Amazon without the knockoffs
knockoff.shopping
knockoff.shopping
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
Yeah. I don't know. I don't love that they're just ripping the list like that, I wouldn't mind as much if they at least helped contribute to the list. That is far and away the hardest part of this thing.
But it is what it is, I'll be more peeved if they monetize it (which I'm unsure if they're doing).
Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo, I'd probably be better about focusing on it then.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...
TIL, thanks for your work!
I wish there was something like this but that filtered out AI books.
I've spotted a book once in the wild that actually had a ghibli-style piss-tinted cover image, which was a dead giveaway, but it's not always so clear cut.
I know one thing. It's grim out there for publishing and real humans who have something good to say but don't have a popular voice.
FSL (vs a copyleft license or just plain old OSS) implies they want to turn this into a revenue source for themselves ultimately, unfortunately.
>Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo
Absolutely :) Cool project.
Right now I'm dealing with a dude that requested his own brand be added. Which is totally cool. But looking at said brand. I am reeeaaallly struggling to tell if hes 3dprinting his stuff to sell, or if hes drop-shipping it and trying to get on the list.
You might even end up getting together a team of volunteers to look through them or it'll probably get overwhelming.
What determination did you use to make the original list?
I am sorta leaning towards just adding his brand. The list isn't append only, we can remove stuff if people feel the need.
edit: lol. tried searching for USB C flex cables. WHOLE search result page is gone. Love it! :-D
Something I've actually found I do is I just leave the addon in debug mode all the time. It's more verbose about what it's doing but it also highlights instead of hides listing. Which I've found I really like.
So I think I'm actually going to make that into a feature, highlighting vs hiding.
Great original idea, BTW. Wish I had known about your extension prior!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...
I'm a Firefox user myself. It is cross browser but it started Firefox first.
But also the List is by far the hardest part. It's way more work/time/misery than the addon itself.
If you're able and willing, create an issue on the addon repo: https://github.com/chris-mosley/AmazonBrandFilter/issues
And I'll build a version for safari for you to test.
You could always release the plugin code MIT and keep the brands.txt file proprietary or under a more restrictive license if you don't like what they are doing. After all, you did explicitly allow this.
But if ya want some proof I'm about to update the filter list with a bunch of mosquito repellents in like 10 minutes :)
Are you really going to be upset that what you originally built would be built upon and potentially monetized? The money will allow more fuel to make it better and better (hopefully)
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
- Coming from the same factory line with the same quality control, just rebranded (Costco famously does this a lot)
- Factory seconds, goods with very minor defects (sometimes not even in the product itself but in the box etc)
- Manufacturers copying specs and running illicit production lines without the company’s authorization
- Complete knockoffs, where the external design was copied but the product is totally different
Ultimately for most of these Amazon brands you have no idea which of these you are getting. Just because a product looks the same doesn’t mean it is the same. And in a lot of cases, e.g. with battery operated electronics the knockoff manufacturers skip a lot of safeguards and it ends up burning your house down.
Costco famously shops around aggressively for quality products -- not premium, but not crap -- and usually from big manufacturers who are already making excess supply.
Is common for supermarkets, too. Kraft can only get sub-par cheese one quarter so they make the same product but sell it as a white label option for lower margin. The factory line keeps running, product gets moved, inventory gets cleared, and margin is slightly lower but acceptable.
Whereas if it's costco it will at least be easy to get your money back if it dies in six months.
Occasionally there are even knockoffs that improve on the original product in some way, although usually they are just nearly as good at a much lower price.
Unless it's high-power LiPo or Li-Ion, that's extremely unlikely.
Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.
Cannot even imagine 1 day.
The value prop of Amazon is (was?) getting your item fast (not cheapest anymore and certainly not highest quality).
Amazon used to be the cheapest and fastest with the best customer support. They have slipped backwards on all those fronts.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k2ydn1rz8o
It seems like the retailers can be held responsible should "ASDAS_A!kr" drop off the radar, but might still be easier to sue local.
