A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.
We don’t buy from Amazon, we don’t do that here.
The developers name is pigford. I’m more than a little envious of their cool name
Am I the only one who doesn’t care where my decorative sculpture comes from or highlighters or house shoes? I assume it’s the same quality as the stores around me.
You would think this is what people pay Amazon to do. What is it they do pay them for, really?
So it can let me filter out any brand that is in all CAPSLOCK? or has no vowels?
If you’re even remotely worried about anything shady, you shouldn’t even be on Amazon to begin with.
It really is just Ali Express with better delivery times these days.
I cancelled Prime and just buy a lot less shit I don’t need.
That sounds like a wise thing to do!
Yes and no. There are a lot of products that i once had bought at (semi)local stores that no longer exist.
So it is either Amazon or Temu or any other online shop like that.
I’m not saying that you can’t find good stuff there. :)
I personally try to avoid it as much as possible due to them being unethical and they not caring about the environment at all.
PS. Happy cakeday!
Oh, thanks. I hadn’t noticed.
I learned it the hard way
Aw. :(
I found my AliExpress stuff to be more reliable than my Amazon stuff.
Literally the same thing. Go to any “how to sell on Amazon” video and the “now you’re a real business person” step is always go to Alibaba and find a good distributor of the product you want to steal, er, become an independent distributor of. Have them slap your logo on it and bam, new millionaire coming right up!
Be sure to save money by purchasing surpluses of QA failures at a discount.
If the product is fine then who cares what “shady” brand is on it. Most knock-offs you’ll find on Amazon aren’t just as good as the original. Same with AliExpress. Half the time they’re literally the same product, just without the “not shady brand name”.
No not really. Two of the same thing can be made by the same company by the same staff and one be completely crap and one is perfectly crafted. They just sell the stuff that didn’t make it pass quality control and then they keep producing the product after they start to run out of proper materials and will begin to use what they can get their hands on. Temu makeup ftw
COOFANDY is not a scam. COOFANDY is a way to stay closer to maximizing best smiles in life to maximum outcomes as well as possible!
I was looking for a specific shirt for a themed party and that brand kept coming up. I bought a good one and one of theirs just to compare and yep, the coofandy one was crap. Too short, weird sleeves, the material was uncomfortable as hell, like wearing a trash bag.
Correct. COOFANDY is c.r.a.p.
C - COOFANDY
R - ® (Registered Trademark)
A - Awesome
P - Products
The only problem is that “knock off” brands are the only ones making products in at least some instances that used to be filled by the “brand names”.
This is the result of globalizing manufacturing. Eventually the brands that could pay for advertising stopped making things, and the void was filled by these “knock offs” (I don’t care for that term as it was applied in this article. These aren’t fake designer hand bags, they’re just products that don’t have a recognized brand name).
The amount of Kickstarters I waited years for, spent a fortune, and by the time it comes, the Chinese manufacturer has started making their own knockoffs for half the price…
Indeed. I’ve had that happen too. Those are actual knockoffs since they’re copying another specific product. It’s a shame that is the reality of our manufacturing industry.
The correct industry term is white label products.
Can you believe that people just 40 years ago were still calling them stickers. Crazy how far we’ve come in just a short amount of time. Now they’re using it in songs on the radio.
They’re usually knock offs. They aren’t trying to present themselves as an item made by Versace or whatever, but they knock off someone else’s idea or product.
That’s still a knock off by most any definition.
It’s not a knockoff unless it’s intended as a copy of a different product. A cheap product in the same category is not a knockoff.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knockoff
The products all do look the same. They’re just missing a specific logo or specific pattern. If you invented the ice cream cone, and then I made an ice cream cone that looked the same, only it had little triangle patterns instead of square patterns, it’s still a knock off.
It’s like how Oreos were blatant knock offs of Hydrox cookies. But the emblem in the middle of the cookie was different. Still a knock off.
The difference I think you are missing is that most of these Amazon “knock-offs” are still coming from the primary manufacturer of the product. They sell them to basically anyone and will put their customer’s logo on it to be resold as whatever brand they want. The mfr doesn’t care what label it has and whether the person buying it knows the company logo on the side or not.
They (typically) didn’t see a successful product and decide to start making a similar product to undercut the original product.
Okay guy, you can define words however you want if that helps you feel good about not knowing the definition of words.
Actually; even using your own Cambridge dictionary definition and examples you linked, it fully shows that I’m correct. Like, just look at the example you provided that talks about a cheap knock off of lord of the rings, for example.
