Amazon without the knockoffs

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• ...and without Firefox, apparently
  by ahartmetz
• It's funny but their homepage exemplifies why one may actually want the "knockoff" brands.

  $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.

  by iLoveOncall
• Costco sells genuine pet beds for $39. $224 is pure insanity.
  by triceratops
• Until it falls apart immediately or gives your pet a rash because of the poor quality materials that were substituted.
  by wffurr
• What an awesome extension!
  by cmdrmac
• and without the https:?
  by SubiculumCode
• I swear if I see one more “Bricolage Grotesque” and Inter website.. this is just what claude gives if you couldn’t be bothered to tell it what you want. Why is this even here?
  by adithyassekhar
• Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.

  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.

  by dheera
• Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less.
  by Cyberdog
• You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.

  We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.

  by bluefirebrand
• Depending on your date range, much of this difference might be the same inflation that has happened everywhere in the market.
  by Brendinooo
• That is because the value of the dollar is half what it used to be. In other words, inflation has been 20% per year for 5 years.

  So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?

  by pocksuppet
• > My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary

  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.

  by jcranmer
• Now we just need GitHub Without the Vibes
  by cwillu
• Pour one out for anyone who hoped to start a new brand.
  by jelder
• Especially those who planned to use a random password generator to come up with their brand name
  by bluescrn
• Would be great if you could port this to Firefox
  by robotnikman
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonbrandfi...

  The original is available on Firefox. The dev has even replied on the current top comment, if you want to check it out.

  by fnordian_slip
• Can you do the inverse as well? Like Amazon but only the knockoffs?
  by storus
• That's pretty much the default Amazon experience, no?
  by gjm11
• These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of weird model collapse is happening.

  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.

  by lenkite
• I'd be interested to know how this works. Whitelist? Blacklist? Something else?

  Edit: appears to be using blacklists.

  by LorenDB
• Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
  by Cyberdog
• Smelling a Honey situation; we'll see affiliated query params added later if it hasn't been added already
  by oathvz
• I would be happy just with a amazon that does not disappear 80% of the results when you apply basic list filters like "cheaper first".

  I don't even know why that is legal.

  by Luker88
• there are lots of comments here defending the knockoffs. in my opinion, they are equivalent to spam. amazon doesn't have a filter for these built into it and they never will. reputation matters especially with fake reviews. i will shop for items with this filter on and if i find the selection lacking or the prices too high then i'll turn it off and look at the knockoffs.
  by gaucheph
• I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
  by dawah45
• Love the idea of this but it has the inverse problem for me. So many brands are simply selling rebranded chinese goods anyway that I am probably better using review count and reviews to find low cost quality Chinese goods.

  I don’t know if it will ever happen but the only solution imo is better curation from an online site.

  by infecto
• Isn’t the whole point of a brand to be recognizable? If customers couldn’t make this association from the start, what value does this provide?
  by pokstad
• IME: Cycling bibs and shorts from knockoff amazon brands seem to be of equal quality to entry-level name brand stuff (pearl izumi) at a fraction of the price. Plain underwear, on the other hand, has serious want of quality vs 'real' athleisure brands (nike, underarmor, hanes). I was surprised to have such different experiences with two similar product categories.
  by quxbar