Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)

> A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:

1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.

2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.

3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?

Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.

Check out the recalls from https://www.cpsc.gov/

Amazon lists thousands of junk products from China that violate US laws around product safety. Toys containing lead paint, crib bumpers that can suffocate babies, etc. The process seems to be that Amazon just needs to remove the product in violation but it really appears that this is a wholesale attempt on Amazon's part to circumvent legislation. It should not be this trivial for consumers to find products that are potentially dangerous.

I wanted to try out the tee-shirt hustle once.

There was a cool design (or at least I thought so) I came up with. Had about 100 of those printed.

Went to Amazon to get a seller account:

1) learned that if I had only 1 tee-shirt with a single design to sell, I couldn't get the account.

2) after researching the competition, discovered that many of the tee-shirt designs for sale were:

    a) clearly in copyright violation (e.g. Disney characters on some mom & pop store.
    
    b) their images on their store were just a photoshopped tee-shirt. I.e., not photos of the actual tee-shirt they had for sale. But the design photoshopped on to a photo of a blank tee-shirt.

Boggled my mind that Amazon was okay with this.

> I tried to move my purchases to Walmart

Walmart does (or at least did) something similar.

* About 7 years ago, I purchased a toy drone online from Walmart for one of my sons for Christmas.

* I purchased it before Thanksgiving because the Walmart website urged me to purchase in time for Christmas delivery.

* My son opened the gift on Christmas and the drone was broken (out of the box).

* I tried to return the drone to a brick-and-mortar Walmart store and they told me that they couldn't issue a refund because I bought it on their website, but it was through a 3rd party seller. I had to take it up with the 3rd party.

* Remember the part where I said I bought the drone before Thanksgiving?? Well, I contacted the 3rd party and was told they had a strict 30 day return policy and they could not issue a refund.

It was a cheap gift, but the whole ordeal bothers me to this day.

For books, your local independent bookstore can order pretty much any book for you if you walk in and ask (if they don't already have what you want). They won't charge shipping, it'll just come with their next shipment from the publisher and then you can come pick it up. Or if you have to do things online, try https://bookshop.org

The "incompetent competitors" is a big point for me. I prefer to buy from a more trusted local (in Japan) store. But it is so cumbersome! Buying something on Amazon is fast and smooth, and they have a huuge selection. Regarding price, many stores here price fit, so Amazon is not actually cheaper.

The lesson they have learned is that people who care, can tell the difference and shop with them are such a small minority that it isn't worth it to their bottom line to address this. The government doesn't seem to care either. The market isn't going to fix this.

Maybe you can round up enough people for a common cause as discussed in the article, but that doesn't scale. Take notice that for all its talk about America first policy & general sinophobia, the current admin in Washington hasn't done anything about this either. They don't care about American small businesses or consumers. They only care about people like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc.

I used to buy a certain book series on fictionwise, because it was the only site selling those books in my country.

B&N bought Fictionwise, and first thing they did was determine that you need to be physically inside USA to download stuff.

Now only way for me to get those books is pirated. :( Maybe I should just download them pirated and donate the price of the books directly to the author account or something. I really don't understand what is the problem of B&N or how they still exist, they are literally anti-business.

I would barely trust Amazon for authentic shampoo never mind vitamins. Are people so desperate to save single dollars they gamble with their health?

AMZN is my last choice for buying anything. An attempt to buy this stuff

https://www.amazon.com/stores/RIVALZ/page/5690A202-6DDB-42BA...

because my wife found one flavor, slightly expired, at the Amish market and liked it fell through when I tried to buy it straight from the vendor because they charged my credit card with a scammy-looking name neither I nor American Express had ever heard of. Can't get it at Walmart.com, so... (For that matter, Walmart had the first five books of Bocchi the Rock and #7 but not #6)

Ever since the time I saw a product listing though which made no sense at all and reported it and got a reply that they don't care if I didn't buy it I started losing trust. Didn't help that 2 day delivery became 5 days suddenly and the fact that I live in a rural area is no excuse because I used to see an AMZN delivery truck driving around in my neighborhood every Sunday. After I quit Prime they started giving me free trials or a week for $2 whenever I bought something and... now I get the 2 day delivery everyone else gets.