(I know "local" companies still find ways to settle / weasel their way out of responsiblities, but at least you know where to reach them...)
Person: Grasp the knockoff.
Computer: I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHICH KNOCKOFF YOU MEAN.
If it's an old and established US mark like Philips or Maytag or something? ZGGCD is the way to go.
in many cases may even be from the same factory made by the same hands with a slightly different supplier or quality of fabric, or lower QA.
but wow, i found this a sad comment to read. i find a lot of value in shopping local.
but, from a purely selfish standpoint: i get way better customer service, i can do trades, i can barter, i get to meet and talk with people, i can see the product before i buy it (no surprise knock-offs, etc.), my money mostly stays local, i find interesting work opportunities and sometimes referrals
Personally none of those things you listed are what I want when buying a book, except knockoff protection, but thank you for answering.
if you have a particular issue, email dang and he can swing by and reprimand me. although i would find that weird, considering me and the other participant continued our conversation on just fine.
You made it personal ("I'm not your dad") and you were condescending ("a sad comment"). That behavior is ugly and it doesn't belong on HN.
I have an interest in maintaining HN as a place where intellectually curious people of good faith engage in conversation, including with people they disagree with. I will continue to advocate for HN to remain such a space, and that includes objecting to behavior that tends to undermine that goal.
If you track the individual dollars, most flows of value eventually, after some number of loops, end up with the French Polynesia sitting people.
I don't think commerce (especially at Amazon) works the way you think it does.
There is a very good chance that when you buy something at Amazon that says it's BigBrand ... it's just a knockoff. Or a fake that has infiltrated another part of Amazon's supply chain. There is big money in lying to customers through Amazon.
She would rail against fakes and would show you how the seams and other details were different and how, looking close, the difference was obvious.
My Uncle Dick, the oldest of the brothers, bought three fake Rolexes from the back of a truck on a trip to see my Great Aunt Simone in NYC. He thought he got a steal. Two months later he reported that they didn't run anymore!
This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
You'll find lots of different manufacturers selling this on Amazon, but there is no well known brand that makes these.
I don't have Amazon Prime.
One other factor is that the minimum order for free shipping is often $10 versus $30 or $39 or $49 depending on Amazon’s algorithmic state and below $10, $1.99 is often Ali Express shipping cost.
But again, that’s for what I buy.
As for shipping - if it's not urgent, I just put it in my Wishlist until I accumulate items beyond the free shipping threshold.
I don’t spend mental energy dealing with Amazon’s dark patterns and terrible search that is flooded with sponsored links for something I did not search for…Ali Express search is not great, but it is not adversarial.
But because it works for me doesn’t mean it works for you.
The best price Amazon showed me for the chips was $9.99. I got $14.99 for two cables. And $6.99 for 60 wire wraps.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FS1H4SQQ
and I am really happy with the first one I bought and bought a second one for a co-worker who liked mine. At my food co-op I found something from the highly reputable Aura Cacia brand that was almost twice the price and I think very similar in quality.
Indeed - they're legitimately solving a real problem. It's just an interesting dynamic that a whole new product category is produced overnight, with no clear leading brand. Usually someone makes a useful product. It gets known. Then others enter in the market to compete. Here you just get 5 companies entering the market altogether.
As for the essential oil diffuser: That category was established long before these brands became a thing. But oh boy the overpriced ones in stores are really not worth it!
i wonder if it would be faster to 3d print that gadget than amazon prime it
We use the 3d printer explicitly for the one-off object scenario.
How future generations will look back at our convenience online ordering practices and be absolutely horrified at how we thought it was no issue to get some bit of plastic made in Asia and shipped over to US or Europe, then next or same day delivered just for for a few dollars/pounds.
Sorry OP, not aiming at you. You just triggered a sad rant.
For example its the same as flying on planes. Number one worst offenders for C02 is frequent flyers, yet whenever you question anybody on it the argument is always "the planes are flying anyway why does it matter if Im on it or not".
> critical things
You miss the whole aspect of production and waste pipelines, which was kind of the point.
