That's super common, and not specifically a bad thing.
Unsure about other countries, but here in France super/hypermarket are even presenting it as an advantage on various points, "XYZ own brand means the cheapest price", ...
Eg I once consulted for the "Super U" chain and the fact that one of their own brand is a certainty of locally produced agricultural product in relation to each supermarket was a big thing they massively insisted on. Or "french origin" etc ...
Like for myself, I love LIDL's "chef to go" brand for salad/smoothies, always fresh and at a good price (their smoothies are awesome and contain nothing but fruits). I will now look for and buy those instead of other "regular" brands. I discovered their smoothies, because they already convinced me with their salad earlier.
Yep super common, usually the supermarket deals directly with a producer and puts their own brand name on the product. However, there are two different ways of doing it:
* the open one (U, Carrefour, Amazon Basics...) the brand is the name of the chain, they must ensure some quality and good price so the customer does not equate the whole shop with shitty products. They can even develop specific brands for high quality products, for organic products, etc. (U bio , Carrefour Sélection...)
* the indirect one (Leclerc, Amazon private brands...) the fact that the brand is owned by the chain is not immediately obvious. This allows them to have low cost/high margin exclusive products whose quality won't damage the chain's image. And they can rename the brand at will...
LIDL's "chef to go" is an indirect one yet focus on quality. Their elctronic brand "Silvercrest", while long being low quality crap, is now trying to focus on being "as good for cheaper" and is succeeding (they're getting great results with their cooking "robot" at half the price of competitors)
You're looking at the brighter side of the private label take over. What you should be noticing is that the majority of private label sellers are simply resellers of China-made crap. Things you can get for pennies on AliExpress/Alibaba costs $20-$30 on Amazon to cover storage, dropshipping, etc. The sales tactics are just as sleazy with brands being similar or products being sold to look like Amazon inventory. I've lost faith in Amazon's quality control and cannot trust what I am buying is the real deal.
>Are you thinking of "white label"? Private label means Amazon-branded.
In later years, the line in between these two kinda began to disappear. Amazon may well fly their private label unit people to China, and actually pay companies there to stuff their marketplace with properly made and maintained listings from inventories of Chinese trade companies.
In retail - the term for such things are "shelf filler": for as long as you don't have any "real deal" product for the category, you may well desire to just have some crappy goods put on shelves just so shelf space still makes at least some money, and investment analysts be happy with that.
That's not my experience with "AmazonBasics" products, I almost always go with those when I look for cables or very basic electronic devices and they generally do the job just fine at a very reasonable price. I'm sure it's just rebranded "china-made crap" but as long as they have decent selection and quality control that's not necessarily an issue.
> What you should be noticing is that the majority of private label sellers are simply resellers of China-made crap. Things you can get for pennies on AliExpress/Alibaba costs $20-$30 on Amazon to cover storage, dropshipping, etc.
And on top of that Amazon themselves barely spend a penny developing their own private brands or run their operations. There are companies specialising in exactly that - "private brands as a service." You can outsource basically everything till the moment goods get to the shelves, an in case of e-Commerce, even that is irrelevant.
Their logic - if we can't win against Aliexpress and Co., we will become Aliexpress and Co. This is them acknowledging that the entire business model they had had weakness at root - no matter how successful and sophisticated they are at selling stuff, the stuff they sell still comes from China.
You make it sound like "private brands as a service" was a bad thing. But unlike the numerous direct to customer nonames on aliexpress, amazon or ebay (the platform is irrelevant) who will never have a reputation to lose, a "private brands as a service" provider is dealing with long term customers. For them, quality issues will have consequences. Even if they both sell the same design, a "private brands as a service" manufacturer (or reseller) will have to balance price and quality, whereas a pop-up noname brand will only ever compete on price.
Long time ago, I worked in one called Yameen in Singapore. Named after the owner. I'm sure that they are not around anymore as I been googling what has became of the company for last 10 years without any result. The second one I worked with was AMR International HK (aka AMR Global Sourcing).
Just any other trade company would also do that - Marubeni, Sojitz, Itochu, Canada Export Centre - (the later should be really called Canada Import Centre) and others
Yes, they are "making a coherent product line from what is possible to customize or source as is" they will not pick a project developing a complex product from scratch.
Unsure about other countries, but here in France super/hypermarket are even presenting it as an advantage on various points, "XYZ own brand means the cheapest price", ...
Eg I once consulted for the "Super U" chain and the fact that one of their own brand is a certainty of locally produced agricultural product in relation to each supermarket was a big thing they massively insisted on. Or "french origin" etc ...
Like for myself, I love LIDL's "chef to go" brand for salad/smoothies, always fresh and at a good price (their smoothies are awesome and contain nothing but fruits). I will now look for and buy those instead of other "regular" brands. I discovered their smoothies, because they already convinced me with their salad earlier.