Amazon Is Allowing a Chinese Knock-Off to Destroy Our Startup | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is Allowing a Chinese Knock-Off to Destroy Our Startup

travelhead.medium.com

111 pointstravelhead48 comments

Hadn't heard of the product before, I was in the market for a belt anyway and for reasons these look like they might be a better option.

So, I hit up your site - and get a "Promotional Code Activated!" banner. I add the default (two) to my cart, and get hit on the next page with a "Would you like (more) fries with that" page next asking me to add two more.

You don't allow determining shipping costs up front, instead requiring me to fill out all my details OR use Paypal checkout first.

Only after going through the Paypal Checkout process do I discover that shipping is going to cost me USD$29 (I'm in Australia), so yeah - No, I bail on that.

Then I get a cart abandonment email - apparently scraped from Paypal Checkout - telling me the promotion code is going to expire, which is clearly not true since it's not personalised and apparently all I have to do even if it were going to expire based on some kind of cookie/whatever, would be to fire up a new browser session.

While I'm sympathetic to the problems with Amazon, the whole experience feels like a mixture of Daytime TV Home Shopping combined with door-to-door sales tactics. I'm just waiting for the followup email 24 hours later telling me if I order now I'll get a free set of steak knives.

Abandonment emails are the reason I started (almost) checking-out with a broken email (no MX) and a fake identity before giving my real details.

I live in Israel and it's extremely hard to tell whether this website will charge me $5, $15, $29 or $50 for shipping. Or what level of shipping that would be (postal or private). Or if they even ship to my country at all, with so many websites not having a "where do you ship?" FAQ. (Or an "estimate shipping" button)

So to find out it's $50 plain mail shipping, or worse, they don't ship at all and still get a "please come back!" email was very annoying.

Amazon is a marketplace, not a retailer.

They are not selling the knock off, they are allowing the knock off merchant to use their marketplace.

Your remedies are with (assuming US based):

* Copyright enforcement via DMCA on your marketing info/photos etc

* Trademark enforcement via Customs and USPTO

* Design patent enforcement via Customs and USPTO

It's not Amazon here that is the issue, it's enforcement by the governmental authorities that are supposed to do that enforcement.

You'd have exactly the same problems if you were selling on etsy instead of amazon, or at a local weekend handicraft market.

Look enforcement is typically difficult for anything being sold. The problem is many magnitudes larger than current abilities of enforcement agencies and a lot of these actions are in very grey legal areas internationally.

I believe we could legislate and leverage the executive to force agreements but anything done will likely be an uphill battle with no end.

Unfortunately this is the reality of manufacturing easily copied goods. Since it is so difficult to sue a vendor to stop selling your product in China, someone will just copy your design and start selling it for less than you can. Even if you get the item taken off Amazon, they will continue selling wherever else they can unless you invest a ton of money in a legal team to aggressively stop them from importing product to North America.

This isn’t just a knock-off, this is a company who stole all my branded imagery which I paid thousands for photoshoots. They stole our copy as well. I understand this is part of business, what I don’t understand is how Amazon is allowing this to happen.

That was interesting. You carefully outlined a clearly delineated issue and the poster conjured up some overarching philosophical point and responded to that instead.

I bet it was like dealing with Amazon all over again.

Perhaps they're confused by the images you submitted. In the image with the man's hand in his pocket, the 'copy' has details that don't exist in the original:

- More of the man's hand and shirt cuff

- Seams on the front of the shirt and trousers

So, at least at first glance, it seems impossible for the left image to be a copy of the one on the right. Perhaps you had previously used a more zoomed-out version, and they copied that?

When I see replies like this, I am made aware that some people see the world dramatically different from me. To me, this is about as close to just directly copying everything as you can get. To point out the seams is to lose the forest for the trees.

Genuine question, does copying to you mean that it has to be exact? Like, if there are small, meaningless differences, then it's not copying?

No, he means that the OP has a cropped version of the image and the “counterfeiter” has an uncropped version of the same image.

If the counterfeiter really stole the images how could he have a less cropped version.

Maybe Amazon also sees things like this and decided they can’t tell who stole from whom.

I don’t that is the case here but it is possible Amazon gets all sorts of notices like this from people who aren’t as genuine and may be lying to remove a competitor.

I agree here. This isn't a case where someone took a similar picture. The pictures are identical except OPs is more cropped than the competitor.

This is similar to a common practice in the art world where you photograph the borders of a painting before framing it. If there's ever any doubt about whether the painting was swapped for a forgerie, just look at the photos of the borders and compare them.

I'd have similar questions if I was on the Amazon team receiving this complaint.

I think it's plausible that the Chinese cloners never bought the original product but instead hacked his server that had all the photos and schematics to produce the product on their own. No, I don't have any evidence for that being the case, but I think it possible with this being the direct method counterfeit groups use to knock off most things from Western countries.

I mean, if the company is copying your product already, why would they go to the effort of coming up with new marketing?

Amazon has no incentive to actually go after counterfeit goods, they get paid either way, so any team that would investigate counterfeit claims is a pure cost to them. Due to this they do the bare minimum to prevent further regulations being brought down that they would have to comply with.

This is why we need an actual competent politician who takes China seriously and is willing to use a lot of American resources to fight things like abuse of IP law, etc.

> unless you invest a ton of money in a legal team to aggressively stop them

How much is a ton of money in this case?

Amazon gets money one way or the other. Amazon is the equivalent to a classic Rome market with people shaving coins down and using rigged weighing scales. Or law enforcement and legislators do something about it or our rights as consumers will go back a thousand years.

