15 ms·

$7M lost on Amazon inventory, then bankrupt

494 points by ilamont 4y ago

VLM 4y ago
Selling at Amazon in the 20s seems as dangerous as selling at Walmart around the turn of the century. The outcome is probably going to be the same; a sea of ultra low quality generic import goods that only poor people shop at.
Justin_K 4y ago
Isn't this a thera gun knockoff? This article is fishy.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Nobody else is allowed to create a massage gun?
  - l3uwin 4y ago
    thats all you got from reading the whole article?
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      No. I was replying to a specific comment. They made it sound like nobody else is allowed to make a massage gun because it is automatically a "thera gun knockoff"
- tttttt5ts 4y ago
  Not at all. Just search "hard drive" first page has this product https://www.amazon.com/External-Hard-Drive-16TB-Portable/dp/B0BK71VMJJ/ https://www.amazon.com/External-Hard-Drive-16TB-Portable/dp/... which is obviously fake. The reviews talk of a scarf.
  - causi 4y ago
    I don't understand how such an abusive loophole has existed for so long.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      Amazon doesn't care, they're too big to care, they don't need to any more. The US population has already been conditioned to "get it on Amazon" and they won't even look at other marketplaces in most cases.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    A scarf, something for the dishwasher, zipper pillow cover... I didn't realise cycling pages was this bad.
tartoran 4y ago
I dont buy anything on Amazon anymore for this reason: knockoffs and scams.
- adamredwoods 4y ago
  It's more than cheap knock-offs, it's noise that makes it very difficult to find quality products. I usually have to look for reviews elsewhere, and find very specific search terms to find quality products that actually match their descriptions.
  - cube00 4y ago
    There are other retailers to give your money to. Maybe they're not as convient or offer one day shipping but also don't try to rip you off as blatantly as Amazon's dodgy sellers are doing.
- curiousguy 4y ago
  Same. Amazon is just another ebay at this point. Both have everything you can ever want and more, but way to much hassle to know if what I buying is legit and if it’s from a legit seller. Amazon used to be my first option for years and now is my last.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    > Amazon is just another ebay at this point. For most non-brandname electronics and gadgets Amazon is just an Aliexpress frontend with a different skin. You can get the exact same stuff from Aliexpress, usually cheaper. For well known brands you can find decent deals on Amazon sometimes - unless it's a knockoff/fake.
- tigrezno 4y ago
  You know you can filter chinese brands out, right? right!?!?!
  - krisoft 4y ago
8note 4y ago
There's no way anyone believes that's not a sex toy
- whoknew1122 4y ago
  I have a percussion massager. I also have literally thousands of dollars in sex toys. (Pro tip: You get what you pay for, and good stuff isn't cheap). Percussion massagers are not sex toys. You might be able to modify one to be a sex toy (the same can be said about power drills, and those aren't listed as sex toys). But their main purpose is to massage muscles.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I know zero about buying sex toys but now I have to know. What’s an example of a high end sex toy you were glad to purchase?
    - fragmede 4y ago
      I've heard good things about the Cowgirl. https://www.goodvibes.com/s/sex-toys/p/GV24556/the-cowgirl/the-cowgirl https://www.goodvibes.com/s/sex-toys/p/GV24556/the-cowgirl/t...
      - tomcam 4y ago
        OK I get it now. Some of this stuff is more like major appliances or furniture. TIL
    - whoknew1122 4y ago
      Like the other responder said, the Cowgirl is good. There are other mechanized things like that. There's also custom built beds and other pieces of furniture. A lot of my spending comes in the form of impact toys like floggers and paddles. Locally created, leather toys can cost upward of $150-200. It's worth it, because the cheaper mass-produced stuff can have edges that will cut the skin. Or they have cardboard in the middle and will break after 3-4 sessions. And having multiple impact toys of varying thickness and weight is important because they all feel different.
WWLink 4y ago
That has to be an inside job lol.
halpmeh 4y ago
Do not fight Chinese sellers on Amazon. If they move into your category, just give up. They understand Amazon's system way better than 99.99% of non-Chinese sellers. The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.: * [easy to use]: blah blah blah The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings. My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  An even stronger indicator than [ and ] is 【 and 】.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  Another trick they use is to flood a new listing with 5 star one line reviews (verified purchase). What they do is buy their own product, review it, and put it back into inventory, losing only the delivery and commission fees.
- number6 4y ago
  I stopped buying on Amazon for this reason. If I want Chinese Wares I get them cheaper on Aliexpress. If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too). Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
  - 4y ago
zaroth 4y ago
Why does Amazon allow this? It actually seems like they’re in on it, and want these Chinese firms to be able to rip off a product and dominate the results. Where are these abuse complains coming from and how can they possible be shutting down major sellers repeatedly?
- cube00 4y ago
  As long as Amazon gets their fee cut I doubt they could care less. The house always wins.
  - zaroth 4y ago
    That can’t explain it! Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations! So they have this whole team setup to do enforcement, and they are being totally manipulated and unwittingly weaponized? So Amazon either (1) they simply don’t care which makes no sense because then why have the team in the first place, (2) their team cares very much and were just too stupid or ill-equipped to do their job and even got totally manipulated, or (3) Amazon actually wants this result and intentionally destroyed this company so that the bad actor could thrive? None of that makes any sense! And this Chinese seller was apparently paying less in fees, so there isn’t even an economic motive! And this story plays out over how many products/sellers every single day? So Amazon is the Wild West and their own trust and safety team is firing the bullets? Weaponized incompetence?! Is there not a class action lawsuit in here somewhere? Amazon has inflicted serious economic destruction on their partner thru negligence or malice to be sure. And of course we’ll never see a postmortem or any kind of apology. No transparency whatsoever when it comes to one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces? The only explanation that would make any sense at all, for which there seems to be one piece of evidence, is that there’s an inside employee taking a large cut from the Chinese seller to boost their rank, kill their competition, and lower their fees. I’d guess on the order of 10% of total take. The only evidence is that somehow the Chinese seller got ahold of PII for the company that went bankrupt and threatened them personally. Where’d they get the contact info? Their lower fee and invulnerability to their own violations is also suggestive of an insider collaborator. But then, if this is true there would be an audit trail a mile long… In the end I’m left simply stunned at the level of gross incompetence which seems to permeate everything in this world, and yet somehow amazing things still do get built.
yumraj 4y ago
If you’re getting a product like this manufactured in China, it seems these days you’re inevitably inviting clones to hit Amazon and other channels.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Even if you are not manufacturing in China.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I feel terrible for this guy. But also...why did he spend so much time getting filtered by the customer service desk? This is what lawyers are for. If you have $7m of inventory, you are moving away from a small business and litigation is part of your life now. A friend in the legal industry says technology companies should budget 10% of their revenue for legal. Litigation is a miserable headache, but it sounds much less demoralizing than struggling with the service desk 100 times in a single year.
