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I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI.

One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product listing unless I'd bought the product.




What I've noticed is if there's 1 product, 500 sellers will buy the product on Alibaba, create 500 different "brands", and when searching Amazon it appears there's thousands of products but it's actually a handful of the same product white labeled by many different sellers. The actual number of unique products in many categories is quite low but there's thousands of listings.


Seems like a convenient way to get around their Most Favored Nation anticompetitive policy.


This 1000%. The number of fly-by-night Chinese “brands” with inscrutable names selling garbage-tier products makes Amazon’s search almost useless without a ton of extra filtering.

More often than not, I end up on Amazon product pages by way of The Wirecutter or other product review sites.


The people who I imagine hate this the most are the Chinese brands that make really great stuff and support it well. I want to do business with people like

https://7artisans.store/

https://us.kandaovr.com/products/qoocam-3-ultra

It is such a breath of fresh air to find actual product manuals on the web site compared to snooty Italian tripod vendors whose web sites have nothing but warnings about how they’ll never support you if you bought your product from the wrong vendor.


Yes! Agreed. I have some 7artisans lenses and have been extremely happy with them for the price.

I can't remember the name of the company offhand, but there's a big Chinese OEM that makes soft cases for guitars on behalf of many of the big international brands. They sell some first-party stuff, and it's high quality and super affordable.


Amazon sucks extra hard because their search functionality is garbage tier.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you actually could filter out slop, but no!

Search results show random crap with no relation to search terms and even changing the display order changes what products you see!

It all feels very intentional and a prime example of enshittification.


I want the check box that says, “Show only brands that GenX would recognize”


I would love a version of Amazon that worked like this. And also "show me brands with a headquarters inside of the US that isn't just someone's house."


Or increase the pagerank for products actually linked from youtube video descriptions.


I'll reference of one of my favorite YouTube videos, possibly of all time, about Amazon products:

https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?si=QHThBTZs3bvz5oFP




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