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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

The problem with that idea is that most brands don’t want to be on Amazon. It’s bad for their margins and their brand equity. They rather push their own ecom sites.

Amazon has a hard time getting brands on the platform. Amazon has a problem with cheap unbranded stuff. What’s left in the future?

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I am starting to see a lot of brands driving social media traffic directly to Amazon as of recently.

There is definitely a problem with the cheap stuff but I wonder if they're concertedly trying to turn that around somewhat and attract proper brands.

And yet few brands are going to build or run the entire distribution infrastructure themselves. You can buy from NameBrand, allegedly shipped from NameBrand, etc - and it's still distributed through some separate maze of businesses. Amazon is just very visible in being such an intermediary.

I'd like to point out that this has to be conscious decision of sorts by Amazon. Amazon UK is pretty much what Amazon US used to be 10 years ago - there's a complete absence of the aliexpress/temu grade 'SHTORY' 'FNARGL' branded products, the search shows you what you searched for instead of random junk and Amazon JP is of a different order entirely, that site is a gleaming spire.

This is clearly a choice that's being made by Amazon US to turn the platform into this... whatever it is...

Reasons? Well, I guess they make sense to somebody.

I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon UK

Yeah, the main difference between Amazon UK and eBay UK is that Amazon's unbranded Alibaba shit is more painful to search through and costs 30-50% more...

I guess the rot is creeping in slowly, I haven't used it for a while

A while = a few years?

This is utterly false for Amazon UK and disprovable by 2 minutes of searching. It’s somewhat incredible to me this claim has been made with a straight face to be honest.

USB Foot Pedal is just one random search that’ll show this.

Mens fleece hoodie, audio recorder, iphone case and electric blanket are full of random named crap.

The problem also extends past these random products and into the seller market too. Even if you search with brand names for a product you want it’ll often be sold by some random new seller preferentially selected due to price undercutting.

The whole platform is rotting from the inside out.

Yeah I live in the UK and was absolutely confused by the comment, Amazon UK is like 98% Chinese no-name brand garbage

For example if I search for 'projector', I get the following brands: XUANPAD, MAGCCUBIC, LQWELL, VOPLLS, CLOKOWE

In retrospect it has been multiple years since I last tried, my bad.

I have to say this really is weird, because there are reputable and high quality Chinese brands that just aren't participating here.

Why is it all crap? Where's the Xiaomi & Hasee tier of products?

Amazon JP is not a "gleaming spire", but I do agree it's not nearly as bad as the horror stories of counterfeiting I keep reading about Amazon US. However, there is still lots and lots of cheap Chinese junk here, but that's pretty easy to discern by just looking at the brand name. As the other poster here said about the UK version, "I get all the 1000 variations on the same shit product with ridiculous brand names on Amazon [JP]."

The other problem with Amazon JP is that returns are not usually free, unless there's a real problem; it's not nearly as easy and free to return stuff as Amazon US.

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