Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

The New York Times did some decent reporting into the pseudo-brands which comes closer to answering the question in the title: having a registered trademark unlocks a lot of on-platform seller tools (predictive analytics, early review program, etc.), and the easiest path to a trademark is to have an utterly unique, nonsense name. Some Chinese municipalities were also offering cash incentives for citizens who obtained foreign intellectual property registrations, further exacerbating the problem.<p>Full article at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;style&#x2F;amazon-trademark-copyright.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;style&#x2F;amazon-trademark-co...</a>

The scam is enormously profitable for Amazon and the Chinese black hats. You can tell it is really profitable because Amazon will compensate you for up to $1000 for damages caused by this junk. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-58163915" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-58163915</a><p>I believe that Amazon probably could not turn the screws on these companies even if it wanted to. It would be a massive loss to their revenue and share holders would revolt. It would bring prices up in aggregate if these companies could not sell junk on the platform.<p>The best they can do is play coy and hope the US government or EU does not crack down hard on them. Caveat Emptor my friends!

Is it correct to say that when you get something &quot;shipped and sold by Amazon.com&quot;, it really comes from them? It&#x27;s the &quot;fulfilled by Amazon&quot; (the infamous FBA) that you need to watch out for.<p>It&#x27;s a bit screwy, but you can filter by seller by clicking into a specific product category, and then selecting Amazon.com in the bar on the left. Then all the items should be &quot;shipped and sold by Amazon.com&quot;.<p>But I&#x27;ve been sort of shocked to find recently that Amazon&#x27;s prices, even with free shipping, are often not competitive with buying first-party, even with paying the shipping. For a lot of products these days, if there&#x27;s a recognizable name brand associated with it, I just by first-party. You get it slower, but you know what you&#x27;re getting, and probably end up giving more money to the seller too.<p>I would not have seen myself doing this ten years ago.

Pro tip: If you absolutely must buy the junk being sold by MOFFBUZW and other randomly generated drop-shipper brands, the exact same product is usually available on AliExpress for 10% the price.

Its funny how much less online shopping Im doing these days specifically because of my bad experiences ordering from Amazon.<p>I feel super old school going into stores, and even my girlfriend complains about it, but I no longer will risk the annoyance of delivery times and returns processes - nor the risky health effects of buying food online or clothing or kitchen ware that I&#x27;ll interact with often.

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Pretty interesting. Its odd Amazon allows this to happen, but I guess they have no incentives not to. Reminds me of this video from the Pitch Meeting YouTube guy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;nQpxAvjD_30" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;nQpxAvjD_30</a>

One of the posts contains a screenshot of a vendor&#x27;s company name and address.<p>The company name (and words in th address) may look really long and suspicious, but it&#x27;s just because it&#x27;s transliterated from Chinese.<p>OP says these are all &#x27;shell companies&#x27;, but AFAIK it&#x27;s more onerous and costly to register and maintain a company in China, than in many states in the US.

It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re repeating an old era of the early United States when every guy on a street corner would be copying reputable wares and selling them without regulation, patent protections, brand &#x2F; trademark protections, and people were hawking quack snake oil under any name.<p>I&#x27;m all for reducing useless regulation, but sometimes you understand where it originally came from as a legitimate need.

I&#x27;ve gotten to the point that if it&#x27;s a nonsense all-caps name or has an item description in broken English, I just don&#x27;t bother. It&#x27;s gonna be trash. It&#x27;ll fail in 3 weeks, there will be no way to get it returned or repaired, the company won&#x27;t exist, and the product listing will be gone next time you come back to it.

The ending is rather unexpected:<p>&gt; despite all of this, i still mostly love Amazon as a customer. it played a big role in getting my e-commerce business off of the ground and i&#x27;m grateful for that.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s a flea market full of cheap (and sometimes dangerous) junk, but I still love it!&quot;

I’ll be the odd person out and say that whatever it’s faults as a company, my shopping experience on Amazon has been great. Not perfect, but nearly so. Certainly better than most other online retail channels, plus the convenience of Prime, and being a “one stop shop” certainly is super useful.<p>I don’t know what everyone is shopping for, But I’ve bought tons of items across a wide variety of categories. I usually avoid the obvious Chinese knockoff stuff (unless it’s some trivially unimportant thing), and don’t find it hard to do so at all.

