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Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud

418 points by WaitWaitWha 5y ago

ozzythecat 5y ago
>Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts, the company confirms to The Verge. The keyword here is "brands", I think. I assume this means you cannot sell any product of that brand name, regardless of who you are. But then the article states: >Even though Aukey was one of the first high-profile companies to get banned in May, the company was still selling earbuds under a sub-brand as of July, and you can still buy a pair of them on Amazon even today. I also found a Choetech wireless charging pad, and a RavPower battery. Okay, so fraudulent sales continue and this is basically a non-story?
jerrysievert 5y ago
now let's do inventory co-mingling for broken and/or counterfeit stuff.
CosmicShadow 5y ago
Amazon used to be awesome and Prime felt so worth it, you could just get stuff sent to you and skip a trip to the store. Now we call it Scamazon and you spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings and fake reviews for any signs that a single item is worth buying before you give up and go to Walmart. It's so sad that it's gotten to the point where I think Walmart has better quality and prices than Amazon. We see dollar store stuff on Amazon for like $27 all the time. It's like they let their brand erode to pure garbage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rossjudson 5y ago
  Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so I can choose well. I hate the fact that there are a relatively small number of actual manufacturers of some classes of product, and then a massive fragmentation of "brands" that are just the same things, repackaged. On Amazon, the brand is Amazon -- because there's a small (and getting smaller) chance you've ever heard of the brand before. So when it comes to trust, our trust relationship is with Amazon. The main thing Amazon has going for it is the liberal return policies -- those transform the lack of trust in the general buying experience into a two-way door.
  - xvector 5y ago
    Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
    - ghshephard 5y ago
      I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
      - the_snooze 5y ago
        If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
      - foerbert 5y ago
        I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
- mancerayder 5y ago
  As someone who's been a customer since it sold books, it's disappointing these past couple of years that I have to shop at other sites for trusted items. The whole point of reviews is to provide insight and lessen risk. Now it's a whole exercise in avoiding getting scammed. I had an experience recently where I wrote a review (which I rarely do) that was 2 or 3 stars for a product (jars) that had glass which cracked in the fridge. They flagged and removed my review. The same thing happens on sites like Airbnb, where it's trivial to delete bad reviews. With a system like this, you can skirt ethics by showing only positive reviews, and then you can't exactly be accused of fraud or fake reviews.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    > since it sold books, I feel for you. I telneted to books.com, before there was a "million book river" amazon ... Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.
  - ncphil 5y ago
    Had a low star review pulled the same way recently. In a pique, I went in and deleted all my reviews. If AMZN isn't interested in preserving honest, critical reviews I'm not going to lend my name to legitimating them. Best Buy, B&H, Sweetwater are reliable sources of quality products. EBay will even do in a pinch, although ordering from them always seems a bit like a game of roulette. The paid ad scam corps have almost totally destroyed my reliance on reviews, as the insanely overhyped copy coming out of the Middle Kingdom has wrecked my trust in online product descriptions. Good work guys, you killed the goose: much luck staying afloat as the majority of shoppers are getting wise to you.
    - mmerlin 5y ago
      This is the perfect response. Thanks for the excellent suggestion! They deleted my last one star review too for a fraudulent fake product that wasted my time and money. Scamazon no longer deserves the SEO juice of previously entered legitimate reviews. Logging in to delete my past reviews now...
    - mancerayder 5y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I let my Prime lapse years ago and I've been boycotting them ever since. Prime is a scam anyway. If I need something immediately then I goto the store. If I can wait then a week is fine (everywhere else has 2 day shipping now anyway). 2 days is a weird timeframe. It's fake convenience, an uncanny valley.
  - ghshephard 5y ago
    Well - one of the nice things about Prime (at least here in Ann Arbor) - is there is a ton of same day stuff that is available as well for free shipping. Also - Expanse justified a bit of expanse. And, if you have "Family" sharing your Prime account, that also offsets the cost.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    2 days does seem weird, but in the UK it's next day; in London (and perhaps other cities) it's same day. (In both cases with a time cut-off.) It would cost me money and time to go I don't even know where to buy the item in person, it's a very non-trivial convenience to me. And then Prime aside, the no-nonsense support/returns is something I knowingly sometimes pay a premium for. A few quid extra at Amazon vs. unknown site, or especially say eBay is worth it IMO. Not to mention the convenience of already having payment details there and not suffering through Sage/WorldPay/Pal for some one-off guest checkout. (Aside: scummy PayPal created an account for me from such a checkout process, and refuse to close it without me first 'verifying' it by providing photo ID and other PII. Such nonsense.)
    - OJFord 5y ago
      I meant to say same day for some products, I assume it's just whatever happens to already be in a London 'fulfillment centre'. Plus groceries.
- barney54 5y ago
  What are you buying on Amazon? I have had really good success and I don’t feel like I have to wade through too much crap. I just want to understand how other people’s experience is so different from mine and part of it has to be the type of things we purchase.
  - fspeech 5y ago
    Maybe different shopping habit? I only use Amazon when I am looking for a specific (type of) product. It takes a little work but the end result is usually satisfactory. I have not done much "browsing" on Amazon as one would in a regular physical store.
    - raydev 5y ago
      Yeah, when I go to Amazon, I usually know exactly what I want and I'm just comparing prices by that point. If the product I want is on Amazon but is only available through third party resellers, then I'm likely to look elsewhere unless the third party reseller's reviews look balanced. All my ahead-of-time product research happens through reddit and YouTube and if it's a purchase that's super important to me, I'll think on it for weeks.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Maybe you just haven’t noticed? The counterfeits can be quite convincing. I’m reminded of this wire cutter post[1] from a year ago. I think the counterfeit Philips Toothbrush and Tweezerman packages look better than the real thing. The others seem a bit suspect when you look carefully and compare them to the real deal but I definitely don’t think I’d be suspicious if I saw them on their own. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-things-from-amazon-prime-can-you-tell-which-ones-are-real/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-thing...
    - raydev 5y ago
      Unless I missed one, every one of the counterfeits came from a third party reseller. I avoid most resellers by default unless the reviews look balanced or they are obviously based in the US or Canada. And if I want something and it only appears to be available through less trustworthy third party resellers, then I will just buy it elsewhere. To be clear, just because I've been able to avoid it doesn't make the situation good, but for me it's relatively easy to avoid being scammed. Be skeptical of third party resellers by default, and it will go a long way. And to avoid "intermingling of fulfillment", all you have to do is verify it says "Ships from and sold by Amazon" in the text under the price. Any mention of fulfillment in that text implies third party somewhere in the chain.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  I really wanted to buy a quality “splash pad” on Amazon. I was willing to pay triple the price of a normal priced pad. But it’s all junk. I ordered the most expensive one I could find, something like $110. It never worked well (the water didn’t spray from all jets), and just died after a month.
- prometheus76 5y ago
  And the free two-day shipping seems to be limited to only select items now. I know it was never universal, but free two-day shipping has turned into free 5-7 day shipping, but you're still paying for prime. I'm really re-evaluating whether prime is worth it anymore.
- 01100011 5y ago
  > spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings I'm confused. What are you shopping for if this is your experience? I've run into a lot of fake reviews but otherwise I still goto Amazon by default for any purchase outside of groceries or bulky, cheap items.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  Yeah I always check whether Amazon is the seller and whether or not there are other 3rd parties selling the same product on the same page. If yes, I will go to another store instead. I definitely no longer mindlessly shop on Amazon anymore.
socialist_coder 5y ago
In my best Jeopardy voice: I'll take "changing your name to get around a ban" for $500 please
- google234123 5y ago
  All these brands seem to come from random name generators anyway. You can trust that GESMATEKIiI has the best usb chargers and mattress pads :P
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  No kidding; I have a couple AUKEY dashcams, one of the removed brands. Searching for an AUKEY DR02 on amazon.co.uk returns an identical model from a brand ostensibly named "ABBB", whose product listing even includes identical images and a description ripped straight from AUKEY's website, for the same price.
  - bmicraft 5y ago
    That's to be expected as Aukey is also just a brand name for rebranded white label products of varying quality. The difference is a little card in the package promising compensation for a positive review.