Our great-great-grandchildren will probably be getting their gadgets via some kind of Star Trek replicator rather than a container ships and no doubt some moral hazard will be involved in that practice.
Generally though, things are getting better, no?
https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/avocados-sustain...
All for what, so someone in a western cafe can have some smashed avocado on their sourdough toast? I'm pretty sure people could do without out of season berries, and avocados at all. We used to east locally and seasonally for millennia, forcing over production of anything to ship it round the world is a recipe for disaster.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
"No brand name" flag is tricky because the Amazon catalog team actively does A/B tests to hide brand names as part of their goal of commodifying all the sellers to increase price competition, when they see you're selling a commodity item.
Same goes to wellknown brands that get caught in the crossfire because they're using their brand name from another language but don't make sense in English.
Agreed that it's an interesting idea, but execution has a LOT of false positives.
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
It took me well over a month of back and forth to get a refund, and only after I repeatedly threatened them with a chargeback. I ordered the exact same tent on Amazon and had it the next day. As a bonus, it was now discounted on Amazon but not on the manufacturer's website.
I only order from Amazon a handful of times a year when I can't find an item elsewhere, but manufacturers are really doing their best to push me towards it.
- shipping sometimes goes to from day(s) to weeks
- suddenly their ads start going to email
- please review us emails
I'd rather bezos get his cut.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
No business gets my real phone number, and the email I provide is companyname@mydomain.com. The minute I start receiving unsolicited email, I revoke the alias and spam will bounce.
IIRC amazon yeets you out of their marketplace if you sell items cheaper than on amazon.com. Which you can work around by giving our coupon on your website, but that results in email/sms spam.
You're talking about buying from a local shop. Unless that local shop is also the manufacturer, then that's a whole different discussion. :)
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Counterfeit goods are clearly bad and a problem, but knockoffs that aren't counterfeit seem to be a good thing from an economics perspective, right?
A knockoff that isn't counterfeit isn't deceiving customers -- it is just competing and competition drives benefits to consumers.
There are many knockoff goods that reach comparable quality as the original, luxury good. We shouldn't support the idea of brands for their own sake. Today, many luxury brands are actually degrading in quality as the only thing customers are buying them for is the status signal more than the actual quality.
What is critical is a customer is informed about the trade offs between the goods to make an informed decision.
When I recently was buying camera gear, I bought some of the peak design bags and accessories (which are amazing). I then also bought some knockoff gear that is compatible with their system. Real:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F94FQRB $29.95 Knockoff: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYCB594Y $5.01
I knew what I was buying in both cases. I wouldn't trust the knockoff clips to hold my $3K Canon, but I am ok with the knockoff clips to hold an old, light film camera I also brought on the trip. I made an informed decision and my choice also helped contribute to competition between vendors, which is good for the market as a whole and consumers broadly.
If everyone used these chrome extensions, economic theory predicts that prices would rise for consumers and quality of the original brands would degrade through reduced competitive pressure.
What could be more informative for consumers that simply eliminating knockoffs from their search results would be to increase information. Maybe adding a visible indicator of which company is the established or originator of the design and which are knockoffs would be better than simply filtering them out.
Amazon doesn't give a shit if you're being hustled. If they have to issue a refund, that's the sellers problem, in all other cases they make money. There is so much junk of Amazon that's just not worth it. The only reason I ever shop at Amazon is if I truly cannot get the item elsewhere. They aren't cheaper, they're certainly not faster (in my area) and with every purchase you're at a much greater risk at getting scammed, compared to shopping at sites that don't do the marketplace crap.
In a sane world Amazons customers would be leaving in droves, and I cannot figure out why they don't.
I don't particularly like Amazon and would like to shop somewhere else, but it is sooooo convenient that it's hard to quit.
Because Costco does not sell a lot of stuff that I want.
Their logistic network is where prime holds its value.
Costco is great for curation, but only for the items they carry.
A combo of Amazon for the random junk I don’t care much about and Costco for consumer staples works out well.
