Re:$7M lost on Amazon inventory, then bankrupt
by solardev on Saturday December 03, 2022 @11:10AM
(#33844470)
The US wages for such a person probably costs more than like five of them combined and would never recoup their costs vs automated translations.
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 It's all been replaced by cheap whitelabeled or unbranded crap sold via a shotgun approach to hordes of unthinking buyers.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.
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.