Amazon without the knockoffs

cmdrmac

What an awesome extension!

LorenDB

I'd be interested to know how this works. Whitelist? Blacklist? Something else? Edit: appears to be using blacklists.

dheera

Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now. My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff. If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.

kjellsbells

Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier. The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.

mjamesaustin

Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.

reader9274

How can a HDJWNSK brand gain our trust and become respected if we're not even trying its products?

tomekb

We need this but for books. These days it is impossible to buy any programming related book that is not a bootleg copy.

gortok

I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately. While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.

cwillu

Now we just need GitHub Without the Vibes

advisedwang

This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task? "Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself. [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...

idopmstuff

I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it. In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent. One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out). On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name. One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there. So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.

mikert89

I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon

jelder

Pour one out for anyone who hoped to start a new brand.

lenkite

These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of weird model collapse is happening. After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.

dawah45

I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.

BeetleB

I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere. This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable... You'll find lots of different manufacturers selling this on Amazon, but there is no well known brand that makes these.

iLoveOncall

It's funny but their homepage exemplifies why one may actually want the "knockoff" brands. $39 instead of $224 for a pet bed. I know which one I'll buy. There are plenty of categories of items where the cheap knockoff is perfectly adequate.

Luker88

I would be happy just with a amazon that does not disappear 80% of the results when you apply basic list filters like "cheaper first". I don't even know why that is legal.

storus

Can you do the inverse as well? Like Amazon but only the knockoffs?

Waterluvian

I feel we're well into the race to the bottom because I'm having an increasingly difficult time finding the brand name products to be any better. A lot of the brand name stuff is now also crap and some of the knock-off stuff seems to be just fine.