- auggierose 4y ago
  Of course your friend would say this.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Said friend is a leading light in the tech/capital ecosystem and the opinion is rooted in long awareness of how much tech companies actually litigate and what the economic tradeoffs. Your dismissive reply is like dismissing a scientist/engineer for suggesting a technology company needs to keep investing in R&D if it aims to maintain a technical advantage over its competitors, and it's a pretty lazy comeback. The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.
    - auggierose 4y ago
      I didn't say your friend is wrong. As for "leading lights", looking at the state of tech and capital in general, there is really not much proper leading going on.
    - kennend3 4y ago
      > The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months. Is that what happened here? Many of the comments seem to indicate that "David" attempted to clone a product, but was out-cloned by others? Would your legal friend be able to advise him on how to be more successful with his counterfeit product vs other counterfeits?
Incipient 4y ago
Playing fair with China just doesn't work. They'll rourt, cheat, and manipulate every aspect of the system to their advantage. It's very disappointing the system doesn't combat this, but as a few people here have said. If Amazon gets paid they don't care.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  It is wildly amusing to watch capitalists get their lunch eaten at capitalism by communists.
  - tasubotadas 4y ago
    That's a complete misunderstanding of situation.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      Except it really isn't. US-led multinationals and their investors were all dead-ass certain that they were going to devour China economically, totally ignoring the culture has a track record of swallowing invading armies and ideologies whole that spans thousands of years.
  - Incipient 4y ago
    China may be communist by branding, but they're economically capitalist, and on a governmental front, mercanalist. Common ownership is not a thing, and it's all about pushing locally made and exporting as much as possible by all means necessary.
    - mpol 4y ago
      Aha, so all-eating capitalism without having healthy limits set by socialism.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      I don't disagree on any particular point, I'm just old enough to remember when none of what you mention was the case, and American corporations were gleefully eyeing China as their next market expansion target. Without exception they got out-played at their own game.
naizarak 4y ago
It really is stupefying how Amazon has turned into a dumping ground for cheap chinese junk. Surely they realize the long term damage they're causing to their own brand? At the same time, they're constantly tightening KYC and other regulations which only hurts honest small-time merchants.
stordoff 4y ago
FWIW, one of the gift card review screenshots doesn't appear to support the claim that the seller is offering gift cards for reviews (not that more evidence of that really seems to be necessary). The circled section of the review is "I won an Amazon Gift Card at work", and it doesn't mention getting one from the seller. > Now the question is how this seller is getting the buyer’s address. The card offering the gift card asks the buyer to send their order ID and a screenshot of the review to a given email address. If the gift cards are sent electronically, they wouldn't need any further information, or if sent physically (which I doubt), they could just ask the customer directly. They don't need to get this information via Amazon if I understand things correctly.
gbtw 4y ago
We had a local amazon competitor that opened up its store to chinese sellers too, and it shows. Basically the same garbage fake products end up on searches for brand name products. I don't get why the real stores using them for selling next to their own still do? Also the main company skirts liability and returns and acts like its not their problem.
Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
I do not normally post on non-technical matters, but I want to say I stopped buying from Amazon a few years ago now; it was because of how warehouse staff are treated. It looks to me a bit like I left at just the right time. This story is absolutely appalling. Amazon are being manipulated, have become a dagger in the hands of the unscrupulous, and seem absolutely unable and unwilling to act. To my eye here Amazon are in part culpable; if you are going to implement mechanisms which can be misused in this way, without adequate safeguards, you bear some responsibility for their misuse. Amazon are I would say now beginning to go the way of Facebook; vast still, but they have lost the plot, are compromising their core functionality, and are alienating their customers, who are both horrified at such behaviour, and harmed by it.
- fastball 4y ago
  Are Amazon warehouse workers being treated any worse than other warehouse workers, or do they merely get more coverage because they work for a tech company that is also paying six fig salaries to software engineers?
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    Normal warehouse jobs don't let a computer fire workers for pissing too often so yeah
  - m-ee 4y ago
    They have injury rates well above other warehouses https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-serious-injuries-at-twice-rate-of-rivals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-...
  - epakai 4y ago
    Amazon is a lot more strict. I worked in a warehouse before and after Amazon bought the company. Afterwards all decisions came from high up. There is no employee consideration. Just a desire for better numbers so you will now suffer these decisions. After I left they put a literal cage with turnstile around the warehouse entrance. Place looks like a prison now.
Derbasti 4y ago
Amazon has become a dumpster fire of scammers, fakes, resellers, and plain trash. It is by now frankly the worst online shopping experience available. Pretty much every other store online is better organized, better curated, and more trustworthy. (In my opinion and experience). The truly sad thing about this is that Amazon used to be genuinely great! But ever since it became mostly a marketplace, and no longer primarily a store, things have gone downhill. Now it's no better than eBay. I try to avoid it wherever humanly possible, i.e. for everything but Chinatech or when I require one-day shipping.
- kennend3 4y ago
  I bought something on Amazon because i wanted 2 day shipping and didn't want to to the local store to get it. ORDER PLACED November 24, 2022 Arriving 7 Dec - 8 Dec They were generous and updated the delivery date last night. It use to say Dec 9 to 12 when i checked yesterday. I've had this happen too many times as well. With this crappy delivery time I would have been better off just going to the store which had it in stock and the same price. They also charged me $20 for "return shipping" because when i had this item in my cart it was "removed" as it was no longer available from the seller i selected. I mistakenly added a similar looking, same priced item and needed to return it. I was unaware that amazon no longer does "free returns"? I gave up on amazon long ago. If i want Chinese products i'd rather just order from aliexpress directly. Deciding to give amazon another shot cost me $20 and 2 weeks waiting??
gryf 4y ago
Just before COVID I did some lowish volume selling on eBay of an imported official product. They are "second sourced" aka "badly cloned" by a couple of Chinese crap shifters as well. I had to fend off various counterfeit reports and even people in China buying them with shill accounts, then cancelling the order until my listed stock was depleted. My eBay account was suspended twice within a month. Eventually I gave up but I decided I'd spend a few months trashing the market first so I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods. That was incredibly effective. But really I would never get into a fight with a Chinese drop shipper again. I sort of broke even with difficulty. There were no gains. I'm in the UK and I tend to not bother with Amazon myself now because it is an ocean of garbage which is difficult to find anything half decent on. I tend to go to Argos who have same day delivery that actually works for a small fee on most products or hit the local supermarket. I couldn't possibly consider entering that market as a seller based on the absolutely shitty customer experience. I use AWS during the day and the quality there isn't much better. The whole org needs a quality and honesty shakedown. The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing. All I hear is people complaining about Amazon's mindset monopoly.
