What they do is buy their own product, review it, and put it back into inventory, losing only the delivery and commission fees.
If I found something interesting on Amazon I will check if there is a independent shop online that sells it (almost always has a Amazon shop too).
Even if I know the brand and the model: there are many fake products on Amazon. Especially when they are produced in China by a Chinese frim: e.g. Anker, who deliver great products if you are not getting fake ones...
What subreddit? Because neither on HN nor Reddit, I ever see anything positive about Amazon.
Not instant, but often quite manageable.
Also if you continue supporting Chinese sellers on Amazon, this would still encourage these behaviors.
Amazon is just filled with scams and fakes now.
But yeah, back to the point… Amazon don’t appear to want to fix this broken system or they’d have done it years ago. It still makes them money.
They upload the data required for mobile notifications to a CDN, which any one of us would likely do.
The other half of the controversy is that they upload a facial identifier for the same notification... if you have facial recognition for notifications turned on.
The hook-up has a more informed take on the issue: https://youtu.be/a_rAXF_btvE. I'm not sure if he was previously a software engineer, but he certainly seems to understand the problem Eufy faced like one.
My take-away is that they should have been more transparent about some form of upload being an unavoidable reality for mobile notifications in their marketing material.
Just give someone an actual link, to an actual article. Like this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23486753/anker-eufy-secu...
> Despite claims of only using local storage with its security cameras, Eufy has been caught uploading identifiable footage to the cloud. And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.
(Personally, this means I won't buy an Eufy camera, and it doesn't change the fact that Anker's chargers have been far better made and reliable than their competitors in my experience.)
For example, for the Anker power adapters we've tested: https://pqs.app/devices?categoryId=1&search=anker. We're also trying to turn it into a business.
That sounds like RTSP to me, which makes the rest questionable.
I’ve already spent a huge amount of my time on that story, being in direct talks with the security researcher before the story exploded - I even helped raise a lot of awareness. So excuse me if I wanted to just quickly mention a quick, no need to sift, route to the info.
(If you happen to see a car on the researchers Twitter running over a Eufy system - that was one of the many things I did for awareness lol).
No, it's aimed specifically at this one.
YouTube's search results vary from person to person. I don't know which video you want me to watch - Paul Moore's five minute one? Den of Tools' eight minute one? Byte of Geek's nine minute one? Something else?
At the very least, since you've got a video in mind, link to it, but text remains a way better medium for this sort of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I know your youtube probably looks different to mine as we probably have differing interests. But I didn’t know Youtube search results varied from person to person - this is news to me.
They've linked many of your devices together so you will see the same consistent videos/results unless you compare with other people, at places that are not your home location.
Even if they didn't saying "it's the top result for ____" STILL isn't helpful. Loads of people make videos designed to rank high for "in" topics. So if it's the top result today it's probably outranked tomorrow by a larger channel.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/eufys-no-clouds-came...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/eufy-camera-cloud-uploa...
I also don't understand why the Chinese listings are so crap and easily identifiable, as you say. I mean, don't tell them, but why don't they just hire an English/American/whatever market person to make it look right? (Font is another one, in images, instructions, even printed on the product itself. They often use a bizarre early computer slightly off-monospace looking one, I assume it's a default somewhere and if you're not used to/natively reading a script, it's harder to have an eye for what's a good font.)
In my language I’m seeing increasingly more legitimate sellers on Amazon switching to styles seen in Chinese listings, like “2022 updated version”, “easily use the product fashion”, whatever. Just on Amazon though.
Because they are betting it results in insufficient extra revenue compared to the extra payroll costs.
The font thing is just their default Chinese font with its Roman glyphs that are designed to look proportional to Chinese characters, not appeal to Western sensibilities.
They already took over the most successful American retail business by selling cheap crap without needing to deal with marketing. American companies that do all that come and go while the Chinese presence keeps growing and winning. Maybe it's us who have our product strategy wrong. Marketing might make sense when you're targeting a certain audience with disposable income, but probably most buyers on Amazon are just looking for the cheapest reasonable crap and don't overthink it...
Really the onus here should be on Amazon. Opening their catalog to third party sellers was inevitably going to destroy the user experience. Did Bezos care? No, they get paid by both sides this way. Everyone else started copying this model too, from Walmart to Bed Bath and Beyond.
