This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
Further, what on earth is the reason for FSL for such a trivial project?
FSL immediately makes me assume this project is monetized in some way, yet it's not immediately presented what that is, which makes me suspicious of the whole project. Maybe that suspicion is unfounded, but it could be immediately cleared up with some explanation on the landing page.
It seems like AmazonBrandFilterList is one of the lists they use. It also seems like there a couple extra features that doesn't have. Either way, it's not like they're hiding the use of it. It would be another thing if it was being secret about it.
Yeah. I don't know. I don't love that they're just ripping the list like that, I wouldn't mind as much if they at least helped contribute to the list. That is far and away the hardest part of this thing.
But it is what it is, I'll be more peeved if they monetize it (which I'm unsure if they're doing).
Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo, I'd probably be better about focusing on it then.
nice.
So in a way it is great that it was released as it brought more attention.
Also may of provided you a way to see a path forward on how to make it more available.
Are you really going to be upset that what you originally built would be built upon and potentially monetized?
The money will allow more fuel to make it better and better (hopefully)
Are there any objectively good systems for sussing out AI books? If not, perhaps treating them like "low background steel" wrt their publication date is the way to go (known good up to a point and confidence falls off without human review and confirmation after a specific year).
I'm extremely wary of anything written from 2024 onwards by lesser known authors.
I've spotted a book once in the wild that actually had a ghibli-style piss-tinted cover image, which was a dead giveaway, but it's not always so clear cut.
2024 is a good cut-off. I use these additional heuristics. Bad cover art. Not from a real publisher or not from an author that hasn't published before 2024.
I hope that real books that just happen to slip through the cracks, that are also genuinely good books will eventually surface as easily findable somehow. Maybe that's wishful thinking, I don't know.
I know one thing. It's grim out there for publishing and real humans who have something good to say but don't have a popular voice.
Not that trying to repackage and possibly resell existing work isn't a little lazy and borderline scummy, but your filter list "brands.txt" is MIT licensed.
You could always release the plugin code MIT and keep the brands.txt file proprietary or under a more restrictive license if you don't like what they are doing. After all, you did explicitly allow this.
To be honest it just felt like the right way to do it. I also never expected it to ever get any amount of traction. The fact I got more than 10 people to run it is thrilling.
I'll have to look into that. It should just work since it works on Chrome and I've made effort to request as little privilege as possible. But I'll have to test and try it out.
So yeah checking. Apple stopped making Safari for Windows a long time ago. So the issue with me supporting it is I have no way to test before publishing. I'll need to figure out something for that if I want to make the Safari version a real boy.
Something I've actually found I do is I just leave the addon in debug mode all the time. It's more verbose about what it's doing but it also highlights instead of hides listing. Which I've found I really like.
So I think I'm actually going to make that into a feature, highlighting vs hiding.
Allow users to opt into you injecting referral links. If they opt in, when they land anywhere, you rewrite amazon links to your referral code. Costs users $0, it's opt-in, and you make money.
I've considered this. I just feel like I need to be really careful on that front.
Right now I'm dealing with a dude that requested his own brand be added. Which is totally cool. But looking at said brand. I am reeeaaallly struggling to tell if hes 3dprinting his stuff to sell, or if hes drop-shipping it and trying to get on the list.
In the current age of AI, deepfakes, etc this is a very hard problem and I don't envy you. I think asking vendors to go through a paid verification process is fair. There are a slew of KYB vendors out there who can help.
I think you're going to have to standardize what you consider to be knock offs and what's not, or you're going to end up in continuous quagmires like this trying to make a determination based on vibes.
You might even end up getting together a team of volunteers to look through them or it'll probably get overwhelming.
What determination did you use to make the original list?
So the original list is very specifically about no-name dropshippers. I very specifically state in the readme that the list isn't a measure of quality. So in the case where this guy is 3D printing stuff and selling it. That's good enough for the list if he's been doing it long enough. But looking at the details of this one, he's dabbled in crypto. He apparently sold crystal tubes... So like he sorta feels like he might be a state-side dropshipper.
I am sorta leaning towards just adding his brand. The list isn't append only, we can remove stuff if people feel the need.
Mixed inventory is really a different issue. So short version, I don't. However Amazon did announce they were stopping the practice so hopefully that's just solved.
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
I love that guy's reviews for the thought and detail he puts in them. But his voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I'm looking forward to AI letting me swap it with James Earl Jones.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not counting the price of the postcard.
Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.
We have a very large Amazon warehouse/center in town, and during my last prime trial I received maybe 5/25 items listed under “2 day shipping” in actually 2 days. Nearly all took 4 or more.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
- Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
- Factory seconds, goods with very minor defects (sometimes not even in the product itself but in the box etc)
- Manufacturers copying specs and running illicit production lines without the company’s authorization
- Complete knockoffs, where the external design was copied but the product is totally different
Ultimately for most of these Amazon brands you have no idea which of these you are getting. Just because a product looks the same doesn’t mean it is the same. And in a lot of cases, e.g. with battery operated electronics the knockoff manufacturers skip a lot of safeguards and it ends up burning your house down.
It's more than likely you're getting the first since Chinese factories simply make more of what the big brand has ordered and sell the rest to drop shippers
I don't think that's necessarily true as a general statement. There are also lots of knockoffs where they clearly aren't actually the exact same product because they're obviously slightly different in a way that shows it wasn't produced with the same dies/molds. I own several knockoffs like that (which I bought intentionally knowing they were a knockoff but the knockoff had good reviews and it wasn't worth spending extra for the original).
Occasionally there are even knockoffs that improve on the original product in some way, although usually they are just nearly as good at a much lower price.
Also one very common subtype of the first option nowadays is that some company is just buying the exact same product from alibaba that you could buy from a random company on amazon or aliexpress, marking it up, and spending a few bucks on an internet presence and advertising to try to seem like a more legit company but doesn't really offer any more support or warranty than the brands that seem like a random combination of letters.
Whereas if it's costco it will at least be easy to get your money back if it dies in six months.
I get so many ads on Instagram for things that are available alibaba but with fancy packaging and a huge markup. This seems like an evolution of the drop shipping hustle.
> Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
Costco famously shops around aggressively for quality products -- not premium, but not crap -- and usually from big manufacturers who are already making excess supply.
Is common for supermarkets, too. Kraft can only get sub-par cheese one quarter so they make the same product but sell it as a white label option for lower margin. The factory line keeps running, product gets moved, inventory gets cleared, and margin is slightly lower but acceptable.
I don't think commerce (especially at Amazon) works the way you think it does.
There is a very good chance that when you buy something at Amazon that says it's BigBrand ... it's just a knockoff. Or a fake that has infiltrated another part of Amazon's supply chain. There is big money in lying to customers through Amazon.
Depends what it is. I would trust Nike products from Dick's Sporting Goods physical store and from the Nike store online but not Amazon or any other online retailer. I'd be suspicious of perfume from (say) Giorgi Armani because rip-off artists have heard of it but who would rip off an boutique bland like Phlur?
It probably goes deeper than you expect. A friend of mine unknowingly bought counterfeit Darn Tough socks from Amazon, and only found out when he sent them in for warranty repair. Clough42 has a video on YouTube about identifying counterfeit Mitutoyo calipers (though I believe they came from Ebay rather than Amazon).
Well back in the 1980s my mom was a clerk at a Jordan Marsh story that turned into Macy's selling men's clothing.
She would rail against fakes and would show you how the seams and other details were different and how, looking close, the difference was obvious.
My Uncle Dick, the oldest of the brothers, bought three fake Rolexes from the back of a truck on a trip to see my Great Aunt Simone in NYC. He thought he got a steal. Two months later he reported that they didn't run anymore!