It is as sad as unsurprising that Amazon promotes this kind of behavior.

Yes unfortunately this seems to be the case. Their incentives aren't aligned with the OP and sadly will continue raking in cash while screwing over sellers until they lose their monopoly.

He only resubmitted 10 days ago. Presuming there was something missing with his first application, something like this would need to go through a legal area internally at Amazon to get a considered opinion. Maybe they are busy?

Best of luck to OP.

Thank you. I hope that’s the case but I’ve escalated the issue for the last month with no follow-up from Amazon.

Congratulations, you’ve made it! I’ve been the victim of both Chinese and American IP theft with my startup as well except I had issues with Apple, not Amazon. It is a sign of your success. Perhaps start using words like “genuine”, “original” of “not a cheap knockoff” in your product descriptions. Unfortunately, IP theft is a big deal and we can’t really touch China.

>Unfortunately, IP theft is a big deal and we can’t really touch China.

But Amazon (the marketplace) sells that stuff. So touch Amazon not China.

Amazon really became a dumpster fire of knock-off products over the years. Just in my circle of friends we had knock-off Marshall and Apple headphones, as well as knock-off Lenovo power adapters. I lost trust in any of the products sold on Amazon and try to avoid them whenever possible.

I wonder if a dcma takedown would be a better approach?

I will look into this approach, I wasn’t aware DMCA works on Amazon listings.

DMCA works on any Internet property operated by a US-based entity. Amazon.com is operated by Amazon US. You might run into issues trying to DMCA Amazon.com.uk but for the top-level main US site you're fine. Note that you must not overstate or misrepresent your case in any way, and you are strongly advised to seek a lawyer since this no comment on this post should be considered legal advice.

They might just remove his account too if they see it as a legal threat? I'm not a lawyer.

Yelling into a 'jungle' will not get you attention, plus who knocking who?

I've never heard of this product but I have been doing exactly this for many years with zip ties. Only if I'm in a pinch situation where I need a belt and don't have access to one of mine.

as long as wealthy US investors get a cut nobody in the legislative will do shit.

Exactly! Amazon is profiting by having more listings compete which drives down the price. They are pricing their listing way lower than my listing.

Hey HN,

Thanks to everyone’s feedback and help we were able to get them take down!

Consider a "design patent"?

Well not sure how to feel sorry for you: you rely on Chinese manufacturing and this is not something thats novel in the first place. Amazon is not a copyright or a trademark enforcer, so this speaks to your inability to sue one Chinese manufacturer (the copier) over another (your preferred manufacturer).

It seems like as a society we have given up on any manufacturing or making physical things outside of a few communist controlled territories. Seems very much like working as intended.... Play with fire, catch fire that's what you get.

Nonsense.

Amazon is clearly selling counterfeit goods. If found guilty, they’d be facing a $15 million fine.

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/selling-fakes-...

IANAL so please correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't counterfeiting imply that the scamming party is claiming to sell something else while actually selling fake goods? Such as passing off their random shirt as a Gucci shirt? Or mixing chemicals themselves and calling it a Versace perfume.

In this case the other listing isn't claiming to sell BeltBro, they are claiming to sell AAROMANO. The fact that they stole the copy etc is wrong but it sounds like a different problem. But there doesn't seem to be any misrepresentation or counterfeiting.

It’s counterfeit because they are using my logo and images on their product with the intent of deceiving my customers into purchasing their product.

Then go through the proper process, which is to file a DMCA takedown request...

Sure, but then a copy cat scammer will pop up in its place. This will be a time and money sink for OP unless he has the coin to keep a lawyer on retainer until the end of time.

You don't need a lawyer to file a DMCA. It's pretty easy.

Agreed! I would love to take this to court against Amazon if any HN lawyer’s that would like to help!

This is one of your previous comments

“This is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated?”

But, I’m not sure how to feel sorry for you should that happen. You played by the rules and got screwed over because big co doesn’t care about you.

See, we all have concerns like this about fairness, but what separates you from the op is they actually built something and brought it into the world.

Isn't it ironic that you're doing the same thing hes afraid Google might - Using someones opinions on social media for punitive purposes. For double irony, it also mirrors China's social credit system in-part.

You're about 30 years too late. Manufacturing is not coming back to the US. We've been migrating towards a service economy for several decades now. The rise of automation has only accelerated this trend. What kind of manufacturing jobs would you like to see come back? The notion of property and property rights is obviously very very different under communism, but even so, their domestic economic policies have been beneficial to the average Chinese citizen. China has successfully brought tens of millions of their own citizens out of poverty - without being involved in stupid wars to 'stimulate the economy'. IP theft aside, that deserves to be commended.

>It’s really unfortunate that Amazon is not protecting our small American start-up business

sympathize with the case but is it really necessary to use this China/protectionist rhetoric in particular? A knockoff is a knockoff, that should be enough. The case doesn't get worse because it's Chinese or other Americans copying their stuff.

It's relevant to the discussion considering I have no legal rights in China to protect my copyright and brand. Amazon is a USA based company that is ignoring my IP rights so they can profit by increased competition which reduces consumer prices.

It does because he has no case in China.

Hey bro, wanted to see the duds myself and couldn't find your listing bruh

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=belt+bro+men&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

You got bro belts for women, but where's my belt bro?

Thanks bruh

/brospeak seriously, did amazon take down your listing or did you? The belt bro for men seems gone?

Do you even belt bruh?

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