Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
To me, that reads either like these all being marques of one company; or there being some Chinese "start a turn-key Amazon business" SaaS that most of these pseudo-brands make use of, which generates a brand name for you, and for product descriptions, takes structured key-value input and formats it into text in this style.
Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofiQ7EGBH8 — all the branded "knock-off" smartphones on Wish/AliExpress with hardware meant to look like some well-known phone, but with generic software (usually with a start-up screen that says "WELCOME"), are in fact made by a single white-label manufacturer, Microhand/KST (https://www.microhand.net/english/).
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
For example: ，。；：【】
If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_fa...
From the comments I was expecting a flood of knock-offs or really problematic products, but it seems the main argument is they’re cheap and delivery takes a boat trip across the globe.
Is there any solid reasons these vendors shouldn’t be on Amazon ?
The knock-offs on AliExpress look to me like a different problem.
From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself.
I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
They were on the early side of this phenom as it was a few years ago...
But this model is with pretty much everything these days Etsy, Amazon, Alibabba-importers etc...
Consumerism is cancer.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Even if zero people bought these weird brand products, their existence causes prices to go down, because prices are at the margin, and that's why it pisses off our Tweeter. Because he has to sell for less profit.
You can debate, of course, where one should draw the line in terms of a race to the bottom of the quality barrel crosses from "good" to "bad" but intentionally avoiding liability and responsibility through lies and shell companies is a pretty clear case.
There's plenty of foreign-brand stuff available for good prices at equal-to-or-higher-quality domestic US brand stuff. But then there's also complete garbage scam trash, and Amazon should absolutely deal with that.
At least the stupid-ass brand names make it easy so far to avoid this stuff.
I believe that Amazon probably could not turn the screws on these companies even if it wanted to. It would be a massive loss to their revenue and share holders would revolt. It would bring prices up in aggregate if these companies could not sell junk on the platform.
The best they can do is play coy and hope the US government or EU does not crack down hard on them. Caveat Emptor my friends!
1. Items whose brand absolutely don't matter so long as they work as intended (e.g., books, home goods like hangers).
2. Home goods it wouldn't be worthwhile to knock off (e.g., KIND bars, toilet paper).
3. Smaller brands whose market share and item appeal are not worth cloning (e.g., a mechanical keyboard breadboard kit).
4. Things I'd order from banggood /aliexpress anyway, that Amazon will get to me faster (e.g., some diodes).
For everything else, I'd rather get it at a local store or order it from Target/Best Buy/Whoever than risk the Amazon purchase.
Even things you might think are niche enough not to attract copycats (ham radio DIY kits requiring soldering and multimeter use) absolutely do, and a lot of it ends up on Amazon, though eBay is by far a worse offender.
When it turned out that I couldn't use the product in my application, I canceled my order before it was shipped. They ignored that and shipped it anyway. Then I had to pay return shipping. If I had bought through Amazon, I could have returned it free.
Moral: When customers seek you out to help you out, don't be assholes.
I posit that we're sliding back to the 1990's Amazon: only good for books. But it doesn't matter because they are interested in being a Google with customer service and making a profit that way.
It's a bit screwy, but you can filter by seller by clicking into a specific product category, and then selecting Amazon.com in the bar on the left. Then all the items should be "shipped and sold by Amazon.com".
But I've been sort of shocked to find recently that Amazon's prices, even with free shipping, are often not competitive with buying first-party, even with paying the shipping. For a lot of products these days, if there's a recognizable name brand associated with it, I just by first-party. You get it slower, but you know what you're getting, and probably end up giving more money to the seller too.
I would not have seen myself doing this ten years ago.
They do, and we have seen people get fake items. this is a huge problem for things like tourniquets. We tell people to go right to North American Rescue for example but so many people instinctively go to Amazon now and order things that it's a problem.
the fakes look almost like the real thing but have no quality control and break easily.
There are lots of bins in the warehouse. They contain up to around five items each. There is a theoretical possibility that two of the same thing from different sellers could end up in the same bin. At that point the picker wouldn’t know which is which.
In general I would say it is safer than an FBA or FBM offer, but not totally safe.
Vendor accounts are highly sought after by black-hatters because:
1. It's much harder to track down shenanigans you run on them (since as you said the only public seller info is "Amazon") 2. They generally have higher authority for editing listings, so if you want to change a competitor's images it's more likely to stick from a vendor account
I returned that and simultaneously ordered the exact same item again from the same page, still "shipped and sold by amazon", and this time the properly packaged product arrived, with a valid serial number, and it worked just fine.