- mlnhd 5y ago
  Jeopardy! hasn't had a $500 clue in 20 years
- Neil44 5y ago
  Ha, yes it’s not like they’re all going to shrug and go back to college is it.
rdxm 5y ago
only 10 bazllion to go!!!!
calebh 5y ago
Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays. I don't trust them for anything important. Case in point: I recently purchased an air purifier but was worried that I would get a fake product since they are notorious for co-mingling. I ended up buying one from Target online which also has free two day shipping now. For anyone who is looking for an alternative to Amazon, it seems like the big retailers (Walmart, Target, Best Buy) have finally caught up with their online offerings. I don't think I'll ever buy anything important from Amazon again until they fix their trash problem.
- xvector 5y ago
  Amazon definitely isn't the place to go if you want any semblance of quality. You pay new prices for returned, used, or counterfeit goods. It's a disaster
  - dheera 5y ago
    If the product quality doesn't match its price or it's used, just write an honest bad review. The seller will chase you by e-mail and give you back 50% or even 100% to edit the review. At that point you just temporarily edit it, get the gift card, and then edit the review back to the honest review. And then you have yourself a good deal on a used product. All we need is some AI to automate the above process and make a one-click interface to get discounted used stuff for 0%-50% of the price.
    - manuelmagic 5y ago
      I personally don't think that's fair and more importantly it doesn't solve the problem. You will pay less, true, but you still get a used or poor object. At least to me, that's not appealing at all.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Why haven't consumers stopped buying?
    - 5y ago
wolfoftheweb 5y ago
Echoing other posters, I no longer can shop with confidence on Amazon. The ease of making a purchase is dead and the fast shipping doesn’t counteract the reality that there is no quality control. Having to sort reviews by most recent and really study the product and seller defeat the point. That’s why I’m back to ordering online with Home Depot and the like.
axpy906 5y ago
I recently had an experience with a seller that kept sending me new tracking numbers as the shipment got “lost”. At first it seemed like great customer service because they would send me a brand new item because the shipment failed to come through or waive the shipping fee on my order. In the end, I got wise to what was going on and on the last day asked for a full refund from Amazon before the appeal time expired. Amazon gave me the refund but that was close.
drefanzor 5y ago
I'll never forget ordering an Intel i9900k processor and receiving an unsoldered microchip for a random RC brand. Not once, but twice in a row; then Amazon accused me of lying. I just use them for video streaming, now.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
That probably means there are at least 12,000 more. :)
- google234123 5y ago
  50,000
xvector 5y ago
Wouldn't be surprised if engineers at Amazon are starting to buy from other retailers because they don't want to have a shitty experience themselves.
schleck8 5y ago
Don‘t forget Amazon took down Fakespot from the App Store, an app to check Amazon product review quality and detect anomalies, and afterwards the Amazon app appeared as an ad when searching for Fakespot on the App Store.
- vlozko 5y ago
  Fakespot is a privacy nightmare: https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy Personal Information We Collect Identifiers: User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.
  - google234123 5y ago
    How is collecting a unique user id a privacy nightmare?
    - vlozko 5y ago
      “User ID also includes your account password…”
      - google234123 5y ago
        This willl blow your mind: when you sign up on a website they save a hash of your password so that you can login again later! Also, when you post a comment on hacker news, hn saves it on their server! What a privacy nightmare am I right?
        google234123 5y ago
        This was too harsh, sorry
  - 5y ago
google234123 5y ago
The first page of any search now is filled with so many weird brands. So many orders now come with a card with info about how to get Amazon card for a 5 star review. Also, who knows about 1 star reviews because these brands like to sabotage each other too... Example: (all the 5 star reviews with photos were paid (40$)) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08398XN1G/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08398XN1G/
rfwhyte 5y ago
Yet somehow when I make a search for a suitably generic product like "Wireless earbuds" the top 20 results are crap products that all have thousands of reviews and 4.5+ star ratings.
yuppie_scum 5y ago
At least it’s pretty easy to determine a shitty Chinese brand. Syntactically Nonsensical brand name usually formed by the composition of two conceptually related words, usually in all caps. I usually have to scroll down quite a bit to find a non sus brand now. And sometimes you do luck out ordering from one of them.
- supernintendo 5y ago
  Those weird brand names have actually become a problem for the US trademark system. The sellers are basically just algorithmically generating company names that haven’t been trademarked yet in an attempt to fill the Amazon marketplace with as many fake brands as possible [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
blibble 5y ago
no doubt they've been back on the store for hours already
dstaley 5y ago
One of the upsetting things about this crackdown is that some of the brands mentioned in the article actually produced good products. I'd have much rathered people purchase products from Ravpower and Aukey than DiHines, AINOPE, Ailun, yootech, SMALLElectric, TT&C, or Amoner, all of which appear on the first page of results for "USB C charger". Besides the review misconduct, I do think a lot of people's issues with Amazon stem from purchasing no-name products from unknown sellers, an action that is made horrendously easy by Amazon's UI. I've purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of items from Amazon, and I have had a perfect experience by following two rules: (1) always buy from Amazon (not a marketplace seller), and (2) always buy a reputable brand. Others have mentioned the issue of co-mingling inventory, and while I believe it's an issue, I've never come across a purchase from Amazon that looked anything less than legitimate.
- mouth 5y ago
  I have found that purchasing SanDisk USB thumb drives and SD cards from Amazon is like playing Russian Roulette. It’s not until you plug them in that you realize you have been scammed. Now I only buys these items from Micro Center.
  - dstaley 5y ago
    Genuinely curious: would you mind confirming that the seller of those items was Amazon (your order details should mention the seller)? I've purchased Samsung microSD cards nine times, and various flash drives also nine times over the past decade and all have been genuine. Small sample size, I know, but hardly a Russian roulette from my experience!
    - sixothree 5y ago
      I am convinced relying on "seller is Amazon" thing is useless. Even if the product you buy is genuine, it seems manufacturers aren't sending their best to Amazon. This really becomes apparent for things like shaving razors.
    - user5994461 5y ago
arglebarglegar 5y ago
they’ll just change their name, it’s not like they have reputations anyway
zamalek 5y ago
I received a gift card pursuant to a review. So I left a 1 star review explaining that gift cards were being used for good reviews (the product was otherwise fantastic). Amazon took the review down.
rdtwo 5y ago
They need to Switch to white lists. Blacklists don’t work
ikiris 5y ago
drop in the ocean. Amazon has become the online scam marketplace. I fully expect every item to be either counterfeit or outright stolen at this point.
l5870uoo9y 5y ago
Amazon is primarily a platform for Chinese resellers.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Find anything on Amazon not made in China. Amazon has actually started an extensive push to recruit South Asian sellers to provide just any kind of counterweight to Chinese.
mortenjorck 5y ago
600 Chinese brands on Amazon… so that’s got to be at least six sellers, right? Given how hard it is, at least for a customer, to match any kind of real-world entity to a XINKDS or MOLYPOW, and how many new vaguely pronounceable permutations of letters show up as new “brands” every month, this actually seems like a low number.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Some of those shell companies even claim to be American, and even go to the extent of making a website. But by looking at the whois info for the domain you notice that they are registered via Alibaba Cloud.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  It's not about the products themselves but about the fake reviews and the little cards in the box promising compensation for a positive review. As such it does not matter if the same products (some of which are genuinely good) will be sold under a different name.
SnowProblem 5y ago
Can't relate to the comments here. I usually just go with the "Amazon Choice" badge when there are options and it's fine.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  Same. Rarely do I ever get anything bad. But then mostly what I'm ordering are brands like the Bialeti 9 cup Moka pot gaskets I just ordered or the GE brand cast iron griddle top for our gas stove. Stuff I can't get locally.
benbristow 5y ago
To be fair I've received those 'give a review' cards on some things I've bought from Amazon before. Out of curiosity I went along with the game, knowing it was probably a scam, and whilst still giving honest reviews because the products were actually good, to be fair to them they actually paid out very promptly with an Amazon gift card voucher code. Products basically paid for themselves.
dang 5y ago
Url changed from https://fintechzoom.com/fintech_news_amazon-nasdaq-amzn/amazon-says-its-permanently-banned-600-chinese-brands-for-review-fraud/ https://fintechzoom.com/fintech_news_amazon-nasdaq-amzn/amaz..., which is shamelessly stolen from this. Thanks to the user who emailed to let us know!
temp8964 5y ago
