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... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbo
by jp57 1y ago
... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products.
I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.
What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.
With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?
The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)
Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.
- supportengineer 1y agoEven more frustrating is when you get a GREAT product from an anti-brand, but there’s no way to buy more from them once they’re gone.
- jstanley 1y agoThe reason this phenomenon exists is because Amazon tried to block generic products from their site by saying the product must feature the seller's brand name. Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product. It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.
- mystraline 1y agoYep, that makes a lot of sense then. But yeah I call the site Scamazon. Even if you think you buy legit, theres a good chance of counterfeit due to SKU mixing. And weirdly enough, in quite a few areas, Scamazon is like 20% more expensive than other retailers. These days, I ask in discord groups who they recommend. At least I can avoid the AI shitfest and get real humans' expertise.
- wat10000 1y agoThe root cause is the unending quest for scale. This could be resolved by having a human person with decent judgment evaluate and approve all products before they can be listed. That's how normal retail outfits operate. Everything you find on a Safeway shelf has been authorized by someone at Safeway corporate. That doesn't mean it's good, but it at least means they consciously intend to sell it. But that scales poorly. This person has to have some sort of skin in the game, so you can't just contract it out or automate it. Amazon leadership is making a conscious decision to allow their store to be flooded with shit in order to reduce their costs of curating it. Given how successful they are, I have a hard time arguing they made the wrong choice, but I certainly don't like it. It's the same reason it's hard to impossible to reach customer service at many of these places. Google would much rather lose you as a "customer" than spend the money it takes to have a person available who can get your gmail account unfucked.
- Workaccount2 1y agoThere is slightly more nuance than that, the brand had to be trademarked, and the fastest way to get trademark approval is to use an unambiguously bad/random name. It also means that people have no brand recognition, and junk brands just blend in, or if you have to discharge your brand for some reason, nothing is lost.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoWhy don't they just make more plausible sounding brand names, especially with the advent of LLMs which can just barf out reasonable sounding ones that you can trust even if you don't speak English, and is almost as easy to do as smashing MIZOUW on the keyboard? Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital letters. Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover, Stillpoint, Aetheria
- supriyo-biswas 1y agoI have nothing to contribute to this discussion, but the points you brought up had the effect of making me view Amazon’s private labels in a more positive light, as in theory, it can be a good differentiator for quality.
- lemonlearnings 1y agoAustralia Kmart got a good round of applause recently on HN and I think it was because of this reason. MZOO prices but with Kmart brand curation (they use their own brand name Anko alot but under the hood must be different suppliers etc.). Not sure how they do it and pay all that staff and rent, but they do!