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Shein forces Amazon to lower seller fees
- givemeethekeys 3y agoBefore this post I'd never heard of Shein before! $40B in GMV, founded in Nanjing, China. Slow shipping but big discounts. It makes me feel as if they're aggressively picking up where Forever 21 left off. The Men's section looks like it would all be worn by the same dude (a certain British vegan chef with a goatee on YouTube).
- shermantanktop 3y agoVegan chef - who, Gaz Oakley?
- givemeethekeys 3y agoThats the one.
- logtempo 3y agoIt popped everywhere. I'm from europe, I was in Bolivia in october. Shein was the new trend. In Bolivia. In an open market of second hand. My guess is tiktok is doing what it's made for, advertising and possibly putting China first to the mass of consumers.
- bagels 3y agoFor those not familiar with the British vegan chef scene... who?
- runjake 3y agoI presume they mean Gaz Oakley. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaz_Oakley https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaz_Oakley
- givemeethekeys 3y agoWe do!
- uoaei 3y agoThey've been in hot water the past couple years, primarily over their labor practices.
- heliodor 3y agoAmazon too.
- mathgeek 3y agoI couldn’t help but assume this was a paid promotion for Shein disguised as an industry piece.
- CaptainOfCoit 3y agoAn ~8 minute introduction to Shein and their fast fashion/low price clothing from The Wall Street Journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWotBPtsulo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWotBPtsulo > Shein says it’s able to make affordable apparel by monitoring user behavior to predict customer demand and producing items in small quantities. The Chinese e-commerce company known for its $5 T-shirts and $20 cocktail dresses controls 40% of the fast-fashion market share in the U.S., with an estimated $8 billion in sales in the country last year. Shein’s inventory turnover rate is twice as fast as other competitor retailers such as H&M and Zara. (the video also mentions "De minimis tax loophole" which I think another commentator here on HN mentioned)
- wkat4242 3y ago$5 is not actually that cheap for a T-shirt. A branded Jack and Jones one costs 10€ here. Cheap crappy ones less than 5 and that's in the store. Though I never buy those because they're thin, always have a different fit and sometimes they give off colour in the wash. The J&Js don't even shrink at 90 degrees Celsius.
- ethbr1 3y agoThe key here is that it's a current t-shirt, not something that flowed through a typical warehouse model. I'm told there are people who care about this sort of thing. ($8B worth of other Americans, apparently)
- wkat4242 3y agoHow can T-shirts be "current"? :) The design has not changed for 50 years or so. Perhaps the colour but they are available in a super wide range anwyay (luckily, because Jack & Jones did only white, black and navy for a couple years).
- ethbr1 3y agoWhat's on the shirt. Finishing. Patterns. Kids will always want to be cool. The old thing is not as cool as the new thing. And fast fashion is a relentless machine to monetize that impulse.
- qingcharles 3y agoYou must not have any women in your life :) Every woman I know has been ordering tons of stuff from here for the last couple of years. Now I see many of them moving to Temu, and I would expect TikTok to overtake all of them within 12-24 months.
- morsch 3y agoIt's not mandatory for women to cycle through a wardrobe of fast fashion every three months.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoSomething to work on in 2024 =).
- themoose8 3y agoShein is bad for the planet and bad for humanity. They profit through exploitation; mostly of their workers (breaking even Chinese labour law), ripping off designs, dodgy marketing practices, skirting local tax laws and employing dark UI patterns. Their clothes are so low in price and quality that they are often worn once and thrown away. At $40B GMV they are bigger than most of their competitors combined; fast fashion on steroids, flying under the radar. Their mere existence is accelerating the destruction of the planet and feels like a distopian hell hole that won't be stopped. It works something like this; 1. Somebody uploads a design they found (probably stole) and creates a piece of clothing 2. Somebody else with just a shred of desire clicks on a couple of buttons and pays $3.78 3. A Chinese sweat shop worker immediately picks up the order and creates the piece of clothing and gets paid $0.03 for the trouble (whilst working 18 hour days in leui of any breaks, weekends or holiday) 4. The clothes get air shipped across the world and delivered to the customer, skipping customs and taxes 5. The customer, who basically forgot they bought the clothes (it was after all purchased in a tiktok haze and didn't affect them much financially) trys on the item, takes a photo, and throws it in the closet 6. A year later it gets donated to charity, who assesses the quality and redirects it to landfill (most of my information here has come from a documentary, "Inside the Shein Machine)
- dv_dt 3y agoFunny that the article mentions that Shein can’t match Amazon two to four day delivery, but at this point Amazon isn’t meeting that for Amazon. Amazon has messed up more orders this year for me than they have in a decade before of using them. I’m actively switching out subscription items just because I’m tired of dealing with it.
- thatguy0900 3y agoThat depends entirely on location. I've maybe had one item delivered late in the last two years, and most of what I bought recently has been free overnight shipping.
- karaterobot 3y agoYeah, it must depend on location. But I'm in Seattle—Amazon central—and overnight has recently come to mean 3 days or more. Not always, but regularly. This is the year when I started keeping a spreadsheet of the stated delivery dates vs. the actual delivery dates, because they sort of silently update them and I want some sort of evidence that I'm being gaslit. It's not even that I urgently need the packages, it's more that I need a predictable schedule so that I can plan on being home to pick them up.
- losteric 3y agoAlso in Seattle - I've never had that experience. Literally ordered something last night with next-day shipping, and it arrived in the early morning. Once in a blue moon something outright disappears, but so it goes with 20+ orders per month...
- Tempest1981 3y ago> Seattle—Amazon central You need to be near Amazon warehouses, vs Amazon HQ Or maybe they're short on drivers in your area?
