![The Internet The Internet](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/internet_64.png)
Browser Extension Shows How Many Brands On Amazon Are Actually Just Amazon (theverge.com) 37
A new browser extension promises to show you which products in your Amazon search results are sold by brands that are either owned by or are exclusive to Amazon, giving you a better idea of who's selling what you're buying. The Verge reports: It's called Amazon Brand Detector, and it uses a list of Amazon brands created by The Markup, along with filters and other techniques (detailed here) to detect and highlight products that are a part of Amazon's Our Brands program. The Markup created this extension after its investigation into how Amazon ranks its in-house brands in search results and says the tool (available for Chrome-like browsers and Firefox) is designed to make searches more transparent. When we tested it, it obviously highlighted Amazon Basics and Essentials products, but it also drew attention to results that were otherwise indistinguishable from ones not affiliated with Amazon: a dog leash labeled as being made by Panykoo, socks by Teebulen, a sweater by Ofeefan.
While Amazon marked some of those results as "featured from our brands," that wasn't the case for all of them. That advisory text is also small and grey, making it easy to miss if you're casually browsing (especially since there may not be any notice of the affiliation on the actual product page), and it didn't show up on every result the tool highlighted. Amazon isn't necessarily shadowy about these brands: it has a page that lists its "private and select exclusive brands," many of which have legit-sounding names: Happy Belly, Wag, Nature's Wonder. Some are private labels owned by Amazon, where some are "curated selections" sold exclusively on Amazon but not necessarily operated by the company. According to The Markup, the extension "does not collect any data" and should be compatible with other extensions.
While Amazon marked some of those results as "featured from our brands," that wasn't the case for all of them. That advisory text is also small and grey, making it easy to miss if you're casually browsing (especially since there may not be any notice of the affiliation on the actual product page), and it didn't show up on every result the tool highlighted. Amazon isn't necessarily shadowy about these brands: it has a page that lists its "private and select exclusive brands," many of which have legit-sounding names: Happy Belly, Wag, Nature's Wonder. Some are private labels owned by Amazon, where some are "curated selections" sold exclusively on Amazon but not necessarily operated by the company. According to The Markup, the extension "does not collect any data" and should be compatible with other extensions.
Happy Belly not Amazon exclusive... (Score:2)
Happy Belly bacon is available through ButcherBox.com. Sorry, not an Amazaon/Whole Foods exclusive, so stop guessing people who are running this new list.
Re:Happy Belly not Amazon exclusive... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be missing the key claim in your claim.
How do you know that website is not buying it from Amazon and reselling it?
Re: Happy Belly not Amazon exclusive... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a mention of ButcherBox on the label.
Re: (Score:2)
Dumb fuck, check the story, it is Amazon themselves that includes Happy Belly on their "owned or exclusive" list.
Your accusation that they guessed is stupid and specious. You've had plenty of time to look at the story to check if my refutation of your claims were correct. Why didn't you? Instead you double-down on stupid?
Maybe they pay Amazon for custom packaging, just like Amazon pays for custom packaging for most of their brands!
Discounts Ahead? (Score:2)
My local grocery store provides a 2% rebate on all store-branded items, as long as you give them your phone number into the terminal as you check out. Not a bad deal, huh?
Think Amazon might someday do something like that... and isn't that fair play?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
My local grocery store provides a 2% rebate on all store-branded items, as long as you give them your phone number into the terminal as you check out. Not a bad deal, huh?
Think Amazon might someday do something like that... and isn't that fair play?
What, charge 2% more than the price you're aiming for and then give the 2% back afterwards? Why would that be more fair than just not doing that? It sounds ridiculous.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, store brand products are always less than the brand names or they wouldn't make any sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it's better than paying $10 to the non-discount store.
Re:Discounts Ahead? (Score:4, Informative)
Fred Meyer, owned by Kroger, lets me scan a 15 year old Safeway card I registered to Joe User and gives me the Kroger card discounts. 555-867-5309
Re: Discounts Ahead? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I tried an old Albertson's card and it didn't work, and that's an 11 digit code and Safeway is 10 digit. I looked it up and Kroger is indeed 10 digit.
It doesn't mean it is "truly anonymous" though. It just means they don't validate the number, and you can be semi-anonymous. They still likely collate and correlate it afterwards.
However, unless you pay cash for every purchase they can correlate the number you enter and your identity via the CC. Major retailers already pay for that data about their customers.
Sounds like that scene in Steinbeck's _The Pearl_ (Score:5, Insightful)
John Steinbeck's The Pearl has a scene where there is a marketplace that appears to have genuine competition, but behind the scenes it's all controlled by one entity that fixes the prices.
Jabberwocky (Score:5, Funny)
a dog leash labeled as being made by Panykoo, socks by Teebulen, a sweater by Ofeefan.
Are these real brands or did someone export QA data into production?
How about a search that works? (Score:5, Insightful)
And now other companies are following suite with bad searches.
"offer up"; if you search for "centuri"; it will automatically change the search to "century"; and you cannot find any "centuri" item(s).
eBay - is returning items that are not in the search criteria too; and they are getting worse at returning items I'm not looking for (and are not related to the search).
It is frustrating to have to try and work around bad search engines (which include: bing; duck; google
Related rant -- injecting advertisements in the search results. I realize they are trying to make a buck; but if I can't find what I'm looking for (or swamped with outside garbage) - they are not going to get any business. One example: when I look on "offer up"; I know about eBay - and don't need (want) to see from random eBay items in the results that are returned. I also don't want to see advertisements for the item/company that was searching for - for the next six months!
