Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Chinese Counterfeit Problem Is Getting Worse (cnbc.com)
A report on CNBC, citing sellers, says that counterfeit problem on the platform has gotten worse after it made it easier for Chinese manufacturers to sell goods to U.S. consumers. The report gives an example of a seller Jamie Whaley who started a bedding business on Amazon that reached $700,000 in annual sales within three years. Her patented product called BedBand consists of a set of shock cords, clamps and locks designed to keep fitted bed sheets in place. Whaley found quite an audience, selling up to 200 units a day for $13.99 a set. BedBand climbed into the top 200 selling products in the home and kitchen category. That was 2013. By mid-2015, the business was in a tailspin. Revenue plummeted by half and Whaley was forced to lay off eight employees. Her sheet fastener had been copied by a legion of mostly Chinese knockoffs that undercut BedBand on price and jumped the seller ranks by obtaining scores of reviews that watchdog site Fakespot.com determined were inauthentic and "harmful for real consumers." The report adds:Spend any time surveying Amazon sellers and Whaley's narrative will start sounding like the norm. In Amazon's quest to be the low-cost provider of everything on the planet, the website has morphed into the world's largest flea market -- a chaotic, somewhat lawless, bazaar with unlimited inventory. Always a problem, the counterfeiting issue has exploded this year, sellers say, following Amazon's effort to openly court Chinese manufacturers, weaving them intimately into the company's expansive logistics operation. Merchants are perpetually unsure of who or what may kill their sales on any given day and how much time they'll have to spend hunting down fakers.
I have family members that sell on amazon and ebay. They say they can get almost double on amazon on many items. The main reason is that people trust the sellers on amazon more than the sellers on ebay. In this case, it's the exact same seller but amazon have managed to create an environment where even used items fetch a premium. If they screw it up and people start realizing that the same hucksters are on amazon (and they are) then people will start shopping elsewhere.
Counterfeits are a huge problem everywhere and it'll only get worse. The lure of money and the ease of capitalizing on someone else's idea make it a market that will never go away, even for niche products.
For some things, however, there ought to be truly severe penalties, like for the people who counterfeited brake pads for the 747's, which turned out to be made of baked sawdust and black paint. They didn't make it into a real plane as far as I know, but the consequences if they had would be staggering.
If you counterfeit a handbag, no one dies, but certain mechanical items, medications, and other "life-dependent "products should have serious penalties, decades in jail in my opinion. Counterfeit meds are problem all over the world, but especially in SE Asia where 50% or more are fake.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Sue Amazon. Well, get a patent on your product first, then sell it on Amazon, -then- sue Amazon for selling items that infringe on your patent. Wouldn't be the first time.
A related anecdote...Back in 2014, I received a solicited free iPad case to try that was a Griffin case knockoff. Looked exactly the same, just missing the logo, and $40 cheaper. I was interested, but curious why it was the exact same case w/o the cost. Long story short, the guy went right to Griffin's suppliers in China and paid them to make the exact same case for his company. His mistake was that he setup an office in the United States, and Griffin sued him into oblivion.
TFA's implication is that a white person has a right to make $700k/year, while the Chinese don't deserve to make a living because they are yellow skinned sub-humans.
You're way out of line here, dragging skin color (not nationality, but skin color) into this.
I think the article / story would have published even if the American was black, Native American, "brown", "yellow", etc. [I put those terms in quotes, because if I said Latino or Asian, that would be nationality, and I'm debating your choice to drag skin color into this. Personally, I think simplistic terms like white / yellow / brown to describe skin color over-simplify things, but I don't make the conventions...]
I totally agree with you about the patent bullshit, about similar products being around forever, etc. but I don't think this is a "Chinese are sub-human animals" piece. That's way too sensitive.
Chinese knock-offs, both legal and illegal, are widely acknowledged as being a reality. They have nothing to do with skin color.
The lady's business was fragile, she should think she had a good run. That also has nothing to do with her skin color.
...10% Polyester.
Middlemen used to drive up the cost, but they would also provide a quality control filter that's now missing as you can buy things directly from China and India through Amazon and eBay.
Caveat Emptor
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
If you don't even manufacture in China it's hard for them to get your IP. I bet she went for the cheapest person that could injection mold her idea and didn't think about what would happen once they had the designs.
