This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The only problem is that “knock off” brands are the only ones making products in at least some instances that used to be filled by the “brand names”.
This is the result of globalizing manufacturing. Eventually the brands that could pay for advertising stopped making things, and the void was filled by these “knock offs” (I don’t care for that term as it was applied in this article. These aren’t fake designer hand bags, they’re just products that don’t have a recognized brand name).
The correct industry term is white label products.
Can you believe that people just 40 years ago were still calling them stickers. Crazy how far we've come in just a short amount of time. Now they're using it in songs on the radio.
The amount of Kickstarters I waited years for, spent a fortune, and by the time it comes, the Chinese manufacturer has started making their own knockoffs for half the price....
Indeed. I’ve had that happen too. Those are actual knockoffs since they’re copying another specific product. It’s a shame that is the reality of our manufacturing industry.
The manufacturing environment in China is different. A lot of products are made from an existing design, then anyone who wants to sell those buys them from the factory.
The weird "brand names" are basically drop shippers. People buy Thing, send them to Amazon's warehouses, pop a storefront.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
The weird brand names are because Amazon requires the products you sell to have a "brand" in order to provide them plausible deniability that your product is not generic OEM stuff from China. So the sellers of generic Chinese OEM stuff have adapted by making up nonsensical brands and registering the letter jumble they come up with as a trademark. Now Amazon can claim everything on their site is a "brand name" product, see? It's all totally above board.
Hate both.
Okay? So? Brand names exist to have a reputation. A random string of characters isn't trying to develop and trade on a positive reputation and so is automatically suspect.
Yes, this is called "white labeling". Brazil does it for a ton of Chinese products. The three big computer part retailers in Brazil get parts from other brands and put their own label on it and sell them as their own.
Which 14 product listings are left after that
The ones at a price you wouldn't pay.
But don't forget you can finance it! And who doesn't want to brag with their "Expensive Brand" labeled something, that mostly doesn't have any inherent benefits or quality over the cheaper Chinese OEM stuff.
COOFANDY is not a scam. COOFANDY is a way to stay closer to maximizing best smiles in life to maximum outcomes as well as possible!
I was looking for a specific shirt for a themed party and that brand kept coming up. I bought a good one and one of theirs just to compare and yep, the coofandy one was crap. Too short, weird sleeves, the material was uncomfortable as hell, like wearing a trash bag.
Correct. COOFANDY is c.r.a.p.
C - COOFANDY
R - ® (Registered Trademark)
A - Awesome
P - Products
Most "name brands" have long been acquired by large umbrella corporations, and shortly after doing so, the "brand recognition" is often leveraged to market white label products; which is increasingly the only differentiator between it and off-brand products. That, and the price-difference: simply paying more for a meaningless "name brand", on an equally inexcusably poor quality product; besides a slightly less shitty customer experience, hopefully.
I really think it's poor design to purely filter on appearance of brands, rather than actual brand reputation. Yes, it might serve as an overgeneralized indicator for questionable reputation, but marketable brands shouldn't be treated as reputable either.
Yeah absolutely agree. I always but hydroflask bottles, but never through hydroflask. The exact same bottles and exact same lids are sold under a rolling list of random Chinese companies like this. Usually these companies do have real names, they're just super Chinese and not worth properly localizing.
Hell, I recently got a new fancy video monopod. The official US name brand that sells it is harlowe. It sells for about a grand
I bought this exact same model from "yc onion" with a nonsensical name the "pineta pro" (said "pine-tah") for less than half that.
I literally brought mine into a store after realizing how similar they are and compared them side by side. Even the stamp and sticker placement is identical. Like they clearly come from the exact same factory just with a different color and a different name printed into the same box on the side.
Why the fuck would anyone pay the 60% price hike just to have a known US company sell it to you? The really shitty thing is that I'm not sure how b and h is allowed to sell it. When I talked to my local camera store they said that they weren't allowed to sell it because they were a brand partner to the US brand and couldn't sell non us products without getting fined or dropped by their suppliers. Maybe b and h is just big enough to not have to care anymore, but that's just going to be one more nail in the already dying camera store market.
Couple things.
First, those are likely “third shift” products. The Chinese company that’s making the original product does more than ordered, and off the books. Slap a different sticker on it, and you can sell it without worry of it being caught as a counterfeit.
Secondly, there is something to be said of going through the original manufacturer. They have warranties, and actually care about their name so will go to some extent to support you if something goes wrong.
Now is that worth doubling the price? Not likely. But it’s something to keep in mind.
If you're even remotely worried about anything shady, you shouldn't even be on Amazon to begin with.
Yes and no. There are a lot of products that i once had bought at (semi)local stores that no longer exist.
So it is either Amazon or Temu or any other online shop like that.
I'm not saying that you can't find good stuff there. :)
I personally try to avoid it as much as possible due to them being unethical and they not caring about the environment at all.
PS. Happy cakeday!
Oh, thanks. I hadn't noticed.
It really is just Ali Express with better delivery times these days.
I cancelled Prime and just buy a lot less shit I don't need.
That sounds like a wise thing to do!
I would live if the extension just blocked Amazon and directed you to actual company websites when you go to add a product to cart.
That would be great, except it seems that most companies are actively discouraging you from using their website, as it's easier for them to list through Amazon. Recent experience was the product on the website was higher prices, slower shipping and a restocking fee if you need to return. Amazon? Next day, 'free shipping' and easy returns.
Not sure unless the place exists locally and you can go in store and actually buy something (that's becoming rare as well), that there is a better way except to not buy anything in general.
I think there are browser extensions and add-ons out there that plug in alternative storefronts you can buy from when looking up an item on Amazon, but you'd have to dig them up. I don't recall any of the names, I just know I've read about them.
I found my AliExpress stuff to be more reliable than my Amazon stuff.
Literally the same thing. Go to any "how to sell on Amazon" video and the "now you're a real business person" step is always go to Alibaba and find a good distributor of the product you want to steal, er, become an independent distributor of. Have them slap your logo on it and bam, new millionaire coming right up!
Be sure to save money by purchasing surpluses of QA failures at a discount.
This is stupid. There are lots of great products from sellers without an established "brand"
Unless you know what you look for, choosing the white label products from Amazon can be risky. For someone like me with extensove experience working with China I can usually tell what is crap and what is good enough, but the average person might take postings at face value or choose a category of product that is high risk of causing harm (e.g. I won't buy any no name plastic or rubber items that come in contact with food)
That is true, but sometimes you want the established brand because of the warranty.
We don't buy from Amazon, we don't do that here.
I've ordered products from some of the brands specifically mentioned, and the quality to price is often great.
Would I buy anything with a battery or an internet connection from them? Probably not. But are many things fine, and likely produced in the same sweat shops as household name brands.
It seems like a stretch to automatically hide every temu-esk brand... The brands themselves don't even attempt to hide what they are.
The next level is getting it straight from AliExpress, skipping the 25% Bezos Yacht tax.
It nicely dims out items with sketchy or no brands but you can still select them if you want.
The developers name is pigford. I'm more than a little envious of their cool name
That sounds useful and is there an extension that hides duplicate results?
Amazon search is shit at best, need also an extension to improve search, if there is anything that can fix that flaming pile of garbage.
amazon's web site as a whole has always been shitty, going all the way back to when they just sold books.
Am I the only one who doesn’t care where my decorative sculpture comes from or highlighters or house shoes? I assume it’s the same quality as the stores around me.
You would think this is what people pay Amazon to do. What is it they do pay them for, really?
For line go up