I think another problem is the lack of good brands in all sorts of gadgets. I was shopping for a webcam last week. Basically it’s logitech + random brands. Also, I don’t believe the review/ratings of those random brands at all. I think they must be fake.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  That's tricky. I've got an old Xiaomi Yi action-cam that punches way above its weight, though I wouldn't want to drop it on a floor or anything. I also use Teensy processors in things, but I'm aware of some of the 'no name' processor boards that are waaaaay cheaper and still functional. Anything like integrated circuits, cameras etc, there is definitely the possibility of somebody coming up with a high quality knock-off that's functionally competitive with the known version. You just won't be able to tell if it's a good knock-off or a broken knock-off. Some things you won't get. There won't be an equivalent of my API microphone preamplifiers: not nearly a large enough market, and too tricky to make properly. But something like a Logitech webcam or a budget Focusrite pre, you are already getting compromised design to hit a price point, and that opens up avenues for a knock-off to try to do the same thing without paying for brand building or discovery in the normal sense. And that's when you find out how much it cost to make the actual object (sometimes, also knocking off the design process and outright pirating it).
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
only 6 million more to go
29athrowaway 5y ago
Amazon has declined to a point in which it is impossible to buy any clothing, furniture, toys, etc. Full of low quality from sockpuppet brands with randomly generated names. Not only low quality, but toxic too. Instead of making products safe, fraudulent vendors do a photo session with white kids playing with their products, or simply they just add them via photomanipulation or stock photos.
sangd 5y ago
Not sure what this would accomplish anything positive or these brands would find ways to dodge. And some brands seem to be ok to use. What about Amazon own brand products? I find it unbelievable with their own reviews and ratings. For example, a Fire HD 8 tablet have almost 120k reviews with 4.6/5 stars. It doesn't make any sense. These tablets are junk quality with crappy software. I find Costco product reviews are way more trustworthy. Even though they're 3-star, I still buy them sometimes.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Don't conflate ratings and quality. The Fire HD 8 having a 4.6/5 and the iPad Mini having a 4.8/5 doesn't mean they are about the same quality of device it means they met the expectations of the buyer about equally. Many get the Fire tablets because they wanted a cheap way to access Kindle on a color screen. Even more love it because there are dirt cheap options to hand their kids. At 1/6 the price of a base iPad Mini it can even arrive DoA and be rated well since Amazon will just RAM without asking questions. People aren't always looking for solid metal frames with high quality software, many are happy to find the cheap piece of plastic that lets them watch a movie in the car and will give good ratings to the product that let them do that for the price of eating out for a night.
  - sangd 5y ago
    I'm not saying they're the same. Wouldn't you think the reviews reflect anything of the quality? If I look at other products else where, a 4.6 rating would tell me a lot about the quality of the product. I think maybe there's a conflation of ratings and usability of some people.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      The 4.6 is telling you it's great for being less than 100 dollars not that it's a great overall. Few options in the 100 dollar space are going to give you OS updates for years but every single one will have crap hardware. As for other places it has a 4.5 or higher at every place I see on Google shopping including target and best buy. You wouldn't rate a McDonald's a 1 star because it was shit compared to the steakhouse down the street you'd rate it based on how it performed against similar competition.
jfrunyon 5y ago
Yes. "Permanently banned". Because the brands certainly won't change their name and go right back up. Until Amazon starts actually vetting the products and sellers that they offer a platform to, they will continue to be full of fraud and scams.
johnwheeler 5y ago
It’s gotten to the point where I bypass mostly anything with thousands of 5 star reviews, and that makes the rest of it a crap shoot. Too much Chinese junk on there. 600 sellers is t even a drop in the bucket. And what’s going to stop them from signing back up with new accounts?
happytoexplain 5y ago
I can't help but feel pessimistic about this progress. The quantity of hyper-low-quality and outright fake products is oppressive in its sheer magnitude.
sbassi 5y ago
I agree with banning bad actors, but not this way. Amazon should give some explaining for the customers who goes to the merchant page instead of a 404. I bought some USB-C extension, I wanted to buy the same again for a new computer, and spend lot of time searching for the same device and there is no trace of the brand, most likely it was banned, but users deserves to know what happened. What taken down by safety reasons? (my device was hot sometimes) or some legal or copyright or fraud? It is very disappointing to not know what happened with a brand you trusted.
wnevets 5y ago
Someone once described Amazon as an online Dollar General where every product has 1000s 5 star reviews and I think about that every time I go to Amazon.
rickspencer3 5y ago
Good. I'm sure the result Chinese vendors will all now understand the intent of these rules and start acting with the utmost in ethics and trustworthiness on Amazon. /s
pdimitar 5y ago
TL;DR: I am from Eastern Europe, moved from shopping from Amazon USA to AliExpress and I saved a ton of money. The waiting times are significantly longer but Amazon's were far from good anyway. --- Long version: I am in Eastern Europe and the markup we pay here for shopping from Amazon USA is crazy. Still, I needed some of the items because I couldn't find them anywhere else: high-quality iPad Pro cases, books at their 6th edition, USB flash sticks with physical protection switches etc. I always end up paying something between 40% to 55% above the combined price of all items in the cart. It's like I get it, delivery fees, EU VAT%, customs et. al. but I eventually got sick of it. I also made the mistake of paying for express shipping several times. It made but a small difference. The "express" time was 12-13 days and the normal one was 18-20. I easily pay $50 to $150 for the privilege to wait 2 weeks and not 3. Meh. Moved to AliExpress a year or so ago. You get the occasional hiccup where a middle party unexpectedly cancels shipping for reasons unknown but AliExpress has so far proved very capable and fair when addressing such problems. Recently passed the 100 orders mark and so far I've lost... $8 or so due to AliExpress not siding with me during 2 disputes. That's less than 1% of what I paid in total. It's a very acceptable risk margin. Do I wait a lot for my stuff? Sadly yes. Stuff travels to Netherlands and then makes a U-turn back to Eastern Europe and I rarely get something before the 4th week mark. And some of the cheaper things where free shipping is the default you might easily wait 6-10 weeks for... but I don't care. I get things that are both cheap and with very good quality. Nothing of what I ordered is life-saving so I am OK with the waiting. The amount and diversity of all sorts of stuff in AliExpress is crazy. I love it.
paxys 5y ago
Cool we will have 600 new brands on Amazon tomorrow.
- thekingofravens 5y ago
  They are already here, put "Aukey Webcam" into the search and you will find a very suspicious AUKEYPOWER brand.
Factorium 5y ago
I've ordered from Amazon Germany and have occasionally left justified 1-star reviews in English. Amazon took these reviews down but I can see they leave 5-star English reviews up. Its not just these brands that are fooling with the review system.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Similar experience here - I once left a detailed positive review of a product and many liked the review. Amazon showed it as the first of many 100's of reviews. A few months later, I bought the item again for a friend, and noticed that the specs had now changed but Amazon still listed it under the same product listing. I updated my review and pointed out this discrepancy. Suddenly my review which was at the top, was buried deep. Another issue I noted with Amazon reviews was that if you post positive reviews, Amazon slowly hikes the price of the same product when you buy it next. I just don't trust Amazon's review system anymore.
  - gilrain 5y ago
    Indeed. Additionally, if you want to save a few bucks on something, check it out on Amazon, add it to a wish list, then ignore it for a few days. When you go back to check your wishlist, it will be a little cheaper than before. They play a lot of manipulative little games like this.
    - aix1 5y ago
      Is the claim that Amazon shows different prices for the same product to different buyers? (I'm guessing it unlikely that one person adding an item to a wishlist would cause the price to drop for everyone.)
      - bmicraft 5y ago
        Yeah I don't believe that either. What is probably happening is that many products have over 20 different sellers that don't stock all products at all times, while amazon usually chooses the one with the lowest price currently available that they fulfill themselves
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
Recently bought a Switch dock new on Amazon. What showed up was in a manilla envelope bubbled wrapped. The power adapter was hilariously fake to my eye but plenty of consumers wouldn’t notice. Here are images of a genuine Nintendo a/c adapter vs the counterfeit version: https://ibb.co/qkK3mWm https://ibb.co/qkK3mWm https://ibb.co/d7qGvLd https://ibb.co/d7qGvLd
chx 5y ago