- ripper1138 4y ago
  AWS isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely the highest “quality” cloud provider money can buy right now.
  - gryf 4y ago
    You're right. It's still not as good quality as the pile of HPE and Cisco kit we replaced with it and it's more expensive at the TCO level.
    - CameronNemo 4y ago
      This is assuming you have a competent infrastructure and networking team, which is expensive. Lots of middle managers don't like hiring engineers that earn more than they do. It defies the pecking order.
rasz 4y ago
>our patented design Haha. This writeup is by a drop shipper. In first sentence he admits to cloning another successful product. They were out conned at their own con, hard to shed a tear.
- Veen 4y ago
  Yes, they were outplayed at their own game. What they did to HyperVolt (Hyperice), the Chinese merchants did to them. But it's still a useful article because it's eye-opening for the average Amazon shopper.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  The same thing happens to you if you design original products. We designed a variety of products, had them manufactured and shipped to the US, and fulfilled them ourselves. The fine counterfeiters our manufacturers illegally sold the designs to have made literal millions selling our designs on Amazon and we have moved on.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    "had them manufactured and shipped to the US" You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct? This is not new. A decade ago I heard about chinese factories doing runs above and beyond the manufacturing they did for a company to sell through "other channels". And that's how "Shimano" products were dirt cheap in Europe for about five years.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      > You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct? Sure, in the same sense that we would have by manufacturing them things ourselves using raw materials we harvested ourselves and then selling them online where anyone could buy them and take them apart?
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Enticed by cheap labor, you handed your intellectual property to them on a silver platter and they made full use of it to undercut you and sell to your customers directly. Chinese manufacturers have been doing this for decades.
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dirtyid 4y ago
Looks like american oem/relabeller drop shipper got blown out by Chinese drop shipper who wants to cut out middle man. American consumers pay less. I don't get the complaint about Amazon being a glorifed Aliexpress front end. Pay a small premium to skip multi week shipping on goods stocked in state side warehouse. Vendors that push volume via CRM game also bundles in pretty solid warranty from vendor. Remember MPOW branded products, decent you get what you pay for tier hardware. It's cheap, cut corners on Q&A which makes aliexpress gamble. But buy it from amazon for 20% premium vs aliexpress and if something breaks, seller will ship you new item no question asked. I've had MPOW honor out of warranty products with common review mentioned failure, with little question asked, because they work hard for those reviews. It was great. Take the review for gift card offer and even better deal. Amazon is flooded with these products because they work fine for what people are willing to pay. If you want old school Amazon experience, do a search for product you want, note price of top selling Chinese products, triple or quadruple it, and there you go.
otikik 4y ago
Eugh. This is how Amazon goes down
55555 4y ago
This is disgusting. As a small biz owner it pains me to see someone go bankrupt because Amazon can't be bothered to enforce their own rules. This literally forces good actors to commit crimes simply to have a chance at competing. Insanely despicable.
NaN1352 4y ago
Stupid thing to say but I wish sometimes for China to do something stupid so the Western world can sanction the shit out of them - and I can finally browse Amazon without sifting through hundreds of shovelware products in every category. The worst part is their products are actually often bad, you use them a short time then throwaway.. so they are also contributing to global pollution. What I find dumbfounding is how their gov thinks their economy is great or whatever in that line of thinking when they’re literally a parasite who is utterly dependent on the West and would be nowhere without us… but ok I get it the same could be said for us too. I mean like they act as if they are not totally interdependent with the Western world. Good for them, that will eventually be their downfall. Evolution doesn’t care for inefficient/dysfunctional systems.
blueboo 4y ago
As macroeconomic conditions, expect this to get worse, more egregious. Top brands will be blackmailed into advertising on Amazon itself, medium- and small-scale businesses will be destroyed or consign themselves to racing to the bottom faster than Chinese players (good luck!) This in turn will empower KOF like mainstream review sites — which will be further corrupted by pay for play as times get tough. Yay! (And if you’re in retail software, this dynamic is coming for you too…)
poisonborz 4y ago
A small, hopeless way around this as a buyer: buy from EU Amazon sites (UK/DE/IT). You still have review number jacking (as Amazon shows aggregated numbers) but reviews in the local language will be honest, the markets are too small for chinese vendors to care. Ordering by "new" will tell you if the currently sold product is good, or if it had been swapped.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Can't tell for UK or IT, but this isn't accurate for DE (anymore?). Tons of auto-translated 5-star-reviews (the bad Chinese kind of auto-translate) in essentially every niche unless you're looking at large brands. It's somewhat easy to identify when you're actively looking, but when you're looking to buy something, you don't want to play review detective.
varispeed 4y ago
Amazon should really either be regulated (with strict enforcement) or closed down. This one time I ordered a device to assist with personal hygiene and realised the device has been unsafe to use, fortunately, before I used it otherwise I would probably have received a bad injury had I used it. I wrote a review where I stated that the device is unsafe. Long story short a week or so later I received an email to my personal account from a person claiming to be a seller of that product and demanding that I will delete my review or else. I was shocked how they were able to obtain my personal details? Anyway, I deleted the review and never posted a review since. I was contemplating reporting this to Amazon, but given they were threatening and had my personal details, I'd rather not risk any retaliation. Police in my country also does nothing in such cases so I have written it off as a loss.
gwnywg 4y ago
Stories like this remind me why it's good idea to buy directly from brand website rather than through Amazon.
trentnix 4y ago
> Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019 So this guy’s company (I may have missed it, but he doesn’t appear to mention what his own product is called) made a copycat product and went from design to manufacturing to market in 5 months? Sounds like they were just relabeling and repackaging someone else’s product. Hard to shed a tear as a grifter gets scammed by an even more unscrupulous grifter. Regardless, this shows the dangers of violating one of the golden rules of business: never depend on a single customer. They’ll own all the leverage when negotiating price and terms. Wal-Mart exploited this for years situation for years, pitting vendors against each other and providing and preferring knock-off alternatives (sometimes its own) when available. Now Amazon does the same.
astura 4y ago
This is why I won't order from Amazon anymore.
Raed667 4y ago