Walmart.com is a rebranded Jet.com. They've only owned it for 9 years.

I have no clue if it’s still true, but Wal-Mart back in the day used to go to the manufacturers of some products and request that same product at a lower price. The idea was “get it to us at that cost, no matter what you have to do” - so you would see name brand products meant to be very similar to ones you would see, but with inferior build quality, and the only distinguishing mark is that it has a different product ID from the manufacturer.

Point being: it doesn’t matter if Walmart does this, because it’s already an empty promise from them, too.

Just stop shopping at these behemoths.

Bookshop.org if you want your books local local. Best Buy for electronics (or B&H if it's near you). General home goods I've gone back to just using the grocery store. Amazon just outright can't be trusted as a marketplace any more.

It doesn't hurt that Amazon can leverage economies of scale which are orders of magnitude greater than their utterly deficient competitors

My client sells on Amazon in Europe and is constantly harassed for presumed IP infringement, safety issues etc. usually due to somebody else either incorrectly renaming item or item name containing some trigger like "life", "battery" or some other brand's name. I always wonder how are examples like yours possible there at all.

I also noticed lots of dubious companies selling hot tub/pool chemicals. I assume there is a more stringent approval process for this as legitimate companies sell them, but knockoffs use accents like "Chlóriñē" to get around whatever filter Amazon has.

Amazon also has their own book printing service that they sell books from under several marques, I assume to make it more difficult to tell it’s from them.

The books are very low quality with poor typesetting that makes them unpleasant to read.

Yes it's really sad how with how much Amazon have been getting shittier they are still the best around. Refunds is another thing that is almost always a pain with other stores but Amazon makes it smooth (but sadly also more and more necessary).

Another pain point is shipping costs. With Amazon I can just filter for free shipping with whatever the current minimum-purchase price for that is whereas elsewhere I am too often surprised by unreasonably high shipping charges designed to make the purchase price look better on comparison sites.

Why Sears Roebuck missed the boat on this I will never understand. There could have been a call to return to their past by embracing the future the moment Amazon proved it was default alive.

What the fuck, guys.

In Canada (and I assume everywhere) it's a race to the bottom. Both WalMart and BestBuy are dominated by 3rd party products in their online stores, and you never know what you will get. Some are perfectly fine and sell legit products; others as bad as Amazon.I've found books from Indigo are pretty close to Amazon in selection, price and delivery but that's such as small part of what people buy online now.

Maybe we should do a curated shopping portal of US based mom & pop shops?

I actually made pretty good experiences with eBay.

> I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!

I went to barnesandnoble.com to check this out.

There's a banner at the top of the page:

> Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.

> For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.

The words "upgrade now" link to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloa... .

It does look like you're right that they won't ship books to your local B&N:

> Other reasons that an item may not be available for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store include:

> The item is out of stock in your selected store

This is very odd, because they will do that if you go into the store and order from there.

Try Target.com

Yep, I'm the same guy. Almost 40 years ago, I chased down those German hackers in my unix boxes; not knowing a thing about writing, I wrote Cuckoo's Egg. (a long story there - how to write a book)

Since then, I've lowered my periscope: my wife, Pat, and I decided to stay home together and raise two kids. They're now fledged - hooray! During that time, I started this micro-business of making Klein bottles - much fun!

Alas, but this past December, my wife left this vale of toil and tears. During the day, staying busy helps keep the grief under control; other times I'm in deep sadness, trying to find my way without her.

To all my friends & acquaintances on HN: my deep thanks for your kindness & support across decades. It's a joy to be considered a member of the tribe.

>how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name

I registered as britneyspears, but dang got mad and made me change it. :(

I thought the absurdity of Britney being on HN was amusing.

His NOVA episode on the same subject is worth a watch as well https://youtu.be/Xe5AE-qYan8

I think most younger readers will be familiar through his videos on the Numberphile YouTube channel.

The first time I lived in Italy, back in the mid nineties, with expensive phone service and no home internet connection... I had a copy of that book and I think I read it like 10 times.