Why not go down to your local independent pet store, keep your money local and support your neighbours instead of giving it to directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
How do you know the local independent pet store is not buying their inventory from a business with directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
But they are not offering anything worth patronizing. There's no value proposition. The prices are higher, getting the book takes longer, they don't ship it to me, and they never have a good book in stock. Independent book stores exist entirely as a charity-empathy business. They only exist because people feel bad about not shopping there.
i'm not a robot or venture capitalist, so i'm not sure why i need to exclude empathy from my decision-making process.
but, from a purely selfish standpoint: i get way better customer service, i can do trades, i can barter, i get to meet and talk with people, i can see the product before i buy it (no surprise knock-offs, etc.), my money mostly stays local, i find interesting work opportunities and sometimes referrals
You don't have to exclude empathy, but I said it is "a charity-empathy business" and you called that "a sad comment to read" and added that you get a lot of value. That would strongly imply that you disagree with my characterization and/or you get a lot of non-charity-empathy value. That then leads to me asking what that value is.
Personally none of those things you listed are what I want when buying a book, except knockoff protection, but thank you for answering.
i will express my opinion when i want to, thanks though.
if you have a particular issue, email dang and he can swing by and reprimand me. although i would find that weird, considering me and the other participant continued our conversation on just fine.
Then, how do you know the local business owner isn't, in turn, using that profit to buy stuff from companies with directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
If you track the individual dollars, most flows of value eventually, after some number of loops, end up with the French Polynesia sitting people.
That local business owner pays taxes and presumably eats food and uses services from his or her own town. They also pay local people to work in their shop who also presumably spends some of their wages locally.
> Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
in many cases may even be from the same factory made by the same hands with a slightly different supplier or quality of fabric, or lower QA.
I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere.
3D printing is more a practice than it is a way to quickly create one off objects. I think certainly if your machine is dialed in and not malfunctioning in some way then it will be cheaper and faster to print than to buy this.
I have a Bambu P1S and using it has been some kind of normie-friendly experience. I recall in the long past before I got this machine, my friend's early model Prusa would semi-bootstrap itself by printing some of its parts but the thing I ended up getting was a fully formed unit that just does the whole thing with a minimum of fuss.
We use the 3d printer explicitly for the one-off object scenario.
That's great to hear! I suppose I always wondered about how Bambu printers fare over time. I have had all sorts of issues with my Creality and FlashForge machines. They have sorta scared me away from the enterprise a bit.
For what I typically buy Amazon is about 2x-8x more. Though sometimes for more expensive items it might be a wash.
One other factor is that the minimum order for free shipping is often $10 versus $30 or $39 or $49 depending on Amazon’s algorithmic state and below $10, $1.99 is often Ali Express shipping cost.
The only way to know how much cheaper is to look on Ali Express. That’s how I wound up there.
I don’t spend mental energy dealing with Amazon’s dark patterns and terrible search that is flooded with sponsored links for something I did not search for…Ali Express search is not great, but it is not adversarial.
But because it works for me doesn’t mean it works for you.
For example, I need a 74hc245 for a repair I am working on. I just bought 10 chips and three 3m USB C/C cables and 50 velcro wire wraps for $10.61 including shipping.
The best price Amazon showed me for the chips was $9.99. I got $14.99 for two cables. And $6.99 for 60 wire wraps.
Such a shame that easily broken and disposable pieces of plastic are shipped around the globe in huge numbers, all in the name of selfish first world comfort.
How future generations will look back at our convenience online ordering practices and be absolutely horrified at how we thought it was no issue to get some bit of plastic made in Asia and shipped over to US or Europe, then next or same day delivered just for for a few dollars/pounds.
Sorry OP, not aiming at you. You just triggered a sad rant.
The ships are already making the trip carrying cars, furniture, medical equipment, and all kinds of critical things. The drop shipped trinkets basically hitch a ride for free.
Yep, thats the attitude thats keeps pushing the machine forward.
For example its the same as flying on planes. Number one worst offenders for C02 is frequent flyers, yet whenever you question anybody on it the argument is always "the planes are flying anyway why does it matter if Im on it or not".
> critical things
You miss the whole aspect of production and waste pipelines, which was kind of the point.
Thinking about some of the business practices of our ancestors, shipping bits of plastic seems like a great improvement.
Our great-great-grandchildren will probably be getting their gadgets via some kind of Star Trek replicator rather than a container ships and no doubt some moral hazard will be involved in that practice.
We do the same for groceries though. Only a few generations ago, oranges or bananas were a luxury if you didn't live in an area where those fruit grow. Now we get avocadoes and berries way out of season, shipped from across the world.
Yep, and it is terrible for the planet. Avocados use disproportionate amount of water to grow, and the boom of their popularity n the west has caused massive water issues in already resource stretched parts of the world.
All for what, so someone in a western cafe can have some smashed avocado on their sourdough toast? I'm pretty sure people could do without out of season berries, and avocados at all. We used to east locally and seasonally for millennia, forcing over production of anything to ship it round the world is a recipe for disaster.
and I am really happy with the first one I bought and bought a second one for a co-worker who liked mine. At my food co-op I found something from the highly reputable Aura Cacia brand that was almost twice the price and I think very similar in quality.
As far as I know, the only brands making the phone charger cords I use are considered 'off-brand'. I am not sure the goal is to remove ever purchasing things that are not 'known brands', but paging through thirty pages of the same exact really stretchy underwear sold under different names for every single page-worth of others is both inefficient and stressful for those of us that dislike shopping in the first place. So, I personally will check this out. Underwear arbitrary, just remember it Christmas shopping.
Indeed - they're legitimately solving a real problem. It's just an interesting dynamic that a whole new product category is produced overnight, with no clear leading brand. Usually someone makes a useful product. It gets known. Then others enter in the market to compete. Here you just get 5 companies entering the market altogether.
As for the essential oil diffuser: That category was established long before these brands became a thing. But oh boy the overpriced ones in stores are really not worth it!
That’s not the problem. The problem is buying stuff from AJSH or HUYA or BJFGL or MNQW or NBXA or any other random 4 letter “company” on Amazon for $40 when the item is crappy $2 item off aliexpress being drop shipped on Amazon.
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
Another PL seller here with a few brands and a couple hundred products:
"No brand name" flag is tricky because the Amazon catalog team actively does A/B tests to hide brand names as part of their goal of commodifying all the sellers to increase price competition, when they see you're selling a commodity item.
Same goes to wellknown brands that get caught in the crossfire because they're using their brand name from another language but don't make sense in English.
Agreed that it's an interesting idea, but execution has a LOT of false positives.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
agree - amazon is awful, I'll never purchase an item from them worth more than $100 again. stolen iphones, broken computer equipment, cheap products in expensive boxes. they want you to file a police report and spend so many hours project managing and dealing with their AI customer support / the ticket it makes it not worth it
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
> Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to.
No business gets my real phone number, and the email I provide is companyname@mydomain.com. The minute I start receiving unsolicited email, I revoke the alias and spam will bounce.
This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars. The excess crap gets caught in the appropriate filters and I just end up with my item in a box.
> This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars.
IIRC amazon yeets you out of their marketplace if you sell items cheaper than on amazon.com. Which you can work around by giving our coupon on your website, but that results in email/sms spam.
Amazons checkout is terrible though. Maybe it's better if you're in the US, but here you're not told the actual price, after currency conversion and shipping costs until the very last minute. Their shipping is awful, because it doesn't integrate with anything, so you can select a pickup point, and shipping is often weeks rather than next day.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
It is also often more expensive than Amazon, which is I think is largely due to Anazon's anti-competetive, and possibly illegal "most favored nation" terms, but as a consumer it does discourage avoiding Amazon (which is why Amazon has those terms).
