There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.
There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.
I know my comment will be lost in a sea of voices, but I need to share my experience _somewhere_ else other than amazon reviews. I got my fiancé two Christmas presents this year - both bought off Amazon. One was an electronic keyboard that was dead on arrival, the other was a snuggie type blanket that started falling apart yesterday. Both items had thousands of 5 star reviews.
I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.
Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!
And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish.
The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.
Unfortunately Amazon's UI is actually pretty hostile to this, too.
I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables...
And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?
If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight.
In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube.
This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it.
For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles:
Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests.
The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality.
Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
Given the counterfeit problem on Amazon, I have been using the retailer as a proxy instead. I feel much more comfortable buying things from a known retailer like Target or Walmart, since I can rely on them to at least do some kind of due diligence on the products they carry. I think this will be the way forward for these companies to stay in business as Amazon becomes overrun with junk.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands.
Thus the loop comes full circle.
Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea).
Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer.
And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.
>I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality
I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example...
If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months.
Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example.
On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc.
These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.
> There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?
100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising...
Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer
Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.
On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
> Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity.
It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.
Branding is an emergent phenomenon in nature as well, e.g. flowers of particular shapes to attract bees. The book "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland goes into this.
This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.
The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.
Skip the Amazon resellers and order direct from China on Alibaba. Their reputation system is less spammy than Amazon's.
One of my areas to watch: solid state relays.
Here we have yet another fake Fotek solid state relay on Amazon.[1] Note the "Made in China".
Here's the real thing.[2] Note the "Taiwan made" from the real Fotek. Costs a lot more.
That's because it will actually handle the rated current. The fakes are notorious for overheating and burning out. The real thing has overheat and surge protection, will shut off if it overheats, and can stand a big short term overload for motor starting or when a short is in the process of tripping the circuit breaker upstream.
Here's a similar solid state relay from China, from the actual manufacturer.
They actually provide a table which shows how much they
exaggerate the ratings. They're over-rated by 2X for
a resistive load, and 6x for an inductive load.
"For a motor with rated current of 15A and the motor
is inductive load, the formula is 15A x 6 = 90A, so
you should choose to buy 100A solid state relay".
For a little extra, you can have your own fake label. Minimum order 200 pcs.
Here's a fake Fotek.[4] What's amusing is that this is the actual manufacturer in China selling the fakes. They're in Guangdong, and they're selling under their own name, but with a fake label. No shame.
There are legit manufacturers in China selling solid state relays.[5] They put their own name on the product, show pictures of the inside their rather grubby factory, and have realistic numbers on their data sheets, along with pictures of UL certification documents. About 4x more expensive than the fakes. If you're in China and are building industrial equipment which needs these components, you need ones that won't fail and shut down a manufacturing line.
Here's a teardown of a fake. [6] The fakes are just solid state switches with power ratings way beyond what their components are good for. UL warning notice about fake Fotek solid state relays.[7] UL issued that notice six years ago, and they're still on Amazon and eBay.
Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.
Adding fuel to the fire; I remember reading an article last year which appeared on HN, it was about how sellers create groups on facebook which offer to send people free products in they agree to give 5 star reviews. Apparently this is also a massive problem with thousands of people doing this
So not only will the reviews be for the wrong product, there is also a good chance that the reviews were bought and are fake.
I was looking at webcams and the Amazon recommended one is 1000+ five star reviews some of which say that you only get a lifetime warranty if you leave a five star review
I've been using ReviewMeta to assist identifying the "real" reviews and learning the unadulterated score. I don't know if it handles "bait-and-switch" as mentioned in TFA, but it's steered me away from a lot of products that seemed reasonable based solely on reviews. I especially like that it can recognize false bad reviews which are often left by competitors.
A simple test for quality - if the clam shell/body is made of ABS (instead of polycarbonate or nylon), it's very likely bad. The dashcam appears ABS, judging from the pics.
You can return stuff back when bought online in 14days, I think this part remains after the 1st of Jan.
I bought a plant growing light a few days ago on amazon. It was the #1 seller in the category, and had nearly 15,000 reviews and sat at 4.5 stars. It was cheap. Mine didn't work. The box said it was 80 watts, but the included adaptor could only do 40 watts.
In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my review had not been accepted this morning. I called amazon the previous night and the first person told me to "contact the seller". It took a second person to tell me that blatantly bribing customers for reviews was against their policy. Clearly nothing will happen.
All I can think of is that the end user is no longer the customer for Amazon. They're a platform for sellers, so the sellers are the new customers. Shame they never told the end users.
From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?)..
What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority?