This is somewhat infuriating. From a USB C charger perspective, many of the banned brands were actually quite good , selling GaNFast chargers which are as good as it comes. Most of what remains is unknown. It's hard to blame these companies , Amazon pretty much made the place such that once one brand started doing this, you were dead if you weren't. So no, I do not see this as a good thing. There are other steps they could've taken but no. Stopping co-mingling would be one but I haven't heard them doing so. Curating products and taking responsibility would be another but LOL. As I mentioned before, my favorite product on Amazon demonstrating the utter lawlessness of a place is a powerstrip with a C5/C6 coupler input and a few NEMA 5-15R sockets. It ships with a CEE7/16-C5 cable (!!) and a couple plug shape adapters. I have been trying to decide for years whether it's a bigger fire hazard than an electricity hazard but I just can't make up my mind. Without a doubt, if a retail store attempted to sell this, it would be closed down, razed and the place sown with salt for good measure. Or at least fined into oblivion. It claims to have a TÜV Süd safety mark, it's obviously a fake one -- I'd pay good money to see the face of a TÜV Süd engineer when they see a power strip with a 2.5A input feeding 15A sockets. And of course losing ground because who needs the safety ground to be connected to ground. It is 4.5 stars with 7966 ratings and an "A" from FakeSpot.
- strombofulous 5y ago
  > From a USB C charger perspective, many of the banned brands were actually quite good That doesn't match my experience, I have started to just put the word "anker" at the end of my searches because that seems to be the only brand amazon carries that don't break after a month
  - chx 5y ago
    Try https://ganfast.com/products https://ganfast.com/products
  - nicbou 5y ago
    I have the Ravpower 100W, 2 port USB-C charger and it works great. I've been using it for a few months now, all over Europe.
user3939382 5y ago
If I was a congressman who was actually concerned about jobs and the American economy I’d force giant online retailers to provide Country of Origin filters so that American consumers could easily find products Made in USA. It’s interesting how Amazon deliberately omits this and there are so many brands that pretend to have a non-Chinese country of origin as a marketing strategy.
- bserge 5y ago
  Well, eBay has this. Sellers just put in a fake location. Though these days some actually have a warehouse there.
notatoad 5y ago
everybody here seems to be shitting on these brands for being generic no-name brands created by random letter generators. but Aukey and Ravpower were legitimately decent brands that had built up a reputation and had some value behind their brand name. whether you liked them or not, knocking them off amazon is a serious punishment that will have a real impact in dissuade other brands from committing review fraud. they also have to account for a serious sales volume on amazon. this isn't a meaningless PR gesture, amazon appears to actually be taking this seriously.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  I have several Aukey products that I quite like (mostly GaN stuff), and they came shipped in nicely designed packaging to boot (similar to Anker). It’s a bummer for them to get removed as they were one of the few brands I trusted (ravpower too) not to burn down my house amid the mountain of other crap in the Amazon listings similar products. So it feels like consumers get punished because brands are forced into the prisoners dilemma of review fraud when the underlying problem is just crap products clogging up the listings? Neat.
dirtyid 5y ago
A bunch of the more established Chinese brands tend to introduce more models from broader ODM space, there's a lot of new stuff not making it's way to North America anymore. Just seeing MPOW go through iterations was amazing. Which is a shame, Anker seems to have stagnated in the past recent years. They've also dramatically cut back on bluetooth audio. Can still order from Aliexpress, but trying to filter through rebranded generics and gambling on defect manufacturing lots with zero support, and waiting weeks for ships is not worth hassle. Selling on Amazon with question free RMAs and next day shipping for what seems like 25% markup of already cheap items was incredible for consumers.
fnord77 5y ago
there's so much junk on amazon with gibberish brand names - a lot of the items under different brands look almost identical. and this junk always is at the top of the search results. From flatware to electric kettles. case in point - I think these are identical, just photoed from different angles. And there's several others that look the same. https://www.amazon.com/Elemore-Home-Protection-Stainless-Bottom-Metal/dp/B099914PDN/ https://www.amazon.com/Elemore-Home-Protection-Stainless-Bot... https://www.amazon.com/Elechomes-Electric-Hot-Cocoa-Protection-Stainless/dp/B08DV3X7C2/ https://www.amazon.com/Elechomes-Electric-Hot-Cocoa-Protecti...
bArray 5y ago
In my opinion, the more interesting article is the South China Morning Post one linked in the article [1]: > Amazon.com said on Friday that it has closed about 3,000 online merchant accounts, backed by about 600 Chinese brands, [..] That's pretty significant. Names like RavPower and Mpow are quite big in this space, it's crazy they did not already make some effort to clean-up their act. I guess this may be the wake-up call they need. > The company’s campaign is not intended to target China or any other country [..] It's just that the ban almost entirely only affected Chinese brands. I really am glad Amazon are finally taking notice of shitty seller practices. > While questionable practices like paying for positive reviews often go unchecked on Chinese e-commerce platforms, [..] This does not speak highly of Chinese e-commerce platforms. > The crackdown has prompted some Chinese merchants to start investing more on other international online retail platforms such as eBay and AliExpress, according to the Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Association. Seems interesting that rather than attempt to clean-up their act and not buy reviews, they would prefer to move platform entirely and continue this obviously immoral behaviour. I suspect it's mostly posturing though, Amazon is a massive platform and gateway into the Western marketplace. [1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3149203/amazon-closes-3000-chinese-brand-online-stores-campaign-against-fake https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3149203/amazon-cl...
kelnos 5y ago
600? My (totally unsubstantiated) feeling is that the number of brands (Chinese or other) committing review fraud is at least an order of magnitude higher. This just feels like Amazon making an example of some of the worst offenders (or the easiest targets) so it makes people think they're doing something.
iszomer 5y ago
Has anyone stopped to question how much potential waste is being produced from unsold/returned item stocks marked for recycling or ending up in a landfill? I've also heard of bulk pallets being sold on the secondary market as "mystery boxes"..
dmix 5y ago
I searched for Mpow + Amazon for this Bluetooth earbuds I bought and found the exact same product now listed under a different brand: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0969F1QY6/ https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0969F1QY6/ Same URL and everything
azinman2 5y ago
As many are pointing out here and have pointed out in the past, Amazon opening up has turned them into Alibaba. Personally what I’d like to see is filters on either where something is made or country of manufacturer. It would massively help at filtering out the cheap Chinese knockoffs and help facilitate local manufacturing.
pnathan 5y ago
I avoid certain categories of goods on Amazon. Small home goods are usually a _disaster_. Toasters. French presses. Lamps. I know there are extremely competent Chinese manufacturers. I just wish that the crappy ones wouldn't be so good at spraying their junk all over Amazon. More pertinently, I'd like Amazon to shut down commingling and the basically uncontrolled third party resellers, instead forming a broader contractual relationship with reputable firms to resell goods and to force accountability.
oliwarner 5y ago
600 sounds like a lot until you find out they're close to 800,000 listed brands now. 100,000 in under a year. These 600 are already replaced by others doing the same. This problem isn't going anywhere. Amazon just wants you to think it has.
sneak 5y ago
I can find totally bogus stuff on Amazon in under 5 minutes. This means that Amazon's staff can, too. This has been the case for years now, so I assume that this is the situation that Amazon desires. Anyone who can build AWS can build anti-abuse tools.
sneak 5y ago
Aukey stuff still available on amazon.co.jp apparently, FWIW: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/PA-B5-BK-Charger-Delivery-Support-Nitride/dp/B08FD357RH https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/PA-B5-BK-Charger-Delivery-Supp... Either this is an unintentional omission, an intentional omission, or they have less of a problem with fakes in Japan.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
It sounds dramatic but give it about ten days and I think the headline will be “600 Chinese vendors join Amazon Marketplace. To quote Michael Scott from The Office, “If tomorrow my company goes under I will just start another paper company. And then another and another and another. I have no shortage of company names.”
lanevorockz 5y ago
Amazon itself relies on the honest and trustworthiness of internet reviews. If they become synonymous with poor quality products and fake advertisement, they will become the new poundland.
gandalfian 5y ago
European (decent) consumer rights are against the retailer. The warranty is almost a politeness. But amazon often denies being the retailer, who may be a random name abroad. This completely undermines the consumer rights to quality and durability and any future right to repair. Retailers that actually stand behind their goods get forced out. This is the really corrosive part of their business model in my opinion.
ZiiS 5y ago
I assume they meen 600/day. Would even that keep up?
notacoward 5y ago
This seems more about cracking down on "please review our product" gift cards in shipped products than much worse practices. My un-favorite is review hijacking, where someone buys a listing with good reviews and then uses the "product variant" loophole to use it for a completely different product. I have products from Mpow, RAVpower, and TaoTronics that I quite like. Meanwhile, many product categories are dominated by drop-shippers selling generic goods under computer-generated brand names that will never be seen again, either hijacked or full of genuinely fake reviews from people who never even existed (or both). I can only wonder what Amazon's reason is for going after one of the least problematic behaviors on their platform, while leaving the more serious crap untouched.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Review fraud but not product fraud? Ok Jeff

