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The problem is the long tail of sellers operating on the marketplace. With a long tail of sellers, you get a long tail of fraud and bullshit too. When you sear
by creato 7y ago
The problem is the long tail of sellers operating on the marketplace. With a long tail of sellers, you get a long tail of fraud and bullshit too.
When you search on Amazon for random basic goods, you'll get thousands of results from insane numbers of gibberish sounding sellers. But there might be only a few dozen unique results. It's going to be basically impossible to combat fraud when this is allowed.
I'd even consider the "legitimate" case of this (an OEM selling the same product to hundreds/thousands of sellers to resell) to be borderline fraud as well. It's basically reputation/review laundering.
- erik_seaberg 7y agoThis. As a buyer I only ever want Amazon sending me stock they got directly from the OEM, because they're so often better at fulfillment and defect returns.
- Lammy 7y agoThese days when I end up on one of those Amazon search results filled with obviously-identical no-name goods it’s my cue to head over to Aliexpress instead. The product I’m getting is the same garbage, but at least I recalibrate my expectations and even save a few bucks by cutting out one layer of middleman.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoLots of Ali Express experience here, some of the Chinese stuff can be great, it's just hard to know which is which amongst tge sea of good knows what
- imtringued 7y agoI have never understood this argument. I have seen lots of American/Japanese high quality brands that manufacture in China and they often cost an insignificantly higher amount than the chinese equivalent The difference is that I don't have to wait months for the product to arrive and the trusted brand is massively reducing the risk of poor quality because they actually have to follow the QC standards of the developing wolrd. Meanwhile on Aliexpress the truly cheap stuff is often just garbage. No savings there.
- Lammy 7y agoWe aren't disagreeing. I'm not talking about high-quality brands who happen to manufacture in China. I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but have you ever landed on a search result page where multiple items from different brands were visibly identical products? Sometimes down to using the exact same photo. Those are the situations I'm talking about.
- jxramos 7y agoExactly this, I dread having to shop for something that's caught on as a popular cheap to produce product that Chinese companies have focused in upon. There is so much noise to wade through its really really annoying. Sometimes I just give up shopping that day because its so time consuming to wade through a bunch of online shopping land mines. Offline shopping is growing in importance to is in the face of this counterfeit noise. Its actually raised our perceptions of Costco for us because they do a great job making selections. For goods we can't risk counterfeit we go Walmart and Vitacost. Vitacost is really great.