The answer is that Amazon has quietly pivoted: Their new business model is
1. Buy stuff from AliExpress.
2. Mark it up 5x-10x.
3. Profit!
Amazon probably hopes their customers don't notice they can get the same stuff from AliExpress much cheaper. Which they won't because only about 1% of Amazon's customers have even heard of AliExpress.
Even with speedy free delivery, Amazon's profit margin by marking up AliExpress stuff is probably quite a bit higher than it was for the old Amazon.
From the limited searching I did when I first noticed this, it seems to actually be a more or less flat $10 markup, regardless of whether that works out to 10x or 10%.
Maybe some sort of fixed cost is involved?
Because all the profit is in being a platform. Otherwise, their retail operations would be looking at the sub 5% profit margins of every other retail business in the US.
I think Aliexpress is usually about 20% of the Amazon price, but depending on the item I agree that it can be 10%.
Any idea why Taobao goes through such great effort to prevent American buyers from using the platform? (Or was I doing it wrong…? I used one of the Taobao forwarding services)
AliExpress.. by the time it arrives I've probably forgotten I've ordered it, and if they won't offer a refund if it's no good/wrong somehow then bank might say the transaction's too old to do anything about (not sure about a time limit on credit card protections, maybe that's a better option), just generally more hassle. Not to mention the janky UX of ordering in the first place. (Why can it never guess both currency and delivery country correctly? UK & GBP isn't an oddball combination...)
Is Amazon better at compensating customers or removing fraudulent product listings?
If I can wait a month, it's cheaper on AliExpress, although their search/discovery is a mess.
If I want it in a week or two, I can usually find it for a few dollars more at eBay claiming 'US seller".
If I want it by the end of the week, I'll try to assemble $25 worth of "shipped by Amazon" items.
I placed an order June 30, it arrived July 17.
I wish they'd at lest truly make the product generic instead of placing a useless logo on it.
After nearly month (and I emailed the guy twice already without reply) I ordered a leather case from UK which cost twice the amount of money. I got it within 2 days. I put a claim with PayPal (he wasn't responding) for the case I didn't receive. It was accepted quickly.
A few days after that the guy emailed me claiming it was due to illness at his company, and that he'd send ut ASAP. A few days after I got it in the mail. Its still rotting somewhere in my house. I wonder if he saw or cared about my claim. Given it only cost him a couple of USD I figure he'd just write it off instead of asking for return.
I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I'll interact with often.
I don't know about target as I don't shop there too often.
Same problem. Different clothes
I'm surprised that reputation didn't do it. (But I agree; Amazon's behavior certainly seems to show that they don't care.)
The company name (and words in th address) may look really long and suspicious, but it's just because it's transliterated from Chinese.
OP says these are all 'shell companies', but AFAIK it's more onerous and costly to register and maintain a company in China, than in many states in the US.
Chinese company names are generally [location] [selected name] [what they do], like Baidu is Beijing + Baidu + Netcom Science Technology.
The transliteration in the tweet: "shenzhenshizhengshunzidianziyouxiangongsi"
Shenzhen-shi (city), Dianzi (electronics), youxian (limited), gongsi (company)
"wu long da sha b dong" seems like it's Five Dragons Building (https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.... ;some kind of office park?), Building B, and a suite number. The first line is something like "Longhuan 1st Road, Jinglong Community, Longhua Street, Longhua District".
It just looks like a mess because people are not used to it, and in chinese writing you don't separate the characters - it's "有限公司" for limited company, not "有限 公司"
(Your comment should probably be the top comment for the thread)
I'm all for reducing useless regulation, but sometimes you understand where it originally came from as a legitimate need.
So some of them are proud of it.
(EYUSHIJIA, which sounds Chinese but doesn’t mean anything according to the trademark application.)
We're talking about Amazon though right? You can definitely return that, that's even inside the official return window (one month).
(Yes, if it's inside the Amazon time window, I could return that)
> despite all of this, i still mostly love Amazon as a customer. it played a big role in getting my e-commerce business off of the ground and i'm grateful for that.
"It's a flea market full of cheap (and sometimes dangerous) junk, but I still love it!"
I got an empty box shipped to me instead of an SSD last week and got an instant refund for it.
I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoid the obvious Chinese knockoff stuff (unless it’s some trivially unimportant thing), and don’t find it hard to do so at all.
On another hand, I ordered something (~$80) from Home Depot online, shipped to my house. The box arrived, without the item inside. HD phone and chat support both claimed the ship weight was correct, and that I'd need to file a dispute with my credit card to resolve it. What kind of crap service is that!? Why would they not ship another one, considering their cost is probably much less than $80 rather than lose the entire $80, product, and piss off someone who spends thousands there every year?
