Once upon a time you could choose to buy good products from good brands on Amazon, or import cheap crap from China via Aliexpress or whatnot.
But now that nearly every category on Amazon is dominated by cheap crap from dodgy brands in China, I'm feeling less reason to buy things from them (unless I need it tomorrow). I suppose that's what's fuelling the popularity of new marketplaces like Temu?
Home brands of durable goods in the last 10 years have pretty much always been "Chinese crap" (I use this term loosely, sometimes the products are pretty good).
BUT, and this is the key part - buyer teams from major brands vet the supplier, make cost/quality tradeoffs and do all the supplier due diligence (like making them attest the products are not made by "modern slavery", don't have lead in them, etc). They also squeeze them super hard on payments and financials.
The BEEZELBUBS and QRYGGS are mostly the SAME factories that have always been making your goods but now they are "out of the box" and can sell to the consumer directly.
The good part is that they can now compete "fairly" outside shelf space monopolies, the bad part is that no one seems to be doing supplier due diligence or addressing quality fade.
This is the whole problem with Amazon and why I call it a flea market.
Other retailers put their reputation on the line with their merchandise. Sure, the same factory that manufactures for Old Navy makes QRYGGS. But Old Navy vets it.
Amazon’s issue is that it tosses its hands up and says “Sold by QRYGGS, fulfilled by Amazon.” Amazon says: if it’s garbage, not our fault, but you can return it. That’s just wandering a flea market with random vendors selling junk.
So I’m actually disappointed that Amazon would double-down on this by eliminating its private labels. At least if I see it’s an Amazon brand, I know they vouch for it. Indeed, my experiences with Amazon brands have been at least decent. But given the choice between fighting the regulators, somehow firewalling the private labels from the other vendors, or reducing its flea-market trafficking, Amazon decided to double-down on the flea market and scale back goods that it vets. It’s a big red-light district of some good stuff mixed in with tons of garbage.
Well, somewhat. But Amazon doesn’t vouch for its supply chain since it “commingles inventory” that various vendors ship to its warehouses. So even if something is “sold by” Amazon there’s risk it’s counterfeit junk.
Some flea market sellers, unreliable as they can be, have an advantage here: many sell under their own brand, even if you’ve never heard of it. In contrast, if you seek out a known brand on Amazon, there’s the risk of fakes. Every product listing on Amazon carries a set of risks.
It's often also impossible to get after-sales support for many of these mystery "brands" and they don't tend to stay around for long before they change names again. I am sure this is by design.
Those companies are not always trying to build up a brand and grow though. Some are just fronts until they accumulate enough bad reputation or reviews until they make a new front. The weird names are to keep things unique and help with searches. They are nonsensical so no due diligence has to be done on name collision issues.
I bought some headphones on Amazon that came with a note offering a $10 refund if I left a 5-star review. I didn't. But several months later when I decided to leave a real review, I found that the product was no longer listed. But an identical product was now sold from a vendor with a near-identical name as the previous vendor. Digging deeper, I see that they even had another different name before I even bought it.
So that's at least 3 different times that this vendor has boosted their reputation and sales by paying for reviews and then switcheroo'd after things slow down.
Meanwhile Amazon happily collects its fees and doesn't give a damn.
My last two orders from Amazon were counterfeits. One was a pack of Sandisk thumbdrives that were very obviously fakes.
I determined that Amazon simply doesn't care anymore. The value proposition was completely lost because I had to drive into town to return them. Twice in a row.
Further, their prices have gotten horrible on a lot of things. I looked at some of their lawncare items, and most of them were 2-3x more than local prices.
I'm just surprised that this hasn't become a big issue for Amazon. Is it that most people aren't aware? Isn't it a big enough story for some news outlet to investigate and report? If it became generally known that a large % of products on amazon are fakes, surely it would affect sales.