The days of quality manufacturing and customer loyalty are long gone. It's all been replaced by cheap whitelabeled or unbranded crap sold via a shotgun approach to hordes of unthinking buyers. It makes the middleman more money that way now that they can easily scale it up to reach millions. SEO and fake reviews replaced quality driven word of mouth.
We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.
Which is often bullshit. The fine for lying about this tends to be $0, and it's likely to be years before you get caught.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/made-in-the-u...
All the actual brains of electronics aren't made here. At most you'd get, what, American plastic?
Even cars, I would trust the Japanese companies more. Computers aren't made here. TVs aren't. Furniture isn't (except maybe the fancy real wood kind?)
What's higher up the value chain? Planes? Spacecraft?
Even looking at an old-guard American think tank's report, it's pretty dismal: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/separate-country-top-500-us-m...
Basically petroleum products and cars, along with electronics assembly where most of the hard manufacturing is done offshore. Military stuff seems to be the only major thing we still produce here.
I mean, is this really controversial? It's been happening for decades and only recently has there been some (very limited) executive action to try to bring it back. I'm all for it, FWIW, but it'll take some time (and a lot of willpower and money) to really make that happen.
Who is going to pay for the cost of manual verification?
I bought a cover set for my Legion 5 Pro, and the best one was made in China, available only in the US. Fortunately the price is low enough to avoid extra duties so Amazon will ship it for $10 overseas within a week. No buying from EU here lol.
Same with a trackball mouse - shipped from UK because there was no stock in EU.
I stopped with the "durr China quality bad" a long time ago because it just isn't. Everything is made in China and you can get cheap/shit or expensive/great.
The Framework laptop for example, can't buy that from China. Sold out in EU. Have to go through forwarding bs to import from US. eBay sellers don't even want to ship overseas. AliExpress sellers will ship it to the middle of the Pacific.
If you want to compete you need to do better, not just give up imo.
https://sell.amazon.in/fees-and-pricing
check "Referral fees"
Modems & Networking Devices 14%
Television 6%
Home improvement - Wallpapers 13.5%
my gross margin is 4-8% at best and that is excluding all returns and losses. how am i supposed to compete with big players who can eat the cost?
the same as you are saying. they want to cut out the middleman (which is you) so retail business is between manufacturers and amazon now with no dependence on existing retail chain?
I once tried to buy a pulse oximeter and all the reviews for the most popular one were about replacement bike tires.
Most likely though someone at Amazon doesn't want to hurt their metrics for sales/relevance.
If someone created an online store like Amazon and essentially gave fraudsters free reign, they would be closed in no time, but this company is too big to fail and nobody seems to want to upset the billionaire owning it.
It's a classic example of one set of laws for the rich and another for the pleb.
You are right that other consumer protection laws etc. should be put in place to make fake reviews, product listing swap-outs etc. impossible.
Amazon knows exactly whats is happening and they are profiting off it
Also, what use is it to point that out with a review? Surely people who actually look at the reviews would notice anyway?
The reviews aren't ordered in a way that makes that obvious. You usually have to dig deep to find these. If you only look at the first page of reviews you are likely not going to see the photo reviews.
Any other legitimate business would be taken to task for a quarter of what they are doing. Maybe they know they can get away with it because they have a blanket liability shield from the AWS contracts?
If I buy a massage gun, I expect it to break after a few months. So being a chinese brand is ok.
What I don't get is why sellers can't sue amazon for profiting from patent violating items? If I lost $7M I would be talking to lawyers and judges as much as possible.
Is this the reason why so many Amazon brands are six letters long and all caps?
The easiest way to identify a Chinese seller is by the name (it will be in all caps) or the short description will contain bullet points enclosed in square brackets. E.g.:
* [easy to use]: blah blah blah
The reason for this is most Chinese sellers use a CRM to manage their Amazon listings. It helps them go through the process of creating their brand and capitalizes the name. The description also has a predictable format. I have no idea what else they offer, but they clearly offer a way to absolutely dominate the search listings.
My advice to non-Chinese sellers would be to allow users to find your product in other ways. E.g. I often search for products made in America or ones at least designed in America so I can have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Make sure your product shows up if googling "Product X made in Y." If your product is made in China, then just give up because you're just a middleman. There is no winning strategy when the producer wants to cut you out.