Do not fight Chinese sellers on Amazon. If they move into your category, just give up. They understand Amazon's system way better than 99.99% of non-Chinese sellers.
The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.:
* [easy to use]: blah blah blah
The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings.
My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.
They also commit a form of fraud that Amazon seems disinterested in fixing: they’ll take a listing with thousands of good reviews and comments and completely swap out the product.
I once tried to buy a pulse oximeter and all the reviews for the most popular one were about replacement bike tires.
That would be difficult to pull off without collusion with an insider doing an end run around the support platform. The support platform is heavily locked down (to a degree I've never seen with other retailers) and surveilled.
I think they are complicit. I've left reviews on products about how the 5 star reviews are for a different product (people uploaded photos in their reviews, which aren't for the current listing's product) and Amazon itself removed my reviews.
AMZN has no comprehension that the obvious fraud listings cause some people to think there must be other fraud listings too and make people less inclined to buy from AMZN.
I'd have to agree. There are so many levels of fraud and other violations (deceptive business practices) going on at that place.
Any other legitimate business would be taken to task for a quarter of what they are doing. Maybe they know they can get away with it because they have a blanket liability shield from the AWS contracts?
Yes, the products were horrible and I reviewed as such.
The reviews aren't ordered in a way that makes that obvious. You usually have to dig deep to find these. If you only look at the first page of reviews you are likely not going to see the photo reviews.
Amazon is not law enforcement. You should actually blame the government and disinterested services like police.
If someone created an online store like Amazon and essentially gave fraudsters free reign, they would be closed in no time, but this company is too big to fail and nobody seems to want to upset the billionaire owning it.
It's a classic example of one set of laws for the rich and another for the pleb.
I do blame Amazon for their short-sightedness. This is driving people away from using them and in the long term I don't think it will have been good to allow this sketchy shit.
You are right that other consumer protection laws etc. should be put in place to make fake reviews, product listing swap-outs etc. impossible.
Why not both? I can easily blame Amazon for scamming me (anything that happens via Amazon.tld is Amazon's doing), and regulators/courts for taking the brib... lobbying money and suddenly losing interest in doing their job in this particular case.
if Amazon is innocent then Alcapone and mafia bisses are innocent - after all they did have to get Alcapone for income tax evasion, therw was no proof that he ever personally killed or extorted anyone.
Amazon knows exactly whats is happening and they are profiting off it
I think this may just be a weird autocorrect, but on the chance it’s not, FYI the guy’s first name is (/was) Al, and his last name is Capone. Al Capone.
I stopped buying on Amazon for this reason. If I want Chinese Wares I get them cheaper on Aliexpress.
If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too).
Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
I used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes, as if an active party was trying to stamp out negativity. I heard about an active social media team that stamps out negativity. Not sure if it’s true, but I can’t rule it out either.
Thanks for the article, so I actually searched “reputation management” and there is actually a subreddit for this, active till two years ago. Crazy really that this can happen.
To be fair if Amazon is showing products with low ratings then it means they are continuing to sell shitty products. You don’t see low ratings because they just get removed.
You can buy it cheaper on Aliexpress, but it will take several weeks, and everyone wants instant gratification. That's the entire business model of majority of Amazon sellers - buy on Aliexpress/baba - sell at Amazon at a markup.
Sometimes producers (RIP MPOW) also directly lists on Amazon, so you pay a small premium for fast shipping from local warehouses, and get pretty decent unofficial warranty - they know Q&A on low margin items lacking, high defect rate likely - will often replaced items no question asks on 1star review with offer to change back to 5 stars to (justifiably) gush about how painless RMA process is. Sometimes they even give you the shady gift card. Much better experience than aliexpress.
The business model of retail stores is that they will deal with individual products, individual users, and small geographic areas in exchange for a share of the profits.
If you shop Amazon for electronic components (LEDs, resistors, etc.) you can find listing that have 3+ weeks delivery times. Not all, but they are in there. Literal drop ship from China, absolutely no reason to buy on Amazon instead of aliexpress/banggood
I'll never understand how people go "just YouTube it". Sure, I'll sift through a bunch of search results to find a 54 minute video that makes the point you meant to reference 23 minutes in after four ads.
> Despite claims of only using local storage with its security cameras, Eufy has been caught uploading identifiable footage to the cloud. And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.
(Personally, this means I won't buy an Eufy camera, and it doesn't change the fact that Anker's chargers have been far better made and reliable than their competitors in my experience.)