I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than random dropshippers. So if you buy 3-4 articles instead of dealing with a single established company you are dealing with many unknown vendors. The probability of getting lemons rises up dramatically.
Amazon has gotten complacent due to its quasi-monopoly. I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them. One of those brick-and-mortar ex-giants, the ones who were displaced could make a comeback. If I buy online I want to deal with recognized companies who have a track record of shipping real products and honoring the warranties, not with some randoms hidden behind not recognizable names.
Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.
I agree it's frustrating, but there is a way to do what you want.
After you've selected the color/model, go to the reviews section, and click to see all reviews, which brings you to a new page. There, you can filter to select reviews that are only for the single color/model.
It's annoying, and it's even dumber that the filter dropdown only lets you toggle between all reviews and reviews for the single color/model (when I'd like to compare reviews easily for different colors/models), but at least it is there if you hunt for it.
I despise this practice. I ran into it recently with the LOTR 4K Bluray set. I was going to leave a 3 or 4 star review, since while it's fantastic, the image detail is hardly an improvement over the standard bluray version, with some claiming the 4K wasn't even a full rescan from the originals. Side by side shots show very minor at best improvements to detail, with most of the actual benefits coming from HDR.
Since a 3 or 4 star review was pointless given their SKU grouping, I left a 1 star review. If 10% of users started punishing companies and Amazon with 1 star reviews they would change pretty quickly.
This is especially a problem for things with different flavours. I have run into multiple problems with Protein shakes where the vanilla is amazing and everything else tastes awful. The comments being merged mean you might have to pick through 1000 review comments to work out which flavours are good and which are bad.
I don't know, it kinda makes sense to have the reviews for phone (blue) in the phone (red) page. It's not like the colour is a major part of the product (in the sense that most reviews won't be about the colour, not that it is not important). Same with cable x1 or x2. Though it certainly is an issue if it changes the product in a major way (say, taste of a yogurt).
Other bait-and-switch problems on Amazon are manufacturers and "brands" launching a product with high production standards, then switching them out with cheap, low-grade junk made with inferior components or materials later on. This is often coupled with rampant paid review scams, as discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434)
A twist on bait and switch is another manufacturer or reseller taking over the "buy box". This is how pirated items or used items sold as new get dumped on customers, with Amazon's full encouragement (lower prices for customers!) and non-enforcement/honor system for sellers. Legitimate manufacturers and brands can scream to the high heavens that they and customers are being ripped off, but Amazon does next to nothing to stop the bad guys let alone compensate customers and brands who were cheated.
Originally the reason I liked Amazon was that I grew up in an area that didn't have access to stores with higher quality goods. Wal-Mart's price sensitive nature and similar stores meant that most of what was offered was 10% less in price, but 30% less in quality / how long it might last.
Now on Amazon everything is a race to the bottom on price and quality and, it is really hard to find something that is good quality and if you do ... someone is probably willing to sell you a fake.
I've gotten a few items I thought were fakes, and when I post a less than glowing review (not even mentioning my fake suspicions) I'm often contacted and offered a free product for removing my review.... I refuse to take these offers, but I wonder how many people do.
Rather than what I sort of expected, Wal-Mart trying to be Amazon... Amazon seems desperate to BE Wal-Mart...
Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.
What I like, are the companies that create a separate listing for every variant of a product, within a price range, so searches get overwhelmed.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a Mag-Safe stand for my new iPhone 12 Mini. When I searched for it on Amazon, look at what the search returned[0]. Now, scroll down, until you get to the "Cheetah" pop stand.
Keep scrolling.
But don't touch that dial! It goes on for 400 pages![1]
Note they raise the price slightly, so they "sort."
I ended up giving up, and getting one straight from the manufacturer.
Oh...BTW. Those stands have this little gem in their description:
> (Not compatible with Apple MagSafe wireless charger or MagSafe wallet.)
Great that they overwhelm a search that is, explicitly:
I don't know about you folks, but I've received so many "new" items from Amazon that were clearly used that I have largely stopped shopping there for expensive items. I think it's still fine for small gifts, plastic utensils, etc. But anything over 100 bucks I try to buy directly off the manufacturer's website.
I think Amazon needs to get a handle on their sellers and reviews ASAP because I am rapidly losing faith in the store.
Same here. I wonder if Amazon employees stopped eating their own dog food, and would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for how they are trying to solve this problem.
I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.
This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India.
Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed.
But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review.
This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.
> As a result of Amazon's action, the top-ranking drone, which previously had more than 6,000 reviews, now has only about 50 reviews and its star rating has dropped to three and a half stars. But the other two listings I mentioned above—both of which I also mentioned in a Monday email to Amazon—still have thousands of positive reviews, including a bunch of obviously bogus ones.
