5 ms·

But why are so many of these pseudo-brands exactly 1. six characters long, 2. all caps, and have 3. point-form descriptions that 4. use some particular emoji as

by derefr 4y ago

But why are so many of these pseudo-brands exactly 1. six characters long, 2. all caps, and have 3. point-form descriptions that 4. use some particular emoji as bullet-point symbols, and 5. give each point a separate, usually-capitalized "title" part, 6. enclosed in either square brackets or the even-more-niche punctuation【】? To me, that reads either like these all being marques of one company; or there being some Chinese "start a turn-key Amazon business" SaaS that most of these pseudo-brands make use of, which generates a brand name for you, and for product descriptions, takes structured key-value input and formats it into text in this style. Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofiQ7EGBH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofiQ7EGBH8 — all the branded "knock-off" smartphones on Wish/AliExpress with hardware meant to look like some well-known phone, but with generic software (usually with a start-up screen that says "WELCOME"), are in fact made by a single white-label manufacturer, Microhand/KST (https://www.microhand.net/english/ https://www.microhand.net/english/).

blowski 4y ago
A lot of fraud is remarkably uncreative. Look at Companies House in the UK - you can spot many of the scams a mile off.
- derefr 4y ago
  But these are the kind of properties where it takes a lot of staring at many different examples to even spot the pattern. I don't expect that someone deciding to do their own spin on this would bother to notice these little things. It'd be like someone setting out to make their own mass-manufactured chicken nuggets, and accidentally recreating the exact set of nugget shapes McDonald's uses.
hgsgm 4y ago
thirtyseven 4y ago
What’s hard to believe about several thousand sellers all copying each other’s homework?
- derefr 4y ago
  Because it's not just the big things that are the same; it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy. You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?
  - pishpash 4y ago
    This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
  - travem 4y ago
    > You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
    - derefr 4y ago
      What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to notice every detail of the pattern. Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random. But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible. (Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
dwringer 4y ago
I wonder if the telltale signs are much the same as in spam emails: a tool to filter out customers who are more discerning and thus liable to cause problems with Amazon if they get ripped off (demanding refunds, reporting seller misconduct, etc).
honkdaddy 4y ago
>"start a turn-key Amazon business" From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself. I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself. From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.
makeitdouble 4y ago
> Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks. From the comments I was expecting a flood of knock-offs or really problematic products, but it seems the main argument is they’re cheap and delivery takes a boat trip across the globe. Is there any solid reasons these vendors shouldn’t be on Amazon ? The knock-offs on AliExpress look to me like a different problem.
- derefr 4y ago
  There's nothing inherent to these vendors (as people) and/or (most of) their products that would mean that they shouldn't be allowed on Amazon, no. The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it. Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with. If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Thanks. The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally. I was looking at the “baby mocassin” listing the tweet is mentioning, and picked one of the “small business” labeled ones that have probably been vetted as an actual US business: https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAmazonFulfilled=1 https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAm... The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)
mhh__ 4y ago
There are some alleged frauds in the UK that rely on lots of small ephemeral businesses, one after the other, I could see that being an valid strategy here too
L_Rahman 4y ago
Your guess that this is driven by a SaaS is built around assumptions of how process and repetition is structured in the West and its labor markets but this doesn't hold in China. In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct. There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form. edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
Raymonf 4y ago
#6: These are full-width brackets. Most Chinese input method editors will output full-width characters by default instead of the half-width ones that you're accustomed to. For example: ，。；：【】 If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
107208579 4y ago
Square brackets【】are a requirement for company/brand names when it comes to SMS communication in China: https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_faq_0002.html https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_fa...

by derefr 4y ago

blowski 4y ago

A lot of fraud is remarkably uncreative. Look at Companies House in the UK - you can spot many of the scams a mile off.

derefr 4y ago
But these are the kind of properties where it takes a lot of staring at many different examples to even spot the pattern. I don't expect that someone deciding to do their own spin on this would bother to notice these little things. It'd be like someone setting out to make their own mass-manufactured chicken nuggets, and accidentally recreating the exact set of nugget shapes McDonald's uses.

hgsgm 4y ago

thirtyseven 4y ago

What’s hard to believe about several thousand sellers all copying each other’s homework?

derefr 4y ago
Because it's not just the big things that are the same; it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy. You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?
- pishpash 4y ago
  This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
- travem 4y ago
  > You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
  - derefr 4y ago
    What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to notice every detail of the pattern. Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random. But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible. (Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)

dwringer 4y ago

I wonder if the telltale signs are much the same as in spam emails: a tool to filter out customers who are more discerning and thus liable to cause problems with Amazon if they get ripped off (demanding refunds, reporting seller misconduct, etc).

honkdaddy 4y ago

>"start a turn-key Amazon business" From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself. I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.

TMWNN 4y ago
>From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself. From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.

makeitdouble 4y ago

> Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks. From the comments I was expecting a flood of knock-offs or really problematic products, but it seems the main argument is they’re cheap and delivery takes a boat trip across the globe. Is there any solid reasons these vendors shouldn’t be on Amazon ? The knock-offs on AliExpress look to me like a different problem.

derefr 4y ago
There's nothing inherent to these vendors (as people) and/or (most of) their products that would mean that they shouldn't be allowed on Amazon, no. The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it. Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with. If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Thanks. The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally. I was looking at the “baby mocassin” listing the tweet is mentioning, and picked one of the “small business” labeled ones that have probably been vetted as an actual US business: https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAmazonFulfilled=1 https://www.amazon.com/sp?ie=UTF8&seller=A1O25JS82TADDG&isAm... The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)

mhh__ 4y ago

There are some alleged frauds in the UK that rely on lots of small ephemeral businesses, one after the other, I could see that being an valid strategy here too

L_Rahman 4y ago

Your guess that this is driven by a SaaS is built around assumptions of how process and repetition is structured in the West and its labor markets but this doesn't hold in China. In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct. There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form. edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.

Raymonf 4y ago

#6: These are full-width brackets. Most Chinese input method editors will output full-width characters by default instead of the half-width ones that you're accustomed to. For example: ，。；：【】 If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.

107208579 4y ago

Square brackets【】are a requirement for company/brand names when it comes to SMS communication in China: https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_faq_0002.html https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/msgsms_faq/sms_fa...