I recently bought a camping tent from Naturehike, a budget but respected Chinese brand. I ordered on their website and, long story short, my parcel got stuck at a warehouse for weeks, presumably lost. They said they can't refund me before they retrieve the tent and "inspect the package", as if I somehow went to a warehouse in a different country, found it there, and damaged it.
It took me well over a month of back and forth to get a refund, and only after I repeatedly threatened them with a chargeback. I ordered the exact same tent on Amazon and had it the next day. As a bonus, it was now discounted on Amazon but not on the manufacturer's website.
I only order from Amazon a handful of times a year when I can't find an item elsewhere, but manufacturers are really doing their best to push me towards it.
Yeah, Amazon has disadvantages (counterfeits, fake reviews, more expensive) but its advantages (insane shipping speed/cost, strong return policy) are nearly impossible for competitors to compete with. The manufacturer is not going to offer same day delivery and no-questions-asked returns.
My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
I'd rather buy a cheap knockoff than pay top dollar for an equally bad branded product. Most "consumer-grade" stuff out there these days is garbage regardless of price or brand. Examples: mattresses, home appliances, furniture, audio devices, routers. If you need something durable or dependable, you need to buy enterprise-grade stuff or make your own.
Counterfeit goods are clearly bad and a problem, but knockoffs that aren't counterfeit seem to be a good thing from an economics perspective, right?
A knockoff that isn't counterfeit isn't deceiving customers -- it is just competing and competition drives benefits to consumers.
There are many knockoff goods that reach comparable quality as the original, luxury good. We shouldn't support the idea of brands for their own sake. Today, many luxury brands are actually degrading in quality as the only thing customers are buying them for is the status signal more than the actual quality.
What is critical is a customer is informed about the trade offs between the goods to make an informed decision.
When I recently was buying camera gear, I bought some of the peak design bags and accessories (which are amazing). I then also bought some knockoff gear that is compatible with their system.
Real:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F94FQRB $29.95
Knockoff: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYCB594Y $5.01
I knew what I was buying in both cases. I wouldn't trust the knockoff clips to hold my $3K Canon, but I am ok with the knockoff clips to hold an old, light film camera I also brought on the trip. I made an informed decision and my choice also helped contribute to competition between vendors, which is good for the market as a whole and consumers broadly.
If everyone used these chrome extensions, economic theory predicts that prices would rise for consumers and quality of the original brands would degrade through reduced competitive pressure.
What could be more informative for consumers that simply eliminating knockoffs from their search results would be to increase information. Maybe adding a visible indicator of which company is the established or originator of the design and which are knockoffs would be better than simply filtering them out.
I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
The fact that Amazon doesn't care enough to implement this filter themselves is a strong indicator to just not buy of the site.
Amazon doesn't give a shit if you're being hustled. If they have to issue a refund, that's the sellers problem, in all other cases they make money. There is so much junk of Amazon that's just not worth it. The only reason I ever shop at Amazon is if I truly cannot get the item elsewhere. They aren't cheaper, they're certainly not faster (in my area) and with every purchase you're at a much greater risk at getting scammed, compared to shopping at sites that don't do the marketplace crap.
In a sane world Amazons customers would be leaving in droves, and I cannot figure out why they don't.
Because if you need something in 2 days in the United States its often your _only_ option. I begrudgingly maintain a prime membership because its typically >2 times per month that I need something in two days. Maybe if I planned better that would happen less and I would save money, but its purely a convenience.
Their logistic network is where prime holds its value.
Costco is great for curation, but only for the items they carry.
A combo of Amazon for the random junk I don’t care much about and Costco for consumer staples works out well.
And no online vendor gets remotely close to Amazon for speed of shipping, ease of returns, and product selection. Usually matches the best price I can find on most things too - outside of stuff I buy direct from China.
Lots of the random crap I buy on Amazon I want the marketplace for. Like I needed a dozen plant domes this spring. I wanted them tomorrow, not next week and I didn’t need qty 100. So having the option for that vs. a gardening warehouse that targets large growers is quite handy and exactly what they excel at for me. I could care less which random brand sells the thing to me since they are all the same.
I feel we're well into the race to the bottom because I'm having an increasingly difficult time finding the brand name products to be any better. A lot of the brand name stuff is now also crap and some of the knock-off stuff seems to be just fine.
These days, Amazon do a lot of print-on-demand which gives bootleg quality, and there's no way to tell if you're going to get it, and there seems to be no way to avoid it.
IME: Cycling bibs and shorts from knockoff amazon brands seem to be of equal quality to entry-level name brand stuff (pearl izumi) at a fraction of the price. Plain underwear, on the other hand, has serious want of quality vs 'real' athleisure brands (nike, underarmor, hanes). I was surprised to have such different experiences with two similar product categories.
Love the idea of this but it has the inverse problem for me. So many brands are simply selling rebranded chinese goods anyway that I am probably better using review count and reviews to find low cost quality Chinese goods.
I don’t know if it will ever happen but the only solution imo is better curation from an online site.
I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
there are lots of comments here defending the knockoffs. in my opinion, they are equivalent to spam. amazon doesn't have a filter for these built into it and they never will. reputation matters especially with fake reviews. i will shop for items with this filter on and if i find the selection lacking or the prices too high then i'll turn it off and look at the knockoffs.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
They want to sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry[1], which requires a valid US trademark, and these crazy names are approved faster because they're obviously unique. See NYT[2]
These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of weird model collapse is happening.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
He says it right after returning from the store. Like "I bought this bag of 12 tortillas, I only need one for this burrito, obviously I would be using the rest for other things".
Actually given that in the US especially you would have to drive to chipotle, queue and then wait for them to prepare it, and you are already doing groceries anyway, you are exchanging driving and waiting at a Chipotle by cooking things at home. I find the second more enjoyable, but I understand that for people that don't like cooking it might not be the case.
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
Are you someone who has the capability to create extra time in your day? If not and you just have a few hours of free time per day, you can choose to spend some of that free time cooking, or you can let someone else cook for you and use that time on other things you value more than saving $10 or whatever.
The strategy is dependent on what is more precious to you - time, or money. Telling someone they should spend their time to save $10 is pretty pointless if you don't know what their financial situation is and whether that $10 has any meaning.
Food waste is food that you buy which is not ultimately consumed , which increases your cost per meal. This might be trimmings, it might be something you burn, it might be leftovers you don't get to.
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
I mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.
I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.
Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?
You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!
Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way. But as a one line throwaway comment it's still nonsense.
Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.
Well, you also don't have to freeze anything. When you cook almost every meal, you end up using most ingredients before they go bad. The ingredients for a burrito are pretty basic and can be used to make all sorts of things.
"cook almost every meal" is exactly the type of "expanding the scope" I was talking about. Cooking food yourself is a well-known way of saving money. Starting by trying to reproduce burrito shop burritos is not the way to get there.
To you, that's expanding the scope. To many, many people that's just the way we live, the way our parents lived, etc. We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month? Usually fast food because we're out and about.
If you have the money and you can stay healthy eating that way, go for it. But your original comment seems absolutely ridiculous to anyone that regularly cooks. I sincerely don't mean this in a mean way, but it was quite ignorant, as if making burritos was some herculean task and just what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes that you don't use?
No, I'm not talking about my own life, but rather the scope of the original response - making it out as something simple you can just do, rather than an undertaking in both prep time and resource management.
> We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month?
I'm right there too at this point in my life. But it's still absurd to suggest someone casually cook a number of dishes that would make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. "Skip the burrito and pack a sandwich" would be reasonable advice, but we have no idea how much OP is already doing that! Rather they merely brought up the price of a burrito for a benchmark about price inflation. Rather than accept the point about price inflation, people then shot the messenger with some fantasy of easy frugality.
> what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes
You've got guac/pico that want to go bad in a day, and rice/beans/protein that want to go bad in ~4 days. So many other recipes like... more burritos or a different Mexicanesque meal that tastes just like burritos?