Amazon didn't get to be the #1 online retailer and 3rd largest company in the world by ripping people off. Clearly, they have online figured out much better than all of their large competition.
I don't disagree with the morality argument, but Amazon has made things so incredibly convenient for the consumer.
I waded through Twitter’s hostile interface only to be made a fool of by hostile content.
Update: At least the title here has been changed now to remove the trick lede.
It really opens up your eyes to the sheer size of the fake account and bot traffic, market. It makes you skeptical of everything you see online.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense/AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.
I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.
So kind of the internet we had in the early to mid 90s
In an economy where the only thing that matters is actual money there wouldn't be any bots - after all I don't see bots queuing up to buy stuff. This is a problem the bullshit advertising and "growth & engagement" industry brought on themselves. If you pay people to click on stuff, they're gonna click it, tell others to click or build machines to click.
Anytime you have thousands of versions of things to sell (Amazon) you're going to need a ranking mechanism. And ranking mechanisms can be gamed by bots and other tricks.
Related, I don't understand twitter as a place for long form content. It's difficult to read and it can't be easy to post.
Instead, I learned to love it. It's almost a way of being reminded again and again about who is speaking, and it gives you a little feedback of how interesting other Twitter users found that particular section.
I don't really like that I learned to love it. I think it might be unhealthy. But that's a different issue.
Man if this isn't the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.
I can't believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn't the FTC or any other department do anything?
This is not a "why don't they fight the spam harder" problem. That's Google's problem. Amazon's problem is, apparently, that their corporate culture is so toxic and broken as to make any kind of internal controls or moderation outright useless.
The reasonable behaviour would of course be to give a pop-up like "hey, you're trying to buy a book that doesn't work for your Kindle, are you sure this is what you want?" I bet they have some sort of disclaimer hidden away in some giant heap of legalese making it "legal" but the whole flow was clearly designed to trick people this way. And I'm a programmer, I don't get tricked as easily as the average person in this context(I hope).
Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.
I would have agreed with this sentiment six months ago, but now Walmart allows third-party sellers. I could consolidate to "At least BRICK-AND-MORTAR Walmart stores should have reliable products", but physical Walmart seems to have gotten in bed with this Chinese brand "onn." Their products are absolute garbage, and they seem to have jettisoned everything else from their store. I've had to tell my parents to please stop buying any electronics stuff from Wal-Mart and go to a Target or something when their iPhone cable breaks so that they can at least get a proper Anker cable.
It's really tiring how much time I have to spend protecting my family from junk products these days.
> Walmart is Onn’s parent company. Onn is Walmart’s generic brand electronics label, and Onn products, including Onn TVs, are only available in Walmart stores.
But even still, the third-party sellers aren't as bad on walmart as they are on amazon
> what's the root cause of all of this?
> Amazon courting overseas manufacturers and sellers at all costs.
Why though? How does it benefit Amazon to have endless, no-name, bad quality listings? It makes the consumer experience awful & dangerous, not to mention the continued lowering trust in the marketplace.
As others have mentioned, it's often better to go to Target/Walmart/Costco/etc to buy from a reputable supply chain (instead of risking getting counterfeit goods from Amazon).
Amazon excels on shipping speed (logistics), but why bother when it's mostly garbage that sometimes gets returned?
EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon Mechanical Turk!
Generally too one of the causes of this craziness is that we keep outsourcing our manufacturing to China. China is only making these items because a much larger American company like OXO has them making really awesome kitchen items (for example) So it's not that hard for the same factory to create a series of shell companies that also sell the OXO stuff. I mean how hard is it to copy and paste the ads that the legit companies make and sell directly?
If we didn't outsource everything then it wouldn't be happening.
Target is definitely the closest we've found over here.
Right now buying home goods online is a nightmare: Search engines don’t help, the big retailer websites are full of junk, prices are unbelievable. But I’ve had great success identifying the handful of companies that make X in the USA and ordering directly from them.
> how can you protect yourself as a consumer?
Followed by a tedious list of hoops to jump through around verifying authenticity to a point where you might not get stung.
At this point, is it not better to just give up on Amazon and use a retailer that takes its product sourcing more seriously?
Continuing to use Amazon when you know how full to the brim of scams it is, just seems to me like rewarding them for bad behaviour.
Take your money elsewhere, with everyone else, and let the invisible hand of the market give Amazon a bloody good slap.
Honestly, if we're talking about convenience, Amazon is pretty much the best game in town. They have many documented failings and faults, but being inconvenient isn't one of them.
