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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

> Instead, they contract low-cost Chinese manufacturers to provide a custom logo on a drone that already exists. Then Holy Stone puts the drone up on Amazon at a significant markup.

Seems like Amazon is filled with "fake" brands like these. Is just so that if some brand messes up, they can just put out the same product under a new brand?

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A lot of electronics are just rebranded Chinese goods. I remember some years back a DLink, Netgear, Netcomm etc. modem routers all came from the same supplier in a different case. I used to work for one of them and we’d purchase competitors product, open it up and it’s look the same inside. We could even install our firmware onto their box.

A lot of items period are like this. I've seen my same fridge with an LG, Electrolux, and Whirlpool logo on it. My grandpa worked at a factory (here in the US) that made chocolate-covered cherries and mid-shift every day they'd have a switch-over on the boxes to switch which brand they were producing. The boxes were the only thing they changed, the chocolate and the cherries were still the same. Even car companies do that, the Chevrolet Aveo was made by Daewoo and branded as a Chevrolet, Daewoo, Holden, Pontiac, Ravon, and Suzuki.

That’s interesting with the cars. I drive a used Camry and my cousin drives a brand new Yaris, and while I’ve had precisely 0 problems with the Camry she has constant problems with the “budget” Toyota model.

Googling it, it looks like Mazda makes at least some of the Yaris line, which used to be the Scion brand before that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/04/09/2018-t...

Yaris and Scion are different badgings that coexisted at the same time.

I'm not sure how it is in other industries, but in automotive this is usually referred to as badge engineering.

It results in some interesting vehicles. In the US, GM used to sell Toyota Corolla badged as Geo Prisms.

And in Japan, Toyota sold Chevrolet Cavaliers rebadged as Toyota Cavaliers.

There is a term for this: OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer).

"An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is a company that produces parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_equipment_manufacture...

When I started working on home power monitoring solutions "cloud" software, we could brand the web page with the company that sold/installed the equipment. If you didn't buy directly from us, you would have little idea where the equipment came from. Even the tech support information was that of our resellers. That changed overtime as the business started using there own branding.

The same is the case for high brand eyewear.

Most "brands" of $100 to $2000 glasses are made in the same factory, owned by the same company (Luxxotica) and use the same materials and craftsmanship (or lack thereof), just with a different design.

Then the same design/materials go off-branded for sale for 1/10th the price or less.

I used to know a guy whose dad had a factory for things like detergent. They did most of the product development and then would put the product into the packages of a lot of name brands. So whatever detergent you buy probably comes from a very small number of manufacturers.

It's mostly to stop people from shopping around for a lower price. You can't sell something for $300 if somebody else is selling the same thing for £150. Amazon will even merge your listings. But if you rebrand it you get your own listing, your own reviews (that you paid for) etc.

Brick-and-mortar stores sometimes use similar tactics. I recall reports of Media Markt and Saturn (two German electronics store chains) selling household appliances (washing machines, refrigerators, etc.) under changed model numbers. Still with the same brand name (because brand recognition is important), but with a different model number so that you cannot find the same model for a lower price somewhere else.

The different model number may indicate a store specific version of that model. There is an appliance company I'm familiar with that has a reputation for low quality products even though they sell the same brands as everyone else. Sure enough, the model numbers of the versions they sell are slightly different to everyone else.

On a similar note, when buying a scooter for my daughter, I found the "same" scooter in Toys-R-Us and Walmart. Despite identical branding and packaging, the Walmart version was of noticeably poorer quality (different materials and so on). I didn't check model numbers / SKUs, but I would expect them to be different.

Different consumers care about different things.

I worked at a retailer who would position certain brands as junk (and they were). The junk label would be used to upsell to a better product or sell a high margin extended warranty. The pricing was usually engineered to make the warranty marginally cheaper.

We see the same thing in the US for matresses, appliances, and especially electronics like TVs. Even well known large brands will be sold with long, and different, model numbers.

The B&Ms know that people are comparison shopping, even as they browse the store: they'll be on their phones looking up model numbers to compare to online and at nearby stores. As we all know, a moat is preferable to competition, even if you have the same or inferior product.

Dixons Group are notorious for this in the UK.