Tangentially related: Can someone explain the pricing of massage guns to me? How a small engine, a small battery, and 4 plastic attachments can sell from $30 to $600?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Because there’s no real way to adequately test them so you can sell them at various price points. If you have something that people don’t know a ton about (so not milk, say) and don’t use a ton (so not tools) it’s very easy to get a wide range of prices. Most people will skip the $30 (obviously it’s crap because it’s too cheap) and some will even but the $600 (it must be the best because the most expensive). And likely the only difference is the number of attachments or something.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  How can a power adapter range from $3 to $19? Here's how: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr... I have no idea if Hyperice guns are actually high quality or just good at marketing, but my experience with power tools is that you generally get what you pay for. Products that cost 10% of the price are often so crappy that you really don't want to use them.
deleted 4y ago
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jongjong 4y ago
The real problem is how could it possibly be profitable to pay people $20 each to leave reviews on a product which costs less than $200? WTF is wrong with the economic environment which allows such obviously wasteful activities to be profitable? In an efficient economy, waste would not be profitable; it would not give someone the upper hand. The competitive edge should be efficiency.
tlogan 4y ago
What is the name of his product? He said it is “unique” and “high-end”. But in general if you are making a clone of other successful product (in this case that is HyperVolt) you do need to have the entire system to make it (fake reviews, gaming system etc.). It does not matter if you are Chinese, american, or what ever. Or work very hard to become a well know brand. Amazon will not police this: they will police only for established brands.
genepope 4y ago
Amazon has become the absolute worst place to sell or buy things. I try to avoid them if at all possible (disclosure: I worked there for 12 years). Just leave them to the Chinese crooks and eventually enough people will wake up that they will all burn out (or move to another fraud host)
cainxinth 4y ago
Can I ask a question about these massage guns? Why are some of them so expensive? I wanted one but balked at paying $500 for what seemed to be little more than a battery powered reciprocating saw with a foam ball were the blade normally is. So I bought a knockoff for $35, just to see if it was any good… and it was! Bought it at the start of the pandemic and it’s still working fine. I’m sure the theraguns and hypervolts are better than my cheapo, but there’s just no way they are ten times better (like their price suggests).
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  And hell, if you want a warranty and good return policy, Costco has ‘em for $60-80. Spending multiple hundreds feels like a sucker’s game.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > Why are some of them so expensive? Because the people that keep saying "you get what you pay for" buy them.
swfsql 4y ago
Those delistings notably had a great impact. This has a good assymetric cost for the abusers. So either the copyright laws are "in practice" more getting in the way than actually helping anyone, or Amazon is missing punishment for abusers of copyright-related stuff. Amazon allowing good-ratings buying, personal info scavenging etc puts Amazon's credibility in question, and I believe that this will eventually take it's toll.
rickspencer3 4y ago
I feel really bad for this seller. This, btw, is why I go straight to merchants and suck up the longer delivery and delivery costs. The effort of dealing with rip-offs on Amazon was made the experience of shopping their so terrible. Also, if this seller got really successful, Amazon would have noticed and created an "Amazon Basics" massage gun anyway. I do still regularly buy certain things on Amazon still (a certain kind of socks, a certain protein powder, etc...). I haven't been able to find a good source for those. Ironically, the protein power is something I used to get at Whole Foods, but they don't carry it there anymore.
- agrippanux 4y ago
  The bulk of my Amazon shopping now is done by setting CamelCamelCamel alerts for legit products and when one hits, triple checking I am buying from the actual company.
arbuge 4y ago
I'm not really following this part: "When we deeply researched this, we f"ound that this person hijacked his listing with a dummy seller account and offered 95% off on Facebook groups, and he sold over 5–6K every day for a week ( this is our estimate based on Jungle Scout, Helium10, and his best seller rank). But since his offer was fulfilled by the merchant, this dummy seller account didn’t ship any massage guns to buyers, but he still got the best seller badge, so he activated his real FBA ( fulfilled by Amazon ) offer on the main account." Could somebody rephrase this for me in clearer language?
- jnguyen64 4y ago
  From my limited Amazon selling knowledge: First paragraph sounds like you’re allowed to have multiple Amazon seller accounts tied to a listing. I think the dummy account was used as a way to prevent the main account from being banned if people reported the reviews. They also give estimates of how much the person sold. Based on a product’s ranking in a category (say a product is ranked #10 in massagers), you can guesstimate how often a product at rank #10 would sell every day in order to achieve that rank. What the person did is when you sell a product on Amazon, you can choose between shipping the product to a customer yourself (so printing the shipping label, boxing the product, and ultimately sending it to a customer), or having Amazon do all of that for you, but for a fee (that process is called fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA). For their dummy account, they would do the “shipping” themselves, but would not actually ship the product. If they knew the customer (and it sounds like they did), then that would mean they’re able to get very cheap reviews since they were giving 95% off these fake shipped products. Hope that clears things up well enough for you!
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Assuming that all of what's written in the article is true: Amazon is ultimately responsible. Amazon is supposed to protect honest merchants / sellers against these exploitations. As long as customers keep giving money to Amazon, there's very little incentive for Amazon to take responsibility and fix these things.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Do you have a valid Trademark for the areas you sell within? If the answer is "No", than anyone registering in this product class can: 1. Leverage a copyright violation take-down. While you may think it is superfluous and lame... the courts do not. 2. sue you for damages to the brand (the law will see it as probably not yours) once the grace period to register IP expires. The grace period is usually 1 to 2 years once published, and after that you are likely SOL in many jurisdictions. 3. freeze your inventory imports into a protected area (see Fluke banning the color Yellow case) 4. freeze your banking account through the courts (for counterfeiters these are likely disposable shell import-only firms) You may have thought a pad-printed generic China produced item is somehow worth $7m inventory risk, but it sounds like the "pay-me-develop-a-product" scam run by IP trolls with old inventory to unload. I had two cons try this on me once when I was young and slightly more gullible... I fed them to my lawyers as some crazies can get aggressive. You should take note many China manufacturers often attempt to register client product trademarks domestically, as they want the domestic markets in compensation for a low-ball contract. If you try to change contract manufacturers, than the nasty side of working in China appears. Note, trademark and patent scooping is dirty, but it happens everywhere... in some places it is more culturally acceptable. Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win. Best of luck =)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
egberts1 4y ago
Money laundering technique #3,198 Next!
bastard_op 4y ago
The sad part is I've seen American companies do the same thing - Walmart is a good example. They would sell a product, say Dial hand soap as an example, and see that they have a really popular type/scent. Next they have their own brand placed right next to it, 10 cents cheaper, and guess which one has more sold pieces off the shelf? How does Dial feel when their extensive walmart sales suddenly drop just to find out their sales partner is now directly competing against them? Costco is another. We love to cannibalize each other already, no honour among thieves, so no wonder another country has figured out how to just take over puppeting our people and corporations against ourselves. Amazon is now basically Chinese run without even drawing the ire of the government.
Ava4312 4y ago
kyliematthew75 4y ago