If you aren’t able to understand that, then I guess you’re just a bit too dumb to comprehend.
people still buying from amazon in 2026 deserve to be ripped off imo
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Why do we think this?
Most “name brands” have long been acquired by large umbrella corporations, and shortly after doing so, the “brand recognition” is often leveraged to market white label products; which is increasingly the only differentiator between it and off-brand products. That, and the price-difference: simply paying more for a meaningless “name brand”, on an equally inexcusably poor quality product; besides a slightly less shitty customer experience, hopefully.
I really think it’s poor design to purely filter on appearance of brands, rather than actual brand reputation. Yes, it might serve as an overgeneralized indicator for questionable reputation, but marketable brands shouldn’t be treated as reputable either.
A alternative that works well for me for many things is buying from Lidl. They source from China, or wherever, but through European importers. They have a three year warranty, parts or replacement at least for that period, their branded products meet EU safety standards, and are good value. Not everything is perfect, but I’d say that about 80-90 % of what I buy meets or exceeds my expectations. Selection is orders of magnitude lower than Amazon, Aliexpress, etc, but their online catalog is growing fast.
Tools in particular are great value, they have a great battery ecosystem for their power tools, and even have a prosumer line (parkside performance, the black ones), that are impressively close to pro stuff from DeWalt, Makita, etc…)
Yeah absolutely agree. I always but hydroflask bottles, but never through hydroflask. The exact same bottles and exact same lids are sold under a rolling list of random Chinese companies like this. Usually these companies do have real names, they’re just super Chinese and not worth properly localizing.
Hell, I recently got a new fancy video monopod. The official US name brand that sells it is harlowe. It sells for about a grand
I bought this exact same model from “yc onion” with a nonsensical name the “pineta pro” (said “pine-tah”) for less than half that.
I literally brought mine into a store after realizing how similar they are and compared them side by side. Even the stamp and sticker placement is identical. Like they clearly come from the exact same factory just with a different color and a different name printed into the same box on the side.
Why the fuck would anyone pay the 60% price hike just to have a known US company sell it to you? The really shitty thing is that I’m not sure how b and h is allowed to sell it. When I talked to my local camera store they said that they weren’t allowed to sell it because they were a brand partner to the US brand and couldn’t sell non us products without getting fined or dropped by their suppliers. Maybe b and h is just big enough to not have to care anymore, but that’s just going to be one more nail in the already dying camera store market.
I have issues with your monopode having three legs. Mostly I think it’s funny.
Couple things.
First, those are likely “third shift” products. The Chinese company that’s making the original product does more than ordered, and off the books. Slap a different sticker on it, and you can sell it without worry of it being caught as a counterfeit.
Secondly, there is something to be said of going through the original manufacturer. They have warranties, and actually care about their name so will go to some extent to support you if something goes wrong.
Now is that worth doubling the price? Not likely. But it’s something to keep in mind.
The manufacturing environment in China is different. A lot of products are made from an existing design, then anyone who wants to sell those buys them from the factory.
The weird “brand names” are basically drop shippers. People buy Thing, send them to Amazon’s warehouses, pop a storefront.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I have plenty of hate to go around.
You, I
likehate you.
The weird “brand names” are basically drop shippers. People buy Thing, send them to Amazon’s warehouses, pop a storefront.
That is not drop shipping
“Basically.” Close enough. All they’re doing is administration, all the logistics and fulfillment is handled by someone else.
Yes, but with dropshipping you’re waiting weeks for the product to arrive from China, with FBA you get it overnight from an Amazon warehouse. FBA is also quite expensive for the seller
Hate both.
The weird brand names are because Amazon requires the products you sell to have a “brand” in order to provide them plausible deniability that your product is not generic OEM stuff from China. So the sellers of generic Chinese OEM stuff have adapted by making up nonsensical brands and registering the letter jumble they come up with as a trademark. Now Amazon can claim everything on their site is a “brand name” product, see? It’s all totally above board.
Okay? So? Brand names exist to have a reputation. A random string of characters isn’t trying to develop and trade on a positive reputation and so is automatically suspect.
Yes, this is called “white labeling”. Brazil does it for a ton of Chinese products. The three big computer part retailers in Brazil get parts from other brands and put their own label on it and sell them as their own.
They do own the IP though and I dont know how we feel about physical product IP rights? Those are kinda useful.
That’s not how it works. Factory makes Thing. Anyone who wants to resell Thing buys it from the factory and labels it BRAND Thing.
