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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 sel
by 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 agoAn even stronger indicator than [ and ] is 【 and 】.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoAnother 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 agoI 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...
- prox 4y agoI used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes, as if an active party was trying to stamp out negativity. I heard about an active social media team that stamps out negativity. Not sure if it’s true, but I can’t rule it out either.
- Semaphor 4y ago> I used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes. What subreddit? Because neither on HN nor Reddit, I ever see anything positive about Amazon.
- prox 4y agoCan’t really remember to be honest, this was a while ago 5/6 years, so maybe things changed. Probably some news subreddits I followed then.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoReddit is pretty much controlled by PR company bots. It's not surprising that they sometimes overdo it.
- prox 4y agoYou have by any chance any resources on how they operate and research into this?
- astura 4y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
- prox 4y agoThanks for the article, so I actually searched “reputation management” and there is actually a subreddit for this, active till two years ago. Crazy really that this can happen.
- OJFord 4y agoAs a customer, I hate all that crap, it's never what I want, would love it if the sellers did manage to remain visible through all that. I also don't understand why the Chinese listings are so crap and easily identifiable, as you say. I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? (Font is another one, in images, instructions, even printed on the product itself. They often use a bizarre early computer slightly off-monospace looking one, I assume it's a default somewhere and if you're not used to/natively reading a script, it's harder to have an eye for what's a good font.)
- numpad0 4y agoIt’s too late. Whatever they do is the norm because of sheer sales volume. In my language I’m seeing increasingly more legitimate sellers on Amazon switching to styles seen in Chinese listings, like “2022 updated version”, “easily use the product fashion”, whatever. Just on Amazon though.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? Because they are betting it results in insufficient extra revenue compared to the extra payroll costs.
- OJFord 4y agoMaybe, but I don't mean a marketing professional, just any student looking for some pocket money would do. I assume they just don't realise how crap it looks.
- jon-wood 4y agoI assume that font is the inverse of western ones that have great rendering of Latin text, but don’t really bother with the rest of Unicode. When working with Chinese suppliers in a previous job all the documentation and comms we got would be in that awful font, I even saw one of their developers using it for code when I was visiting them.
- 4y ago
- azinman2 4y agoI wish Amazon let me filter by country. In fact, I’d love to see some kind of meta shopping experience do exactly that. All I ever find is random small time websites that are outdated and minimal content for “made in USA”. For certain categories I’d prefer other countries or at least some options. I’m surprised the “America first” lobby hasn’t tried to accomplish something like this. Vote with your wallet if you really want manufacturing back.
- SXX 4y agoI'm not from US, but I tried to find some product "made in US" on Amazon because it really suppose to be of higher quality and I utterly failed.
- solardev 4y agoFor electronics, I think the Asian manufacturers actually have better quality and precision these days. It's been their bread and butter for decades and they have way better factories and tooling and production experience. We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.
- otikik 4y agoI have seen some tiny movements on that direction- influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US as something positive and the reverse “I could not find anything US made so I had to cave in and get a Chinese mower”. The America First collective unfortunately has a lot of folks that see themselves as fundamentally rich, (or temporarily poor). They self identify more with Jeff Bezos than with their fellow (poor) countrymen. His success is “theirs” on their mind.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US Which is often bullshit. The fine for lying about this tends to be $0, and it's likely to be years before you get caught. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/made-in-the-usa-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/made-in-the-u...
- jotm 4y agoBasically don't be a middleman. I bought a cover set for my Legion 5 Pro, and the best one was made in China, available only in the US. Fortunately the price is low enough to avoid extra duties so Amazon will ship it for $10 overseas within a week. No buying from EU here lol. Same with a trackball mouse - shipped from UK because there was no stock in EU. I stopped with the "durr China quality bad" a long time ago because it just isn't. Everything is made in China and you can get cheap/shit or expensive/great. The Framework laptop for example, can't buy that from China. Sold out in EU. Have to go through forwarding bs to import from US. eBay sellers don't even want to ship overseas. AliExpress sellers will ship it to the middle of the Pacific. If you want to compete you need to do better, not just give up imo.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoi have "thought" about getting into amazon selling stuff but the fees at least the amazon ones plus freight and storage only does not make any sense. https://sell.amazon.in/fees-and-pricing https://sell.amazon.in/fees-and-pricing check "Referral fees" Modems & Networking Devices 14% Television 6% Home improvement - Wallpapers 13.5% my gross margin is 4-8% at best and that is excluding all returns and losses. how am i supposed to compete with big players who can eat the cost? the same as you are saying. they want to cut out the middleman (which is you) so retail business is between manufacturers and amazon now with no dependence on existing retail chain?
- tomcam 4y agoAnd they still raise seller fees every year.
- chubbnix 4y agoI manufacture my own product that sells well on my website but even as the manufacturer I find selling on amazon to be too expensive and too risky. Instead I have my products listed so I can prevent others from controlling the product pages and reselling them but leave them as unavailable to purchase On that platform.
- Spooky23 4y agoIt’s crazy. In the old days they were cheaper than eBay.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThey also commit a form of fraud that Amazon seems disinterested in fixing: they’ll take a listing with thousands of good reviews and comments and completely swap out the product. I once tried to buy a pulse oximeter and all the reviews for the most popular one were about replacement bike tires.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoAlternative vew: Amazon commits this fraud with their hands, like a drug kingpin that manages dealers and keeps his hands clean.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoI would not be surprised if they bribe the employees.
- sithadmin 4y agoThat would be difficult to pull off without collusion with an insider doing an end run around the support platform. The support platform is heavily locked down (to a degree I've never seen with other retailers) and surveilled.
- ceejayoz 4y agoIs that so unlikely? People commit treason for $100k. Here we’re talking about much, much more at stake.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoand much less in the way od punishment
- NBJack 4y agoBut it sounds like it would be trivial to look the other way on these investigations, as evident by their repeated lack of action. Most likely though someone at Amazon doesn't want to hurt their metrics for sales/relevance.
- timnetworks 4y agoGet the fuck out of here. FIGHT THEM ON ALL FRONTS. Don't listen to the tool.
- Fooloo 4y agoThis is the reason I do not buy from Amazon anymore it is all Chines crap of immoral companies.
- ncpa-cpl 4y ago> The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) Is this the reason why so many Amazon brands are six letters long and all caps?
- hda111 4y agoThese aren’t normal square brackets. These brackets are only used in Chinese and Japanese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%80%90_%E3%80%91 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%80%90_%E3%80%91
- garfieldnate 4y agoThis seems like a business opportunity for someone that can read Chinese. Help non-Chinese businesses get set up with the tool that Chinese sellers are using to even the playing field. Although it's possible if the tactics became widely known in the English-speaking world, Amazon may have to do something about all the fraud.