> You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way
No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable
I see what you're doing, and you're completely correct. It's expensive to make meals solo.
But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.
Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.
If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:
You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.
That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.
People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.
---
Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.
For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.
(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.
Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)
The funny part is that I'm currently at the home-centric cook-for-multiple-people end of the spectrum. But burritos are just such a comically bad example of things to make at home to save money. Switch to pasta or basic sandwiches and then there is a point.
People can complain about whatever they want and Other People are free to tell them "your problems are trivial, quit whining"
My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves
> But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?
It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?
There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.
(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
Exactly. My point is the price of everything has gone up, and the authentic "original" brands are no longer affordable. The knockoffs are still affordable, and with them I'm doing great.
I have no incentive to change anything about my spending habits. If the "system" changes itself so that I have a ton more disposable cash lying around then sure I'll re-consider the authentic brands.
About the only situation I still buy authentic brands is if there's an electrical safety or lithium battery involved. But yeah, I'm not spending $52.99 on a nice-looking bike bell ([1] with shipping and taxes) when there's a $10 knockoff of it that looks exactly the same and works just as well.
Back in the days when the original was $5 and the knockoff was $1, I might be willing to pay for the original.
> My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
If we're being pedantic, investment income comes from a bunch of people who trade pieces of paper for a living deciding that a particular piece of paper is now worth $1 more today than yesterday. Well, okay, it's not paper anymore, just entries in some computer database in New Jersey or Delaware or something.
Investment income--in the form of capital gains--isn't coming from profits, it's coming from the mass delusion in the value of stock assets (which is somewhat correlated with profits, although the existence of stocks like SpaceX or Gamestop show the possible disconnects).
If you wanted to complain about the salaries of billionaires, or the stock grants on the other hand... but you said investment income!
I swear if I see one more “Bricolage Grotesque” and Inter website.. this is just what claude gives if you couldn’t be bothered to tell it what you want. Why is this even here?
This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
Further, what on earth is the reason for FSL for such a trivial project? FSL immediately makes me assume this project is monetized in some way, yet it's not immediately presented what that is, which makes me suspicious of the whole project. Maybe that suspicion is unfounded, but it could be immediately cleared up with some explanation on the landing page.
It seems like AmazonBrandFilterList is one of the lists they use. It also seems like there a couple extra features that doesn't have. Either way, it's not like they're hiding the use of it. It would be another thing if it was being secret about it.
AmazonBrandFilter dev here.
Yeah. I don't know. I don't love that they're just ripping the list like that, I wouldn't mind as much if they at least helped contribute to the list. That is far and away the hardest part of this thing.
But it is what it is, I'll be more peeved if they monetize it (which I'm unsure if they're doing).
Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo, I'd probably be better about focusing on it then.
need the firefox extension please
2nd that
I gotchu
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...
I'm a Firefox user myself. It is cross browser but it started Firefox first.
thanks
>I'll be more peeved if they monetize it
FSL (vs a copyleft license or just plain old OSS) implies they want to turn this into a revenue source for themselves ultimately, unfortunately.
>Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo
Absolutely :) Cool project.
Are you really the dev or just the person who signed up with this name? The profile was created 6 minutes before this post and the only one ever.
Yeah my buddy sent it to me. I don't usually visit ycombinator. I just created an account because I'm basking in my small amount of recognition.
But if ya want some proof I'm about to update the filter list with a bunch of mosquito repellents in like 10 minutes :)
You forgot Skin So Soft! My grandmother swore by that brand!
I just checked and it's actually in there, it's part of AVON! :D
nice. So in a way it is great that it was released as it brought more attention. Also may of provided you a way to see a path forward on how to make it more available.
Are you really going to be upset that what you originally built would be built upon and potentially monetized? The money will allow more fuel to make it better and better (hopefully)
Project: https://github.com/chris-mosley/AmazonBrandFilter
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...
TIL, thanks for your work!
Nice.
I wish there was something like this but that filtered out AI books.
Are there any objectively good systems for sussing out AI books? If not, perhaps treating them like "low background steel" wrt their publication date is the way to go (known good up to a point and confidence falls off without human review and confirmation after a specific year).
I'm extremely wary of anything written from 2024 onwards by lesser known authors.
I've spotted a book once in the wild that actually had a ghibli-style piss-tinted cover image, which was a dead giveaway, but it's not always so clear cut.
2024 is a good cut-off. I use these additional heuristics. Bad cover art. Not from a real publisher or not from an author that hasn't published before 2024. I hope that real books that just happen to slip through the cracks, that are also genuinely good books will eventually surface as easily findable somehow. Maybe that's wishful thinking, I don't know.
I know one thing. It's grim out there for publishing and real humans who have something good to say but don't have a popular voice.
Not that trying to repackage and possibly resell existing work isn't a little lazy and borderline scummy, but your filter list "brands.txt" is MIT licensed.
You could always release the plugin code MIT and keep the brands.txt file proprietary or under a more restrictive license if you don't like what they are doing. After all, you did explicitly allow this.
To be honest it just felt like the right way to do it. I also never expected it to ever get any amount of traction. The fact I got more than 10 people to run it is thrilling.
Amazon ripped off the price tracking and history from camelcamelcamel.com
Can we get a Safari version?
I'll have to look into that. It should just work since it works on Chrome and I've made effort to request as little privilege as possible. But I'll have to test and try it out.
If you're able and willing, create an issue on the addon repo: https://github.com/chris-mosley/AmazonBrandFilter/issues
And I'll build a version for safari for you to test.
Thanks so much! Will do
So yeah checking. Apple stopped making Safari for Windows a long time ago. So the issue with me supporting it is I have no way to test before publishing. I'll need to figure out something for that if I want to make the Safari version a real boy.
Thank you for your work! Just installed the plugin, hope it will ease the pain of finding things on Amazon. :-D
edit: lol. tried searching for USB C flex cables. WHOLE search result page is gone. Love it! :-D
Ha, oh yeah USB chargers was a huge pain.
Something I've actually found I do is I just leave the addon in debug mode all the time. It's more verbose about what it's doing but it also highlights instead of hides listing. Which I've found I really like.
So I think I'm actually going to make that into a feature, highlighting vs hiding.
Yes, that feature was my very first though.
Thanks Chris, great work!
Allow users to opt into you injecting referral links. If they opt in, when they land anywhere, you rewrite amazon links to your referral code. Costs users $0, it's opt-in, and you make money.
I've considered this. I just feel like I need to be really careful on that front.
Right now I'm dealing with a dude that requested his own brand be added. Which is totally cool. But looking at said brand. I am reeeaaallly struggling to tell if hes 3dprinting his stuff to sell, or if hes drop-shipping it and trying to get on the list.
Could you ask him for a video of himself 3d printing it?
In the current age of AI, deepfakes, etc this is a very hard problem and I don't envy you. I think asking vendors to go through a paid verification process is fair. There are a slew of KYB vendors out there who can help.
Have him send you a sample piece, with his name embossed in the print. Easy to do in most slicers.
I think you're going to have to standardize what you consider to be knock offs and what's not, or you're going to end up in continuous quagmires like this trying to make a determination based on vibes.
You might even end up getting together a team of volunteers to look through them or it'll probably get overwhelming.
What determination did you use to make the original list?
So the original list is very specifically about no-name dropshippers. I very specifically state in the readme that the list isn't a measure of quality. So in the case where this guy is 3D printing stuff and selling it. That's good enough for the list if he's been doing it long enough. But looking at the details of this one, he's dabbled in crypto. He apparently sold crystal tubes... So like he sorta feels like he might be a state-side dropshipper.
I am sorta leaning towards just adding his brand. The list isn't append only, we can remove stuff if people feel the need.
How did you determine who was a no name drop shipper though? Based on what criteria?