418 points by WaitWaitWha 5y ago

>Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts, the company confirms to The Verge. The keyword here is "brands", I think. I assume this means you cannot sell any product of that brand name, regardless of who you are. But then the article states: >Even though Aukey was one of the first high-profile companies to get banned in May, the company was still selling earbuds under a sub-brand as of July, and you can still buy a pair of them on Amazon even today. I also found a Choetech wireless charging pad, and a RavPower battery. Okay, so fraudulent sales continue and this is basically a non-story?

jerrysievert 5y ago

now let's do inventory co-mingling for broken and/or counterfeit stuff.

CosmicShadow 5y ago

Amazon used to be awesome and Prime felt so worth it, you could just get stuff sent to you and skip a trip to the store. Now we call it Scamazon and you spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings and fake reviews for any signs that a single item is worth buying before you give up and go to Walmart. It's so sad that it's gotten to the point where I think Walmart has better quality and prices than Amazon. We see dollar store stuff on Amazon for like $27 all the time. It's like they let their brand erode to pure garbage.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rossjudson 5y ago
Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so I can choose well. I hate the fact that there are a relatively small number of actual manufacturers of some classes of product, and then a massive fragmentation of "brands" that are just the same things, repackaged. On Amazon, the brand is Amazon -- because there's a small (and getting smaller) chance you've ever heard of the brand before. So when it comes to trust, our trust relationship is with Amazon. The main thing Amazon has going for it is the liberal return policies -- those transform the lack of trust in the general buying experience into a two-way door.
- xvector 5y ago
  Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
  - ghshephard 5y ago
    I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
    - the_snooze 5y ago
      If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
    - foerbert 5y ago
      I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
mancerayder 5y ago
As someone who's been a customer since it sold books, it's disappointing these past couple of years that I have to shop at other sites for trusted items. The whole point of reviews is to provide insight and lessen risk. Now it's a whole exercise in avoiding getting scammed. I had an experience recently where I wrote a review (which I rarely do) that was 2 or 3 stars for a product (jars) that had glass which cracked in the fridge. They flagged and removed my review. The same thing happens on sites like Airbnb, where it's trivial to delete bad reviews. With a system like this, you can skirt ethics by showing only positive reviews, and then you can't exactly be accused of fraud or fake reviews.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  > since it sold books, I feel for you. I telneted to books.com, before there was a "million book river" amazon ... Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.
- ncphil 5y ago
  Had a low star review pulled the same way recently. In a pique, I went in and deleted all my reviews. If AMZN isn't interested in preserving honest, critical reviews I'm not going to lend my name to legitimating them. Best Buy, B&H, Sweetwater are reliable sources of quality products. EBay will even do in a pinch, although ordering from them always seems a bit like a game of roulette. The paid ad scam corps have almost totally destroyed my reliance on reviews, as the insanely overhyped copy coming out of the Middle Kingdom has wrecked my trust in online product descriptions. Good work guys, you killed the goose: much luck staying afloat as the majority of shoppers are getting wise to you.
  - mmerlin 5y ago
    This is the perfect response. Thanks for the excellent suggestion! They deleted my last one star review too for a fraudulent fake product that wasted my time and money. Scamazon no longer deserves the SEO juice of previously entered legitimate reviews. Logging in to delete my past reviews now...
  - mancerayder 5y ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I let my Prime lapse years ago and I've been boycotting them ever since. Prime is a scam anyway. If I need something immediately then I goto the store. If I can wait then a week is fine (everywhere else has 2 day shipping now anyway). 2 days is a weird timeframe. It's fake convenience, an uncanny valley.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  Well - one of the nice things about Prime (at least here in Ann Arbor) - is there is a ton of same day stuff that is available as well for free shipping. Also - Expanse justified a bit of expanse. And, if you have "Family" sharing your Prime account, that also offsets the cost.
- OJFord 5y ago
  2 days does seem weird, but in the UK it's next day; in London (and perhaps other cities) it's same day. (In both cases with a time cut-off.) It would cost me money and time to go I don't even know where to buy the item in person, it's a very non-trivial convenience to me. And then Prime aside, the no-nonsense support/returns is something I knowingly sometimes pay a premium for. A few quid extra at Amazon vs. unknown site, or especially say eBay is worth it IMO. Not to mention the convenience of already having payment details there and not suffering through Sage/WorldPay/Pal for some one-off guest checkout. (Aside: scummy PayPal created an account for me from such a checkout process, and refuse to close it without me first 'verifying' it by providing photo ID and other PII. Such nonsense.)
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I meant to say same day for some products, I assume it's just whatever happens to already be in a London 'fulfillment centre'. Plus groceries.
barney54 5y ago
What are you buying on Amazon? I have had really good success and I don’t feel like I have to wade through too much crap. I just want to understand how other people’s experience is so different from mine and part of it has to be the type of things we purchase.
- fspeech 5y ago
  Maybe different shopping habit? I only use Amazon when I am looking for a specific (type of) product. It takes a little work but the end result is usually satisfactory. I have not done much "browsing" on Amazon as one would in a regular physical store.
  - raydev 5y ago
    Yeah, when I go to Amazon, I usually know exactly what I want and I'm just comparing prices by that point. If the product I want is on Amazon but is only available through third party resellers, then I'm likely to look elsewhere unless the third party reseller's reviews look balanced. All my ahead-of-time product research happens through reddit and YouTube and if it's a purchase that's super important to me, I'll think on it for weeks.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Maybe you just haven’t noticed? The counterfeits can be quite convincing. I’m reminded of this wire cutter post[1] from a year ago. I think the counterfeit Philips Toothbrush and Tweezerman packages look better than the real thing. The others seem a bit suspect when you look carefully and compare them to the real deal but I definitely don’t think I’d be suspicious if I saw them on their own. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-things-from-amazon-prime-can-you-tell-which-ones-are-real/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/i-bought-these-thing...
  - raydev 5y ago
    Unless I missed one, every one of the counterfeits came from a third party reseller. I avoid most resellers by default unless the reviews look balanced or they are obviously based in the US or Canada. And if I want something and it only appears to be available through less trustworthy third party resellers, then I will just buy it elsewhere. To be clear, just because I've been able to avoid it doesn't make the situation good, but for me it's relatively easy to avoid being scammed. Be skeptical of third party resellers by default, and it will go a long way. And to avoid "intermingling of fulfillment", all you have to do is verify it says "Ships from and sold by Amazon" in the text under the price. Any mention of fulfillment in that text implies third party somewhere in the chain.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I really wanted to buy a quality “splash pad” on Amazon. I was willing to pay triple the price of a normal priced pad. But it’s all junk. I ordered the most expensive one I could find, something like $110. It never worked well (the water didn’t spray from all jets), and just died after a month.
prometheus76 5y ago
And the free two-day shipping seems to be limited to only select items now. I know it was never universal, but free two-day shipping has turned into free 5-7 day shipping, but you're still paying for prime. I'm really re-evaluating whether prime is worth it anymore.
01100011 5y ago
> spend like 30 minutes weeding through crap, scammy duplicate looking listings I'm confused. What are you shopping for if this is your experience? I've run into a lot of fake reviews but otherwise I still goto Amazon by default for any purchase outside of groceries or bulky, cheap items.
chaostheory 5y ago
Yeah I always check whether Amazon is the seller and whether or not there are other 3rd parties selling the same product on the same page. If yes, I will go to another store instead. I definitely no longer mindlessly shop on Amazon anymore.

socialist_coder 5y ago

In my best Jeopardy voice: I'll take "changing your name to get around a ban" for $500 please

google234123 5y ago
All these brands seem to come from random name generators anyway. You can trust that GESMATEKIiI has the best usb chargers and mattress pads :P
aaronmdjones 5y ago
No kidding; I have a couple AUKEY dashcams, one of the removed brands. Searching for an AUKEY DR02 on amazon.co.uk returns an identical model from a brand ostensibly named "ABBB", whose product listing even includes identical images and a description ripped straight from AUKEY's website, for the same price.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  That's to be expected as Aukey is also just a brand name for rebranded white label products of varying quality. The difference is a little card in the package promising compensation for a positive review.
mlnhd 5y ago
Jeopardy! hasn't had a $500 clue in 20 years
Neil44 5y ago
Ha, yes it’s not like they’re all going to shrug and go back to college is it.

rdxm 5y ago

only 10 bazllion to go!!!!