I think it's not well known. I've mentioned the counterfeiting problem to several friends, and none of them had heard if it before. For some things, especially any sort of safety related equipment, it makes buying from Amazon a complete non-starter for me because the risk of getting a shoddy fake is literally life and death.
My experience as well. HN is one of the few places I heard people talking about the commingling problem. I wonder how Amazon is able to keep this information from being known by so few people.
In my life, I nor anyone I know has ever gotten a counterfeit product. I've gotten obviously opened, returned, and repacked shit, low quality AliExpress shit no one would buy if they inspected it in real life, but nothing actually fake.
I've used Amazon regularly, back even when it was just a place to get cheap books. I assume it happens but I think the comments on Hacker News are just not representative of the general public on this issue. Any Amazon thread on here is chock-full of people saying they constantly get fake products.
I avoid large purchases on Amazon when I can, but that's mostly because I want there to be competition for them.
> In my life, I nor anyone I know has ever gotten a counterfeit product. I've gotten obviously opened, returned, and repacked shit, low quality AliExpress shit no one would buy if they inspected it in real life, but nothing actually fake.
I got a fake Google Pixel case for my wife. It looked identical to the real one, but didn't fit the phone.
While I have avoided most of the counterfeit dupes (of which I will broaden beyond just selling clones; there are plenty of shady products with questionable descriptions that don't match reality), they have been steadily increasing prices on many products to the point that I am often better off driving to a Lowes or Home Depot for faster service and better deals on things. I also can't emphasize enough that they haven't been that competitive in the laptop market or the home desktop PC market either for years now. Parts and DIY, sure, but I frequently find better deals elsewhere on what is usually the same hardware. I suspect the suppliers are the real root cause of this, but either way it ends up a bad deal. Additionally, finding things with targeted specs is surprisingly difficult at times, and can easily lead to choices that aren't even correct when search starts looking at adjacent products.
Prices of some things on Amazon such as hot sauce or soap can be absurdly high, while other times it’s the same as I’d pay at a local store. Definitely not bargains any more. I can’t trust any of the prices I see without double checking them, plus they do that thing where prices fluctuate based on how much they think you might pay. One month some bandages were $9, then $7, then $10, then $13, then $5. Sometimes the hot sauce is a great deal at two large bottles for $12, other times, the same pack is $20 or $15. Dr Bronner’s soap is simply too expensive at twice the price as my local grocery store. I’d just like to know one real price for each of these items.
Unfortunately the real price is what someone is willing to pay. The same people that pay 2x as much for the same McDonald's via Uber Eats are the ones probably paying 2x as much for soap on Amazon for the "convenience" (laziness) factor.
Sure, if they can sell as many as they want for twice the regular price,it makes Amazon less useful for me, but that’s up to them. My objection is mainly the sizable constant fluctuations.
> I determined that Amazon simply doesn't care anymore.
It's very messed up. About a year ago I ordered a nice camera from Amazon. What I received was an old beat up camera thrown carelessly into a box with most of the accessories missing.
Sure, they took it back and refunded me without much pain (but I had to take time of my day to repackage it and drive to a mailbox store to drop it off). But seriously, how is this even possible? Not even in the shadiest fleamarket would this kind of bait & switch happen. This is supposed to be one of the top companies?
To be honest Temu sounds like someone was watching the Wish.com saga and decided it was a great idea to burn a bunch of billions. It can grow a lot while it's new but I have my doubts about longevity of this type "we only sell crap" platforms.
At least in Australia Temu hits the sweet spot of offering almost-China prices with reasonably speedy delivery (under a week). If you buy the same crap on Amazon.au, you pay a 3-4x premium for local warehousing, and if you buy it off AliExpress, it often takes a month or longer to deliver.
That said, I presume the only way Temu can pull this off logistically is air freight, so I also have my doubts about his sustainable this is.
Aliexpress have been great recently with shipping times.
A lot of stuff is dispatched from their local warehouses (or at least flown in from China and consolidated locally) and distributed by their own courier network.