How do you account for comingled inventory?
Mixed inventory is really a different issue. So short version, I don't. However Amazon did announce they were stopping the practice so hopefully that's just solved.
This is like the maintainers of all Adblock lists getting upset at the creator of uBlock origin for using them.
Except that Raymond Hill explicitly refuses to accept financial contributions of any sort and directs people to support the list maintainers.
This guy isn’t taking financial contributions, and the Amazon brand list is only one part of the product.
I actually just put in a buymeacoffee link lol.
But also the List is by far the hardest part. It's way more work/time/misery than the addon itself.
They acknowledge your project under the "Prior art" section of their README.md and the list is MIT licensed. Seems fine to me?
Great original idea, BTW. Wish I had known about your extension prior!
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
He also routinely tests three or four identical products with nothing distinguishing beyond different paint jobs.
Yes, but those are three or four knock off products. The brand name is always different.
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
I love that guy's reviews for the thought and detail he puts in them. But his voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I'm looking forward to AI letting me swap it with James Earl Jones.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not counting the price of the postcard.
Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.
We have a very large Amazon warehouse/center in town, and during my last prime trial I received maybe 5/25 items listed under “2 day shipping” in actually 2 days. Nearly all took 4 or more.
Cannot even imagine 1 day.
Aliexpress used to ship almost exclusively from China, so your package took 4-6 weeks in a best case scenario.
The value prop of Amazon is (was?) getting your item fast (not cheapest anymore and certainly not highest quality).
AliExpress rarely takes longer than 2 weeks from china these days, and I’ve had AE ship from china and beat Amazon sending domestically before.
Amazon used to be the cheapest and fastest with the best customer support. They have slipped backwards on all those fronts.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k2ydn1rz8o
It seems like the retailers can be held responsible should "ASDAS_A!kr" drop off the radar, but might still be easier to sue local.
(I know "local" companies still find ways to settle / weasel their way out of responsiblities, but at least you know where to reach them...)
“Knockoffs” can be of many different types:
- Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
- Factory seconds, goods with very minor defects (sometimes not even in the product itself but in the box etc)
- Manufacturers copying specs and running illicit production lines without the company’s authorization
- Complete knockoffs, where the external design was copied but the product is totally different
Ultimately for most of these Amazon brands you have no idea which of these you are getting. Just because a product looks the same doesn’t mean it is the same. And in a lot of cases, e.g. with battery operated electronics the knockoff manufacturers skip a lot of safeguards and it ends up burning your house down.
It's more than likely you're getting the first since Chinese factories simply make more of what the big brand has ordered and sell the rest to drop shippers
You don’t actually know those odds, and they vary by category.
Is there a best and not-so-best category for certain odds?
I don't think that's necessarily true as a general statement. There are also lots of knockoffs where they clearly aren't actually the exact same product because they're obviously slightly different in a way that shows it wasn't produced with the same dies/molds. I own several knockoffs like that (which I bought intentionally knowing they were a knockoff but the knockoff had good reviews and it wasn't worth spending extra for the original).
Occasionally there are even knockoffs that improve on the original product in some way, although usually they are just nearly as good at a much lower price.
> battery operated electronics ... burning your house down
Unless it's high-power LiPo or Li-Ion, that's extremely unlikely.
Also one very common subtype of the first option nowadays is that some company is just buying the exact same product from alibaba that you could buy from a random company on amazon or aliexpress, marking it up, and spending a few bucks on an internet presence and advertising to try to seem like a more legit company but doesn't really offer any more support or warranty than the brands that seem like a random combination of letters.
Whereas if it's costco it will at least be easy to get your money back if it dies in six months.
I get so many ads on Instagram for things that are available alibaba but with fancy packaging and a huge markup. This seems like an evolution of the drop shipping hustle.
It's not an evolution that's literally what drop shipping is.
> Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
Costco famously shops around aggressively for quality products -- not premium, but not crap -- and usually from big manufacturers who are already making excess supply.
Is common for supermarkets, too. Kraft can only get sub-par cheese one quarter so they make the same product but sell it as a white label option for lower margin. The factory line keeps running, product gets moved, inventory gets cleared, and margin is slightly lower but acceptable.
Depends on the company. If it's a respectable Asian brand? I'm safe.
If it's an old and established US mark like Philips or Maytag or something? ZGGCD is the way to go.
Knockoff shnockoff. You get an upvote for SHRDLU!
"BigBrand gets it from the same supplier"
I don't think commerce (especially at Amazon) works the way you think it does.
There is a very good chance that when you buy something at Amazon that says it's BigBrand ... it's just a knockoff. Or a fake that has infiltrated another part of Amazon's supply chain. There is big money in lying to customers through Amazon.
Depends what it is. I would trust Nike products from Dick's Sporting Goods physical store and from the Nike store online but not Amazon or any other online retailer. I'd be suspicious of perfume from (say) Giorgi Armani because rip-off artists have heard of it but who would rip off an boutique bland like Phlur?
It probably goes deeper than you expect. A friend of mine unknowingly bought counterfeit Darn Tough socks from Amazon, and only found out when he sent them in for warranty repair. Clough42 has a video on YouTube about identifying counterfeit Mitutoyo calipers (though I believe they came from Ebay rather than Amazon).
Well back in the 1980s my mom was a clerk at a Jordan Marsh story that turned into Macy's selling men's clothing.
She would rail against fakes and would show you how the seams and other details were different and how, looking close, the difference was obvious.
My Uncle Dick, the oldest of the brothers, bought three fake Rolexes from the back of a truck on a trip to see my Great Aunt Simone in NYC. He thought he got a steal. Two months later he reported that they didn't run anymore!
Why not go down to your local independent pet store, keep your money local and support your neighbours instead of giving it to directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
How do you know the local independent pet store is not buying their inventory from a business with directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
even if that's the case, the local independent book store is still being supported by your patronage.
But they are not offering anything worth patronizing. There's no value proposition. The prices are higher, getting the book takes longer, they don't ship it to me, and they never have a good book in stock. Independent book stores exist entirely as a charity-empathy business. They only exist because people feel bad about not shopping there.
im not your dad, so im not going to tell you how to spend your money. if you prefer to support amazon, go for it. save your $1.25 or whatever.
but wow, i found this a sad comment to read. i find a lot of value in shopping local.
What is the value you find excluding charity or empathy feelings?
i'm not a robot or venture capitalist, so i'm not sure why i need to exclude empathy from my decision-making process.
but, from a purely selfish standpoint: i get way better customer service, i can do trades, i can barter, i get to meet and talk with people, i can see the product before i buy it (no surprise knock-offs, etc.), my money mostly stays local, i find interesting work opportunities and sometimes referrals
You don't have to exclude empathy, but I said it is "a charity-empathy business" and you called that "a sad comment to read" and added that you get a lot of value. That would strongly imply that you disagree with my characterization and/or you get a lot of non-charity-empathy value. That then leads to me asking what that value is.
Personally none of those things you listed are what I want when buying a book, except knockoff protection, but thank you for answering.
Don't do this here.
i will express my opinion when i want to, thanks though.
if you have a particular issue, email dang and he can swing by and reprimand me. although i would find that weird, considering me and the other participant continued our conversation on just fine.
The local business owner is still getting the profit not Amazon
Then, how do you know the local business owner isn't, in turn, using that profit to buy stuff from companies with directors and shareholders sitting on beaches in French Polynesia?
If you track the individual dollars, most flows of value eventually, after some number of loops, end up with the French Polynesia sitting people.
That local business owner pays taxes and presumably eats food and uses services from his or her own town. They also pay local people to work in their shop who also presumably spends some of their wages locally.
That sounds virtuous, but there's no real way to know that the way you're spending your money is ending up the way that you're describing.
