Not just counterfeits but pages upon pages of shitty products from companies like WOWZAMGO and PARTUE that, now that they have sponsored rankings, will always come up first in search. They also all have endless fake reviews. This renders Amazon's search essentially useless.
WOWZAMGO makes quality products. I bought their portable usb battery and it only caught fire after the 20th charge cycle. PARTUE, on the other hand… don’t ask!
The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]. When you don't have subliminal[1] and limited selection pressure (both of which exist in brick and mortar stores), coupled with a UI that makes it pretty easy to discover other brands, and coalesced signals (reviews placement etc), lowest price wins.
[0]: Put another way, if its expensive, it gets more scrutiny by the average consumer (whatever their definition for expensive is). The other circumstance is if they care about the category or are in the slice of shoppers who do quality research, which is less common than you might think, until the cost factor kicks in, usually.
[1]: This is brand awareness, and other related verticals. Effectively, this is what brand and mass marketing is about.
> The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]
Well said. Also, let's not forget time. I've spent countless hours researching many things I intended to buy only to give up partway down the road. It's in part because of the endless results on Amazon (referenced here) but also elsewhere.
Let's say, for example, I'm trying to find the best saute pan. Amazon gives me thousands of results, but so does Google. My search results are littered with tons of X-best SEO-optimizing websites that don't help narrow down choices. So, in that situation, it's less about the price and more about the time: I'll just buy whatever seems reasonably rated and not outrageously expensive and move on.
I really enjoyed the earlier days of the Wirecutter - tell me the thing to buy in my search category even if it's not the cheapest or most commoditized.
There’s a pretty strong “market for lemons” effect going on almost economy-wide in which every manufacturer out there seems to be sprinting to make the lowest quality shit they can sneak past the regulatory bodies, so it’s not surprising consumers are selecting solely based on price because there’s functionally no other differentiator at this point.
The UPPERCASENONSENSENAMES are so obvious it makes me wonder if this is a target-selection technique in the same vein as the 419 scammers use -- make it so only the most clueless people would ever buy your garbage product, so you get a lower percentage of people who are going to report you.
I believe it might [0] have to do with Amazon offering preferential treatment, under a program called Brand Registry, to Chinese exporters if they register a name--any name--with the USPTO.
The thing is, it's 2023, we all "know" that every company's product get made in the same factory and there's just a fork at the end of the conveyor where they get different branding slapped on.
So the gamble is that UCNN is sourced out of the exact same factory as the product/brand you actually want. It's the the evolution of the Warby Parker model.
Just bought a wood bed frame online. 5 vendors with nearly the exact same frame, all priced within $50 of each other. How does one choose? Does it matter?
It’s a great signal that you are buying from the wrong middleman. Seek out the source for a 50% discount. Usually that source is on AliExpress/Alibaba.
It's more like they flood the results so you literally can't find the quality product unless you know the brand name to search for. I can't be an expert in every vertical, so either I go to some sort of trusted review platform like Wirecutter, or I give up and buy whatever I can find on Amazon return decent reviews and hope for the best.
I don't really have a problem with this stuff. It's memeable (some great photoshop artists there; always good when the company has no photo of their actual product) and not that cheap, but I think of Amazon as an overpriced Shenzhen market and this stuff is essential to maintaining that vibe.
