Amazon Is Allowing a Chinese Knock-Off to Destroy Our Startup

Hadn&#x27;t heard of the product before, I was in the market for a belt anyway and for reasons these look like they might be a better option.<p>So, I hit up your site - and get a &quot;Promotional Code Activated!&quot; banner. I add the default (two) to my cart, and get hit on the next page with a &quot;Would you like (more) fries with that&quot; page next asking me to add two more.<p>You don&#x27;t allow determining shipping costs up front, instead requiring me to fill out all my details OR use Paypal checkout first.<p>Only after going through the Paypal Checkout process do I discover that shipping is going to cost me USD$29 (I&#x27;m in Australia), so yeah - No, I bail on that.<p>Then I get a cart abandonment email - apparently scraped from Paypal Checkout - telling me the promotion code is going to expire, which is clearly not true since it&#x27;s not personalised and apparently all I have to do even if it were going to expire based on some kind of cookie&#x2F;whatever, would be to fire up a new browser session.<p>While I&#x27;m sympathetic to the problems with Amazon, the whole experience feels like a mixture of Daytime TV Home Shopping combined with door-to-door sales tactics. I&#x27;m just waiting for the followup email 24 hours later telling me if I order now I&#x27;ll get a free set of steak knives.

Amazon is a marketplace, not a retailer.<p>They are not selling the knock off, they are allowing the knock off merchant to use their marketplace.<p>Your remedies are with (assuming US based):<p>* Copyright enforcement via DMCA on your marketing info&#x2F;photos etc<p>* Trademark enforcement via Customs and USPTO<p>* Design patent enforcement via Customs and USPTO<p>It&#x27;s not Amazon here that is the issue, it&#x27;s enforcement by the governmental authorities that are supposed to do that enforcement.<p>You&#x27;d have exactly the same problems if you were selling on etsy instead of amazon, or at a local weekend handicraft market.

Unfortunately this is the reality of manufacturing easily copied goods. Since it is so difficult to sue a vendor to stop selling your product in China, someone will just copy your design and start selling it for less than you can. Even if you get the item taken off Amazon, they will continue selling wherever else they can unless you invest a ton of money in a legal team to aggressively stop them from importing product to North America.

Amazon gets money one way or the other. Amazon is the equivalent to a classic Rome market with people shaving coins down and using rigged weighing scales. Or law enforcement and legislators do something about it or our rights as consumers will go back a thousand years.<p>It is as sad as unsurprising that Amazon promotes this kind of behavior.

He only resubmitted 10 days ago. Presuming there was something missing with his first application, something like this would need to go through a legal area internally at Amazon to get a considered opinion. Maybe they are busy?<p>Best of luck to OP.

Congratulations, you’ve made it! I’ve been the victim of both Chinese and American IP theft with my startup as well except I had issues with Apple, not Amazon. It is a sign of your success. Perhaps start using words like “genuine”, “original” of “not a cheap knockoff” in your product descriptions. Unfortunately, IP theft is a big deal and we can’t really touch China.

Amazon really became a dumpster fire of knock-off products over the years. Just in my circle of friends we had knock-off Marshall and Apple headphones, as well as knock-off Lenovo power adapters. I lost trust in any of the products sold on Amazon and try to avoid them whenever possible.

I wonder if a dcma takedown would be a better approach?

Yelling into a &#x27;jungle&#x27; will not get you attention, plus who knocking who?

I&#x27;ve never heard of this product but I have been doing exactly this for many years with zip ties. Only if I&#x27;m in a pinch situation where I need a belt and don&#x27;t have access to one of mine.

as long as wealthy US investors get a cut nobody in the legislative will do shit.

Hey HN,<p>Thanks to everyone’s feedback and help we were able to get them take down!

Consider a &quot;design patent&quot;?

Well not sure how to feel sorry for you: you rely on Chinese manufacturing and this is not something thats novel in the first place. Amazon is not a copyright or a trademark enforcer, so this speaks to your inability to sue one Chinese manufacturer (the copier) over another (your preferred manufacturer).<p>It seems like as a society we have given up on any manufacturing or making physical things outside of a few communist controlled territories. Seems very much like working as intended.... Play with fire, catch fire that&#x27;s what you get.

&gt;It’s really unfortunate that Amazon is not protecting our small American start-up business<p>sympathize with the case but is it really necessary to use this China&#x2F;protectionist rhetoric in particular? A knockoff is a knockoff, that should be enough. The case doesn&#x27;t get worse because it&#x27;s Chinese or other Americans copying their stuff.

Hey bro, wanted to see the duds myself and couldn&#x27;t find your listing bruh<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s?k=belt+bro+men&amp;ref=nb_sb_noss_2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s?k=belt+bro+men&amp;ref=nb_sb_noss_2</a><p>You got bro belts for women, but where&#x27;s my belt bro?<p>Thanks bruh<p>&#x2F;brospeak seriously, did amazon take down your listing or did you? The belt bro for men seems gone?