> this knockoff site shows SHRDLU[1] has the same thing for $40?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
> Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
in many cases may even be from the same factory made by the same hands with a slightly different supplier or quality of fabric, or lower QA.
I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere.
This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
You'll find lots of different manufacturers selling this on Amazon, but there is no well known brand that makes these.
> This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
i wonder if it would be faster to 3d print that gadget than amazon prime it
I wouldn't trust a typical 3D printed one. My one has so many degrees of freedom/rotation - lots of moving parts.
3D printing is more a practice than it is a way to quickly create one off objects. I think certainly if your machine is dialed in and not malfunctioning in some way then it will be cheaper and faster to print than to buy this.
I have a Bambu P1S and using it has been some kind of normie-friendly experience. I recall in the long past before I got this machine, my friend's early model Prusa would semi-bootstrap itself by printing some of its parts but the thing I ended up getting was a fully formed unit that just does the whole thing with a minimum of fuss.
We use the 3d printer explicitly for the one-off object scenario.
That's great to hear! I suppose I always wondered about how Bambu printers fare over time. I have had all sorts of issues with my Creality and FlashForge machines. They have sorta scared me away from the enterprise a bit.
The plastic parts almost definitely, but this seems like it has a couple springs and hinges that make it more of a pain.
I use Ali Express for those things because I don’t need them next day and I need my money more than Jeff Bezos does.
I probably should, but they're so cheap on Amazon anyway.
I don't have Amazon Prime.
For what I typically buy Amazon is about 2x-8x more. Though sometimes for more expensive items it might be a wash.
One other factor is that the minimum order for free shipping is often $10 versus $30 or $39 or $49 depending on Amazon’s algorithmic state and below $10, $1.99 is often Ali Express shipping cost.
But again, that’s for what I buy.
The example I gave was $10. I suppose it's possible I'll get it cheaper on AliExpress, but how much cheaper?
As for shipping - if it's not urgent, I just put it in my Wishlist until I accumulate items beyond the free shipping threshold.
The only way to know how much cheaper is to look on Ali Express. That’s how I wound up there.
I don’t spend mental energy dealing with Amazon’s dark patterns and terrible search that is flooded with sponsored links for something I did not search for…Ali Express search is not great, but it is not adversarial.
But because it works for me doesn’t mean it works for you.
For example, I need a 74hc245 for a repair I am working on. I just bought 10 chips and three 3m USB C/C cables and 50 velcro wire wraps for $10.61 including shipping.
The best price Amazon showed me for the chips was $9.99. I got $14.99 for two cables. And $6.99 for 60 wire wraps.
Such a shame that easily broken and disposable pieces of plastic are shipped around the globe in huge numbers, all in the name of selfish first world comfort.
How future generations will look back at our convenience online ordering practices and be absolutely horrified at how we thought it was no issue to get some bit of plastic made in Asia and shipped over to US or Europe, then next or same day delivered just for for a few dollars/pounds.
Sorry OP, not aiming at you. You just triggered a sad rant.
The ships are already making the trip carrying cars, furniture, medical equipment, and all kinds of critical things. The drop shipped trinkets basically hitch a ride for free.
Yep, thats the attitude thats keeps pushing the machine forward.
For example its the same as flying on planes. Number one worst offenders for C02 is frequent flyers, yet whenever you question anybody on it the argument is always "the planes are flying anyway why does it matter if Im on it or not".
> critical things
You miss the whole aspect of production and waste pipelines, which was kind of the point.
You had good luck navigating a house of mirrors. It's still a house of mirrors though.
Those employees were going to sweep the floor anyway, why not throw my trash on the floor?
Thinking about some of the business practices of our ancestors, shipping bits of plastic seems like a great improvement.
Our great-great-grandchildren will probably be getting their gadgets via some kind of Star Trek replicator rather than a container ships and no doubt some moral hazard will be involved in that practice.
Generally though, things are getting better, no?
We do the same for groceries though. Only a few generations ago, oranges or bananas were a luxury if you didn't live in an area where those fruit grow. Now we get avocadoes and berries way out of season, shipped from across the world.
Yep, and it is terrible for the planet. Avocados use disproportionate amount of water to grow, and the boom of their popularity n the west has caused massive water issues in already resource stretched parts of the world.
https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/avocados-sustain...
All for what, so someone in a western cafe can have some smashed avocado on their sourdough toast? I'm pretty sure people could do without out of season berries, and avocados at all. We used to east locally and seasonally for millennia, forcing over production of anything to ship it round the world is a recipe for disaster.
Some those weird brands make some good things. Like this thing is great
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FS1H4SQQ
and I am really happy with the first one I bought and bought a second one for a co-worker who liked mine. At my food co-op I found something from the highly reputable Aura Cacia brand that was almost twice the price and I think very similar in quality.
As far as I know, the only brands making the phone charger cords I use are considered 'off-brand'. I am not sure the goal is to remove ever purchasing things that are not 'known brands', but paging through thirty pages of the same exact really stretchy underwear sold under different names for every single page-worth of others is both inefficient and stressful for those of us that dislike shopping in the first place. So, I personally will check this out. Underwear arbitrary, just remember it Christmas shopping.
> Some those weird brands make some good things.
Indeed - they're legitimately solving a real problem. It's just an interesting dynamic that a whole new product category is produced overnight, with no clear leading brand. Usually someone makes a useful product. It gets known. Then others enter in the market to compete. Here you just get 5 companies entering the market altogether.
As for the essential oil diffuser: That category was established long before these brands became a thing. But oh boy the overpriced ones in stores are really not worth it!
That’s not the problem. The problem is buying stuff from AJSH or HUYA or BJFGL or MNQW or NBXA or any other random 4 letter “company” on Amazon for $40 when the item is crappy $2 item off aliexpress being drop shipped on Amazon.
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
China supports Chinese interests.
So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.
If amazon suddenly banned this class of products temu and alibaba are there to take up the slack.
I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
Another PL seller here with a few brands and a couple hundred products:
"No brand name" flag is tricky because the Amazon catalog team actively does A/B tests to hide brand names as part of their goal of commodifying all the sellers to increase price competition, when they see you're selling a commodity item.
Same goes to wellknown brands that get caught in the crossfire because they're using their brand name from another language but don't make sense in English.
Agreed that it's an interesting idea, but execution has a LOT of false positives.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
I'd rather not spread out personal info like credit cards to more parties than necessary while Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Every time I talk to them I ask for a gift card for compensation for whatever problem and they give it to me.
agree - amazon is awful, I'll never purchase an item from them worth more than $100 again. stolen iphones, broken computer equipment, cheap products in expensive boxes. they want you to file a police report and spend so many hours project managing and dealing with their AI customer support / the ticket it makes it not worth it
Many CC let you generate one time use CC numbers if you’re actually concerned about manufactures information security.
I feel like a better solution would have been anonymized/single use card numbers.
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
Credit cards are pretty locked down, you can't connect to that network without a verified identity to be sued when unauthorized charges are made.
And do the same for knockoffs as well.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
Every time I do that I get frustrated:
- shipping sometimes goes to from day(s) to weeks
- suddenly their ads start going to email
- please review us emails
I'd rather bezos get his cut.
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
Can't you get a few thousand dollars by suing them for spamming you?
Not for physical mail.
Yeeeeey for living in a country where physical mail is prohibitively expensive. A standard letter, 2 - 5 business days, costs $3.50.
In US, USPS (government snail mail) literally has program that allows you to send^W spam marketing mail: https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm
Do they make it up on volume or is postal workers just incredibly cheap?
They're forced to deliver it at a loss and then yelled at by congress when they fail to turn a profit. The system just works.
> Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to.
No business gets my real phone number, and the email I provide is companyname@mydomain.com. The minute I start receiving unsolicited email, I revoke the alias and spam will bounce.
