> temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year.
This has been my experience with Amazon too. Better to let direct sellers like Temu and Shein sell these products at much lower prices, and Amazon can stick to branded/expensive goods that might need to be returned.
The problem with that idea is that most brands don’t want to be on Amazon. It’s bad for their margins and their brand equity. They rather push their own ecom sites.
Amazon has a hard time getting brands on the platform. Amazon has a problem with cheap unbranded stuff. What’s left in the future?
And yet few brands are going to build or run the entire distribution infrastructure themselves. You can buy from NameBrand, allegedly shipped from NameBrand, etc - and it's still distributed through some separate maze of businesses. Amazon is just very visible in being such an intermediary.
I'd like to point out that this has to be conscious decision of sorts by Amazon. Amazon UK is pretty much what Amazon US used to be 10 years ago - there's a complete absence of the aliexpress/temu grade 'SHTORY' 'FNARGL' branded products, the search shows you what you searched for instead of random junk and Amazon JP is of a different order entirely, that site is a gleaming spire.
This is clearly a choice that's being made by Amazon US to turn the platform into this... whatever it is...
Reasons? Well, I guess they make sense to somebody.
Yeah, the main difference between Amazon UK and eBay UK is that Amazon's unbranded Alibaba shit is more painful to search through and costs 30-50% more...
This is utterly false for Amazon UK and disprovable by 2 minutes of searching. It’s somewhat incredible to me this claim has been made with a straight face to be honest.
USB Foot Pedal is just one random search that’ll show this.
Mens fleece hoodie, audio recorder, iphone case and electric blanket are full of random named crap.
The problem also extends past these random products and into the seller market too. Even if you search with brand names for a product you want it’ll often be sold by some random new seller preferentially selected due to price undercutting.
The whole platform is rotting from the inside out.
Amazon JP is not a "gleaming spire", but I do agree it's not nearly as bad as the horror stories of counterfeiting I keep reading about Amazon US. However, there is still lots and lots of cheap Chinese junk here, but that's pretty easy to discern by just looking at the brand name. As the other poster here said about the UK version, "I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon [JP]."
The other problem with Amazon JP is that returns are not usually free, unless there's a real problem; it's not nearly as easy and free to return stuff as Amazon US.
This has been my experience with Amazon too. Better to let direct sellers like Temu and Shein sell these products at much lower prices, and Amazon can stick to branded/expensive goods that might need to be returned.