The long twitter message list doesn&#x27;t contain an actual answer to the question. Just a rant everyone likes to agree with and would like to see solved and that&#x27;s why this is on the top 3 front page, no actual interesting content (stay for the discussion, though, but save some time reading the OP).

Everyone who does anything online should be required to hang out on some black hat internet forums and marketplaces.<p>It really opens up your eyes to the sheer size of the fake account and bot traffic, market. It makes you skeptical of everything you see online.<p>You can buy verified Twitter accounts, blue check mark accounts, Facebook ad accounts, Google AdSense&#x2F;AdWords accounts, Amazon accounts, and more bot traffic than you can imagine. All for a few hundred dollars at most.<p>I wonder what the internet would really look like if there was no bot traffic, fake clicks, and fake accounts.

Unless I missed it, he didn&#x27;t really talk about why these names exist, other than to suggest it might be a troll?<p>Related, I don&#x27;t understand twitter as a place for long form content. It&#x27;s difficult to read and it can&#x27;t be easy to post.

Amazon &quot;... is turning their marketplace into a flea market of total junk.&quot;<p>Man if this isn&#x27;t the dead-on honest truth. Amazon is so garbage now that Walmart.com is a trusted supplier by comparison.<p>I can&#x27;t believe Amazon gets away with the crap they do. They so obviously turn a blind eye to constant, serious anti-consumer crap from Chinese sellers. Why? And why doesn&#x27;t the FTC or any other department do anything?

Imagine if Amazon dedicated some human effort and time to curate their catalog and reviews instead of their legion of engineers trying to automate the solution and continually failing. Hire a bunch of college interns every semester and they&#x27;d have this problem solved.<p>EDIT: I actually forgot they have this already in Amazon Mechanical Turk!

my wife and I have been increasingly buy on Target, HomeDepot and other sites to buy things because the brands are much more likely to have a legit business backing them up.<p>Generally too one of the causes of this craziness is that we keep outsourcing our manufacturing to China. China is only making these items because a much larger American company like OXO has them making really awesome kitchen items (for example) So it&#x27;s not that hard for the same factory to create a series of shell companies that also sell the OXO stuff. I mean how hard is it to copy and paste the ads that the legit companies make and sell directly?<p>If we didn&#x27;t outsource everything then it wouldn&#x27;t be happening.

The author writes:<p>&gt; <i>how can you protect yourself as a consumer?</i><p>Followed by a tedious list of hoops to jump through around verifying authenticity to a point where you might not get stung.<p>At this point, is it not better to just give up on Amazon and use a retailer that takes its product sourcing more seriously?<p>Continuing to use Amazon when you know how full to the brim of scams it is, just seems to me like rewarding them for bad behaviour.<p>Take your money elsewhere, with everyone else, and let the invisible hand of the market give Amazon a bloody good slap.

I wonder if theres a business idea in here. Set up a site that looks better than Amazon (not hard) and only list reputable listings on Amazon. Collect affiliate revenue.<p>Basically just filter out the crap and profit

