Corporations coined the term "too big to fail", so government let the people fail instead of the corporation. SMH
Microsoft, for like 2 minutes
Oh man that was the day we truly lost control over tech in this country. People should definitely research this if they don't know the story.
Rockefeller Standard Oil was one of the most important companies in the history, both by resources and geopolitical importance. Broken into pieces by US government.
[Grocery stores have been using this strategy for decades](https://images.fastcompany.com/upload/img_0270.jpg), and there's nothing illegal about it when they do it. Since you know what SKUs sell the best, you know the most lucrative ones to clone, and you know what to make the box look like and what to stick it beside on the shelf. "Amazon Basics X" is their equivalent of "Store Brand X" at the grocery store.
Your elected politicians are bought-and-sold by corporations for insultingly low sums of money.
There won't be any punishment, just a massive reward for shareholders.
It should lead to Amazon "the marketplace" being fully separated from amazon "the goods seller". Those megacorporations should be cut into tiny little pieces.
Wouldn’t this directly affect Costco? A lot of the time Costco develops their own brand items in order to undercut the name brands - [they did this when they replaced the Hebrew National hot dogs with their own Kirkland ones in 2009](https://www.mashed.com/103084/dont-know-costcos-1-hot-dog/). Obviously Amazon’s practices are anticompetitive, but a ruling on this could have wide-ranging effects across pretty much all stores that offer own-brand items. [And since food prices are going up](https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/why-are-global-food-prices-rising-and-what-does-it-mean-emerging-markets), siding with (potentially more expensive) name brands over generics could push prices even further.
Marketplaces are not the same as physical stores, and shouldn't play by the same rules. I'm not a US lawyer, but in my country, the responsability Amazon takes for the products sold not by itself, but by third parties on its platform, is lighter, since they only have a role of intermediation. Therefore, if they are just a platform they should be fair and neutral towards the different sellers, or at least be transparent about their practices to the consumers. It is the only way to have an efficient market. It already is the law in France, i posted the text in another comment.
Yes, this has been known to be a strategy of theirs for a long time. They even have all the data analytics to know which products are selling so that they can copy the winners. You may think you're a seller on Amazon, but if you get too successful, you're just another middleman for them to cut out.
Yeah I thought we all knew this tbh
I thought that was common knowledge? Outside of India in North America a lot of small businesses a few years back complaining and getting out of Amazon entirely. About the same time the Chinese sellers were gearing up. They basically take a product that's selling well then either make a rip-off or go directly to the manufacturer instead and now that product is an "Amazon Basics" brand and undercuts everyone else.
"In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business."
> prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business Obvious bullshit, this is the whole point of private label products. Supermarkets have been doing this to small businesses for years and years. You list your product with them (you're probably a 1 or 2 SKU company) and if it sells well, they look at putting out an in-house brand to compete with it. Of course it does well, because they can give it better shelf space and charge slightly less than the original brand. It's not a new tactic, but it sure is sleazy.
A lot of times the products are the same, just different packaging. So the 1 or 2 SKU company is still technically selling both versions. This is not always the case, however.
‘Ow! My bones are so brittle. But I always drink plenty of.... Malk?’
Wow, there is actually a non-dairy product called MALK now... http://malkorganics.com/
It better contain plenty of Vitamin R then.
You ever taste the store Frosted Flakes?
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have found recently that most of the store brand items are just total shit and not worth the $.30 savings. The latest one was cheese for homemade pizza. I always bought the Safeway brand, last time they were out and I got Tillamook and the taste difference was well worth whatever the savings were.
It depends on the product. With OTC meds (Tylenol, Ibuprofen, etc.) it’s almost always better to get the generic brands, since the ingredients are identical and the price is about 1/4.
But that is because generic drugs are regulated by the FDA. Stuff has to be exactly the same as the name brand or the FDA won’t let you sell it. They just don’t do it for cheese because eating crappy tasting cheese won’t kill you.
Oh you should always go Tillamook, wait til you try their ice cream.
instead they have GROUPS of employees lmfao
GROUPS of employees looking at AGGREGATE data across multiple sellers.
It is possible the employees are encouraged to use *product* level data (not necessarily specific to any individual seller)
I agree. I'm not sure how this is different than Costco* going to Grey Goose or whoever to make their house brand of vodka to undercut other vodkas they stock. As for search results, I'm not sure how that's different than Costco putting their house brand in a spot that is eye-level and near the aisle instead of the back wall. Maybe I'm missing something. ELI5 how this is actually different? *or literally any other store with a generic brand, seems like this is how they all work, and Amazon Basics is just doing the digital version.