- dv_dt 3y agoIt’s not just location or lateness - though I’ve had lateness on almost every order. I don’t even care if it takes longer it’s if the delivery is estimated for three days, don’t tell me there is a five day delay the day of the delivery. Last month I had every single subscription switch addresses and had to fix multiple items I didn’t catch - in part because they’ve been coming to my address for a while. And then fixing required that the wrong items arrive before they would be willing to take any action on the problem. This month I had another regular order and one subscription order get spontaneously canceled and refunded.
- mattas 3y agoBoth Shein and TEMU are taking advantage of two changes to customs rules that have been made in the last 5 years. First, the de minimis threshold was increased to $800. Second, CBP has introduced a new entry (Type 86) that makes it a lot easier to clear de minimis shipments. This enables foreign retailers to easily import single shipments to US customers. Because they no longer need to deal with more complicated customs filings, they can instead use air freight and get shipments to customers quickly. They trade customs expense for premium air freight.
- pridkett 3y agoThey’re air freighting the goods but doing so in bulk, so it ends up being far less than what the customs fees would be. If they were shipping them in bulk to a US warehouse without a designated customer, they’d have to pay customs. But rather, they arrive at a repackager which manages to skirt these regulations - at the expense of the taxpayer and competition who follow the rules. In other words, they’ve found a loophole to avoid customs on goods with otherwise high tariffs, pocketing some of the money for themselves and using the rest of the savings (and arguably difficult to return lower quality merchandise, we are talking about fast fashion) to undercut competition. I’d think that SV would worship this type of “disruption”.
- mattas 3y agoRight. They even print the UPS/FedEx/USPS label in the distribution center in China. They throw the individual boxes in a Gaylord and inject the Gaylords into the domestic distribution network at the destination air terminal.
- ggm 3y agoI'm wondering if this is de facto evidence of distorted market and so fuels regulatory intervention into Amazon's practices: Shein is huge. Amazon are only doing this because they have to.
- seydor 3y agothe most likely regulatory action is to ban/tax shein
- xnx 3y agoBig fan of Temu for low-cost unbranded items that I previously bought at Amazon. Exact same products, but without a dropshipper and Amazon adding extra margin for little extra value (better return policy).
- adra 3y agoRacing to the bottom has never been so steep. I was trying to buy an android auto wired to wireless dongle and all I see are temporary garbage re-skins of the same products from half a dozen suppliers that likely won't exist next year. I've never felt so apathetic about using Amazon. I've definitely moved away from them as much as possible alas. It's starting to stink like eBay.
- bobsmooth 3y agoSkip the middleman and just get it direct from aliexpress. Sellers there actually care about their seller rating.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoThere are categories that I'll generally try to avoid buying on Aliexpress (stuff that has a higher risk of being harmful if bad/toxic, e.g. anything in contact with hot food or extended contact with skin), but for small gadgets or tools, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative. I can buy the same crap resold at 3x the price (sometimes even with the same slow shipping) with almost zero additional quality control, but that's just buying from Aliexpress with extra steps (and cost). I can try to get something from a local seller (not necessarily locally made), but I'll have 1/10th of the selection with the price often being 5-10x plus local shipping that costs more than the Aliexpress product with shipping included. Sure, it's cheaply made, and sure, some of it breaks within a month. But most of the stuff is actually engineered correctly: It's exactly good enough. Just very very barely good enough, but good enough.
- creer 3y agoDo they? I tend to see 15 vendors of the same item - all claiming to have sold between zero (!) and NN items and having 5999 available ready to ship. With the added complication of using a crappy package delivery company.
- bobsmooth 3y agoSort by number of orders and look out for items marked with express shipping. My packages are always delivered by the national mail service and if you order items from multiple sellers at the same time aliexpress usually bundles them together so it's only one shipment. I usually get my packages within a couple weeks.
- theGnuMe 3y agoThe race to the bottom has always been the end state for Amazon. The Amazon as we knew it will be displaced by Shein and Temu. Without action they will be displaced. Soon they will have to add value like target or Walmart. I guess in some sense that’s why they bought Whole Foods.
- happytiger 3y agoThis is the smoking gun that Amazon has been operating as a monopoly. As soon as a competitor comes along from another part of the world they’re able to lower their fees by hundreds of percent.
- gunapologist99 3y ago> Items stored in domestic Amazon warehouses will always be more costly than Shein’s direct shipments to consumers from China, which also skip inspection and taxation by U.S. Customs Everyone likes cheap things, but these policies are quite insane. The U.S. is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies and penalizing its own companies and citizens.
- mavelikara 3y ago> The U.S. is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies and penalizing its own companies and citizens. Not new. https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/418081-usps-is-done-subsidizing-chinese-package-shipping/ https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/418081-usps-is-done-subs...
- Racing0461 3y agoIsn't this a better option than what nike is doing? they pay 10 cents per shoe but then we have to go to a store to buy it at 1000x the price. All this does is allow us to also pay 10 cents per show (albeit without the logo on it).
- azinman2 3y agoThis is the move that has turned the world against globalism. We have increased economic inequality in trade for cheaper items. But those items are made elsewhere, and slowly you erode those who would make and then buy items. Now with less and less money they can only buy the items from cheap places. A Faustian bargain.
- dan-robertson 3y agoDo you have a source for 10cents per shoe? Does that number include materials or is it just labour. It seems surprisingly low to me.
- aembleton 3y agoI think it was used as a way to illustrate the massive markup made by companies like nike
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoDid I just read my first HN article written by GPT ???
- seydor 3y agothen you must have gone missing for past few years