The result of blatant fraud and manipulation is simply removing the fraud? Why is Amazon continuing business with this shady company as if nothing happened?
I consider their "corrective" action far worse and damming than their inaction on other pages. Inaction could be from an inability to police everything. But merely covering up fraud when it happens is nearly as bad as taking no action.
The worst of it is that if you report an obviously fraudulent product listing nobody at AMZN cares if you didn't buy it.
Years ago I quit buying things at staples and started buying at AMZN because staples only stocked crap brands like vtech. Now the crap product listings on AMZN really stink.
Amazon uses this tactic themselves! They did it with the high capacity Amazon Basics AA batteries. The community pretty much verified they were rebranded Panasonic batteries manufactured in Japan. Then, after a few years and thousands of 5 star reviews they switched the batteries out for Chinese manufactured batteries. Check for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeab...
Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks?
Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment.
This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what inspires these tactics.
I had this problem literally half an hour ago. Looking for power strips, and the top rated one (average > 4.5 stars) thankfully has customer pictures showing extremely flimsy connections and soldering, a huge fire hazard.
[+] [-] TravisLS|5 years ago|reply
But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.
There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.
[+] [-] CapmCrackaWaka|5 years ago|reply
I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.
[+] [-] bombcar|5 years ago|reply
And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|5 years ago|reply
The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.
[+] [-] Pxtl|5 years ago|reply
I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables...
And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biztos|5 years ago|reply
In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube.
This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it.
For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles:
1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw
2. https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost
3. https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin
[+] [-] dopylitty|5 years ago|reply
The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality.
Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
[+] [-] orev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
Thus the loop comes full circle.
Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea).
Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer.
And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|5 years ago|reply
I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example...
If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months.
Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example.
On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc.
These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.
[+] [-] yrimaxi|5 years ago|reply
Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?
[+] [-] nikanj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrxd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr0|5 years ago|reply
Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer
Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.
On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
[+] [-] Kluny|5 years ago|reply
Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity.
It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.
[+] [-] HPsquared|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|5 years ago|reply
I don't have much to add here, but economists call this perfect information.
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.
[+] [-] tehjoker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
One of my areas to watch: solid state relays.
Here we have yet another fake Fotek solid state relay on Amazon.[1] Note the "Made in China".
Here's the real thing.[2] Note the "Taiwan made" from the real Fotek. Costs a lot more. That's because it will actually handle the rated current. The fakes are notorious for overheating and burning out. The real thing has overheat and surge protection, will shut off if it overheats, and can stand a big short term overload for motor starting or when a short is in the process of tripping the circuit breaker upstream.
Here's a similar solid state relay from China, from the actual manufacturer.
They actually provide a table which shows how much they exaggerate the ratings. They're over-rated by 2X for a resistive load, and 6x for an inductive load. "For a motor with rated current of 15A and the motor is inductive load, the formula is 15A x 6 = 90A, so you should choose to buy 100A solid state relay".
For a little extra, you can have your own fake label. Minimum order 200 pcs.
Here's a fake Fotek.[4] What's amusing is that this is the actual manufacturer in China selling the fakes. They're in Guangdong, and they're selling under their own name, but with a fake label. No shame.
There are legit manufacturers in China selling solid state relays.[5] They put their own name on the product, show pictures of the inside their rather grubby factory, and have realistic numbers on their data sheets, along with pictures of UL certification documents. About 4x more expensive than the fakes. If you're in China and are building industrial equipment which needs these components, you need ones that won't fail and shut down a manufacturing line.
Here's a teardown of a fake. [6] The fakes are just solid state switches with power ratings way beyond what their components are good for. UL warning notice about fake Fotek solid state relays.[7] UL issued that notice six years ago, and they're still on Amazon and eBay.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SSR-25-DC-AC-Solid-State-Relay/dp/B07...
[2] https://www.fotek.com.tw/en-gb/product-category/143
[3] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1PCS-SSR-10-DA-DC-Con...
[4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-SSR-25DA...
[5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SSR-S25DA-H-DC-TO-AC_...
[6] https://youtu.be/DxEhxjvifyY
[7] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ul-warns-of-solid-s...
[+] [-] djohnston|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdflhasjd|5 years ago|reply
I was looking for dashcams and came across this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-D...
91% 5-star reviews, a lot of the reviews are from "Top XXX reviewer", and almost every one seems to be reading off a script.
If you check out all the profiles of these "Top XX" reviewers, they all seem to be non-stop purchasers of chinese tat... curiously all rated 5 starts.