Re: Anker chargers, a few perform pretty well but many are kind of middling. A friend has been doing a lot of reviews of these on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace) and we started compiling test data- focusing on power conversion metrics such as efficiency and power factor, summarized into a single "power quality score" on a 0-200 scale- in a database at https://pqs.app.
Do you test for protocol negotiation for USB C Power Delivery and proper Lightning or Thunderbolt support? I think for many uses that's more important than small electrical losses
We haven't done lightning/thunderbolt, but the Youtube reviews include the different USB-C power modes. We also look at some aspects of safety, such as when overcurrent protection in kicks in relative to the device rating, and if it automatically resets after tripping or requires power cycling.
I hear what you are saying. But, I KNOW that it’s the top result with the search criteria I suggested… there was no need to sift through anything so your comment is generalised at some other experience.
I’ve already spent a huge amount of my time on that story, being in direct talks with the security researcher before the story exploded - I even helped raise a lot of awareness. So excuse me if I wanted to just quickly mention a quick, no need to sift, route to the info.
(If you happen to see a car on the researchers Twitter running over a Eufy system - that was one of the many things I did for awareness lol).
> your comment is generalised at some other experience
No, it's aimed specifically at this one.
YouTube's search results vary from person to person. I don't know which video you want me to watch - Paul Moore's five minute one? Den of Tools' eight minute one? Byte of Geek's nine minute one? Something else?
At the very least, since you've got a video in mind, link to it, but text remains a way better medium for this sort of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I know your youtube probably looks different to mine as we probably have differing interests. But I didn’t know Youtube search results varied from person to person - this is news to me.
Results vary from person to person and probably depend on locale and language.
Even if they didn't saying "it's the top result for ____" STILL isn't helpful. Loads of people make videos designed to rank high for "in" topics. So if it's the top result today it's probably outranked tomorrow by a larger channel.
This has been happening fairly actively since at least 2020, its not just youtube, search results have many of the same issues, and its not a single device, its by person(profile).
They've linked many of your devices together so you will see the same consistent videos/results unless you compare with other people, at places that are not your home location.
Anker’s EUFY product, which markets itself as a home security service not requiring cloud connectivity, uploads facial recognition and other data to their cloud
Linus Tech Tips with his Dunning-Kruger effect once again.
They upload the data required for mobile notifications to a CDN, which any one of us would likely do.
The other half of the controversy is that they upload a facial identifier for the same notification... if you have facial recognition for notifications turned on.
The hook-up has a more informed take on the issue: https://youtu.be/a_rAXF_btvE. I'm not sure if he was previously a software engineer, but he certainly seems to understand the problem Eufy faced like one.
My take-away is that they should have been more transparent about some form of upload being an unavoidable reality for mobile notifications in their marketing material.
Ummm I’m pretty sure it’s related to the fact you can access unencrypted video streams from cameras that supposedly only have local recording. Or are you just trying to distract from that?
The excusing of Eufy's behavior is incredible... if you have to push something to the cloud, why not encrypt it instead of promising to encrypt "later". Since the device promises local capabilities it would be easy to setup an encryption key on it/on the phone and transfer it to the device over local wifi...
As a customer, I hate all that crap, it's never what I want, would love it if the sellers did manage to remain visible through all that.
I also don't understand why the Chinese listings are so crap and easily identifiable, as you say. I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? (Font is another one, in images, instructions, even printed on the product itself. They often use a bizarre early computer slightly off-monospace looking one, I assume it's a default somewhere and if you're not used to/natively reading a script, it's harder to have an eye for what's a good font.)
The US wages for such a person probably costs more than like five of them combined and would never recoup their costs vs automated translations.
The font thing is just their default Chinese font with its Roman glyphs that are designed to look proportional to Chinese characters, not appeal to Western sensibilities.
They already took over the most successful American retail business by selling cheap crap without needing to deal with marketing. American companies that do all that come and go while the Chinese presence keeps growing and winning. Maybe it's us who have our product strategy wrong. Marketing might make sense when you're targeting a certain audience with disposable income, but probably most buyers on Amazon are just looking for the cheapest reasonable crap and don't overthink it...
Really the onus here should be on Amazon. Opening their catalog to third party sellers was inevitably going to destroy the user experience. Did Bezos care? No, they get paid by both sides this way. Everyone else started copying this model too, from Walmart to Bed Bath and Beyond.
The days of quality manufacturing and customer loyalty are long gone. It's all been replaced by cheap whitelabeled or unbranded crap sold via a shotgun approach to hordes of unthinking buyers. It makes the middleman more money that way now that they can easily scale it up to reach millions. SEO and fake reviews replaced quality driven word of mouth.