This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars. The excess crap gets caught in the appropriate filters and I just end up with my item in a box.
> This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars.
IIRC amazon yeets you out of their marketplace if you sell items cheaper than on amazon.com. Which you can work around by giving our coupon on your website, but that results in email/sms spam.
Amazons checkout is terrible though. Maybe it's better if you're in the US, but here you're not told the actual price, after currency conversion and shipping costs until the very last minute. Their shipping is awful, because it doesn't integrate with anything, so you can select a pickup point, and shipping is often weeks rather than next day.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
They were talking about buying directly from the manufacturer (presumably to be delivered) instead of Amazon (definitely to be delivered).
You're talking about buying from a local shop. Unless that local shop is also the manufacturer, then that's a whole different discussion. :)
Well yeah, but GP also writes about local shops and complains about quality and service...
Sometimes I try to do this, and they fulfill through their Amazon store anyway.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
amazon shipping speed, return policies, and customer support are simply too good.
I've had bad experiances trying this:
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
It is also often more expensive than Amazon, which is I think is largely due to Anazon's anti-competetive, and possibly illegal "most favored nation" terms, but as a consumer it does discourage avoiding Amazon (which is why Amazon has those terms).
I recently bought a camping tent from Naturehike, a budget but respected Chinese brand. I ordered on their website and, long story short, my parcel got stuck at a warehouse for weeks, presumably lost. They said they can't refund me before they retrieve the tent and "inspect the package", as if I somehow went to a warehouse in a different country, found it there, and damaged it.
It took me well over a month of back and forth to get a refund, and only after I repeatedly threatened them with a chargeback. I ordered the exact same tent on Amazon and had it the next day. As a bonus, it was now discounted on Amazon but not on the manufacturer's website.
I only order from Amazon a handful of times a year when I can't find an item elsewhere, but manufacturers are really doing their best to push me towards it.
Yeah, Amazon has disadvantages (counterfeits, fake reviews, more expensive) but its advantages (insane shipping speed/cost, strong return policy) are nearly impossible for competitors to compete with. The manufacturer is not going to offer same day delivery and no-questions-asked returns.
It's not unusual for many manufacturers to have an online store that is backed by AMZN anyway.
My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
Do you know why it is the same price on the manufacturer website?
I'd rather buy a cheap knockoff than pay top dollar for an equally bad branded product. Most "consumer-grade" stuff out there these days is garbage regardless of price or brand. Examples: mattresses, home appliances, furniture, audio devices, routers. If you need something durable or dependable, you need to buy enterprise-grade stuff or make your own.
I'm confused.
Counterfeit goods are clearly bad and a problem, but knockoffs that aren't counterfeit seem to be a good thing from an economics perspective, right?
A knockoff that isn't counterfeit isn't deceiving customers -- it is just competing and competition drives benefits to consumers.
There are many knockoff goods that reach comparable quality as the original, luxury good. We shouldn't support the idea of brands for their own sake. Today, many luxury brands are actually degrading in quality as the only thing customers are buying them for is the status signal more than the actual quality.
What is critical is a customer is informed about the trade offs between the goods to make an informed decision.
When I recently was buying camera gear, I bought some of the peak design bags and accessories (which are amazing). I then also bought some knockoff gear that is compatible with their system. Real:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F94FQRB $29.95 Knockoff: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYCB594Y $5.01
I knew what I was buying in both cases. I wouldn't trust the knockoff clips to hold my $3K Canon, but I am ok with the knockoff clips to hold an old, light film camera I also brought on the trip. I made an informed decision and my choice also helped contribute to competition between vendors, which is good for the market as a whole and consumers broadly.
If everyone used these chrome extensions, economic theory predicts that prices would rise for consumers and quality of the original brands would degrade through reduced competitive pressure.
What could be more informative for consumers that simply eliminating knockoffs from their search results would be to increase information. Maybe adding a visible indicator of which company is the established or originator of the design and which are knockoffs would be better than simply filtering them out.
How can a HDJWNSK brand gain our trust and become respected if we're not even trying its products?
It cant get trust, as it disappears after a month.
By word of mouth, HDJWNSK just rolls off the tongue.
I like my NWOUIIAY
By coincidence it's flying ant evening in my part of the world. One of them just flew into my mouth and I said HDJWNSK three times in a row.
I think your lysdexia strikes again. It's HDWJNSK /s
I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
The fact that Amazon doesn't care enough to implement this filter themselves is a strong indicator to just not buy of the site.
Amazon doesn't give a shit if you're being hustled. If they have to issue a refund, that's the sellers problem, in all other cases they make money. There is so much junk of Amazon that's just not worth it. The only reason I ever shop at Amazon is if I truly cannot get the item elsewhere. They aren't cheaper, they're certainly not faster (in my area) and with every purchase you're at a much greater risk at getting scammed, compared to shopping at sites that don't do the marketplace crap.
In a sane world Amazons customers would be leaving in droves, and I cannot figure out why they don't.
> In a sane world Amazons customers would be leaving in droves, and I cannot figure out why they don't.
Because Costco does not sell a lot of stuff that I want.
Because if you need something in 2 days in the United States its often your _only_ option. I begrudgingly maintain a prime membership because its typically >2 times per month that I need something in two days. Maybe if I planned better that would happen less and I would save money, but its purely a convenience.
Their logistic network is where prime holds its value.
Walmart and Target also do the marketplace stuff.
Costco is great for curation, but only for the items they carry.
A combo of Amazon for the random junk I don’t care much about and Costco for consumer staples works out well.
And no online vendor gets remotely close to Amazon for speed of shipping, ease of returns, and product selection. Usually matches the best price I can find on most things too - outside of stuff I buy direct from China.
Lots of the random crap I buy on Amazon I want the marketplace for. Like I needed a dozen plant domes this spring. I wanted them tomorrow, not next week and I didn’t need qty 100. So having the option for that vs. a gardening warehouse that targets large growers is quite handy and exactly what they excel at for me. I could care less which random brand sells the thing to me since they are all the same.
I feel we're well into the race to the bottom because I'm having an increasingly difficult time finding the brand name products to be any better. A lot of the brand name stuff is now also crap and some of the knock-off stuff seems to be just fine.
We need this but for books. These days it is impossible to buy any programming related book that is not a bootleg copy.
Ironic. Selling you quality books at a good price is how Amazon started.
These days, Amazon do a lot of print-on-demand which gives bootleg quality, and there's no way to tell if you're going to get it, and there seems to be no way to avoid it.
Go with reputable publishers (e. g. O'Reilly or No Starch Press) and you will get quality books.
> Knockoff filters the trademark-squat pseudo-brands (the SZHLUXes and HORUSDYs)
I see "HORUSDY" type brand names all the time. It's crazy that any shirt/pants/etc results in one of these.
IME: Cycling bibs and shorts from knockoff amazon brands seem to be of equal quality to entry-level name brand stuff (pearl izumi) at a fraction of the price. Plain underwear, on the other hand, has serious want of quality vs 'real' athleisure brands (nike, underarmor, hanes). I was surprised to have such different experiences with two similar product categories.
What is a "squat-length string"?
I realize this is one of Claude's copy tells (using excessively hyphenated words) but in this case I can't figure out what it means.
Isn’t the whole point of a brand to be recognizable? If customers couldn’t make this association from the start, what value does this provide?
Love the idea of this but it has the inverse problem for me. So many brands are simply selling rebranded chinese goods anyway that I am probably better using review count and reviews to find low cost quality Chinese goods.
I don’t know if it will ever happen but the only solution imo is better curation from an online site.
I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
there are lots of comments here defending the knockoffs. in my opinion, they are equivalent to spam. amazon doesn't have a filter for these built into it and they never will. reputation matters especially with fake reviews. i will shop for items with this filter on and if i find the selection lacking or the prices too high then i'll turn it off and look at the knockoffs.
