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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

Home brands of durable goods in the last 10 years have pretty much always been "Chinese crap" (I use this term loosely, sometimes the products are pretty good).

BUT, and this is the key part - buyer teams from major brands vet the supplier, make cost/quality tradeoffs and do all the supplier due diligence (like making them attest the products are not made by "modern slavery", don't have lead in them, etc). They also squeeze them super hard on payments and financials.

The BEEZELBUBS and QRYGGS are mostly the SAME factories that have always been making your goods but now they are "out of the box" and can sell to the consumer directly.

The good part is that they can now compete "fairly" outside shelf space monopolies, the bad part is that no one seems to be doing supplier due diligence or addressing quality fade.

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This is the whole problem with Amazon and why I call it a flea market.

Other retailers put their reputation on the line with their merchandise. Sure, the same factory that manufactures for Old Navy makes QRYGGS. But Old Navy vets it.

Amazon’s issue is that it tosses its hands up and says “Sold by QRYGGS, fulfilled by Amazon.” Amazon says: if it’s garbage, not our fault, but you can return it. That’s just wandering a flea market with random vendors selling junk.

So I’m actually disappointed that Amazon would double-down on this by eliminating its private labels. At least if I see it’s an Amazon brand, I know they vouch for it. Indeed, my experiences with Amazon brands have been at least decent. But given the choice between fighting the regulators, somehow firewalling the private labels from the other vendors, or reducing its flea-market trafficking, Amazon decided to double-down on the flea market and scale back goods that it vets. It’s a big red-light district of some good stuff mixed in with tons of garbage.

> Amazon says: if it’s garbage, not our fault, but you can return it.

But we will close your account if you return too many things.

> “Sold by QRYGGS, fulfilled by Amazon.”

Do you think we can side step the issue by only buying stuff that’s “sold by” Amazon or one of its global subsidiaries?

Well, somewhat. But Amazon doesn’t vouch for its supply chain since it “commingles inventory” that various vendors ship to its warehouses. So even if something is “sold by” Amazon there’s risk it’s counterfeit junk.

Some flea market sellers, unreliable as they can be, have an advantage here: many sell under their own brand, even if you’ve never heard of it. In contrast, if you seek out a known brand on Amazon, there’s the risk of fakes. Every product listing on Amazon carries a set of risks.

It's often also impossible to get after-sales support for many of these mystery "brands" and they don't tend to stay around for long before they change names again. I am sure this is by design.

Those companies are not always trying to build up a brand and grow though. Some are just fronts until they accumulate enough bad reputation or reviews until they make a new front. The weird names are to keep things unique and help with searches. They are nonsensical so no due diligence has to be done on name collision issues.

Not saying always but it's definitely a thing.

I bought some headphones on Amazon that came with a note offering a $10 refund if I left a 5-star review. I didn't. But several months later when I decided to leave a real review, I found that the product was no longer listed. But an identical product was now sold from a vendor with a near-identical name as the previous vendor. Digging deeper, I see that they even had another different name before I even bought it.

So that's at least 3 different times that this vendor has boosted their reputation and sales by paying for reviews and then switcheroo'd after things slow down.

Meanwhile Amazon happily collects its fees and doesn't give a damn.

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