Birbla

Discussion summary

Discussions highlight the prevalence of knockoff products on Amazon, with some users preferring cheaper alternatives, while others warn about quality issues. The conversation also touches on rising food costs and the impact on consumer choices.

What the discussion says

  • Some users prefer knockoff products for affordability.
  • Concerns about quality and safety of cheaper items.
  • Rising food prices influence consumer behavior.
  • Cooking at home is suggested as a cost-saving measure.
“Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.”
— dheera
“Costco sells genuine pet beds for $39, $224 is insanity.”
— triceratops

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • I feel we're well into the race to the bottom because I'm having an increasingly difficult time finding the brand name products to be any better. A lot of the brand name stuff is now also crap and some of the knock-off stuff seems to be just fine.
    by Waterluvian
  • I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
    by mikert89
  • The fact that Amazon doesn't care enough to implement this filter themselves is a strong indicator to just not buy of the site.

    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.

    by mrweasel
  • How can a HDJWNSK brand gain our trust and become respected if we're not even trying its products?
    by reader9274
  • I think your lysdexia strikes again. It's HDWJNSK /s
    by dylan604
  • By word of mouth, HDJWNSK just rolls off the tongue.
    by ActionHank
  • It cant get trust, as it disappears after a month.
    by 0x073
  • I'd rather buy a cheap knockoff than pay top dollar for an equally bad branded product. Most "consumer-grade" stuff out there these days is garbage regardless of price or brand. Examples: mattresses, home appliances, furniture, audio devices, routers. If you need something durable or dependable, you need to buy enterprise-grade stuff or make your own.
    by drnick1
  • I'm confused.

    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.

    by ryan_j_naughton
  • Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
    by mjamesaustin
  • I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.

    I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.

    by dyselon
  • My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
    by reeddavid
  • Sometimes I try to do this, and they fulfill through their Amazon store anyway.
    by recursive
  • I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
    by graemep
  • I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
    by datakan
  • That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
    by stronglikedan
  • Every time I do that I get frustrated:

    - 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.

    by 0x457
  • I've had bad experiances trying this:

    - 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!

    by glzone1
  • I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.

    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.

    by idopmstuff
  • Another PL seller here with a few brands and a couple hundred products:

    "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.

    by binarysolo
  • I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.

    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.

    by gortok
  • If amazon suddenly banned this class of products temu and alibaba are there to take up the slack.
    by sleepybrett
  • China supports Chinese interests.

    So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.

    by kardianos
  • I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
    by jjice