494 points by ilamont 4y ago

VLM 4y ago

Selling at Amazon in the 20s seems as dangerous as selling at Walmart around the turn of the century. The outcome is probably going to be the same; a sea of ultra low quality generic import goods that only poor people shop at.

Justin_K 4y ago

Isn't this a thera gun knockoff? This article is fishy.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago
Nobody else is allowed to create a massage gun?
- l3uwin 4y ago
  thats all you got from reading the whole article?
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    No. I was replying to a specific comment. They made it sound like nobody else is allowed to make a massage gun because it is automatically a "thera gun knockoff"
tttttt5ts 4y ago
Not at all. Just search "hard drive" first page has this product https://www.amazon.com/External-Hard-Drive-16TB-Portable/dp/B0BK71VMJJ/ https://www.amazon.com/External-Hard-Drive-16TB-Portable/dp/... which is obviously fake. The reviews talk of a scarf.
- causi 4y ago
  I don't understand how such an abusive loophole has existed for so long.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Amazon doesn't care, they're too big to care, they don't need to any more. The US population has already been conditioned to "get it on Amazon" and they won't even look at other marketplaces in most cases.
- nprateem 4y ago
  A scarf, something for the dishwasher, zipper pillow cover... I didn't realise cycling pages was this bad.

tartoran 4y ago

I dont buy anything on Amazon anymore for this reason: knockoffs and scams.

adamredwoods 4y ago
It's more than cheap knock-offs, it's noise that makes it very difficult to find quality products. I usually have to look for reviews elsewhere, and find very specific search terms to find quality products that actually match their descriptions.
- cube00 4y ago
  There are other retailers to give your money to. Maybe they're not as convient or offer one day shipping but also don't try to rip you off as blatantly as Amazon's dodgy sellers are doing.
curiousguy 4y ago
Same. Amazon is just another ebay at this point. Both have everything you can ever want and more, but way to much hassle to know if what I buying is legit and if it’s from a legit seller. Amazon used to be my first option for years and now is my last.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  > Amazon is just another ebay at this point. For most non-brandname electronics and gadgets Amazon is just an Aliexpress frontend with a different skin. You can get the exact same stuff from Aliexpress, usually cheaper. For well known brands you can find decent deals on Amazon sometimes - unless it's a knockoff/fake.
tigrezno 4y ago
You know you can filter chinese brands out, right? right!?!?!
- krisoft 4y ago

8note 4y ago

There's no way anyone believes that's not a sex toy

whoknew1122 4y ago
I have a percussion massager. I also have literally thousands of dollars in sex toys. (Pro tip: You get what you pay for, and good stuff isn't cheap). Percussion massagers are not sex toys. You might be able to modify one to be a sex toy (the same can be said about power drills, and those aren't listed as sex toys). But their main purpose is to massage muscles.
- tomcam 4y ago
  I know zero about buying sex toys but now I have to know. What’s an example of a high end sex toy you were glad to purchase?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    I've heard good things about the Cowgirl. https://www.goodvibes.com/s/sex-toys/p/GV24556/the-cowgirl/the-cowgirl https://www.goodvibes.com/s/sex-toys/p/GV24556/the-cowgirl/t...
    - tomcam 4y ago
      OK I get it now. Some of this stuff is more like major appliances or furniture. TIL
  - whoknew1122 4y ago
    Like the other responder said, the Cowgirl is good. There are other mechanized things like that. There's also custom built beds and other pieces of furniture. A lot of my spending comes in the form of impact toys like floggers and paddles. Locally created, leather toys can cost upward of $150-200. It's worth it, because the cheaper mass-produced stuff can have edges that will cut the skin. Or they have cardboard in the middle and will break after 3-4 sessions. And having multiple impact toys of varying thickness and weight is important because they all feel different.

WWLink 4y ago

That has to be an inside job lol.

halpmeh 4y ago

Do not fight Chinese sellers on Amazon. If they move into your category, just give up. They understand Amazon's system way better than 99.99% of non-Chinese sellers. The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.: * [easy to use]: blah blah blah The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings. My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.

josephcsible 4y ago
An even stronger indicator than [ and ] is 【 and 】.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
Another trick they use is to flood a new listing with 5 star one line reviews (verified purchase). What they do is buy their own product, review it, and put it back into inventory, losing only the delivery and commission fees.
number6 4y ago
I stopped buying on Amazon for this reason. If I want Chinese Wares I get them cheaper on Aliexpress. If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too). Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
- 4y ago

zaroth 4y ago

Why does Amazon allow this? It actually seems like they’re in on it, and want these Chinese firms to be able to rip off a product and dominate the results. Where are these abuse complains coming from and how can they possible be shutting down major sellers repeatedly?

cube00 4y ago
As long as Amazon gets their fee cut I doubt they could care less. The house always wins.
- zaroth 4y ago
  That can’t explain it! Amazon is happy to rake an innovative and thriving seller over the coals arguably in an attempt to enforce policy violations! So they have this whole team setup to do enforcement, and they are being totally manipulated and unwittingly weaponized? So Amazon either (1) they simply don’t care which makes no sense because then why have the team in the first place, (2) their team cares very much and were just too stupid or ill-equipped to do their job and even got totally manipulated, or (3) Amazon actually wants this result and intentionally destroyed this company so that the bad actor could thrive? None of that makes any sense! And this Chinese seller was apparently paying less in fees, so there isn’t even an economic motive! And this story plays out over how many products/sellers every single day? So Amazon is the Wild West and their own trust and safety team is firing the bullets? Weaponized incompetence?! Is there not a class action lawsuit in here somewhere? Amazon has inflicted serious economic destruction on their partner thru negligence or malice to be sure. And of course we’ll never see a postmortem or any kind of apology. No transparency whatsoever when it comes to one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces? The only explanation that would make any sense at all, for which there seems to be one piece of evidence, is that there’s an inside employee taking a large cut from the Chinese seller to boost their rank, kill their competition, and lower their fees. I’d guess on the order of 10% of total take. The only evidence is that somehow the Chinese seller got ahold of PII for the company that went bankrupt and threatened them personally. Where’d they get the contact info? Their lower fee and invulnerability to their own violations is also suggestive of an insider collaborator. But then, if this is true there would be an audit trail a mile long… In the end I’m left simply stunned at the level of gross incompetence which seems to permeate everything in this world, and yet somehow amazing things still do get built.

yumraj 4y ago

If you’re getting a product like this manufactured in China, it seems these days you’re inevitably inviting clones to hit Amazon and other channels.