I highly doubt that they would import a product made at some local shop to reverse engineer it and start making clones.
It's one of the most frustrating things about watching a kickstarter fail because they decided to go to China. When I'm developing a new tool or idea I have a much better response time with a local shop. I can swing by after going to the bank, just tell them in my own English words exactly what I want done and they'll likely be able to do it. How many kickstarters have a "Sorry about the Delay, prototype .... was delayed because apparently there's a New Year in china". What takes a Week locally usually takes 4-6 months with Chinese transit time.
She chose to make it as cheap as possible and got her initial $700k for one year as a result. She could have either charged more or cut revenue to manufacture locally and had a business that lasted 5-10+ years.
Chinese knock-offs, both legal and illegal, are widely acknowledged as being a reality.
Yet the article doesn't give a single example of that. The main focus is on legitimate competition, that is somehow illegitimate because they are "Chinese".
You mean Weber grills, who were sued for putting Chinese parts in a made-in-USA grill?
Don't kid yourself. I just bought a barbecue recently, and after some research discovered pretty much all bbq manufacturers use China to manufacture, even the $1k+ grilles (I looked at Jackson, Weber, and Broil King grilles.) So I said screw it, if I'm going to get one from China anyway I'm not spending $1000 on one, and found a Char-Broil one for $400.
I will go out of my way not to buy a product made in China. About the only thing I can't buy are sunglasses and winter gloves, and that includes those overpriced Marmot gloves. Even companies such as North Face have their products made in China then charge outrageous prices because, you know, they're specially made for the adventurer in you.
Stop buying Chinese-made products and their industries will dry up. Stop having products made in China and they don't have the exact specs of your product. It's really a very simple solution but like everything else it makes too much sense so will never be done.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Of course that prediction completely failed to note that housing and healthcare wouldn't go down any leaving most of us less well off than before.
It is a bit ironic that if you assert that someone has violated your copyright (e.g. used one of your images or some of your text), then under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), you can contact Amazon and they are obligated to take the listing down right away.
But if you assert that someone has violated your patent, the process is much harder. So young man, remember that (cue disco ball): it's more fun to play with the DMCA!
If patents did not exist, then why would they ever be illegal (outside of safety violations)?
Counterfeiting is not about patents, it is about trademarked brands. Brands are an indicator of quality, and it is, and should be, illegal for one manufacturer to impersonate another.
Note: TFA does not claim that either trademarks or patents are being infringed. Just that competitors are making similar products and selling them for less. But (and this is the important part) they are Chinese, so therefore we should be outraged.
This article is mixing three issues, all of which should concern any online retailer.
The first is counterfeit or fake goods - a customer buys a product, but instead gets an item that doesn't match what they ordered. This is clearly fraud, and makes it difficult to trust online purchases. This doesn't seemed to have happened here. Most customers must have known they were buying the product from someone else, not the "original".
The second is that the signal to noise ratio drops very low because a lot of vendors flood the marketplace (perhaps automatically) with products that are supposed to grab the top spot (due to low price, for example). The product might not even exist - say I print a t-shirt when someone makes an order, but I can digitally generate a million t-shirt slogans and create a million different t-shirts to show up on search. This isn't fraud - I know exactly what I'm getting, but the marketplace experience as a whole is terrible.
The third is gaming the review system. I tend to read the content of the reviews carefully (I don't trust the rating system as much) to gain information, rather than checking the ratings. In this case, it seems as if the "inferior" product had a lot of fake reviews. If true buyers were returning the product in large numbers, however, Amazon might even pull the product.
I do agree that it isn't the merchant's job to track down fraud/fakers (which this particular example is not); Amazon should be careful that they don't become the next ebay or craigslist.
Broil King. Canadian/Northeastern US made. All the quality you only think a weber has.
They do still make them, and I bought one. It's one of the old top-loaders that have been around since the 60s or 70s. It uses some fairly simple electronics instead of a mechanical timer, but otherwise the same. It was cheap and has been going for 12 years with no problems so far.
Speaking of economists, I think we should have only one-armed economists.
That way they couldn't say, "On the other hand . . . "
Amazon, and unfortunately NewEgg, are both cutting their own throat in this regard. They forget that one of the services a store provides is selection. In both directions. Variety of available wares and culling of worthless duplicates. Amazon and NewEgg are absolutely buried under thousands of copies of the exact same product using literally the exact same photograph but somehow with unique listings that differ by one or two or zero cents. All of which have bullshit tags and bullshit categories.