Sounds similar to Temu, and TBH is probably exactly the same network. If you get tracking updates from "Fast Horse Express", it's definitely the same network. :)
Yeah, Aliexpress "premium shipping" is by air, and like Temu they have a minimum order threshold to trigger it. But Aliexpress is a messy jumble of tiny merchants with their own shipping fees etc etc, whereas Temu abstracts away all that complexity.
I've been getting ads on social media to buy silencers on Temu. Ok not silencers, but adapters where one end has the female thread of a soda bottle on it, and the other has the female thread to match the external thread available on a Ruger 10/22. While silencers are federally legal in the U.S., they are illegal in many states and subject to a federal transfer tax. I could see this being a problem for Temu, and I could also see this never being any kind of problem for Temu.
There may be settled case law that says these aren't silencers legally, idk. The whole discipline is hilariously talmudic and full of the heap problem (is a billet of metal a gun? What about with one hole in it? Two holes and a chamfer here and a routed channel there? etc.)
Suppressors are only Federally legal with a tax stamp, typically acquired with a “Form 1” self manufacture or a Form 4” transfer (purchase) along with a $200 tax for the stamp, per item.
The seller would need special ATF licensure and follow an onerous process to sell what is typically considered safety equipment in Europe, ironically. This involves submitting fingerprints, passport photos, and a lengthy (9+ month) approval process on the part of the ATF.
For the self-manufacture, this has been de-factor outlawed by the current regime with DIY kits being arbitrarily reclassified as suppressors themselves. Most if not all Form 1 builds are outright denied.
So, in short, Temu cannot sell these at all. Of course they also occasionally sell selector switches to concert Glock handguns to fully automatic. This is even more comically illegal than a suppressor workaround.
right, I forgot to mention that manufacture also requires a tax stamp which is only available to registered manufacturers.
And yeah the Glock switch thing is absolutely wild. Sure, calling a shoelace a machine gun[0] stretches philosophy a fair bit. But the widespread availability of a bit of hardware that can only add select fire to a handgun tells me that enforcement is only a problem for those willing to adhere to the rules at all.
Temu is fundamentally different than Wish - it has local warehouses and therefore much faster delivery. It's a competitor to Amazon, not Wish/AliExpress. It trades this off by having a much smaller selection of goods.
my last hack before i completely jump platforms is to make sure that when im buying something, I click into the link right below the item name itself so i get to the brand's actual amazon page, then i click the item again
50% of the time it'll be cheaper and have a better prime ship date (and say Sold By BrandName or Amazon instead of a random seller name), and no counterfeits at all this way yet
Do you have an example originally searched for ASIN* and brand-linked ASIN that this works on?
I've not seen this personally, and checking my last 10 ordered items (some 6-7 character made up brand imported items and some recognizable brand items), following this process landed me on the same ASIN/same PDP each time, but it's definitely intriguing enough for me to want to find out more.
* The alphanumeric Amazon Stock ID Number, for physical goods it's usually (always?) a B followed by 9 alphanumeric digits.
Temu and Shein are at least improved versions of Wish. Idk how both companies did it but my last few orders have gotten to me in 8 days. Amazon for me is taking like 3-5 days without Prime, so the speed difference is not as big as it used to be when ordering from China would be a 1-2 month wait with everything showing up in a different package.
I’ve seen them air ship my cheap crap from China to USA for “free.” I thought I read it was a national subsidy/strategy but can’t find article now. Maybe economic warfare? Can’t see how flying my $10 order of giant plastic balls is economic.
Note that the linked piece is just an opinion piece from a professional writer who doesn't actually know what he's talking about and appears to just be making things up. It may even be paid for by Temu.
Chinese shipping is cheap because the Chinese government subsidies it for exported goods, and because due to a postal treaty the U.S. government was forced to honor those rates for goods shipped to U.S. addresses. This treaty was renegotiated in 2019 (changes effective 2020) to make shipping costs several times more expensive for Chinese manufacturers, but those higher prices are still ridiculously cheap compared to the prices domestic manufacturers must pay so there is still a substantial arbitrage opportunity, which is basically what Temu is (in addition to being an I.P. theft play, but that's an entirely separate issue).