Currently the only company - search engine that works as expected is Craigs List; though sometimes it has issues with plural item(s).
Re: (Score:1)
While I agree in the large, your specific examples are easily fixed. Search for "hardware nails" with no quotes and you get that. Search for "centuri" with quotes and you get that. Search for "mercury redstone" with quotes and you get that.
Re: (Score:2)
1. "hardware nails" return tacks (clearly stated in the title/description). And - if you didn't know the keyword "hardware"; the suggestion is useless for each additional item. In one instance -- I've called Amazon; and we were not able to reduce invalid results, and I had to look (go) elsewhere.
2. "centuri" with quote: no; it doesn't work. I have a long email thread seeking support from offer u
Re: (Score:1)
Of course I tried them. Hardware nails works fine at Amazon. Just tried it in a clean browser in a sandboxed VM too and I nails.
Same with the others in Amazon and DDG and they both return mostly relevant results. Don't know anything about Shapeways so you're probably right about that. Maybe there's history or customization changing your results. It's certainly possible we're both seeing different things.
Re: (Score:2)
1 cent nails never made it to Amazon... they can't get a penny over a credit card. You usually have to purchase to many of those, and that's better shopped for a Home Depot / Lowes.
Re: (Score:2)
And note: It's not like I've kept this to myself --- I've been trying to show them about the failures and the cost of loss business to customers.
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon is the worst; try and search for "nails"; then click on "Tools & Home Improvement". Everything you wanted to know about painting your nails (on your hands).
So I didn't believe you, and tested it. Just the word "nails" produced a large number of both nails for hammering, and fake nails for fingers. Clicking the Home Improvement department completely removed the finger nails from the search results, though it did still display "sponsored" finger nails.
I'm gonna guess that you're apping, not using the website, and probably accidentally clicked back, or otherwise didn't successfully select the department.
Or maybe you just buy so much cosmetics that the AI didn't b
Re: (Score:2)
o First line (three items) product "Mr. Pen";
o Second line four items (1 sponsored; 1 Az choice; 2 best seller);
o Third line video on right with a "sponsored" on left (practice);
o The fourth line has four articles on nail (pedicure) then back to more product(s).
o The was also a sticker/hook "sponsored" (not even close) further down.
Amazon - search results screen shot. [bomarc.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Over half the page in your screenshot is nails, for use with a hammer.
You're so powerfully triggered by the sight of girl stuff your eyes glaze over, and you can't see anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
^^ THIS!
The horrible lack of proper category filter makes Amazon useless for some things. Your nails is a perfect example -- without context you get false positives.
> searching for "mercury restone"; you will get "mercury" (planet for example); merged with results from "redstone" (not quite sure what it is; but there is a lot of them).
Search engines are probably "autocorrecting" restone to be "redstone" due to:
* Minecraft's popularity (redstone is a key building ingredient), and
* the Mercury Redstone [wikipedia.org] La
Here it is: (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon Brand Detector - Firefox [mozilla.org]
Amazon Brand Detector - Chrome Web Store [google.com]
In 2021, we deserve more than the Amazon website (Score:2)
I like the made-up Aldi brands better. (Score:3, Informative)
More transparency necessary (Score:4, Interesting)
This is definitevely a problem with big conglomerates creating/buying companies and brands left and right that offer products that cover the same needs and give the public the false sense of competition in the free market.
A magazine about mountaineering that I read had a graphic the other day that clustered brands together that belonged to the same business group. Usually a business group would have a brand for the high-end stuff and another brand for the consumer market, but there was definitively a lot of overlap. If you look at the food industry a handfull of companies like Nestle, Mondelez etc. own hundreds of brands that make up something like half of the freakin' supermarket. In Europe, you have (had? I haven't been in either of them for quite some time) two brick-and-mortar shops, Saturn and Media-Markt selling electronics that belong to the same corporation, but were definitively giving the false impression they were competing with each other. In the automobile industry the situation is so ludicrous I'm not even going to go into it.
I don't blame the corporations for striving to monopolize the market. That's the actual ultimate goal of any company. The state is there to make laws that ensure this goal remains unachievable, for obvious reasons. But in the meantime we, as consumers, need more transparency so that we can make informed decisions. At least when I buy a chocolate bar, after a bit of squinting I can find the tiny Nestle logo and become more aware with whom I'm doing business with (not that I have a real fight with Nestle, it's just an example). But in a lot of other cases this is not possible and people would freak out if the multitude of brand-logos all around us dissappeared overnight and got replaced with the logos of the mothership-companies. The information of who belongs to whom is not secret and this is really not a "megacoporations are out to get us" kind of rant, but we should demand more transparency or we *will* end up getting conned at every corner.
Re: More transparency necessary (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. At least when it comes to resellers/importers they can pretend to compete with each other in terms of customer service, offered guarantee, financing options for more expensive items etc. Maybe the omnipresent "made in China" notification is not good enough for the 21st century. We would have to make it more specific, like "made by Chao Corp. in Guangdong".
Chinese knockoff detector (Score:2)
Free market economics (Score:2)
Like your local grocery store (Score:2)
This is like the practices used by your local grocery store chains to profit more.
Soon they try to replace all brands with the store brand, and raise the prices of the other brands to further steer people towards the store brand. Once people start buying the store brand, then they raise prices of both the store brand to match the other brand, and further raise prices on other brands as well to keep people on the store brand.
Amazon is trying to do the same thing online but casting a much wider net.