They do this a lot, they ask manufacturers to create custom versions. With computers or laptops it could be a unique configuration, a combination of harddisk size and memory not sold elsewhere.

This way the store can give you a "lowest price guarantee". Find it lower priced elsewhere, and we will pay you the difference!

Easy to give such a guarantee if you're 100% sure no other store sells the exact model.

This also happens in the UK, except that many of the stores themselves are owned by the same conglomerate.

Also easy to offer a lowest price guarantee when you know that customers are likely to only shop around at the high street 'competitors' which you also own. Will they bother to shop around? Doesn't really matter - heads you win, tails you win.

Although this probably works less well with much of the demographic of people who buy computers in the online shopping age.

Norway too

Not only can you not price match those situations but often times they get advertised as "exclusive" and maybe have one small feature change to warrant it.

IKEA rebrands appliances in the US. However, I consider this a value add because IKEA has an excellent warranty policy. Sometimes rebranding makes sense when you have some sort of value to add to ownership.

This doesn't stop the people who go on eBay (or anywhere else with an equally powerful search tool) and sort by price to get the same imported product without the custom branding.

I recently tried to buy a new mouse on amazon.

I found page after page of cheap identical rebranded products: https://i.imgur.com/KRNTBDB.jpg

I did not buy a new mouse on amazon.

I don’t know how much success you were hoping for in buying a commodity item from no-name brands like that. That’s always going to be a free for all. If you look for mice from reputable companies the results on Amazon are fine.

But then you're playing counterfeit roulette as you figure out what seller to buy from and who is even selling it anyway.

Are counterfeits listed as brand names that big of a problem on Amazon? I make most of my electronics purchases from Amazon (tons in the last few years) and have never received a counterfeit item to the best of my knowledge.

Certain categories of items are ripe with them, fake Sandisk SD cards have been a problem for years, for example.

That's precisely the problem: I don't know how big of a problem it is, and I'm not keen to find out. I know it's enough of a problem that it's easier to simply shop elsewhere.

I personally know a few people who have gotten counterfeit items, even including consumables like protein powder. I don't have to buy from Amazon so it's just a chance I'm not going to take until such a time I can be convinced it's not a problem. It's not any more difficult or even expensive for me to shop elsewhere so I don't have to be particularly rational or thorough about it (I don't have time for that!).

This practice of rebranded stuff is as old as the cheap consumer electronics industry. Back in the 90s myself and a friend had the exact same bedroom TV but they were different brands because they were bought from different high street stores.

What worries me more is fake reviews because that makes it harder to trust anything sold.

Can you trust the reviews? "Our engine has detected that Amazon has altered and removed reviews from this listing. We approximate total reviews removed to be 182. Previous analysis of this listing was an C grade." https://www.fakespot.com/

> Can you trust the reviews?

I can't tell if your comment is intended to be a counterargument (it seems to read that way) but you're actually agreeing with the point I was making:

Personally speaking re-branded products doesn't really bother me however the way reviews are abused does.

I think your link is a little disingenuous in the way it's worded too because I don't think Amazon actually remove or alter any reviews themselves. What I think happens is sellers contact customers and ask them to remove bad reviews in favour of a refund (or whatever). At least that was how negative reviews used to be purged a few years back. Of course you could still argue that Amazon should take a more proactive stance to customer bribery (just as Amazon should against fake reviews too) but I'm just directly addressing the phrasing "Amazon has altered or removed reviews" as seen in your citation.

I should have taken more time to write the comment. I copy/pasted the text "Amazon has altered or removed reviews" from the report the tool provided when I copied the URL from the Amazon Product Page and ran it to check the reviews.

I know, I said twice in my post that quote was from the site (both at the start of the paragraph and again at the end).

Honestly, I think what you actually need to do is take more time to read the comments you're replying to because that's the second time in two posts where you've corrected me on something while going on to make the same point in your rebuttable as the comment you're supposedly countering.

In some companies and industries there is a very good good reason.

The supplier will test and QC a range of products and when they find one which matches the spec they need they will have it branded and brought into their range. Although it's primarily a generic product they have put the time & effort into sourcing it and are [more] responsible for maintaining the quality and compatibility with their other offerings.

It’s called white-labelling. There’s an entire cottage industry around that.

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