9 ms·
A Business with No End
- CPLX 8y agoCan someone make a website that sells stuff to me and has good selection, pricing, and customer service, and doesn't welcome the absolute dregs of the internet scam community into my life? I have literally no interest in being involved in this insanity just because I shop on Amazon. I can't be the only one who feels this way.
- whitepoplar 8y agoShopping on Amazon these days feels like walking through a back alley in Shanghai trying to find a pair of authentic Nike Air Jordans.
- thrower123 8y agoI am mystified as to what people are buying that they have such problems with fakes and knock-offs on Amazon. I've had Prime for around a decade, and I can remember exactly once where they screwed up and sent me a wrong package.
- whitepoplar 8y agoCan you tell whether or not this is authentic?: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-Cable-iPhone-6S/dp/B07K9K7QFY https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-Cable-iPhone-6S/dp/B0... It's the first seemingly non-third-party listing on Amazon.com for the search term, "iPhone lightning cable." It's the 4th search result. If you hover over the first of "Other sellers" you'll see a store which has a 67% satisfaction rating. If you click through and read the negative reviews, almost all of them list getting a fake product. Amazon lists the brand of the cable as "Apple." The item description says that it comes in "non-retail packaging."
- holtalanm 8y agolooks authentic to me, but if it gets the job done, do I really care if it is authentic? no. the answer is no.
- whitepoplar 8y agoYou're okay with paying a premium for what turns out to be a fake product? What if it ends up burning your house down?
- paulrpotts 8y agoBecause a cheap knockoff device that plugs into AC current could kill you. http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...
- jaggederest 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdn0MuCK_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdn0MuCK_0 is another interesting example.
- paulrpotts 8y agoHooo boy, that is scary!
- holtalanm 8y agowell, then, it wouldn't be getting the job done, now would it?
- acct1771 8y ago.............
- chenster 8y agoYou can get a 6-feet lightning cable from Five Below b&m.
- everdrive 8y agoI generally agree with you, but I have definitely seen some sketchy listings, and also bought really bad knockoff 9-Volt batteries. It's bad out there for some products.
- skgoa 8y agoUhm, how about trying to buy a genuine new battery for a MacBook? Buying the "Apple" product has resulted in 2/3 of the batteries I received being fakes. One of those fakes I got even when the site claimed I was buying and got fullfiled by Amazon. In the end I switched to going with obvious copies (where the seller did not make any attemot to mislead) whenever I needed a new battery.
- saul_goodman 8y agoAll depends on what you are buying. A lot things I could care less about, usually knock-offs are decent enough quality. But when you go out of your way to buy the genuine product and you get a fake that's a problem. I buy photography components off Amazon, buying a B&W UV filter has become impossible on Amazon. The fakes are actually a lot better than bottom-end UV lenses which is fine, but I didn't spend $45 for a knock-off. I spent that money for the real thing. If I could get the fake at a knock-off price I'd even consider it, but the fakes are being sold as the real thing at full price. After I found out how how to spot the fakes I found that half of the UV lenses I already had were fake. The real ones are made of brass and have better glass coatings. The fakes are made of aluminum and the threads are not as good which is important for lens filters, you don't want one getting jammed on a $1200 lens. They are painted black so the main way to tell them apart is to weigh them. The amazon review comments for B&W filters have extensive coverage of how to spot the fakes: https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coating/product-reviews/B004OVE188/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_top?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews https://www.amazon.com/77mm-XS-Pro-Clear-Multi-Resistant-Coa...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gkanai 8y ago> in Shanghai trying to find a pair of authentic Nike Air Jordans. The fact of the matter is that today China is such an important market for Nike that it's probably easier to get a rare authentic Air Jordan in Shanghai than it is in your local American city. Greater metro Shanghai is larger than any single American city.
- whitepoplar 8y agoYou're 100% right and I simply wrote it as an ill-considered figure of speech. Too late to edit, but <facepalm>.
- burlesona 8y agoThe problem is how hard it would be to create and scale an ethical Amazon competitor. Things like Etsy are the closest viable path I can think of, but I don't know how saintly they are either.
- ashrk 8y agoThe difficulty is you have to achieve traction and scale to compete with a company that's making tons of money exploitatively and user-hostilely strip-mining their own system and running on low margins with high reinvestment due to their scale and (stock market) reputation. Good luck. See also: voice interfaces. Your nifty paid version that's entirely local? Good luck competing against free, cloudy, and data-stealing, especially when the data-stealing helps the competing services get better. There's a reason local voice-to-text seemed to be getting really good for a while then suddenly dropped into obscurity. See also also: any paid (or even free and volunteer-based!) website or service that might compete with ad-paid and/or information-harvesting and free. Uphill battle to gain user-share. You'll almost certainly fail, because information-harvesting is a possible business model and no matter how much people hate it they can't organize to stop it, realistically, because game theory (ahem, which is we have governments, in the short-short version)
- snaky 8y agoOTOH OpenStreetMap is doing well, don't you think?