calebh 5y ago

Amazon is filled with cheap junk nowadays. I don't trust them for anything important. Case in point: I recently purchased an air purifier but was worried that I would get a fake product since they are notorious for co-mingling. I ended up buying one from Target online which also has free two day shipping now. For anyone who is looking for an alternative to Amazon, it seems like the big retailers (Walmart, Target, Best Buy) have finally caught up with their online offerings. I don't think I'll ever buy anything important from Amazon again until they fix their trash problem.

xvector 5y ago
Amazon definitely isn't the place to go if you want any semblance of quality. You pay new prices for returned, used, or counterfeit goods. It's a disaster
- dheera 5y ago
  If the product quality doesn't match its price or it's used, just write an honest bad review. The seller will chase you by e-mail and give you back 50% or even 100% to edit the review. At that point you just temporarily edit it, get the gift card, and then edit the review back to the honest review. And then you have yourself a good deal on a used product. All we need is some AI to automate the above process and make a one-click interface to get discounted used stuff for 0%-50% of the price.
  - manuelmagic 5y ago
    I personally don't think that's fair and more importantly it doesn't solve the problem. You will pay less, true, but you still get a used or poor object. At least to me, that's not appealing at all.
- echelon 5y ago
  Why haven't consumers stopped buying?
  - 5y ago

wolfoftheweb 5y ago

Echoing other posters, I no longer can shop with confidence on Amazon. The ease of making a purchase is dead and the fast shipping doesn’t counteract the reality that there is no quality control. Having to sort reviews by most recent and really study the product and seller defeat the point. That’s why I’m back to ordering online with Home Depot and the like.

axpy906 5y ago

I recently had an experience with a seller that kept sending me new tracking numbers as the shipment got “lost”. At first it seemed like great customer service because they would send me a brand new item because the shipment failed to come through or waive the shipping fee on my order. In the end, I got wise to what was going on and on the last day asked for a full refund from Amazon before the appeal time expired. Amazon gave me the refund but that was close.

drefanzor 5y ago

I'll never forget ordering an Intel i9900k processor and receiving an unsoldered microchip for a random RC brand. Not once, but twice in a row; then Amazon accused me of lying. I just use them for video streaming, now.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

That probably means there are at least 12,000 more. :)

google234123 5y ago
50,000

xvector 5y ago

Wouldn't be surprised if engineers at Amazon are starting to buy from other retailers because they don't want to have a shitty experience themselves.

schleck8 5y ago

Don‘t forget Amazon took down Fakespot from the App Store, an app to check Amazon product review quality and detect anomalies, and afterwards the Amazon app appeared as an ad when searching for Fakespot on the App Store.

vlozko 5y ago
Fakespot is a privacy nightmare: https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy Personal Information We Collect Identifiers: User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.
- google234123 5y ago
  How is collecting a unique user id a privacy nightmare?
  - vlozko 5y ago
    “User ID also includes your account password…”
    - google234123 5y ago
      This willl blow your mind: when you sign up on a website they save a hash of your password so that you can login again later! Also, when you post a comment on hacker news, hn saves it on their server! What a privacy nightmare am I right?
      - google234123 5y ago
        This was too harsh, sorry
- 5y ago

google234123 5y ago

The first page of any search now is filled with so many weird brands. So many orders now come with a card with info about how to get Amazon card for a 5 star review. Also, who knows about 1 star reviews because these brands like to sabotage each other too... Example: (all the 5 star reviews with photos were paid (40$)) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08398XN1G/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08398XN1G/

rfwhyte 5y ago

Yet somehow when I make a search for a suitably generic product like "Wireless earbuds" the top 20 results are crap products that all have thousands of reviews and 4.5+ star ratings.

yuppie_scum 5y ago

At least it’s pretty easy to determine a shitty Chinese brand. Syntactically Nonsensical brand name usually formed by the composition of two conceptually related words, usually in all caps. I usually have to scroll down quite a bit to find a non sus brand now. And sometimes you do luck out ordering from one of them.

supernintendo 5y ago
Those weird brand names have actually become a problem for the US trademark system. The sellers are basically just algorithmically generating company names that haven’t been trademarked yet in an attempt to fill the Amazon marketplace with as many fake brands as possible [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...

blibble 5y ago

no doubt they've been back on the store for hours already

dstaley 5y ago

One of the upsetting things about this crackdown is that some of the brands mentioned in the article actually produced good products. I'd have much rathered people purchase products from Ravpower and Aukey than DiHines, AINOPE, Ailun, yootech, SMALLElectric, TT&C, or Amoner, all of which appear on the first page of results for "USB C charger". Besides the review misconduct, I do think a lot of people's issues with Amazon stem from purchasing no-name products from unknown sellers, an action that is made horrendously easy by Amazon's UI. I've purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of items from Amazon, and I have had a perfect experience by following two rules: (1) always buy from Amazon (not a marketplace seller), and (2) always buy a reputable brand. Others have mentioned the issue of co-mingling inventory, and while I believe it's an issue, I've never come across a purchase from Amazon that looked anything less than legitimate.

mouth 5y ago
I have found that purchasing SanDisk USB thumb drives and SD cards from Amazon is like playing Russian Roulette. It’s not until you plug them in that you realize you have been scammed. Now I only buys these items from Micro Center.
- dstaley 5y ago
  Genuinely curious: would you mind confirming that the seller of those items was Amazon (your order details should mention the seller)? I've purchased Samsung microSD cards nine times, and various flash drives also nine times over the past decade and all have been genuine. Small sample size, I know, but hardly a Russian roulette from my experience!
  - sixothree 5y ago
    I am convinced relying on "seller is Amazon" thing is useless. Even if the product you buy is genuine, it seems manufacturers aren't sending their best to Amazon. This really becomes apparent for things like shaving razors.
  - user5994461 5y ago

arglebarglegar 5y ago

they’ll just change their name, it’s not like they have reputations anyway

zamalek 5y ago

I received a gift card pursuant to a review. So I left a 1 star review explaining that gift cards were being used for good reviews (the product was otherwise fantastic). Amazon took the review down.

rdtwo 5y ago

They need to Switch to white lists. Blacklists don’t work

ikiris 5y ago

drop in the ocean. Amazon has become the online scam marketplace. I fully expect every item to be either counterfeit or outright stolen at this point.

l5870uoo9y 5y ago

Amazon is primarily a platform for Chinese resellers.

baybal2 5y ago
Find anything on Amazon not made in China. Amazon has actually started an extensive push to recruit South Asian sellers to provide just any kind of counterweight to Chinese.

mortenjorck 5y ago

600 Chinese brands on Amazon… so that’s got to be at least six sellers, right? Given how hard it is, at least for a customer, to match any kind of real-world entity to a XINKDS or MOLYPOW, and how many new vaguely pronounceable permutations of letters show up as new “brands” every month, this actually seems like a low number.

29athrowaway 5y ago
Some of those shell companies even claim to be American, and even go to the extent of making a website. But by looking at the whois info for the domain you notice that they are registered via Alibaba Cloud.
bmicraft 5y ago
It's not about the products themselves but about the fake reviews and the little cards in the box promising compensation for a positive review. As such it does not matter if the same products (some of which are genuinely good) will be sold under a different name.

SnowProblem 5y ago

Can't relate to the comments here. I usually just go with the "Amazon Choice" badge when there are options and it's fine.

pugworthy 5y ago
Same. Rarely do I ever get anything bad. But then mostly what I'm ordering are brands like the Bialeti 9 cup Moka pot gaskets I just ordered or the GE brand cast iron griddle top for our gas stove. Stuff I can't get locally.

benbristow 5y ago

To be fair I've received those 'give a review' cards on some things I've bought from Amazon before. Out of curiosity I went along with the game, knowing it was probably a scam, and whilst still giving honest reviews because the products were actually good, to be fair to them they actually paid out very promptly with an Amazon gift card voucher code. Products basically paid for themselves.

dang 5y ago

Url changed from https://fintechzoom.com/fintech_news_amazon-nasdaq-amzn/amazon-says-its-permanently-banned-600-chinese-brands-for-review-fraud/ https://fintechzoom.com/fintech_news_amazon-nasdaq-amzn/amaz..., which is shamelessly stolen from this. Thanks to the user who emailed to let us know!

temp8964 5y ago

I think another problem is the lack of good brands in all sorts of gadgets. I was shopping for a webcam last week. Basically it’s logitech + random brands. Also, I don’t believe the review/ratings of those random brands at all. I think they must be fake.