Happy to see this discussed on HN because I&#x27;ve constantly been stressing about this whenever I shop on Amazon. &quot;All these brands are Chinese with random combinations of characters for a name&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve looked at laptop cases. Here is a sampling of brand names: Lacdo, Voova, KINGSLONG, NIDOO, tomtoc, MOSISO, INVZI, XMBFZ, Arvok, Kinmac, Londo...<p>I&#x27;ve bought cases for my ipad and work laptop from Lacdo and one for my upcoming MBA from Voova. They&#x27;re actually great, but I worry they&#x27;re made with Uighur slave labor or toxic materials or something.<p>I&#x27;d prefer not to support Amazon, but where else am I supposed to find stuff like this? Do I buy my electronics (eg. Hue lights recently) from Best Buy instead, which has a worse return policy and whose Geek Squad worked with the FBI to violate customers&#x27; rights?<p>Edit: Also, a few days ago I went on a search for a desktop organizer. Here are some brand names: DALTACK, ARCOBIS, DEZZIE, Hossejoy, Greenco, AMERIERGO, SONGMICS, X-cosrack, Marbrasse, Citmage, Samstar, Beiz. It goes on forever.<p>I checked Walmart and Target too, but wound up buying this one from &quot;Lavatino&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B09PL59RL6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B09PL59RL6</a> The product is actually awesome. The compartments are the perfect size to hold my coasters and I organized everything that was loose on my desk with room to spare.<p>So, it feels great to get something I needed, but the whole process still feels bad somehow.

Someone in the postings wonders what would happen if Retail was split from AWS.<p>Good question. Supposedly Retail is not profitable and AWS carries all the weight for the company. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s true or not (?)<p>Anyhow, I don&#x27;t think it would make that much difference. The reputational hit that Retail takes every day probably does not carry over much to AWS, nor does AWS good will (if there is any) help Retail at all.

&gt; want to get in touch with DOTTAVR?<p>&gt; well, they&#x27;re on Amazon... surely they are a legit company and Amazon is covering their bases... good luck!<p>&gt;&gt; Business Address:<p>&gt;&gt; longhuaqulonghuajiadaojinglongshequLONGHUANYILU jiruizongheyuanWULONGDASHA Bdong502<p>&gt;&gt; Shenzhenshi<p>&gt;&gt; Guangdongsheng<p>&gt;&gt; 518110<p>&gt;&gt; CN<p>This is the second time I&#x27;ve seen someone complain about &quot;obviously&quot; illegitimate business information that appears to be the vendor&#x27;s own home address. I don&#x27;t see how they could be <i>more</i> open or informative than that. Want to get in touch with them? Send a letter to that address; they&#x27;ll see it.

I’ve been slowly trying to de-amazon my life, even more aggressively than trying to de-google (which is easy once you accept that search result quality is still good elsewhere). I got a Shoprunner account and Walmart plus from AMEX and recently started using it. I also found that VISA gets you a shipt account.<p>Shoprunner let’s you buy direct from brand with 2 day shipping, so you don’t need to lose that benefit, while avoid “mass marketplace” mis-incentives of amazon like fake products. It has the benefit of being good on clothing, which amazon was never a great destination for.<p>I haven’t used the Walmart “prime-equivilent” benefit, but it seems pretty comparable to amazon prime but at a retailer that has quality control (of some basic level). I’m just not much of a Walmart user.<p>Shipt gets you “Same day” delivery from stores like target, which is a good counter to the growing same day delivery amazon has been rolling out. I found that its way worse than amazon though, since Shipt is “gig workers” and doesn’t connect to the store’s inventory very well, so you never really know if your order will be fulfilled in full. I use this for last-minute target orders when I don’t have time to visit the store.<p>Shopify is rolling out a bunch of competing features, but the most useful one is that they’ll provide a single app to track your purchases, which means you don’t need 20 apps on your phone for each retailer just to track that one package a month you order (or more if that’s you).<p>Oh and now you have a bunch of accounts that you have to give your data to and hope they don’t get breached.<p>TLDR: It’s really hard to de-amazon if you’re a regular and hooked on the convenience BUT capitalism at work is providing alternatives slowly…

You&#x27;ll also find the same product with same description&#x2F;images listed by multiple different &quot;companies&quot; all with odd names like this.

For certain categories Amazon is a mess.<p>Case in point I recently got an iPad and I was looking for a rugged case, an alternative to OtterBox. It&#x27;s a mess, with no real winners, and lots of questionable brands&#x2F;products.<p>It was suggested before, the time is ripe for a disruptor search engine, The Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma style; starting with some segment of search.