Aeolun 4y ago
Even if you are not manufacturing in China.

anigbrowl 4y ago

I feel terrible for this guy. But also...why did he spend so much time getting filtered by the customer service desk? This is what lawyers are for. If you have $7m of inventory, you are moving away from a small business and litigation is part of your life now. A friend in the legal industry says technology companies should budget 10% of their revenue for legal. Litigation is a miserable headache, but it sounds much less demoralizing than struggling with the service desk 100 times in a single year.

auggierose 4y ago
Of course your friend would say this.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Said friend is a leading light in the tech/capital ecosystem and the opinion is rooted in long awareness of how much tech companies actually litigate and what the economic tradeoffs. Your dismissive reply is like dismissing a scientist/engineer for suggesting a technology company needs to keep investing in R&D if it aims to maintain a technical advantage over its competitors, and it's a pretty lazy comeback. The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months.
  - auggierose 4y ago
    I didn't say your friend is wrong. As for "leading lights", looking at the state of tech and capital in general, there is really not much proper leading going on.
  - kennend3 4y ago
    > The DIY approach clearly didn't work out for the author of this article, who went from running a successful consumer product business to insolvency in the space of 18 months. Is that what happened here? Many of the comments seem to indicate that "David" attempted to clone a product, but was out-cloned by others? Would your legal friend be able to advise him on how to be more successful with his counterfeit product vs other counterfeits?

Incipient 4y ago

Playing fair with China just doesn't work. They'll rourt, cheat, and manipulate every aspect of the system to their advantage. It's very disappointing the system doesn't combat this, but as a few people here have said. If Amazon gets paid they don't care.

forgetfreeman 4y ago
It is wildly amusing to watch capitalists get their lunch eaten at capitalism by communists.
- tasubotadas 4y ago
  That's a complete misunderstanding of situation.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    Except it really isn't. US-led multinationals and their investors were all dead-ass certain that they were going to devour China economically, totally ignoring the culture has a track record of swallowing invading armies and ideologies whole that spans thousands of years.
- Incipient 4y ago
  China may be communist by branding, but they're economically capitalist, and on a governmental front, mercanalist. Common ownership is not a thing, and it's all about pushing locally made and exporting as much as possible by all means necessary.
  - mpol 4y ago
    Aha, so all-eating capitalism without having healthy limits set by socialism.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    I don't disagree on any particular point, I'm just old enough to remember when none of what you mention was the case, and American corporations were gleefully eyeing China as their next market expansion target. Without exception they got out-played at their own game.

naizarak 4y ago

It really is stupefying how Amazon has turned into a dumping ground for cheap chinese junk. Surely they realize the long term damage they're causing to their own brand? At the same time, they're constantly tightening KYC and other regulations which only hurts honest small-time merchants.

stordoff 4y ago

FWIW, one of the gift card review screenshots doesn't appear to support the claim that the seller is offering gift cards for reviews (not that more evidence of that really seems to be necessary). The circled section of the review is "I won an Amazon Gift Card at work", and it doesn't mention getting one from the seller. > Now the question is how this seller is getting the buyer’s address. The card offering the gift card asks the buyer to send their order ID and a screenshot of the review to a given email address. If the gift cards are sent electronically, they wouldn't need any further information, or if sent physically (which I doubt), they could just ask the customer directly. They don't need to get this information via Amazon if I understand things correctly.

gbtw 4y ago

We had a local amazon competitor that opened up its store to chinese sellers too, and it shows. Basically the same garbage fake products end up on searches for brand name products. I don't get why the real stores using them for selling next to their own still do? Also the main company skirts liability and returns and acts like its not their problem.

Max-Ganz-II 4y ago

I do not normally post on non-technical matters, but I want to say I stopped buying from Amazon a few years ago now; it was because of how warehouse staff are treated. It looks to me a bit like I left at just the right time. This story is absolutely appalling. Amazon are being manipulated, have become a dagger in the hands of the unscrupulous, and seem absolutely unable and unwilling to act. To my eye here Amazon are in part culpable; if you are going to implement mechanisms which can be misused in this way, without adequate safeguards, you bear some responsibility for their misuse. Amazon are I would say now beginning to go the way of Facebook; vast still, but they have lost the plot, are compromising their core functionality, and are alienating their customers, who are both horrified at such behaviour, and harmed by it.

fastball 4y ago
Are Amazon warehouse workers being treated any worse than other warehouse workers, or do they merely get more coverage because they work for a tech company that is also paying six fig salaries to software engineers?
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Normal warehouse jobs don't let a computer fire workers for pissing too often so yeah
- m-ee 4y ago
  They have injury rates well above other warehouses https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-serious-injuries-at-twice-rate-of-rivals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-...
- epakai 4y ago
  Amazon is a lot more strict. I worked in a warehouse before and after Amazon bought the company. Afterwards all decisions came from high up. There is no employee consideration. Just a desire for better numbers so you will now suffer these decisions. After I left they put a literal cage with turnstile around the warehouse entrance. Place looks like a prison now.

Derbasti 4y ago

Amazon has become a dumpster fire of scammers, fakes, resellers, and plain trash. It is by now frankly the worst online shopping experience available. Pretty much every other store online is better organized, better curated, and more trustworthy. (In my opinion and experience). The truly sad thing about this is that Amazon used to be genuinely great! But ever since it became mostly a marketplace, and no longer primarily a store, things have gone downhill. Now it's no better than eBay. I try to avoid it wherever humanly possible, i.e. for everything but Chinatech or when I require one-day shipping.

kennend3 4y ago
I bought something on Amazon because i wanted 2 day shipping and didn't want to to the local store to get it. ORDER PLACED November 24, 2022 Arriving 7 Dec - 8 Dec They were generous and updated the delivery date last night. It use to say Dec 9 to 12 when i checked yesterday. I've had this happen too many times as well. With this crappy delivery time I would have been better off just going to the store which had it in stock and the same price. They also charged me $20 for "return shipping" because when i had this item in my cart it was "removed" as it was no longer available from the seller i selected. I mistakenly added a similar looking, same priced item and needed to return it. I was unaware that amazon no longer does "free returns"? I gave up on amazon long ago. If i want Chinese products i'd rather just order from aliexpress directly. Deciding to give amazon another shot cost me $20 and 2 weeks waiting??

gryf 4y ago

Just before COVID I did some lowish volume selling on eBay of an imported official product. They are "second sourced" aka "badly cloned" by a couple of Chinese crap shifters as well. I had to fend off various counterfeit reports and even people in China buying them with shill accounts, then cancelling the order until my listed stock was depleted. My eBay account was suspended twice within a month. Eventually I gave up but I decided I'd spend a few months trashing the market first so I ran a selenium job daily which went and reported all of the drop ship sellers for counterfeit goods. That was incredibly effective. But really I would never get into a fight with a Chinese drop shipper again. I sort of broke even with difficulty. There were no gains. I'm in the UK and I tend to not bother with Amazon myself now because it is an ocean of garbage which is difficult to find anything half decent on. I tend to go to Argos who have same day delivery that actually works for a small fee on most products or hit the local supermarket. I couldn't possibly consider entering that market as a seller based on the absolutely shitty customer experience. I use AWS during the day and the quality there isn't much better. The whole org needs a quality and honesty shakedown. The market is definitely open to an Amazon competitor which has a store front not chock full of garbage, a decent logistics network, returns policy and reasonable pricing. All I hear is people complaining about Amazon's mindset monopoly.

ripper1138 4y ago
AWS isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely the highest “quality” cloud provider money can buy right now.
- gryf 4y ago
  You're right. It's still not as good quality as the pile of HPE and Cisco kit we replaced with it and it's more expensive at the TCO level.
  - CameronNemo 4y ago
    This is assuming you have a competent infrastructure and networking team, which is expensive. Lots of middle managers don't like hiring engineers that earn more than they do. It defies the pecking order.

rasz 4y ago

>our patented design Haha. This writeup is by a drop shipper. In first sentence he admits to cloning another successful product. They were out conned at their own con, hard to shed a tear.