Basically just filter out the crap and profit
I've looked at laptop cases. Here is a sampling of brand names: Lacdo, Voova, KINGSLONG, NIDOO, tomtoc, MOSISO, INVZI, XMBFZ, Arvok, Kinmac, Londo...
I've bought cases for my ipad and work laptop from Lacdo and one for my upcoming MBA from Voova. They're actually great, but I worry they're made with Uighur slave labor or toxic materials or something.
I'd prefer not to support Amazon, but where else am I supposed to find stuff like this? Do I buy my electronics (eg. Hue lights recently) from Best Buy instead, which has a worse return policy and whose Geek Squad worked with the FBI to violate customers' rights?
Edit: Also, a few days ago I went on a search for a desktop organizer. Here are some brand names: DALTACK, ARCOBIS, DEZZIE, Hossejoy, Greenco, AMERIERGO, SONGMICS, X-cosrack, Marbrasse, Citmage, Samstar, Beiz. It goes on forever.
I checked Walmart and Target too, but wound up buying this one from "Lavatino" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PL59RL6 The product is actually awesome. The compartments are the perfect size to hold my coasters and I organized everything that was loose on my desk with room to spare.
So, it feels great to get something I needed, but the whole process still feels bad somehow.
Keep in mind that while Amazon is the white whale here, this absolutely happens at pretty much any retailer that has moved to an online store where they list more than any individual store has inventory of. I hate supporting Amazon, but personally Best Buy is the lesser of two evils, and at least there I can return in store.
This amused me because, as a native English speaker, I once considered buying Voova.com as a [then] freely available brandable five digit dotcom!
tbh names like Lacdo or MOSISO actually seem better than rubbish names like Google or Nvidia
Good question. Supposedly Retail is not profitable and AWS carries all the weight for the company. I don't know if that's true or not (?)
Anyhow, I don't think it would make that much difference. The reputational hit that Retail takes every day probably does not carry over much to AWS, nor does AWS good will (if there is any) help Retail at all.
> well, they're on Amazon... surely they are a legit company and Amazon is covering their bases... good luck!
>> Business Address:
>> longhuaqulonghuajiadaojinglongshequLONGHUANYILU jiruizongheyuanWULONGDASHA Bdong502
>> Shenzhenshi
>> Guangdongsheng
>> 518110
>> CN
This is the second time I've seen someone complain about "obviously" illegitimate business information that appears to be the vendor's own home address. I don't see how they could be more open or informative than that. Want to get in touch with them? Send a letter to that address; they'll see it.
Compare that with that string of garbled pinyin: it returns zero google results, refers to an area of China with no Street View access, and I wouldn't even know where to begin to verify if they are actually a registered company, who owns that address or how long the company has existed, and there's nothing I could cross-reference with other sources. If they wanted to throw away that identity, they could probably get a dozen like it in under a week with minimal effort. So yes, there's definitely many ways they could be more open or informative to communicate their status as a legitimate business that values their identity.
Shoprunner let’s you buy direct from brand with 2 day shipping, so you don’t need to lose that benefit, while avoid “mass marketplace” mis-incentives of amazon like fake products. It has the benefit of being good on clothing, which amazon was never a great destination for.
I haven’t used the Walmart “prime-equivilent” benefit, but it seems pretty comparable to amazon prime but at a retailer that has quality control (of some basic level). I’m just not much of a Walmart user.
Shipt gets you “Same day” delivery from stores like target, which is a good counter to the growing same day delivery amazon has been rolling out. I found that its way worse than amazon though, since Shipt is “gig workers” and doesn’t connect to the store’s inventory very well, so you never really know if your order will be fulfilled in full. I use this for last-minute target orders when I don’t have time to visit the store.
Shopify is rolling out a bunch of competing features, but the most useful one is that they’ll provide a single app to track your purchases, which means you don’t need 20 apps on your phone for each retailer just to track that one package a month you order (or more if that’s you).
Oh and now you have a bunch of accounts that you have to give your data to and hope they don’t get breached.
TLDR: It’s really hard to de-amazon if you’re a regular and hooked on the convenience BUT capitalism at work is providing alternatives slowly…
Case in point I recently got an iPad and I was looking for a rugged case, an alternative to OtterBox. It's a mess, with no real winners, and lots of questionable brands/products.
It was suggested before, the time is ripe for a disruptor search engine, The Innovator's Dilemma style; starting with some segment of search.
There's still the inventory co-mingling issue that people have mentioned in other comments. Solving this would mean I'd start to consider using Amazon more frequently.
For me it's worth $5 to not have to buy a replacement every 3 months.