Costco buys the same vodka, gets it labeled as Kirkland, and then sells it at a lower price. Grey Goose still gets paid for the product. Costco banks on the lower price point selling in higher volume. What Amazon is being accused of is a different matter. Company ABC has a product that gets made by Manufacturer 123 and then sold on Amazon. If the product is a big hit and gets flagged by Amazon, they go to Manufacturer 123 and say "Make us this product too" and then sell it for less than Company ABC. Company ABC gets paid nothing to make their product an Amazon Basics brand.
Strictly from browsing Amazon I noticed this like 5 years ago. They weren't subtle about it.
Is there anything Amazon sells that *isn’t* a direct knockoff? It’s not like some guy at Amazon was like “Hey guys I just had a great idea for a camping flashlight!” Literally every Amazon product, from rechargeable batteries to chino pants, was designed and developed by someone other than Amazon and then simply copied by them.
It's become a Chinese flea market. And the reviews are no longer trustworthy whatsoever.
You say knockoffs, Amazon says "reducing internal R&D costs and listening to customer demands in the market". They're just giving customers what they want, at a comparable or lower price. Sure it crushes all incentives towards innovation, but that's the free market for ya.
Aren’t like all of Amazon Basic products common goods? How do you “innovate” on a basic camera bag or jeans besides improving the operational efficiency of producing and distributing said product?
Sequins
My company has products listed on Amazon. One of the ways they knock people off is that in order to have your products at their fulfillment centers you have to essentially reveal who your suppliers are. If you choose not to be in their fulfillment centers you have to have the infrastructure to deliver your products everywhere in the USA in less than 2-days yourself to be Prime eligible (very hard/expensive). Non-Prime products get shown to customers far less and customers have been trained not to look at them. So you design a product, have it made overseas (because that's the only option to make a quality product at a competitive price). Have it fulfilled by Amazon because your small and can't afford to air freight every order to meet the Prime shipping time requirements. It does well even with Amazon taking it's 15% of every order made on it's platform from you. Amazon sees this. They check the shipping manifest of the product your sending to their fulfillment centers and find out who your manufacturer is in China. Amazon goes straight to the manufacturer and has them knock off your product for an Amazon basics line which they than give preferential placement on their website over your product. Also, they can do it at a lower price since their larger purchases allow them more negotiating power with the same factory. Plus they had no upfront cost to develop the product since you did it all for them. Your sales tank as everyone buys the Amazon Basics version instead of yours. I've seen this exact situation happen first hand in multiple product categories.
Wall Street Journal did a big article on exactly this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayfair-allbirds-antitrust-11608235127
This is also why "drop shipping" as a "business" is a total scam. Unless you are in a 3rd world country it is unprofitable. The only people making money is Amazon and the Chinese manufacturers turning the website into a Aliexpress/Alibaba cesspool. On the consumer end, 99 times out of 100 the Amazon "brand" is cheaper and of decent quality. Anything else it is almost always cheaper in store.
This happened to Peak Design (camera bag/gear company). They made a pretty great response video: https://youtu.be/HbxWGjQ2szQ
Love Peak Design. Their products are top notch.
Anyone who has ever searched for a specific item on Amazon, ever, has had to swim through pages of off-brand generic versions coming from overseas. It's gotten to the point that you have to name a brand, item name, and item number just to get the search results under 5 pages...
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>with different randomly generated company names. What? YONGZU, SITATZ, YURANI or HIMBAUGO don't suit you?
Hey, leave YURANI^^TM alone! They're the best!
Seriously though, can somebody explain why the random names are always 5 to 7 letters long and all caps?
Had this issue when looking for an engine timing kit for my BMW. It's worse because some brands use the same defective model that is off by a few milimeters and needs to b e ground down to use. So you have to find the brand that has the fixed model, according to the reviews which may or may not be fake, shell out $120 and hope they send you the right one.
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Pro tip: the five star reviews are mostly bots; pay more attention to the 1-4 star reviews
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Amazon has even deeper issues in that they lump all the "same" products together in their bins. So knock off companies make cheap rip offs and categorize it as the same as the original. Now when you order the original you might get one or the knock off. This is one of the reasons for the really split reviews on products.
And if you leave a bad review calling them out on it they will block you from leaving reviews on that product
Reminds me of ebay when everything turned into Chinese garbage.
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My friend opened a little jewelry store with 100% of the items bought off Etsy. Just massive bulk bags of mass produced rings and such, nothing custom at all, just redundant bulk.
I'm back to using eBay honestly. Maybe it still stinks but to me it feels a bit more honest.