Applejinx 5y ago
That's tricky. I've got an old Xiaomi Yi action-cam that punches way above its weight, though I wouldn't want to drop it on a floor or anything. I also use Teensy processors in things, but I'm aware of some of the 'no name' processor boards that are waaaaay cheaper and still functional. Anything like integrated circuits, cameras etc, there is definitely the possibility of somebody coming up with a high quality knock-off that's functionally competitive with the known version. You just won't be able to tell if it's a good knock-off or a broken knock-off. Some things you won't get. There won't be an equivalent of my API microphone preamplifiers: not nearly a large enough market, and too tricky to make properly. But something like a Logitech webcam or a budget Focusrite pre, you are already getting compromised design to hit a price point, and that opens up avenues for a knock-off to try to do the same thing without paying for brand building or discovery in the normal sense. And that's when you find out how much it cost to make the actual object (sometimes, also knocking off the design process and outright pirating it).

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

only 6 million more to go

29athrowaway 5y ago

Amazon has declined to a point in which it is impossible to buy any clothing, furniture, toys, etc. Full of low quality from sockpuppet brands with randomly generated names. Not only low quality, but toxic too. Instead of making products safe, fraudulent vendors do a photo session with white kids playing with their products, or simply they just add them via photomanipulation or stock photos.

sangd 5y ago

Not sure what this would accomplish anything positive or these brands would find ways to dodge. And some brands seem to be ok to use. What about Amazon own brand products? I find it unbelievable with their own reviews and ratings. For example, a Fire HD 8 tablet have almost 120k reviews with 4.6/5 stars. It doesn't make any sense. These tablets are junk quality with crappy software. I find Costco product reviews are way more trustworthy. Even though they're 3-star, I still buy them sometimes.

zamadatix 5y ago
Don't conflate ratings and quality. The Fire HD 8 having a 4.6/5 and the iPad Mini having a 4.8/5 doesn't mean they are about the same quality of device it means they met the expectations of the buyer about equally. Many get the Fire tablets because they wanted a cheap way to access Kindle on a color screen. Even more love it because there are dirt cheap options to hand their kids. At 1/6 the price of a base iPad Mini it can even arrive DoA and be rated well since Amazon will just RAM without asking questions. People aren't always looking for solid metal frames with high quality software, many are happy to find the cheap piece of plastic that lets them watch a movie in the car and will give good ratings to the product that let them do that for the price of eating out for a night.
- sangd 5y ago
  I'm not saying they're the same. Wouldn't you think the reviews reflect anything of the quality? If I look at other products else where, a 4.6 rating would tell me a lot about the quality of the product. I think maybe there's a conflation of ratings and usability of some people.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    The 4.6 is telling you it's great for being less than 100 dollars not that it's a great overall. Few options in the 100 dollar space are going to give you OS updates for years but every single one will have crap hardware. As for other places it has a 4.5 or higher at every place I see on Google shopping including target and best buy. You wouldn't rate a McDonald's a 1 star because it was shit compared to the steakhouse down the street you'd rate it based on how it performed against similar competition.

jfrunyon 5y ago

Yes. "Permanently banned". Because the brands certainly won't change their name and go right back up. Until Amazon starts actually vetting the products and sellers that they offer a platform to, they will continue to be full of fraud and scams.

johnwheeler 5y ago

It’s gotten to the point where I bypass mostly anything with thousands of 5 star reviews, and that makes the rest of it a crap shoot. Too much Chinese junk on there. 600 sellers is t even a drop in the bucket. And what’s going to stop them from signing back up with new accounts?

happytoexplain 5y ago

I can't help but feel pessimistic about this progress. The quantity of hyper-low-quality and outright fake products is oppressive in its sheer magnitude.

sbassi 5y ago

I agree with banning bad actors, but not this way. Amazon should give some explaining for the customers who goes to the merchant page instead of a 404. I bought some USB-C extension, I wanted to buy the same again for a new computer, and spend lot of time searching for the same device and there is no trace of the brand, most likely it was banned, but users deserves to know what happened. What taken down by safety reasons? (my device was hot sometimes) or some legal or copyright or fraud? It is very disappointing to not know what happened with a brand you trusted.

wnevets 5y ago

Someone once described Amazon as an online Dollar General where every product has 1000s 5 star reviews and I think about that every time I go to Amazon.

rickspencer3 5y ago

Good. I'm sure the result Chinese vendors will all now understand the intent of these rules and start acting with the utmost in ethics and trustworthiness on Amazon. /s

pdimitar 5y ago

TL;DR: I am from Eastern Europe, moved from shopping from Amazon USA to AliExpress and I saved a ton of money. The waiting times are significantly longer but Amazon's were far from good anyway. --- Long version: I am in Eastern Europe and the markup we pay here for shopping from Amazon USA is crazy. Still, I needed some of the items because I couldn't find them anywhere else: high-quality iPad Pro cases, books at their 6th edition, USB flash sticks with physical protection switches etc. I always end up paying something between 40% to 55% above the combined price of all items in the cart. It's like I get it, delivery fees, EU VAT%, customs et. al. but I eventually got sick of it. I also made the mistake of paying for express shipping several times. It made but a small difference. The "express" time was 12-13 days and the normal one was 18-20. I easily pay $50 to $150 for the privilege to wait 2 weeks and not 3. Meh. Moved to AliExpress a year or so ago. You get the occasional hiccup where a middle party unexpectedly cancels shipping for reasons unknown but AliExpress has so far proved very capable and fair when addressing such problems. Recently passed the 100 orders mark and so far I've lost... $8 or so due to AliExpress not siding with me during 2 disputes. That's less than 1% of what I paid in total. It's a very acceptable risk margin. Do I wait a lot for my stuff? Sadly yes. Stuff travels to Netherlands and then makes a U-turn back to Eastern Europe and I rarely get something before the 4th week mark. And some of the cheaper things where free shipping is the default you might easily wait 6-10 weeks for... but I don't care. I get things that are both cheap and with very good quality. Nothing of what I ordered is life-saving so I am OK with the waiting. The amount and diversity of all sorts of stuff in AliExpress is crazy. I love it.

paxys 5y ago

Cool we will have 600 new brands on Amazon tomorrow.

thekingofravens 5y ago
They are already here, put "Aukey Webcam" into the search and you will find a very suspicious AUKEYPOWER brand.

Factorium 5y ago

I've ordered from Amazon Germany and have occasionally left justified 1-star reviews in English. Amazon took these reviews down but I can see they leave 5-star English reviews up. Its not just these brands that are fooling with the review system.

webmobdev 5y ago
Similar experience here - I once left a detailed positive review of a product and many liked the review. Amazon showed it as the first of many 100's of reviews. A few months later, I bought the item again for a friend, and noticed that the specs had now changed but Amazon still listed it under the same product listing. I updated my review and pointed out this discrepancy. Suddenly my review which was at the top, was buried deep. Another issue I noted with Amazon reviews was that if you post positive reviews, Amazon slowly hikes the price of the same product when you buy it next. I just don't trust Amazon's review system anymore.
- gilrain 5y ago
  Indeed. Additionally, if you want to save a few bucks on something, check it out on Amazon, add it to a wish list, then ignore it for a few days. When you go back to check your wishlist, it will be a little cheaper than before. They play a lot of manipulative little games like this.
  - aix1 5y ago
    Is the claim that Amazon shows different prices for the same product to different buyers? (I'm guessing it unlikely that one person adding an item to a wishlist would cause the price to drop for everyone.)
    - bmicraft 5y ago
      Yeah I don't believe that either. What is probably happening is that many products have over 20 different sellers that don't stock all products at all times, while amazon usually chooses the one with the lowest price currently available that they fulfill themselves

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

Recently bought a Switch dock new on Amazon. What showed up was in a manilla envelope bubbled wrapped. The power adapter was hilariously fake to my eye but plenty of consumers wouldn’t notice. Here are images of a genuine Nintendo a/c adapter vs the counterfeit version: https://ibb.co/qkK3mWm https://ibb.co/qkK3mWm https://ibb.co/d7qGvLd https://ibb.co/d7qGvLd

chx 5y ago

This is somewhat infuriating. From a USB C charger perspective, many of the banned brands were actually quite good , selling GaNFast chargers which are as good as it comes. Most of what remains is unknown. It's hard to blame these companies , Amazon pretty much made the place such that once one brand started doing this, you were dead if you weren't. So no, I do not see this as a good thing. There are other steps they could've taken but no. Stopping co-mingling would be one but I haven't heard them doing so. Curating products and taking responsibility would be another but LOL. As I mentioned before, my favorite product on Amazon demonstrating the utter lawlessness of a place is a powerstrip with a C5/C6 coupler input and a few NEMA 5-15R sockets. It ships with a CEE7/16-C5 cable (!!) and a couple plug shape adapters. I have been trying to decide for years whether it's a bigger fire hazard than an electricity hazard but I just can't make up my mind. Without a doubt, if a retail store attempted to sell this, it would be closed down, razed and the place sown with salt for good measure. Or at least fined into oblivion. It claims to have a TÜV Süd safety mark, it's obviously a fake one -- I'd pay good money to see the face of a TÜV Süd engineer when they see a power strip with a 2.5A input feeding 15A sockets. And of course losing ground because who needs the safety ground to be connected to ground. It is 4.5 stars with 7966 ratings and an "A" from FakeSpot.