Veen 4y ago
Yes, they were outplayed at their own game. What they did to HyperVolt (Hyperice), the Chinese merchants did to them. But it's still a useful article because it's eye-opening for the average Amazon shopper.
anonymoushn 4y ago
The same thing happens to you if you design original products. We designed a variety of products, had them manufactured and shipped to the US, and fulfilled them ourselves. The fine counterfeiters our manufacturers illegally sold the designs to have made literal millions selling our designs on Amazon and we have moved on.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  "had them manufactured and shipped to the US" You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct? This is not new. A decade ago I heard about chinese factories doing runs above and beyond the manufacturing they did for a company to sell through "other channels". And that's how "Shimano" products were dirt cheap in Europe for about five years.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    > You surrendered your IP doing that, effectively, correct? Sure, in the same sense that we would have by manufacturing them things ourselves using raw materials we harvested ourselves and then selling them online where anyone could buy them and take them apart?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Enticed by cheap labor, you handed your intellectual property to them on a silver platter and they made full use of it to undercut you and sell to your customers directly. Chinese manufacturers have been doing this for decades.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dirtyid 4y ago

Looks like american oem/relabeller drop shipper got blown out by Chinese drop shipper who wants to cut out middle man. American consumers pay less. I don't get the complaint about Amazon being a glorifed Aliexpress front end. Pay a small premium to skip multi week shipping on goods stocked in state side warehouse. Vendors that push volume via CRM game also bundles in pretty solid warranty from vendor. Remember MPOW branded products, decent you get what you pay for tier hardware. It's cheap, cut corners on Q&A which makes aliexpress gamble. But buy it from amazon for 20% premium vs aliexpress and if something breaks, seller will ship you new item no question asked. I've had MPOW honor out of warranty products with common review mentioned failure, with little question asked, because they work hard for those reviews. It was great. Take the review for gift card offer and even better deal. Amazon is flooded with these products because they work fine for what people are willing to pay. If you want old school Amazon experience, do a search for product you want, note price of top selling Chinese products, triple or quadruple it, and there you go.

otikik 4y ago

Eugh. This is how Amazon goes down

55555 4y ago

This is disgusting. As a small biz owner it pains me to see someone go bankrupt because Amazon can't be bothered to enforce their own rules. This literally forces good actors to commit crimes simply to have a chance at competing. Insanely despicable.

NaN1352 4y ago

Stupid thing to say but I wish sometimes for China to do something stupid so the Western world can sanction the shit out of them - and I can finally browse Amazon without sifting through hundreds of shovelware products in every category. The worst part is their products are actually often bad, you use them a short time then throwaway.. so they are also contributing to global pollution. What I find dumbfounding is how their gov thinks their economy is great or whatever in that line of thinking when they’re literally a parasite who is utterly dependent on the West and would be nowhere without us… but ok I get it the same could be said for us too. I mean like they act as if they are not totally interdependent with the Western world. Good for them, that will eventually be their downfall. Evolution doesn’t care for inefficient/dysfunctional systems.

blueboo 4y ago

As macroeconomic conditions, expect this to get worse, more egregious. Top brands will be blackmailed into advertising on Amazon itself, medium- and small-scale businesses will be destroyed or consign themselves to racing to the bottom faster than Chinese players (good luck!) This in turn will empower KOF like mainstream review sites — which will be further corrupted by pay for play as times get tough. Yay! (And if you’re in retail software, this dynamic is coming for you too…)

poisonborz 4y ago

A small, hopeless way around this as a buyer: buy from EU Amazon sites (UK/DE/IT). You still have review number jacking (as Amazon shows aggregated numbers) but reviews in the local language will be honest, the markets are too small for chinese vendors to care. Ordering by "new" will tell you if the currently sold product is good, or if it had been swapped.

luckylion 4y ago
Can't tell for UK or IT, but this isn't accurate for DE (anymore?). Tons of auto-translated 5-star-reviews (the bad Chinese kind of auto-translate) in essentially every niche unless you're looking at large brands. It's somewhat easy to identify when you're actively looking, but when you're looking to buy something, you don't want to play review detective.

varispeed 4y ago

Amazon should really either be regulated (with strict enforcement) or closed down. This one time I ordered a device to assist with personal hygiene and realised the device has been unsafe to use, fortunately, before I used it otherwise I would probably have received a bad injury had I used it. I wrote a review where I stated that the device is unsafe. Long story short a week or so later I received an email to my personal account from a person claiming to be a seller of that product and demanding that I will delete my review or else. I was shocked how they were able to obtain my personal details? Anyway, I deleted the review and never posted a review since. I was contemplating reporting this to Amazon, but given they were threatening and had my personal details, I'd rather not risk any retaliation. Police in my country also does nothing in such cases so I have written it off as a loss.

gwnywg 4y ago

Stories like this remind me why it's good idea to buy directly from brand website rather than through Amazon.

trentnix 4y ago

> Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this product that we began designing our patented design in February 2019 and launched our first massage gun on Amazon in July 2019 So this guy’s company (I may have missed it, but he doesn’t appear to mention what his own product is called) made a copycat product and went from design to manufacturing to market in 5 months? Sounds like they were just relabeling and repackaging someone else’s product. Hard to shed a tear as a grifter gets scammed by an even more unscrupulous grifter. Regardless, this shows the dangers of violating one of the golden rules of business: never depend on a single customer. They’ll own all the leverage when negotiating price and terms. Wal-Mart exploited this for years situation for years, pitting vendors against each other and providing and preferring knock-off alternatives (sometimes its own) when available. Now Amazon does the same.

astura 4y ago

This is why I won't order from Amazon anymore.