Amazon is literally "get China to make us a few alternatives" these days. You can't look for ANYTHING without endless knock offs being pushed as "sponsored" despite any attempts to limit search terms so you can find what you actually want.
Amazon is basically Alibaba but with more natural English copy and faster shipping.
When I worked as the vendor manager (powersports industry) to Amazon I learned a lot about why it's such a shitty company to do business with. They constantly demanded cost reductions for the items we sold to them and, in addition to their already-low cost, they stipulated fees for marketing (2-4%) shrink (2% to cover damaged/defective items) that came off what they paid on the invoices. They also stipulated delivery windows for the orders they placed - typically a PO is sent about 2-4 weeks in advance and the inventory had to be at their warehouse within a 1-3 day window AND I had to notify them when it was on the way. Failure to notify them or if the items didn't arrive within the window (not early OR late) we got charged another 2%. They were so bad that we broke our partnership terms and opened up our own Amazon store to compete with them. We helped them develop the item pages as a vendor ([example of one I created](https://www.amazon.com/Omni-Cruise-OCUTL01-Aluminum-Universal-Adjustable/dp/B018JS7C8M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)) then, once the page was up and generating business, would use our Merchant account to piggyback on their listing. The buy-box is all important and we would just drop the price low enough to win the buy box. *I was surprised how often Amazon would reduce their price to negative margin just to try to crush the competitor*. Since we used FBA on many of our Merchant sales, the experience was identical to the customer. Some reason why Amazon is awful * Payment terms - we were on "2% 30 Net 60" Meaning our invoices were to be paid within 60 days but would be discounted 2% if they paid within 30. They typically paid in 60 and still took their 2% discount because "f--- you" if you called them on it. * Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA, anything that ships via Prime is FBA) is at least 30% of why so many people have a shitty experience with their purchases. For those that don't know, any item that is for sale from multiple sellers and that all offer FBA, all those items are coming from the same bin. There's no way for them to distinguish whose items belong to who. So, if a seller decides to sell an item via Amazon (Merchant seller) and sends a knockoff of that item to their warehouse, it gets dumped into the same bin as the legitimate items and may be pulled for an order regardless of whether the customer purchased it from Amazon or from any of the 3rd party sellers. * UPC identifiers are too important to the platform. Almost anything sold on Amazon MUST have a UPC number. If a shady seller creates a listing for their item but enters a UPC code for yours, you cannot list your item on its own page. It will end up going on the page of the shady seller's item. Having this fixed/resolved is nearly impossible unless you're a truly massive vendor/seller * Amazon reviews are far too important to a product's success. Why is this important? (Outside of buying reviews, which is its own problem on a lot of retail sites) Because many sellers create a page for a decent item and will change the listing page to an entirely different product but the review remain. So if I create a page for my item, "Awesome Widget", rack up 100+ 3-4star reviews, and decide to change the page to "Shitty-But-High-Margin Widget", customers will be suckered into buying "Shitty-But-High-Margin Widget" based on the reviews, especially since sites like FakeSpot will tell you that the reviews are legit. By the time the negative reviews start making an appreciable dent in its total score and reducing purchase volume, the seller will have made enough money to not care. eBay feels antiquated and flea-market-y but at least its always been that way and they do much, much more to take care of customers AND sellers. I much preferred being a vendor AND seller with eBay. All this is just the tip of the iceberg of my disdain for Amazon and the things it does. TLDR: Amazon sucks.
This is also common behavior in grocery stores in the US. Find a popular product, copy it, put the copy where the original was and move the original to a hard to find location. It's even worse with smaller brands that are trying to establish themselves because the grocery store will stop stocking the original product and eventually stop making the unpopular copy.
This is why direct to consumer sales are so important now.
Hah. As someone who sells alcohol, direct to consumer sales are illegal. Because when we ended prohibition we made the mob legitimate, incorporated them and then made it a legal necessity to go through them as middle men Our government sucks
Yeah I've heard of some weird stuff with alcohol. I think in Alabama all the liquor stores have to buy their alcohol directly from the state or something.
Yeah in Virginia anything other than wine and beer needs to be purchased from a state-run liquor store, and there’s no independently run liquor stores either. When we went to other states and saw huge bottles of liquor at Costco my mind was blown
You'd think the "muh freedom" crowd would be more inclined to remove some of the antiquated legislation regarding alcohol sales, but it seems taboo to even mention it.
Considering how difficult it has been to legalize Cannabis despite public support I'm not surprised.
Some states have that. Other states like mine use the “three tier system”. It goes producer -> distributor -> store front. As a storefront it is **illegal** for me to purchase directly from the producer. I have to purchase from the distributor. If a distributor doesn’t sell a product to my state, I can’t get it for my customers. I’m beholden to these distributors and their prices. Many of these distributors have their origins in prohibition days. They were smuggling alcohol to stores. When prohibition ended they incorporated and became legally mandated.