- ashrk 8y agoI see it on here from time to time on here but have never heard a person in real life mention it, so... maybe? Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing that really ought to be handled by government. Up-to-date, freely (or very cheaply) available map data should be considered infrastructure, and government(s) ought to already be generating/collecting it. Let the private market get it to consumers, but governments ought to be providing good-enough data that there's no need for private collection of it, in the general case. Leave street view and business reviews and such to Google and friends, but enough data to build a pretty damn good navigation app should just exist for anyone to use. It's a huge waste of effort to have multiple organizations trying to put all that together and it's something governments should to already have the data to provide, given some coordination—great candidate for a government service, or at least one of those government-coordinated public-private shared-cost-shared-benefit projects, post-war Japan style.
- petra 8y ago1.buy Amazon brands or exclusives. 2.I'm not sure that this works: Amazon sellers can choose not to co-mingle. You got higher chances that brand's own Amazon store will prefer to be on the safe side.
- snaky 8y ago'Maybe higher chances' is acute, while on Aliexpress (yes, Aliexpress) there are official brand stores with no co-mingling.
- rconti 8y agoNo, because, in the end, you're looking for a perfect marketplace curated by perfect human beings that also scales to millions (billions?) of transactions. I hesitate to say it's impossible to scale this way, but all of the forms of editorial control we're looking for the Amazons and Facebooks of the world directly impact their ability to scale. You may say "that's fine", but of course they won't win on price against the thing that DOES scale, so there needs to be some outside force acting on it. Regulation, or every single consumer deciding they prefer X level of service over Y level of discount, or similar.
- retzkek 8y agoCostco (and costco.com) seems to be working on filling the niche of a trusted source for quality products at reasonable prices, with great customer service. All while treating their employees well (as I understand it).
- paulddraper 8y agoThe frequently quoted Costco (and costco.com) downside is the limited selection. But that's partly because they do a dang good job in selecting good stuff. You can walk into Costco, buy anything there and know that you got a pretty good thing for a pretty good price. (Not the best thing, or the best price, but pretty good.) And if you didn't, there's always the ridiculously good return/warranty policies.
- CPLX 8y agoYou know that's a good idea. I'm already a member. They're a little challenging for us New Yorkers though, all those massive sizes and so on. I've already moved basically all my electronics purchasing to B&H. Maybe I should just stop expecting Amazon to be something that it isn't.
- kristo 8y agoThe issue with B&H is how they support the chauvinist hasidic community not to mention their racism: https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department-of-labor-lawsuit/ https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department...
- rb808 8y agotarget.com, bestbuy.com, macys.com, hd.com should cover everything you need without 3rd party stuff. They're working hard to stay relevant and actually pretty decent.
- maxxxxx 8y agoFor electronics try B&H or Adorama.
- kristo 8y agoI don't suggest B&H on account of how they support the hasidic community (cult) that treats women like shit not to mention their racism: https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department-of-labor-lawsuit/ https://hyperallergic.com/396180/bh-photo-settles-department...
- JohnnyFortune 8y agoAbsolutely. Amazon feels like a 3-rd part eCommerce site this days. And here is some help for everyone who wants to start small with online store: https://medium.com/@JohnBeardslee/woocommerce-guide-how-to-start-an-online-store-in-1-hour-3f8ae5e682d3 https://medium.com/@JohnBeardslee/woocommerce-guide-how-to-s...
- mjevans 8y agoI'd really like Amazon (and other similar sites) to improve customer service by being more transparent and providing some modest authentication to the goods sold. * Clearly state if the seller is an OEM, An OEM authorized 3rd party, or 'other'. * NOT co-mingle products* * * Unless authorized and then enumerate with which other sellers the co-mingling is authorized. * Allow filtering by all of the above.
- whitepoplar 8y agoYes! If available, I try to buy all my electronics from Abt.com or B&H Photo, primarily to avoid fakes and co-mingling. For non-electronic items, it's often surprisingly difficult to find them off-Amazon, at the same-or-better prices, and with expedient shipping. I'd buy more high-ticket items from Amazon if they implemented better supply-chain controls.
