[derefr]

> If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?

Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc.

So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.)

This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands.

The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site.

> And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.

I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in my mouth. What's the worst a christmas ornament is going to do to me? Get glitter on the floor?

I do understand the cases you're referring to — electronics and such — but in those cases, there are import regulations that actually prevent things like "burns your house down" electronics from coming into the country, with actively-maintained blacklists of products. Some few dangerous items might slip through the cracks and get imported anyway (especially at first, in unusual+novel categories like "negative-ion wellness products"), but one email to US Customs is usually enough to get these things sorted out, and the whole category will disappear from the store the next day. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0)

[VRay]

What the hell are you talking about? No-name Shenzhen manufacturers rocket to the #1 slot all the time, through a combination of being cheaper and literally paying for 5 star reviews

Just search for anything on Amazon right now and you can see what I mean. I ran afoul of this when I needed a humidifier last year, but just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page

[jimbob45]

I think his point was that the Shenzhen stuff only rockets up like you say when you’re buying niche items.

For example, if you search for a good mixer, you’re going to get reputable brands at the top like KitchenAid, Cuisinart, etc. Conversely, when I went to buy a pull-up bar last year, there were only Shenzhen knockoffs because there are no big-time players in the pull-up bar industry.

There’s probably a nice parallel to be made between this subject and first-party and third-party games made for certain gaming consoles.

[VRay]

Amazon search for "Good Mixer"

Top results:

Hamilton Beach

KUCCU

VIVOHOME

Cuisinart

Vospeed

CUSIMAX

Aucma

[derefr]

> just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page

This query betrays a certain level of naivety about the game theory of keyword-advertising.

Individuals who are shopping for a phone charger, don't tend to search for "phone charger." Instead, they look at the particular phone they already have, and decide they want a charger (or more likely, a second charger) that's compatible with it and guaranteed to make it charge as fast as it can. So they search e.g. "iphone charger" or "samsung galaxy charger."

We reductionist engineering-minded people might think "those are both just USB-A -socketed 5V1A DC switching-mode power supplies; and what do people call those? Phone chargers!" and so search "phone charger" — but that's a mistake.

The above individuals, because they're the majority, are what the brands are all competing over with their keyword-advertising spend. So when you search e.g. "iphone charger", Apple has paid to be there at the top; and the up-market third-party vendors like Anker who want to snatch your sale away from Apple have also paid to be there at the top.

But no individual is really just looking for an unqualified "phone charger", so when you search that, you get to see a page of stuff that nobody has paid Amazon for placement on; where instead, it's all ranked by how much scummy heuristic keyword SEO manipulation each listing can pull off.

(I say "individual", because there are institutional buyers who are really trying to buy unqualified "phone chargers", because they are buying them to install in e.g. hotel rooms, without any knowledge of what kind of phone a customer is going to have. So you might notice that there are some reputable brands in among these listings, but that the listings are for ugly unbranded flush-mount phone chargers, rather than consumer chargers. Commercial phone chargers, per se. Electronics that are components of a build, rather than standalone products.)

-----

As a tangent: the "happy path" for Amazon is actually all about browsing, not searching.

How do most people get to an Amazon listing? Not by typing words into Amazon's search box. For most shoppers, typing a keyword search into Amazon is done about as frequently as asking a clerk to help you find an item in a grocery store. And as with that flow, while it's certainly supported as a customer-service mechanism, it's never been intended as the primary item-discovery mechanism. Amazon isn't Google; they don't have a "so make a freeform text field for it, and let some ML find it in an index" view of the world.

Instead, people find things on Amazon mostly through these three paths:

• Searching a product category on Google, and then clicking through a paid keyword advertisement placed by one manufacturer that takes you to an individual Amazon listing for that manufacturer's product

• Clicking an Amazon affiliate link embedded in a review webpage/video, or as the target of an ad in Facebook/Instagram/etc.

• Clicking around on the Amazon website itself, starting on the home page; going into various "departments", looking through "Hot New Releases" and "Top Sellers", etc.

Approaching Amazon through any of these flows will land you on listings that somebody, at some point, paid to take you to. And that means that the category the listing sits upon is valuable, and is worthwhile to fight over. So in turn, all the "More items to explore" listings linked from that page will be that product's keyword-advertised rivals, trying to lure you away from the original listing.

The best way to shop for a humidifier on Amazon isn't to search Amazon for "humidifier." It's to search Google for "humidifier"; click through to a review site listing the best humidifiers (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifi... ); click through the first Amazon affiliate link you see on that page; and then look at all the humidifiers that are fighting over your known-high-value eyeballs on that listing page. Try it! I promise you it works. (The speedrun version of this process, if you already know a popular brand of humidifiers, is to just search "[popular brand] humidifier" on Amazon. All that brand's rivals will also be paying to show up there.)

[VRay]

"Google Pixel 6 charger" -> Google, Looptimo, "Superer", "color rokk"

I guess you could just admit you're completely wrong about Amazon search rather than change the subject to Google search