I wish there was some way to force the &quot;sold by Amazon&quot; filter to be on all the time; I think that would resolve most of the issues I have with browsing on Amazon.<p>There&#x27;s still the inventory co-mingling issue that people have mentioned in other comments. Solving this would mean I&#x27;d start to consider using Amazon more frequently.

After a spate of bad cables (mostly where their internal circuitry overheats) I&#x27;ve stopped buying most electronics on Amazon and instead use bestbuy&#x27;s insignia brand.<p>For me it&#x27;s worth $5 to not have to buy a replacement every 3 months.<p>Maybe just my sample but it seems these things always fail _just_ after the return window.

Anecdotally: Amazon Canada has gotten really really bad in the past months.<p>My standards are low but woof. You can’t even get a marble run that’s not that super thin brittle plastic. The marble run at Walmart was half the price.<p>I’m the laziest, least ethics-motivated consumer and I think my time with Amazon is wrapping up.

I have a friend who works as a category manager at Amazon global and she gets frequent offers from shady people for &quot;mutually beneficial partnership&quot;.<p>Even the suspensions don&#x27;t have alot of affect for these shady sellers.<p>I have worked with a company that provides listing services on Amazon in the past. The owner once casually mentioned how they help these companies get out of suspensions for long enough to withdraw their balance(I have seen screenshots with over $200k in balance) with the help of an amazon employee. The listing company and amazon employee are both paid via Bitcoin.

Amazon has set a low bar and now there are unsafe, toxic products out there.<p>Including: toxic toys for children, toxic cooking utensils, toxic water filters, toxic birthday cake decorations, toxic furniture, toxic plumbing, toxic rugs, etc.<p>Buying on Amazon in 2022 is like walking on a minefield.<p>Some companies go out of their way to emulate being non-chinese. But you can tell due to the aesthetics they use, punctuation, color palette, fonts, and sometimes DNS information that they are chinese shell companies as nobody in the west uses Alibaba cloud to host their stuff.

The case that is mentioned is Oberdorf vs Amazon. Here&#x27;s an article from 2019. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courthousenews.com&#x2F;amazon-back-on-the-hook-for-dog-owner-blinded-by-leash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courthousenews.com&#x2F;amazon-back-on-the-hook-for-d...</a> I can&#x27;t find anything more recent. The case is interesting as it needs to make a decision if Amazon has the same responsibility for Amazon marketplace as it has for its own listings.

Amazon carved a good niche for themselves by pretending you&#x27;re not buying from them but rather some &quot;vendor&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s not right IMHO. The seller is Amazon; where they source their stuff and what subcontractors they have is their business.<p>It&#x27;s like EBay takes more responsibility for products you buy, even though that is explicitly a site for matching random buyers and random sellers. Not that i use ebay much either.

And in contrast to the focus of the (but alluded to), getting a legit seller account can be very tough. I tried and failed a year ago for my electronics business. I tried for about 2 months, with ~50 appeals. Ended up unable to get my account verified. I&#x27;ll spare you the details since it&#x27;s the typical FAANG tech support story that shows here regularly.

I still end up using Amazon for a lot of things, but I do find the gibberish chinesium crap somewhat amusing. I won&#x27;t buy anything that isn&#x27;t sold by Amazon, brand name, and not a battery or other really common counterfeiting target.<p>I also use eBay sometimes, but the prices are 9&#x2F;10 times higher than Amazon for brand name items.

Amazon employees have a &quot;perk&quot; of a 10% off multi-use coupon, up to $1000. It applies to anything whose seller is Amazon (sold by amazon.com).<p>In the last few years it&#x27;s been extremely difficult to make full use of the &quot;perk&quot;, simply because there aren&#x27;t a lot of things that are sold by amazon.com anymore.

The thread didn&#x27;t answer the question.

I&#x27;ve stopped shopping on Amazon because of the hundreds of Chinese brands for the exact same product.