- ikeboy 8y agoB&H does a ton of grey market though
- whitepoplar 8y agoSure, for camera gear, but it's clearly marked on the item's page. There's also nothing explicitly wrong with grey market items.
- fmajid 8y agoThey're up-front about it, and those are still genuine products, just not meant for the US market. Amazon's nonchalance about counterfeiting and fake reviews looks increasingly like willful ignorance. Bezos could probably buy Fakespot.com or equivalent with loose change from his sofa, but no, they only pay lip service to cracking down on fake reviews and thus the search results in Amazon are highly questionable. I don't think this will change until someone is electrocuted by a fake iPhone charger sold by Amazon from stickerless commingled inventory, and they are sued for billions.
- function_seven 8y agoThis is the kind of story where a corkboard with photos and yarn is required to follow it. I couldn't keep up with all the interconnected players and LLCs. The most bizarre part is Newsweek. I've known for a while that it isn't what it once was. What I didn't know was how much it had fallen. Similar to when I see "Polaroid" branded products, where it's obvious the name is the only thing left of that company.
- gruez 8y ago>This is the kind of story where a corkboard with photos and yarn is required to follow it. I couldn't keep up with all the interconnected players and LLCs. there was an article i read a while ago (maybe it was on Bloomberg, I couldn't remember) that has a solution for this. if you clicked on the name of an important company/person, it'd show you a short description, along with cross references to them elsewhere in the story.
- Technetium_Hat 8y agoNow I want a browser extension that adds Wikipedia-style link previews on all pages.
- Sushi-san 8y agoThis story is so surreal: how is it ethical for a Christian organization like this to have such a large network of fraud?
- dbt00 8y agoTrick question: They're not meaningfully christian, they just claim the mantle like a shield. This reminds of nothing more than Rev. Moon's wacky Unification Church, which eventually founded the Washington Times and bought the UPI wire service to appear legitimate (and, at least in the case of the Washington Times, curry favor with conservative politicians).
- srtjstjsj 8y agoWhy is strange that someone whose brand identity is a well-known ancient lie would be a liar?
- dbt00 8y agoTL;DR: A giant, weird pile of money laundering and fraud.
- chenster 8y agoSo the story is really about discovering an elaborated money laundry operation using shell company and online fake store.
- grrowl 8y agoIt feels to me like selling dropshipped items for twice the price online, then re-selling the returns in random retail stores domestically would be part of this. I wonder how they can afford rent, but as long as they can pay salaries then the laundering cycle becomes complete
- jmccaf 8y agoI wonder if the weird storefronts like Stevens Books, Leez Dept. Store are to sell returned merchandise (that was drop-shipped)
- abalone 8y agoSo how did the fraud work? I seriously tried to read the whole thing. I had to click through to the indictment[1] to read that they improperly used funds from lenders that were supposedly for Newsweek's servers. But how exactly did the weird Amazon listings and bookstores play into it? I wish this was written more concisely instead of stretched out like a television series. [1] https://www.manhattanda.org/da-vance-announces-indictment-of-newsweek-and-christian-media-chiefs-in-long-running-10-million-fraud-probe/ https://www.manhattanda.org/da-vance-announces-indictment-of...
- mattzito 8y agoMy interpretation, possibly missing something, is that these e-commerce sites are a long tail play. They have lots of peoples time committed to work on this, so why not build a network of random Shopify sites that sell stuff you can get elsewhere for cheaper? Most stuff won’t sell, but the things that will return a disproportionate return relative to the effort.
- flas9sd 8y ago"The web" delivers on its name, not a hypertext of explanations, but a cobweb of obscurity. Writing of the author has been featured here before, also in line with her interests in obscure business schemes, about gratis watches and dropshipping that for me personally went into modern themes of brands and identity:"Museum of Capitalism - There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch".
- Bucephalus355 8y agoPart of this is money laundering. Think about how easy it is to move money from say Romania to the United States. Typically this would be very hard to do. If I want to withdraw $5,000 or more in cash in the US, I have to fill out a suspicious activity report (SAR). Transferring even under ten thousand dollars today via SWIFT can be tough (like Venmo for the international banks). However, what if you set up a company in the US selling 16 oz organic potting soil for $400 a bag? You could place an order for 100x, get your over priced potting soil shipped to Romania, but what you’ve also done is incredibly valuable. You’ve transferred $40,000 USD across continents and essentially outside of the central banking system via the credit card companies. Money laundering leads to grossly inflated assets (like buying a house that’s 300k over valued because you just want to store the money in a non-cash asset and don’t care about price). This affects us all, and should be studied more.