If it means something, I've occasionally seen orders from AliExpress (where you'd expect the goods to be 99% Chinese-made) where the customs declarations/shipping label lists an even lower GDP country as the nominal return address. I wonder if they literally route around the higher CN -> US shipping by doing, say China -> Tajikstan -> US?
I'm finding the shipping times are less terrible than they used to be-- often 2-3 weeks, with surprisingly good tracking. (The big black hole seems to be when the package arrives in Compton, and then usually spends a few days before being handed over to the USPS; I imagine they crack open a shipping container and re-wrap everyone's purchases for the last 1000km through a domestic carrier.
It's interesting that nobody's ever proposed a big fat USPS subsidy for domestic mail as a way to make American business more competitive. There are plenty of items (anything in the "small, unbranded, low-performance-needed hardware/accessories/toys" category) where the options are often "$2 + free shipping from Shenzhen in 2-3 weeks" or "$2 + $4.50 shipping in 3-4 days for a comparable item sold by a guy in Tacoma". I might be willing to pay $1 more for the convenience of having it sooner, but much more than that and I'll just compensate for slow delivery times by always having a project or two in the pipeline.
At this point you have to both go with a “real” brand and investigate if any of their lines are still designed in house, or whether it’s a zombie brand that only badges white-box items.
I don't see notion of brands themseves staying a viable differentiator for most online purchases.
Sure you could remember a name you decide to trust, and never ever care to do research from there. But I see it the same way we had a period on usenet where you'd put your real name and phone number in your posts signature.
Too sad Amazon allowed reviews to be gamed, but I think third party reviews are still the way forward to identify good products.
This is so sad. I live off of Amazon brands, because they're so cheap, convenient, and relatively good quality. I've NEVER had a quality issue from them. Call me a corporate stooge if you want, but their mattresses, clothing, drugs, etc. have been a lifesaver.
I find that generally I go for Amazon brands whenever possible.
Honestly they are one of the few shorts I wear because it is so hard to find good cargo shorts for tall guys.
Paper Towels, TP, vitamins, ibuprofen, etc. Much of it is solid quality, does what I need, and far cheaper than the alternatives even local ones.
Looking at what is mentioned it is the staples like this that will be fine. The things that will be going away will be the fancier things or things like furniture.
I bought their bluetooth speaker that turns itself off when you haven't sent music through it for five minutes, and that you have to get up to turn back on.
edit: The physical quality seemed fine, but it's obvious that they never tested it or even thought about it much.
Nothing to do with Amazon but this has become endemic in tech in recent years and it grinds my gears. The amount of websites and services and remote control sessions that sign out or lock while I’m using them, because I’m not using them fast enough, it’s infuriating.
Yes I leave stuff open for a couple of hours while troubleshooting, not every problem is solved in five minutes and one device! No bank, you aren’t increasing security, I’m not in a library or a cafe. Especially infuriating if it happens while I'm waiting for the thing to check/update something and it signs me out because I'm not doing anything!
This happens all the time and should be seen an accessibility issue. Some people don't have the dexterity to keep the page from timing out while they, say, fetch their card out of their wallet, or type in their address and phone number.
Hm, my more brandy JBL one does the same, maybe it is 10 minutes, but I find it reasonable. I have a long set or playlists or choose something new when it gets silent, and otherwise I enjoy the luxury that I can just turn off the sender and know the battery won't be wasted for long?
> No new products are being ordered for the brands being phased out, which will cease to exist once their inventory is sold. Strong-selling items in brands that have been discontinued are being rebranded under Amazon Essentials or other remaining labels.
Sounds like the usual whittling of unsuccessful products and a consolidation of branding.