I would be happy just with a amazon that does not disappear 80% of the results when you apply basic list filters like "cheaper first".
I don't even know why that is legal.
Smelling a Honey situation; we'll see affiliated query params added later if it hasn't been added already
I'd be interested to know how this works. Whitelist? Blacklist? Something else?
Edit: appears to be using blacklists.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
Don't give them ideas.
They want to sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry[1], which requires a valid US trademark, and these crazy names are approved faster because they're obviously unique. See NYT[2]
[1]: https://sell.amazon.com/brand-registry
[2]: https://archive.is/IQs4i / https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of weird model collapse is happening.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
Can you do the inverse as well? Like Amazon but only the knockoffs?
That's pretty much the default Amazon experience, no?
Or maybe the AliExpress experience.
Well, not exactly, for example if I search for LEGO I get the original but not the 10x cheaper compatible knockoffs.
Would be great if you could port this to Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...
The original is available on Firefox. The dev has even replied on the current top comment, if you want to check it out.
Pour one out for anyone who hoped to start a new brand.
Especially those who planned to use a random password generator to come up with their brand name
Now we just need GitHub Without the Vibes
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
This was actually tried. Cheaper and healthier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRtoUoBgjDw
That video shows a person spending more than $34 on groceries and making exactly 1 burrito.
You didn't watch it then. The leftovers would allow him to make way more burritos than just one.
I saw what I saw.
If there are more burritos in the future, then: I eagerly await Episode 2: One More Burrito [from last week's funky leftovers]
He says it right after returning from the store. Like "I bought this bag of 12 tortillas, I only need one for this burrito, obviously I would be using the rest for other things".
My point is it's cheap if you value your time at $0.
Actually given that in the US especially you would have to drive to chipotle, queue and then wait for them to prepare it, and you are already doing groceries anyway, you are exchanging driving and waiting at a Chipotle by cooking things at home. I find the second more enjoyable, but I understand that for people that don't like cooking it might not be the case.
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
Are you someone who has the capability to create extra time in your day? If not and you just have a few hours of free time per day, you can choose to spend some of that free time cooking, or you can let someone else cook for you and use that time on other things you value more than saving $10 or whatever.
The strategy is dependent on what is more precious to you - time, or money. Telling someone they should spend their time to save $10 is pretty pointless if you don't know what their financial situation is and whether that $10 has any meaning.
Food waste is food that you buy which is not ultimately consumed , which increases your cost per meal. This might be trimmings, it might be something you burn, it might be leftovers you don't get to.
is this your first time being introduced to the concept of cooking?
Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
But you wouldn't be making a single burrito. You'd be making several over several days, and/or using the leftover ingredients for other meals.
Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.
This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
I mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.
I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.
Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?
You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!
Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.
> tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce
Yes but you never just buy enough of this for one single burrito!
When you're saying it costs $20-$25, you're not talking about per burrito the way you buy burritos at chiptole
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way. But as a one line throwaway comment it's still nonsense.
Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.
Well, you also don't have to freeze anything. When you cook almost every meal, you end up using most ingredients before they go bad. The ingredients for a burrito are pretty basic and can be used to make all sorts of things.
"cook almost every meal" is exactly the type of "expanding the scope" I was talking about. Cooking food yourself is a well-known way of saving money. Starting by trying to reproduce burrito shop burritos is not the way to get there.
To you, that's expanding the scope. To many, many people that's just the way we live, the way our parents lived, etc. We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month? Usually fast food because we're out and about.
If you have the money and you can stay healthy eating that way, go for it. But your original comment seems absolutely ridiculous to anyone that regularly cooks. I sincerely don't mean this in a mean way, but it was quite ignorant, as if making burritos was some herculean task and just what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes that you don't use?
> To you, that's expanding the scope
No, I'm not talking about my own life, but rather the scope of the original response - making it out as something simple you can just do, rather than an undertaking in both prep time and resource management.
> We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month?
I'm right there too at this point in my life. But it's still absurd to suggest someone casually cook a number of dishes that would make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. "Skip the burrito and pack a sandwich" would be reasonable advice, but we have no idea how much OP is already doing that! Rather they merely brought up the price of a burrito for a benchmark about price inflation. Rather than accept the point about price inflation, people then shot the messenger with some fantasy of easy frugality.
> what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes
You've got guac/pico that want to go bad in a day, and rice/beans/protein that want to go bad in ~4 days. So many other recipes like... more burritos or a different Mexicanesque meal that tastes just like burritos?
> You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way
No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable
I see what you're doing, and you're completely correct. It's expensive to make meals solo.
But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.
Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.
If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:
You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.
That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.
People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.
---
Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.
For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.
(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.
Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)
The funny part is that I'm currently at the home-centric cook-for-multiple-people end of the spectrum. But burritos are just such a comically bad example of things to make at home to save money. Switch to pasta or basic sandwiches and then there is a point.
> For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession
For this person: too fucking bad, that's life
If you don't want to live that life then you should pay a premium for the privilege
Does that mean that folks are not free to complain about the price of a burrito at a restaurant? What's your end goal, here?
People can complain about whatever they want and Other People are free to tell them "your problems are trivial, quit whining"
My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves
> I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25
Sort of yes?
But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?
There's no way your purchases wind up being $20-25 per burrito, right? That would be nuts.
> But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?
It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?
There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.
(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)
I have work to do. I'd probably get PIP if I did that every day.
So you're doing work but not willing to pay others to do?
Nope, because I don't get to keep much of the money that I get from my work.
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
Exactly. My point is the price of everything has gone up, and the authentic "original" brands are no longer affordable. The knockoffs are still affordable, and with them I'm doing great.
I have no incentive to change anything about my spending habits. If the "system" changes itself so that I have a ton more disposable cash lying around then sure I'll re-consider the authentic brands.
About the only situation I still buy authentic brands is if there's an electrical safety or lithium battery involved. But yeah, I'm not spending $52.99 on a nice-looking bike bell ([1] with shipping and taxes) when there's a $10 knockoff of it that looks exactly the same and works just as well.
Back in the days when the original was $5 and the knockoff was $1, I might be willing to pay for the original.
[1] https://us.knog.com/products/oi-luxe-bike-bell
Depending on your date range, much of this difference might be the same inflation that has happened everywhere in the market.
That is because the value of the dollar is half what it used to be. In other words, inflation has been 20% per year for 5 years.
So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?
> My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
That's a great excuse. Meanwhile, there are billionaires whose investment incomes could pay those salaries many times over.
Where do those investment incomes come from?
Ahh, yes. Profits.
If we're being pedantic, investment income comes from a bunch of people who trade pieces of paper for a living deciding that a particular piece of paper is now worth $1 more today than yesterday. Well, okay, it's not paper anymore, just entries in some computer database in New Jersey or Delaware or something.
Investment income--in the form of capital gains--isn't coming from profits, it's coming from the mass delusion in the value of stock assets (which is somewhat correlated with profits, although the existence of stocks like SpaceX or Gamestop show the possible disconnects).
If you wanted to complain about the salaries of billionaires, or the stock grants on the other hand... but you said investment income!
I swear if I see one more “Bricolage Grotesque” and Inter website.. this is just what claude gives if you couldn’t be bothered to tell it what you want. Why is this even here?
and without the https:?
What an awesome extension!
It's funny but their homepage exemplifies why one may actually want the "knockoff" brands.
$39 instead of $224 for a pet bed. I know which one I'll buy.
There are plenty of categories of items where the cheap knockoff is perfectly adequate.
Until it falls apart immediately or gives your pet a rash because of the poor quality materials that were substituted.
Costco sells genuine pet beds for $39. $224 is pure insanity.
Yeah, they sell the same as XHLMFPETS on Amazon.
...and without Firefox, apparently