- Joakal 8y agoBuying over priced bags would be too obvious and flagged quickly. It's better to buy property as it's a hard-to-compare good.
- skgoa 8y agoOr art, antiques etc.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- acct1771 8y agoQatar, etc, anyone?
- hackeraccount 8y agoAsk Paul Manafort to buy a rug for you.
- cleaver 8y agoI remember looking for a house to rent in Mexico and wondering why some places seemed to be much more expensive than similar properties. Took me a little while to figure out why ;)
- bhouston 8y agoI think there are three potential explanations: (1) money laundering fronts (2) someone sold this idea to all the participants that they may get rich doing this but all the businesses are essentially failing, but the religious keep donating somehow to keep ti slightly afloat. (3) the long tail works -- but I strongly suspect it doesn't, this is to shittily put together.
- mprev 8y agoI know it's a little off-topic but I wish they'd let the content speak for itself. Are the Geocities-style background and animated GIFs really necessary? I feel they add to the cognitive load rather than adding to the story.
- cribbles 8y agoI really enjoyed the author's 2017 piece, "There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch"[1] (linked in article, also discussed in [2]). This one, not so much, and I feel compelled to explore _why_ I feel this article doesn't work as well. First, here's my attempt at a synopsis of the article. I only read it once, and admittedly found it hard to follow, so I'm sure a few details are off. - There are a bunch of fake-seeming storefronts on Amazon selling various products in unrelated categories at high markup. The business model seems to be basically massively automated Alibaba drop-shipping. Rather than providing a material or marketing value-add, the sellers are banking on buyers not doing any comparison shopping. - A lot of these storefronts are connected with a shady Christian university chancellor who had profiteered off of content farming via a journalism company called IBTimes, a business that acquired Newsweek in 2013 and ran WaPo-style tactics to ramp up the clickbait. - Separately of that, the chancellor has covertly supported the entrepreneurial ventures of his university's graduates. This usually takes the form of either 1) acquiring fledgling existing businesses, ramping up the prices, setting up Shopify online storefronts and profiteering off unscrupulous consumers, 2) creating brick-and-mortar storefronts that sell a mix of marked-up retail goods and returned items from these Amazon storefronts, or 3) some mix of 1 and 2. - It's not clear how approach #2 makes money, since some of these brick-and-mortar storefronts are in extremely high-rent areas, e.g. Manhattan and San Francisco. - Also, many of the businesses connected to this organization are currently under investigation for commercial fraud. So why doesn't this article "work?" Well, to extract the above synopsis, we have to wade through: 1. A non-linear narrative about the author's acquaintance getting some goods from one of these storefronts returned to their parents' house. This has no connection to the rest of the piece. Seems like it was just a mistake. 2. A labyrinth, Pepe Silvia-style thumbtack-and-yarn exposition on a bunch of overly precise yet insignificant investigation details (storefront names, suppliers, warehouses, products) and recurring literary devices to match (e.g. "warehouse foo sells unrelated items x, y, and z") 3. An anecdote about buying some lipstick from one of these places, then returning it. 4. Some anecdotes about visiting some of the storefronts and observing that they're kind of weird and empty. 5. Some excerpts from email transaction with some of the "players" involved in this whole scheme, which don't amount to much - PR fluff basically, which could have been made up. We don't know. 6. Lots, and lots, and lots of exposition about the "journey" to figuring all this stuff out - I reverse image searched this pic, which lead me to this business page, which was connected to this trademark, etc. etc. (none of which exceeds the standard Google-fu any reader of this piece is probably capable of doing themselves, or needs to read about at length) 7. Half-baked, Baudrillardian navel-gazing divergences about how weird and dreamy and postmodern all this is. I felt myself a little ripped off by the time I got to the bottom of the article and learned that, in fact, we have _no idea_ what the answer is to some of the core questions prompted by this piece. How do these ritsy storefronts make money? If they don't, are they just laundering money? If so, for what illegal activities? Is it connected to the IBTimes fraud? Whom exactly are they defrauding? What exactly is the relationship of the university to the IBTimes and these stores? And so on, and so on. I feel like if the author had simply made a PDF providing a simple, linear narrative - similar to her watch story - it wouldn't have mattered that these questions went unanswered. The mechanics of the drop-shipping operation are sufficiently compelling. But the platform (a newspaper) and the piece's pretense (long-form, old school investigative journalism) demand unwieldy narrative inflation that isn't really merited by the meat of the story, and that ultimately makes it feel that much less satisfying. [1] http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154934