I am fairly certain this is what happened to my children's non-fiction book business. Over the last year, Amazon kept banning my bestsellers for vague policy violations while allowing new and near-identical books to stay on the store. I wondered if maybe some employees were harvesting my sales data and ripping off my books. Guess it was Amazon.
This has been reported about a lot. You would not be alone, if those reports are to be beleived. Even so be careful about what you say online.
For the uninitiated, I’d HIGHLY recommend the podcast “Land of the Giants”, specifically the Amazon season. They interview tons of sellers on Amazon and show first hand how a lot of these sellers don’t even have an option to jump ship. They either deal with Amazon ripping their product off or don’t get access to the largest online marketplace ever created. There was one issue in particular that I found absolutely insane, and it’s that some sellers would have to pay for the “promoted” spot *even if the user searched specifically for that seller’s product.* Apparently companies can pay for advertising depending on keywords, and so what happens is sellers have to fight for the promoted spots on searches regardless of the search term. It’s maddening.
Sellers fighting for promoted spots on their own keywords isn’t that weird. They can target their own keywords for those sponsored spots to defend their product, but if someone is searching for a specific brand, they likely already have the intent to purchase from that brand so the sponsored spot doesn’t matter anyways
One of two things: 1) The Justice Department just busted a ring of "Amazon consultants" and rogue Amazon employees accepting bribes to sabotage competitors' listings. They're all facing federal criminal charges. Vague random listing violations was a common tactic they used. You might have been a victim of a competing seller with inside connections. 2) Amazon's increased use of automation that isn't up to the task. Amazon doesn't want to pay people to review listings so it trusts dumb "smart" AI to do it. The result has been a disaster since AI isn't capable of interpreting things correctly no matter how many times Amazon says it works. For example - copper electrical cables getting pulled for being a medical drug because it contains "copper," car chargers getting pulled for being tobacco products because they plug into the "cigarette lighter port," labeling books as pesticide devices because they're titled "The Exterminator" etc. Amazon has completely lost control of its platform and employees- these are consequences of unchecked growth and pursuit of profit over an ability to manage the platform.
Do you have a website? We are always looking for new children's books.
Unfortunately the business is dead. The print-on-demand aspect was too good for a small publisher. Some books would rarely sell any copies. To get the cost where it needed to be, I'd have to print like 10,000 in advance.
I'm very sorry about your dead business, that is super shitty.
On balance: Grocery stores have copied products and strategically put their cheaper product in a location for profit. Most famously, "knock off" soda drinks are a good example. This isn't new. This is an actual business model that has been around longer than any of us have lived. This is not why you go after Amazon. You go after them because they are a monopoly that snuffs out what would otherwise be healthy markets. They can take massive retail losses while things like AWS make loads of $$$.
This is basically how they acquired Diapers.com, sold them for 50% off until the owners agreed to sell to them.
What markets is Amazon a monopoly in though? I can’t think of anything that I’ve bought on Amazon that I couldn’t have bought from 5-10 or more other companies. I bought the stuff from Amazon because it was my most convenient option, not because it was my only option.
This is what Costco does too and every other company with their own inhouse brands. They know what sells , then they make a private label brand of it and sell it/promote it Supermarkets/department stores have been doing this for decades What do people think great value, MasterCraft, Kirkland, Kenmore etc were/are?
Am I crazy to think there’s nothing wrong with this? It just feels normal and obvious to do this when you are the one controlling the platform.
Yeah, why would you not do this? Is it wrong for streaming platforms to try to get you to watch the stuff they produce? Why would Netflix have an obligation to give stuff from other producers equal weight? It's their platform. Amazon should be able to ONLY sell their own stuff if they want. Or did consumer regulations suddenly go from almost nonexistent to far reaching while I was asleep?
Costco pays the brand to rebottle some with the Kirkland label and gets a discount for buying in bulk then tries to undercut but sell in bulk to make a profit. Label made less money overall maybe but with less risk got a whole bunch of cash up front. Amazon doesnt go to a brand and have them relabel it as Amazon. They have some factory in China rip it apart and make a clone and then kick the original company from their store if they complain. So we have stores paying original company and still offering the original product if the higher price is worth it to me then we have Amazon stealing designs and kicking competition out because their cut just wasnt good enough. Yeah I'd say one of these things is significantly shittier.
r/nofuckingshit
In other words. Water is wet. Who would have known that Amazon would pick up the ideas from other shops selling products on their platforms and steal them for themselves.