I'm sure Amazon is perfectly capable of detecting and handling this, what incentive do they have to allow all these fake reviews?
[+] [-] robotnikman|5 years ago|reply
So not only will the reviews be for the wrong product, there is also a good chance that the reviews were bought and are fake.
[+] [-] Zizizizz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanianian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxs|5 years ago|reply
You can return stuff back when bought online in 14days, I think this part remains after the 1st of Jan.
[+] [-] taurath|5 years ago|reply
In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my review had not been accepted this morning. I called amazon the previous night and the first person told me to "contact the seller". It took a second person to tell me that blatantly bribing customers for reviews was against their policy. Clearly nothing will happen.
All I can think of is that the end user is no longer the customer for Amazon. They're a platform for sellers, so the sellers are the new customers. Shame they never told the end users.
[+] [-] Raed667|5 years ago|reply
What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2
[+] [-] cambalache|5 years ago|reply
Amazon has gotten complacent due to its quasi-monopoly. I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them. One of those brick-and-mortar ex-giants, the ones who were displaced could make a comeback. If I buy online I want to deal with recognized companies who have a track record of shipping real products and honoring the warranties, not with some randoms hidden behind not recognizable names.
[+] [-] cbanek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
After you've selected the color/model, go to the reviews section, and click to see all reviews, which brings you to a new page. There, you can filter to select reviews that are only for the single color/model.
It's annoying, and it's even dumber that the filter dropdown only lets you toggle between all reviews and reviews for the single color/model (when I'd like to compare reviews easily for different colors/models), but at least it is there if you hunt for it.
[+] [-] Covzire|5 years ago|reply
Since a 3 or 4 star review was pointless given their SKU grouping, I left a 1 star review. If 10% of users started punishing companies and Amazon with 1 star reviews they would change pretty quickly.
[+] [-] PaulKeeble|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Leherenn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|5 years ago|reply
A twist on bait and switch is another manufacturer or reseller taking over the "buy box". This is how pirated items or used items sold as new get dumped on customers, with Amazon's full encouragement (lower prices for customers!) and non-enforcement/honor system for sellers. Legitimate manufacturers and brands can scream to the high heavens that they and customers are being ripped off, but Amazon does next to nothing to stop the bad guys let alone compensate customers and brands who were cheated.
Case in point: Bill Pollock's experience having his Python books repeatedly pirated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199135)
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
Now on Amazon everything is a race to the bottom on price and quality and, it is really hard to find something that is good quality and if you do ... someone is probably willing to sell you a fake.
I've gotten a few items I thought were fakes, and when I post a less than glowing review (not even mentioning my fake suspicions) I'm often contacted and offered a free product for removing my review.... I refuse to take these offers, but I wonder how many people do.
Rather than what I sort of expected, Wal-Mart trying to be Amazon... Amazon seems desperate to BE Wal-Mart...
[+] [-] alkonaut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a Mag-Safe stand for my new iPhone 12 Mini. When I searched for it on Amazon, look at what the search returned[0]. Now, scroll down, until you get to the "Cheetah" pop stand.
Keep scrolling.
But don't touch that dial! It goes on for 400 pages![1]
Note they raise the price slightly, so they "sort."
I ended up giving up, and getting one straight from the manufacturer.
Oh...BTW. Those stands have this little gem in their description:
> (Not compatible with Apple MagSafe wireless charger or MagSafe wallet.)
Great that they overwhelm a search that is, explicitly:
magsafe iPhone stand
[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p...
[+] [-] IAmWorried|5 years ago|reply
I think Amazon needs to get a handle on their sellers and reviews ASAP because I am rapidly losing faith in the store.
[+] [-] prepend|5 years ago|reply
I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.
[+] [-] hbt|5 years ago|reply
they shipped me a used one where the paste was already partially applied on the socket.
it works but still payed full price for a "new" item when it was a returned item.
it's just scummy all around
[+] [-] tangoalpha|5 years ago|reply
Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed.
But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review.
This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.
[+] [-] epistasis|5 years ago|reply
The result of blatant fraud and manipulation is simply removing the fraud? Why is Amazon continuing business with this shady company as if nothing happened?
I consider their "corrective" action far worse and damming than their inaction on other pages. Inaction could be from an inability to police everything. But merely covering up fraud when it happens is nearly as bad as taking no action.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|5 years ago|reply
Years ago I quit buying things at staples and started buying at AMZN because staples only stocked crap brands like vtech. Now the crap product listings on AMZN really stink.
[+] [-] Rapzid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lesinski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago|reply
Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks?
Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment.
This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what inspires these tactics.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|5 years ago|reply