It’s too late. Whatever they do is the norm because of sheer sales volume.
In my language I’m seeing increasingly more legitimate sellers on Amazon switching to styles seen in Chinese listings, like “2022 updated version”, “easily use the product fashion”, whatever. Just on Amazon though.
Maybe, but I don't mean a marketing professional, just any student looking for some pocket money would do. I assume they just don't realise how crap it looks.
I assume that font is the inverse of western ones that have great rendering of Latin text, but don’t really bother with the rest of Unicode. When working with Chinese suppliers in a previous job all the documentation and comms we got would be in that awful font, I even saw one of their developers using it for code when I was visiting them.
I wish Amazon let me filter by country. In fact, I’d love to see some kind of meta shopping experience do exactly that. All I ever find is random small time websites that are outdated and minimal content for “made in USA”. For certain categories I’d prefer other countries or at least some options. I’m surprised the “America first” lobby hasn’t tried to accomplish something like this. Vote with your wallet if you really want manufacturing back.
Actually a lot of things are made in the US, it tends to be higher up on the value chain. Even starting with assembled is better than nothing, but I’m also interested in various other allied countries as well. You might be surprised when you explicitly look for this that often there are options other than China.
Hammers, stickers, Murica swag, and WD-40? Lol, this is the kind of stuff I'd expect to find in airport tourist-trap gift shops. Not exactly the kind of things "higher up the value chain" that GP mentioned, more like a shallow parody of Americana and a pretty far cry from the manufacturing powerhouse Asia has become...
Basically petroleum products and cars, along with electronics assembly where most of the hard manufacturing is done offshore. Military stuff seems to be the only major thing we still produce here.
I mean, is this really controversial? It's been happening for decades and only recently has there been some (very limited) executive action to try to bring it back. I'm all for it, FWIW, but it'll take some time (and a lot of willpower and money) to really make that happen.
So your point is that there shouldn’t be a way to search for made in the USA stuff because not enough or what?
That the USA shouldn’t try to bring back manufacturing, or what?
At least the military stuff seems to be working pretty well.
No, I'd love to see it come back. It's just not there right now. Searching for made in USA stuff is not helpful when most everyday things aren't made in the USA.
For electronics, I think the Asian manufacturers actually have better quality and precision these days. It's been their bread and butter for decades and they have way better factories and tooling and production experience.
We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.
I have seen some tiny movements on that direction- influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US as something positive and the reverse “I could not find anything US made so I had to cave in and get a Chinese mower”. The America First collective unfortunately has a lot of folks that see themselves as fundamentally rich, (or temporarily poor). They self identify more with Jeff Bezos than with their fellow (poor) countrymen. His success is “theirs” on their mind.
Wow. I’m shocked actually - I would have thought the penalties for lying were quite severe. It’s also unclear to me how widespread this actually is. It’s also from 2019 - did anything change with the FTC?
Not enormously, and it's a very tough moving target. Catch a Chinese manufacturer claiming to be "made in the USA" and they'll disappear and reopen as a new name the next day.
I bought a cover set for my Legion 5 Pro, and the best one was made in China, available only in the US. Fortunately the price is low enough to avoid extra duties so Amazon will ship it for $10 overseas within a week. No buying from EU here lol.
Same with a trackball mouse - shipped from UK because there was no stock in EU.
I stopped with the "durr China quality bad" a long time ago because it just isn't. Everything is made in China and you can get cheap/shit or expensive/great.
The Framework laptop for example, can't buy that from China. Sold out in EU. Have to go through forwarding bs to import from US. eBay sellers don't even want to ship overseas. AliExpress sellers will ship it to the middle of the Pacific.
If you want to compete you need to do better, not just give up imo.
my gross margin is 4-8% at best and that is excluding all returns and losses. how am i supposed to compete with big players who can eat the cost?
the same as you are saying. they want to cut out the middleman (which is you) so retail business is between manufacturers and amazon now with no dependence on existing retail chain?
I manufacture my own product that sells well on my website but even as the manufacturer I find selling on amazon to be too expensive and too risky. Instead I have my products listed so I can prevent others from controlling the product pages and reselling them but leave them as unavailable to purchase On that platform.
This seems like a business opportunity for someone that can read Chinese. Help non-Chinese businesses get set up with the tool that Chinese sellers are using to even the playing field. Although it's possible if the tactics became widely known in the English-speaking world, Amazon may have to do something about all the fraud.
The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.:
* [easy to use]: blah blah blah
The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings.
My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.