Most buyers are savvy though and buy reputable brands. Search for ‘USB flash drive’ and invariably you will get cheap Chinese muck that will break within a day. Then just filter by respectable brands like SanDisk and case closed, all the cheap stuff is filtered out!

The amount of non sense on amazon these days has me just ordering from target or other retailers.

I’ve stopped buying most things at Amazon for this reason. Surely they realise that long term this is going to be an existential threat for their retail business? Much like how Netflix is now having issues after pumping out sub-par content for too long.

I look for alternatives to Amazon every time now and have cancelled prime after 15 years.

Rock bottom prices, free delivery (with prime) + one click, no risk, no question asked refunds overweight fakes and crap.<p>Hard to argue with that, honestly.<p>Obviously if you want to buy genuine Rolex, or quality European made tools, Amazon is not the place.

&gt;1. i just need some commodity cheap and fast, and am not too worried about safety or authenticity.<p>Made this mistake with a cheap rice cooker. Main voltages, high temps, water and steam and sketchy wiring was a terrible plan

I have a tip for Amazon shopping related to these weird brand names: Do not buy anything that will go in or on your body. Doing this significantly reduces the likelihood of counterfeit or poorly packaged goods.

It&#x27;s a shame how Amazon is bloated of Chinese off-brand products with mediocre quality. Some of them are simply products from AliExpress, DealExtreme, or similar Chinese websites but sold more expensive.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;ColeSouth&#x2F;status&#x2F;1550230795230781440" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;ColeSouth&#x2F;status&#x2F;1550230795230781440</a>

Decoupling from China can&#x27;t happen fast enough.

I only shop on Amazon when there&#x27;s something that&#x27;s difficult to find. That&#x27;s it. I prefer spending on niche or small shops.

Amazon has become pretty much unusable to me at this point.it no longer is my go-to which is a change from the last 8 years

My favorite example is BEEGOD, I was never sure if it was &quot;be god&quot;, &quot;bee god&quot;, or &quot;be good.&quot;

It all comes from the same factories. Some just has fancy branding and pricing attached. (ie. American middlemen.)

At least ebay has a quality search with precision filters.<p>Amazon is an absolute nightmare to find specific details.

Please, fix the title: &quot;Cheap junk flooding amazon.com has brand names like MOFFBUZW&quot;.

Cole South used to be one (probably still is) of the best poker players in the world.

eBay has been more reliable for me the last two years. I don&#x27;t want to dig through thousands of fake reviews, reviews for wrong items, etc.

Some of these are Amazon Choice too

Who is JUST becoming aware of this?

I no longer have the patience to navigate Amazon&#x27;s terrible search results and have lost trust in the quality of their inventory.<p>Nowadays I only order from Amazon if the order is a time critical item that only they can deliver on time for a reasonable price. That&#x27;s less than 5% of my purchases in dollar amount.<p>I&#x27;ve been a customer since 1997. Amazon has impressed me with their ability to play the long game, and I don&#x27;t understand the long term incentives favoring Amazon here.

Shopping on amazon is really an awful experience nowdays. I really do not want to search through 40 pages of water kettles of really dubious brands. It is so anxiety inducing and unpleasant.

Is there an opportunity to create a marketplace that does meaningful validation and testing of the items on it, such that when you buy a product, you can be guaranteed to be getting the real thing?<p>What could a competitor do to attack Amazon here?

Amazon is the last place I go if I need to purchase something. Sometimes I&#x27;ll use it like a search engine and then go off-site and make the purchase elsewhere.

I was excited to know where the names come from, and after reading all of the tweets I still don&#x27;t know. If the answer is just: it&#x27;s a random collection of letters because it&#x27;s not a brand they want to build, then that&#x27;s a very predictable and uninteresting answer.

I stopped shopping at Amazon when they kicked Parler off of AWS. I don&#x27;t understand how any self respecting liberal could celebrate a mega corp censoring the internet along idealogical lines, even those who drank the insurrection kool-aid.