Unsure how much this actually impacts end users (except those thinking they’re being anti-Amazon by buying a non-Amazon product that’s aktually an Amazon product)
I think it's good from transparency point of view. It's one thing when a retailer has one or two house brands, like Kirkland brand at Costco. Then the consumer can know that's the retailers house brand. Amazon on the other hand had 30 clothing brands with names like Lark & Ro, Daily Ritual and Goodthreads with just a tiny "An Amazon brand" buried in the product description bullets. I'm not sure if it was designed this way to be misleading, but I can see how it wouldn't be interpreted kindly during any kind of antitrust scrutiny.
Home Depot has tons of brands too. I didn't realize how many brands were theirs until I did a kitchen remodel, and got a bunch of cheaply built crap that started having problems after installation. Fuckin anything with "Bay" in the name is theirs. Hampton Bay, Glacier Bay, etc. Most of the stuff in their stores is their own brand. Most of it is trash too. Their doors have all been sagging on me, the stainless steel sink I bought keeps needing me to scrub off corrosion, their wood countertops have some shitty UV coating that just peels off.
Costco actually pioneered that approach. The traditional corporate strategy had always been to have a bunch of different house brands fpr different product categories.
My experience is that Costco is cheaper and entirely adequate/sufficient quality products, but rarely/never "top shelf" products (assuming that's meant to mean "the best").
This makes sense, as Costco is trying to move a lot of units and you can move a lot more units into the market that's looking for "perfectly adequate" than the ones looking for "the best". Honda outsells Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini combined and all that...
That was the intent though. How can I buy cheap Chinese mass-produced products (usually low on the quality scale) but still have some basic quality bar that the products are not fraudulent? That they wouldn't fail basic safety standards or cause a fire or contain highly toxic ingredients. If I cared about higher quality for a given purchase, I wouldn't be choosing Amazon Basics. But for plenty of products (garbage bags, whiteboard markers, shop towels, etc ...) I just want the cheapest thing thing that actually will do the bare the minimum job.
I found the quality of Amazon-brand products to be inconsistent. I hoped Amazon would be able to use its scale to produce some items at lower costs and higher quality than competitors, but it just didn't work out. Often I find Amazon Basics goods at much higher prices than other retailers on their sites.
And Amazon's own-brand instant coffee is truly, truly awful, FYI. (Although their filter coffee is good)
Not much of a concession to regulators. They could just expand the breadth of offerings from their remaining brands if they wanted to, until they were selling the exact same products.
I am not an FTC regulator, but to me it seems like the shadiest thing Amazon does with its brands is to give them increased prominence in search results. They cannot tell me they don't juice the results to bubble their brands up to the top.
It seems rather plausible to me what the article has to say on this exact question:
After that 2020 article, Amazon curbed a yearslong practice in which its own brands were given a boost in the search results on its site in special placements—the kind of edge other sellers could only gain by buying ads—according to the people familiar with the recent changes. That change caused many of Amazon’s brands to be buried in search results, making it harder for items to sell. The cost of warehousing all that inventory was significant for Amazon, making it a target during the cost cutting.
Doesn't mean they stopped the practice completely, but apparently it was enough to make most of their own brands unprofitable.
Why should they not be able to do that since it’s their platform and store front? Should Walmart not be able to position Sam’s Choice before other brands?
Except it's terrible for that (if you care about the condition of your books) because they did away with their book-specific packaging, and now just toss books in a box or bubble mailer with no protection. The majority of the time they arrive banged up. You may as well buy them second-hand for cheaper.
The only amazon basics I bought is two monitor arms. I bought them because they are made by Ergotron and have a logo applied to them. They were on sale for 65€ each while the original (Ergotron LX) costs 160€
But now that nearly every category on Amazon is dominated by cheap crap from dodgy brands in China, I'm feeling less reason to buy things from them (unless I need it tomorrow). I suppose that's what's fuelling the popularity of new marketplaces like Temu?