And no online vendor gets remotely close to Amazon for speed of shipping, ease of returns, and product selection. Usually matches the best price I can find on most things too - outside of stuff I buy direct from China.
Lots of the random crap I buy on Amazon I want the marketplace for. Like I needed a dozen plant domes this spring. I wanted them tomorrow, not next week and I didn’t need qty 100. So having the option for that vs. a gardening warehouse that targets large growers is quite handy and exactly what they excel at for me. I could care less which random brand sells the thing to me since they are all the same.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
Where do those investment incomes come from?
Ahh, yes. Profits.
Investment income--in the form of capital gains--isn't coming from profits, it's coming from the mass delusion in the value of stock assets (which is somewhat correlated with profits, although the existence of stocks like SpaceX or Gamestop show the possible disconnects).
If you wanted to complain about the salaries of billionaires, or the stock grants on the other hand... but you said investment income!
So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
I have no incentive to change anything about my spending habits. If the "system" changes itself so that I have a ton more disposable cash lying around then sure I'll re-consider the authentic brands.
About the only situation I still buy authentic brands is if there's an electrical safety or lithium battery involved. But yeah, I'm not spending $52.99 on a nice-looking bike bell ([1] with shipping and taxes) when there's a $10 knockoff of it that looks exactly the same and works just as well.
Back in the days when the original was $5 and the knockoff was $1, I might be willing to pay for the original.
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.
If you have the money and you can stay healthy eating that way, go for it. But your original comment seems absolutely ridiculous to anyone that regularly cooks. I sincerely don't mean this in a mean way, but it was quite ignorant, as if making burritos was some herculean task and just what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes that you don't use?
No, I'm not talking about my own life, but rather the scope of the original response - making it out as something simple you can just do, rather than an undertaking in both prep time and resource management.
> We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month?
I'm right there too at this point in my life. But it's still absurd to suggest someone casually cook a number of dishes that would make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. "Skip the burrito and pack a sandwich" would be reasonable advice, but we have no idea how much OP is already doing that! Rather they merely brought up the price of a burrito for a benchmark about price inflation. Rather than accept the point about price inflation, people then shot the messenger with some fantasy of easy frugality.
> what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes
You've got guac/pico that want to go bad in a day, and rice/beans/protein that want to go bad in ~4 days. So many other recipes like... more burritos or a different Mexicanesque meal that tastes just like burritos?
No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable
Sort of yes?
But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?
There's no way your purchases wind up being $20-25 per burrito, right? That would be nuts.
It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?
There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.
(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)
But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.
Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.
If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:
You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.
That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.
People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.
---
Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.
For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.
(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.
Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)
For this person: too fucking bad, that's life
If you don't want to live that life then you should pay a premium for the privilege
My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves
Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.
Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?
Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.
Yes but you never just buy enough of this for one single burrito!
When you're saying it costs $20-$25, you're not talking about per burrito the way you buy burritos at chiptole
If there are more burritos in the future, then: I eagerly await Episode 2: One More Burrito [from last week's funky leftovers]
The cost of the singular burrito has now been reduced to ~$30, which still seems rather expensive.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
The strategy is dependent on what is more precious to you - time, or money. Telling someone they should spend their time to save $10 is pretty pointless if you don't know what their financial situation is and whether that $10 has any meaning.
Food waste is food that you buy which is not ultimately consumed , which increases your cost per meal. This might be trimmings, it might be something you burn, it might be leftovers you don't get to.
I see "HORUSDY" type brand names all the time. It's crazy that any shirt/pants/etc results in one of these.
I realize this is one of Claude's copy tells (using excessively hyphenated words) but in this case I can't figure out what it means.
I don’t know if it will ever happen but the only solution imo is better curation from an online site.
I don't even know why that is legal.
Edit: appears to be using blacklists.
[1]: https://sell.amazon.com/brand-registry
[2]: https://archive.is/IQs4i / https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
$39 instead of $224 for a pet bed. I know which one I'll buy.
There are plenty of categories of items where the cheap knockoff is perfectly adequate.
The original is available on Firefox. The dev has even replied on the current top comment, if you want to check it out.