strombofulous 5y ago
> From a USB C charger perspective, many of the banned brands were actually quite good That doesn't match my experience, I have started to just put the word "anker" at the end of my searches because that seems to be the only brand amazon carries that don't break after a month
- chx 5y ago
  Try https://ganfast.com/products https://ganfast.com/products
- nicbou 5y ago
  I have the Ravpower 100W, 2 port USB-C charger and it works great. I've been using it for a few months now, all over Europe.

user3939382 5y ago

If I was a congressman who was actually concerned about jobs and the American economy I’d force giant online retailers to provide Country of Origin filters so that American consumers could easily find products Made in USA. It’s interesting how Amazon deliberately omits this and there are so many brands that pretend to have a non-Chinese country of origin as a marketing strategy.

bserge 5y ago
Well, eBay has this. Sellers just put in a fake location. Though these days some actually have a warehouse there.

notatoad 5y ago

everybody here seems to be shitting on these brands for being generic no-name brands created by random letter generators. but Aukey and Ravpower were legitimately decent brands that had built up a reputation and had some value behind their brand name. whether you liked them or not, knocking them off amazon is a serious punishment that will have a real impact in dissuade other brands from committing review fraud. they also have to account for a serious sales volume on amazon. this isn't a meaningless PR gesture, amazon appears to actually be taking this seriously.

merrywhether 5y ago
I have several Aukey products that I quite like (mostly GaN stuff), and they came shipped in nicely designed packaging to boot (similar to Anker). It’s a bummer for them to get removed as they were one of the few brands I trusted (ravpower too) not to burn down my house amid the mountain of other crap in the Amazon listings similar products. So it feels like consumers get punished because brands are forced into the prisoners dilemma of review fraud when the underlying problem is just crap products clogging up the listings? Neat.

dirtyid 5y ago

A bunch of the more established Chinese brands tend to introduce more models from broader ODM space, there's a lot of new stuff not making it's way to North America anymore. Just seeing MPOW go through iterations was amazing. Which is a shame, Anker seems to have stagnated in the past recent years. They've also dramatically cut back on bluetooth audio. Can still order from Aliexpress, but trying to filter through rebranded generics and gambling on defect manufacturing lots with zero support, and waiting weeks for ships is not worth hassle. Selling on Amazon with question free RMAs and next day shipping for what seems like 25% markup of already cheap items was incredible for consumers.

fnord77 5y ago

there's so much junk on amazon with gibberish brand names - a lot of the items under different brands look almost identical. and this junk always is at the top of the search results. From flatware to electric kettles. case in point - I think these are identical, just photoed from different angles. And there's several others that look the same. https://www.amazon.com/Elemore-Home-Protection-Stainless-Bottom-Metal/dp/B099914PDN/ https://www.amazon.com/Elemore-Home-Protection-Stainless-Bot... https://www.amazon.com/Elechomes-Electric-Hot-Cocoa-Protection-Stainless/dp/B08DV3X7C2/ https://www.amazon.com/Elechomes-Electric-Hot-Cocoa-Protecti...

bArray 5y ago

In my opinion, the more interesting article is the South China Morning Post one linked in the article [1]: > Amazon.com said on Friday that it has closed about 3,000 online merchant accounts, backed by about 600 Chinese brands, [..] That's pretty significant. Names like RavPower and Mpow are quite big in this space, it's crazy they did not already make some effort to clean-up their act. I guess this may be the wake-up call they need. > The company’s campaign is not intended to target China or any other country [..] It's just that the ban almost entirely only affected Chinese brands. I really am glad Amazon are finally taking notice of shitty seller practices. > While questionable practices like paying for positive reviews often go unchecked on Chinese e-commerce platforms, [..] This does not speak highly of Chinese e-commerce platforms. > The crackdown has prompted some Chinese merchants to start investing more on other international online retail platforms such as eBay and AliExpress, according to the Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Association. Seems interesting that rather than attempt to clean-up their act and not buy reviews, they would prefer to move platform entirely and continue this obviously immoral behaviour. I suspect it's mostly posturing though, Amazon is a massive platform and gateway into the Western marketplace. [1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3149203/amazon-closes-3000-chinese-brand-online-stores-campaign-against-fake https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3149203/amazon-cl...

kelnos 5y ago

600? My (totally unsubstantiated) feeling is that the number of brands (Chinese or other) committing review fraud is at least an order of magnitude higher. This just feels like Amazon making an example of some of the worst offenders (or the easiest targets) so it makes people think they're doing something.

iszomer 5y ago

Has anyone stopped to question how much potential waste is being produced from unsold/returned item stocks marked for recycling or ending up in a landfill? I've also heard of bulk pallets being sold on the secondary market as "mystery boxes"..

dmix 5y ago

I searched for Mpow + Amazon for this Bluetooth earbuds I bought and found the exact same product now listed under a different brand: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0969F1QY6/ https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0969F1QY6/ Same URL and everything

azinman2 5y ago

As many are pointing out here and have pointed out in the past, Amazon opening up has turned them into Alibaba. Personally what I’d like to see is filters on either where something is made or country of manufacturer. It would massively help at filtering out the cheap Chinese knockoffs and help facilitate local manufacturing.

pnathan 5y ago

I avoid certain categories of goods on Amazon. Small home goods are usually a _disaster_. Toasters. French presses. Lamps. I know there are extremely competent Chinese manufacturers. I just wish that the crappy ones wouldn't be so good at spraying their junk all over Amazon. More pertinently, I'd like Amazon to shut down commingling and the basically uncontrolled third party resellers, instead forming a broader contractual relationship with reputable firms to resell goods and to force accountability.

oliwarner 5y ago

600 sounds like a lot until you find out they're close to 800,000 listed brands now. 100,000 in under a year. These 600 are already replaced by others doing the same. This problem isn't going anywhere. Amazon just wants you to think it has.

sneak 5y ago

I can find totally bogus stuff on Amazon in under 5 minutes. This means that Amazon's staff can, too. This has been the case for years now, so I assume that this is the situation that Amazon desires. Anyone who can build AWS can build anti-abuse tools.

sneak 5y ago

Aukey stuff still available on amazon.co.jp apparently, FWIW: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/PA-B5-BK-Charger-Delivery-Support-Nitride/dp/B08FD357RH https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/PA-B5-BK-Charger-Delivery-Supp... Either this is an unintentional omission, an intentional omission, or they have less of a problem with fakes in Japan.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

It sounds dramatic but give it about ten days and I think the headline will be “600 Chinese vendors join Amazon Marketplace. To quote Michael Scott from The Office, “If tomorrow my company goes under I will just start another paper company. And then another and another and another. I have no shortage of company names.”

lanevorockz 5y ago

Amazon itself relies on the honest and trustworthiness of internet reviews. If they become synonymous with poor quality products and fake advertisement, they will become the new poundland.

gandalfian 5y ago

European (decent) consumer rights are against the retailer. The warranty is almost a politeness. But amazon often denies being the retailer, who may be a random name abroad. This completely undermines the consumer rights to quality and durability and any future right to repair. Retailers that actually stand behind their goods get forced out. This is the really corrosive part of their business model in my opinion.

ZiiS 5y ago

I assume they meen 600/day. Would even that keep up?

notacoward 5y ago

This seems more about cracking down on "please review our product" gift cards in shipped products than much worse practices. My un-favorite is review hijacking, where someone buys a listing with good reviews and then uses the "product variant" loophole to use it for a completely different product. I have products from Mpow, RAVpower, and TaoTronics that I quite like. Meanwhile, many product categories are dominated by drop-shippers selling generic goods under computer-generated brand names that will never be seen again, either hijacked or full of genuinely fake reviews from people who never even existed (or both). I can only wonder what Amazon's reason is for going after one of the least problematic behaviors on their platform, while leaving the more serious crap untouched.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Review fraud but not product fraud? Ok Jeff