This is not valuable to me. This is absolutely stupid for me, as a customer. It wastes my time, totally pollutes search results, and annoys the shit out of me. Enough that I will choose another store, even a brick and mortar store, just because the signal to noise ratio has become so horrendous I literally can't find what I'm looking for.
NewEgg are you listening? I know Amazon is not. But NewEgg, I expected better. NewEgg had useful, reliable, helpful category- and specification-based search for more than a decade, long before Amazon's half-assed attempt. Now it's been overrun by asshole third-worlders hawking $2 useless plastic shit I don't want, don't need, and REALLY don't want to see when I'm searching for a goddamned video card. A vinyl sticker designed for a Macbook cover is not a video card! Curate your collections! It matters!
</rant>
It is an invention.
But it's certainly not their invention.
I've seen straps that hold fitted sheets to beds for the last 20-something years at least. Hell, I've own a fitted sheet that came with them.
It's certainly not novel. And I think their "copies" have nothing to do with their downturn. You've been able to buy these things for decades. More likely is that people are camping on their trademark website and getting into the "related items" for their products and then consumers are realising "Hey, look, there's a cheaper version that does the same thing" and buying that instead.
But, to be honest, if you genuinely go into business thinking that product A of yours is going to sell, be successful, and repeat that success into perpetuity, even when your competitors start to clone it, then you're a damn idiot.
You have a strap for a bed. Great. You sold a lot of them. What's your plan to keep you buoyant NEXT year?
Because it stifles innovation and R&D or worse, puts the company out of business and people out of jobs.
You're going to have to be more specific about what "it" is and how "it" does that, otherwise you're just handwaving.
At any rate, things have been getting less and less expensive over the last 50 years, and I haven't seen any sign that innovation has been stifled; quite the opposite, actually. Computers for example used to be super expensive in the 80's, and now even homeless people carry around portable ones. Simple tasks that people used to do faded away over the years as people did them with computers instead, (or in some cases, those tasks became outright irrelevant, such as licking a stamp and sealing an envelope and walking to the mailbox merely for the purpose of sending somebody a message) which freed up their time and money to do other things. Take for example written spreadsheets vs electronic spreadsheets; the later being a MASSIVE time saver.
Because it's a band for a fucking bed.
That's not really a trademark, it's a generic term that's likely to be challenged as a trademark even in the territories that have (stupidly) allowed it.
It's like complaining that if you go searching for "sticky tape" that you get things that aren't your genuine, registered trademark "StickyTape®" sticky tapes.
If you'd called your company "Joe's Shitty Products®" and someone sniped all your "Joe's Shitty Product® Sheet Fastener's", yeah, sure you have a case. But "bed band" is a description of exactly what the product is, using two generic and common English words related to that product. That's NOT what you should be trademarking.
If you want to protect a trademark you combine it with a company name that's pretty unique and which you own the trademarks in your territories and industry sectors for.
But trademarking TennisBall tennis balls is a) likely to not be allowed in the first place, b) likely to be struck down for genericity at any time and c) stupid because I don't have to be specifically sniping your trademark to have a website that scores high for searches of tennis balls that aren't TennisBall tennis balls.
BedBands is, quite honestly, one of the worst product names that I've seen. And one of the worst products that I've seen. I could make it myself, make something better, I've bought better things that do the same job, copy it in about ten minutes, and I could market it as the "best bed band product" without infringing on BedBands trademarks unfairly. Because it's a fucking band for a fucking bed.
And, to be honest, that "sit on the corner of the sheet" shite will last two seconds until I rip it off when I roll over. Most of the bed bands that actually work do so by tying the left of the sheet to the right of the sheet under the mattress, not just the corners.
I hope their blatant and unnecessary slashvertisement just waters down their trademarks even more.
This rant is trademarked by me. Nobody else can have an InternetRant internet rant but me, now.
OK... you're wrong. The "whole point" of capitalism is that capital is owned by individuals, as opposed to government (not as opposed to corporations). That's it.
Well I only read the summary, but it does say specifically that her product was patented. So no, this would not be legitimate competition.