Maybe just my sample but it seems these things always fail _just_ after the return window.
My standards are low but woof. You can’t even get a marble run that’s not that super thin brittle plastic. The marble run at Walmart was half the price.
I’m the laziest, least ethics-motivated consumer and I think my time with Amazon is wrapping up.
Even the suspensions don't have alot of affect for these shady sellers.
I have worked with a company that provides listing services on Amazon in the past. The owner once casually mentioned how they help these companies get out of suspensions for long enough to withdraw their balance(I have seen screenshots with over $200k in balance) with the help of an amazon employee. The listing company and amazon employee are both paid via Bitcoin.
Including: toxic toys for children, toxic cooking utensils, toxic water filters, toxic birthday cake decorations, toxic furniture, toxic plumbing, toxic rugs, etc.
Buying on Amazon in 2022 is like walking on a minefield.
Some companies go out of their way to emulate being non-chinese. But you can tell due to the aesthetics they use, punctuation, color palette, fonts, and sometimes DNS information that they are chinese shell companies as nobody in the west uses Alibaba cloud to host their stuff.
That's not right IMHO. The seller is Amazon; where they source their stuff and what subcontractors they have is their business.
It's like EBay takes more responsibility for products you buy, even though that is explicitly a site for matching random buyers and random sellers. Not that i use ebay much either.
I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9/10 times higher than Amazon for brand name items.
In the last few years it's been extremely difficult to make full use of the "perk", simply because there aren't a lot of things that are sold by amazon.com anymore.
Hard to argue with that, honestly.
Obviously if you want to buy genuine Rolex, or quality European made tools, Amazon is not the place.
These companies couldn't afford a "no risk no questions asked refunds" policy, since there's no way they'd ever pay for that wasted time.
I'm not asking for a genuine Rolex, but fakery is so bad at the moment that I'm not even confident I'd get a genuine Casio.
Made this mistake with a cheap rice cooker. Main voltages, high temps, water and steam and sketchy wiring was a terrible plan
Amazon is an absolute nightmare to find specific details.
Nowadays I only order from Amazon if the order is a time critical item that only they can deliver on time for a reasonable price. That's less than 5% of my purchases in dollar amount.
I've been a customer since 1997. Amazon has impressed me with their ability to play the long game, and I don't understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon here.
Possibly there’s nothing to understand. It’s easily been long enough that it’s plausible that people are playing Chesterton’s Fence games, getting promoted for increasing revenue by .05% while making the experience 0.2% worse.
Funny that’s about 50% of my purchases because I’m terribly impatient and don’t (often) have a car so it’s way easier than going to the store and Canadas e-commerce options aren’t nearly as good as the US.
There is no practical way to buy a reputable/brand name on amazon.
Some brand names are "available", but it seems not officially and people are buying them at a store and shipping them to customers.
Other brand names are available, but the search results are paid (and manipulated) so they get crowded off the page by sponsored and "5 star (2)" results.
and so amazon as a brand is associated with junk.
I wanted a new card shuffler.
All I got was pages of the same 3 models of shuffler from every nonsense name brand you could think of.
But really just 3 choices…
I wanted some weight sensors for an arduino project, Arrow had them but Amazon also listed them but in bags of 4 for about the price 2 would have cost from Arrow, plus they'd arrive faster. They ended up being varying weight sensors ripped directly out of various electronic scales and 3/4 didn't work. Had to order from Arrow anyway.
My wife wanted one of those percussive massage guns for post workout, Amazon had the best price but then I saw in some of the reviews people showing that the items they received from Amazon weren't legit and the company (hypervolt iirc) wouldn't honor any warranty from one purchased from Amazon. I was pretty much done at that point. We ended up picking a different model but when we did we went straight through the manufacturer.
Shopping on Amazon sucks.
Sadly enough, at this point Amazon.nl is overshadowing this by giving insane discounts and refunds to customers, so I hope they do not win over Bol.com, but I am anxious about it.
I would never buy something from Amazon that touched my food.
Electronics more complicated than a cable require some review, figuring out if there's a reputable brand underneath, etc.
I don't think it's improved with age, but the links aren't any good, anymore.
What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?
1. Amazon is the never the cheapest. 2. Their search is absolutely garbage and I can't use it. I'd need to go elsewhere, find a specific product, then search to compare.
I just logged into Amazon and the last thing I bought was 2021 "Leuko Tape" for hiking since it was the only seller that had it at a reasonable price.
I am genuinely always amazed by the responses on HackerNews. It might be because amazon.com is just cheaper in general than amazon.co.uk?