Raed667 4y ago

Tangentially related: Can someone explain the pricing of massage guns to me? How a small engine, a small battery, and 4 plastic attachments can sell from $30 to $600?

bombcar 4y ago
Because there’s no real way to adequately test them so you can sell them at various price points. If you have something that people don’t know a ton about (so not milk, say) and don’t use a ton (so not tools) it’s very easy to get a wide range of prices. Most people will skip the $30 (obviously it’s crap because it’s too cheap) and some will even but the $600 (it must be the best because the most expensive). And likely the only difference is the number of attachments or something.
newaccount74 4y ago
How can a power adapter range from $3 to $19? Here's how: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr... I have no idea if Hyperice guns are actually high quality or just good at marketing, but my experience with power tools is that you generally get what you pay for. Products that cost 10% of the price are often so crappy that you really don't want to use them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jongjong 4y ago

The real problem is how could it possibly be profitable to pay people $20 each to leave reviews on a product which costs less than $200? WTF is wrong with the economic environment which allows such obviously wasteful activities to be profitable? In an efficient economy, waste would not be profitable; it would not give someone the upper hand. The competitive edge should be efficiency.

tlogan 4y ago

What is the name of his product? He said it is “unique” and “high-end”. But in general if you are making a clone of other successful product (in this case that is HyperVolt) you do need to have the entire system to make it (fake reviews, gaming system etc.). It does not matter if you are Chinese, american, or what ever. Or work very hard to become a well know brand. Amazon will not police this: they will police only for established brands.

genepope 4y ago

Amazon has become the absolute worst place to sell or buy things. I try to avoid them if at all possible (disclosure: I worked there for 12 years). Just leave them to the Chinese crooks and eventually enough people will wake up that they will all burn out (or move to another fraud host)

cainxinth 4y ago

Can I ask a question about these massage guns? Why are some of them so expensive? I wanted one but balked at paying $500 for what seemed to be little more than a battery powered reciprocating saw with a foam ball were the blade normally is. So I bought a knockoff for $35, just to see if it was any good… and it was! Bought it at the start of the pandemic and it’s still working fine. I’m sure the theraguns and hypervolts are better than my cheapo, but there’s just no way they are ten times better (like their price suggests).

ceejayoz 4y ago
And hell, if you want a warranty and good return policy, Costco has ‘em for $60-80. Spending multiple hundreds feels like a sucker’s game.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> Why are some of them so expensive? Because the people that keep saying "you get what you pay for" buy them.

swfsql 4y ago

Those delistings notably had a great impact. This has a good assymetric cost for the abusers. So either the copyright laws are "in practice" more getting in the way than actually helping anyone, or Amazon is missing punishment for abusers of copyright-related stuff. Amazon allowing good-ratings buying, personal info scavenging etc puts Amazon's credibility in question, and I believe that this will eventually take it's toll.

rickspencer3 4y ago

I feel really bad for this seller. This, btw, is why I go straight to merchants and suck up the longer delivery and delivery costs. The effort of dealing with rip-offs on Amazon was made the experience of shopping their so terrible. Also, if this seller got really successful, Amazon would have noticed and created an "Amazon Basics" massage gun anyway. I do still regularly buy certain things on Amazon still (a certain kind of socks, a certain protein powder, etc...). I haven't been able to find a good source for those. Ironically, the protein power is something I used to get at Whole Foods, but they don't carry it there anymore.

agrippanux 4y ago
The bulk of my Amazon shopping now is done by setting CamelCamelCamel alerts for legit products and when one hits, triple checking I am buying from the actual company.

arbuge 4y ago

I'm not really following this part: "When we deeply researched this, we f"ound that this person hijacked his listing with a dummy seller account and offered 95% off on Facebook groups, and he sold over 5–6K every day for a week ( this is our estimate based on Jungle Scout, Helium10, and his best seller rank). But since his offer was fulfilled by the merchant, this dummy seller account didn’t ship any massage guns to buyers, but he still got the best seller badge, so he activated his real FBA ( fulfilled by Amazon ) offer on the main account." Could somebody rephrase this for me in clearer language?

jnguyen64 4y ago
From my limited Amazon selling knowledge: First paragraph sounds like you’re allowed to have multiple Amazon seller accounts tied to a listing. I think the dummy account was used as a way to prevent the main account from being banned if people reported the reviews. They also give estimates of how much the person sold. Based on a product’s ranking in a category (say a product is ranked #10 in massagers), you can guesstimate how often a product at rank #10 would sell every day in order to achieve that rank. What the person did is when you sell a product on Amazon, you can choose between shipping the product to a customer yourself (so printing the shipping label, boxing the product, and ultimately sending it to a customer), or having Amazon do all of that for you, but for a fee (that process is called fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA). For their dummy account, they would do the “shipping” themselves, but would not actually ship the product. If they knew the customer (and it sounds like they did), then that would mean they’re able to get very cheap reviews since they were giving 95% off these fake shipped products. Hope that clears things up well enough for you!

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Assuming that all of what's written in the article is true: Amazon is ultimately responsible. Amazon is supposed to protect honest merchants / sellers against these exploitations. As long as customers keep giving money to Amazon, there's very little incentive for Amazon to take responsibility and fix these things.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Do you have a valid Trademark for the areas you sell within? If the answer is "No", than anyone registering in this product class can: 1. Leverage a copyright violation take-down. While you may think it is superfluous and lame... the courts do not. 2. sue you for damages to the brand (the law will see it as probably not yours) once the grace period to register IP expires. The grace period is usually 1 to 2 years once published, and after that you are likely SOL in many jurisdictions. 3. freeze your inventory imports into a protected area (see Fluke banning the color Yellow case) 4. freeze your banking account through the courts (for counterfeiters these are likely disposable shell import-only firms) You may have thought a pad-printed generic China produced item is somehow worth $7m inventory risk, but it sounds like the "pay-me-develop-a-product" scam run by IP trolls with old inventory to unload. I had two cons try this on me once when I was young and slightly more gullible... I fed them to my lawyers as some crazies can get aggressive. You should take note many China manufacturers often attempt to register client product trademarks domestically, as they want the domestic markets in compensation for a low-ball contract. If you try to change contract manufacturers, than the nasty side of working in China appears. Note, trademark and patent scooping is dirty, but it happens everywhere... in some places it is more culturally acceptable. Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win. Best of luck =)

deleted 4y ago

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egberts1 4y ago

Money laundering technique #3,198 Next!

bastard_op 4y ago

The sad part is I've seen American companies do the same thing - Walmart is a good example. They would sell a product, say Dial hand soap as an example, and see that they have a really popular type/scent. Next they have their own brand placed right next to it, 10 cents cheaper, and guess which one has more sold pieces off the shelf? How does Dial feel when their extensive walmart sales suddenly drop just to find out their sales partner is now directly competing against them? Costco is another. We love to cannibalize each other already, no honour among thieves, so no wonder another country has figured out how to just take over puppeting our people and corporations against ourselves. Amazon is now basically Chinese run without even drawing the ire of the government.

Ava4312 4y ago

kyliematthew75 4y ago