Yeah but someone has to design the thing
It could be designed by company A and made in Factory A, then designers at factory A come up with a way to cut costs and make a worse design that is similar to company A’s design but slightly worse and much cheaper, then the factory makes that, and drop shippers sell it.
Lots of factories design things. This isn’t the 80s. The factories are often a complete firm with design, R&D teams, etc. It’s what ODMs are and they exist for all things, simple and cheap to complex and expensive.
Yes but aren’t people entitled to revenue of the brand they build? And I dont mean Nike here but something like a band selling their t shirts etc. The copying in chinese manufacturing is going too far to the point where it’s a net negative on our society and I say this as someone who’s generally anti copyright.
Making new tech innovation is such a gamble these days - you only have a few months to make back money you spent on your initial design because manufacturers just overpower you eventually unless you make it not worth it for them through explicit brand protection strategies. It’s such a waste of everyone’s resources and stiffles human effort overall.
That being said i think the most realistic answer here is in house manufacturing which is becoming more and more acessible but still a long road to go, especially in more complex niches like electronics. You either ship a competitively priced product and hope you make your effort back in a few months or build in house for 3x the market price and even then get only a bit more than those few months. It’s not a healthy, just environment no matter how you look at it.
aren’t people entitled to revenue of the brand they build?
Perhaps no. Take the capitalist system at its best - the brief periods in an industry when a competitive environment delivers good products at low prices. That kind of environment means competitors can very easily start producing an alternative of what the other guy is producing and undercut their prices. This is the desired status quo that actually delivers wealth for most people. In such status quo, the firms that make things can only make as much money as to pay their costs and salaries with little leftover for shareholders. Conversely - the vast majority of society gets more things and has more money to buy more other things, instead of padding the pockets of shareholders. This is what competition is and obviously firm owners, large or small, don’t like it.
The fact that we can’t make a whole lotta things in (Canada) without costing 3x what China makes it for is a separate but related issue. Personally I think it’s got a lot more to do with how much money Canadian firms make at various sides of the supply chains. People like talking abt cheap labour but Chinese labour isn’t nearly as cheap as it used to be and labour isn’t the main cost in a whole lotta things. E.g. in automotive, labour is 10-15% of the cost and if we assume free labour the Chinese cars are a lot cheaper than 15%. The rest is tools, machines, and parts like nuts and bolts. A Canadian-blessed machine screw set from my local hardware store costs $20. A significantly larger set from AliExpress (not the cheapest place in China) costs $2. This speaks to the profit margins involved in the two screw sets. Most of our industries have gone past their competitive stages and are now largely consolidated into 1 to several firms so they can extract significant profit margins. I think the avg for North American corpos is 10-15%. In China that’s about 5% and the state-owned sector which provides a lot of inputs operates as non-profit. Margins across suppliers for a product stack like compound interest and the price grows exponentially. If you have a product that starts at $1 at the beginning and you have 5 suppliers till the final product, you get $1.28 with 5% avg and $2.01 with 15% avg. If you have 10 suppliers you get $1.63 vs $4. The difference between the two is also exponential. The exorbitant profits of our industries make it not only too expensive to make things here, it makes it very difficuly to even attempt anything by people who don’t have significant capital.
So yeah, the answer is def in-house manufacturing for more than one reason but for it to be viable, shareholders have to make less, a lot less. If we get to such a point, down to just the difference in price of labour, I’m pretty sure we’d be able to easily handle that. The state we’re in at the moment is def not healthy but I don’t think we’ll solve it by protecting shareholder value while keeping domestic worker salaries low - a reflection of the high margins. When margins go down, either prices would go down, or wages would go up, or both. Both make it possible for more people to buy the domestically manufactured product. In other words the in-house manufactured product won’t be 3x market price in real terms anymore.
A lot of times we’re talking about something that was actually designed in the 80s or 90s, maybe not even by a company that exists anymore or in the same country where it’s currently being produced.
No I dont think that’s true statistically speaking. My cousin works in brand protection and IP theft of contemporary creators is by far the majority. I’m generally a free software and anti copyright but manufacturing theft is really pushing me in favor of copyright here. Most of it is so incredibly blatant and bad faith - it’s not a good thing unless it’s actually a practical device like medicine or something.
The Chinese design-manufacturing-retail pipeline isn’t like what it is in the West. There aren’t nearly as many “bespoke” products made for a single company.
Which 14 product listings are left after that
The ones at a price you wouldn’t pay.
But don’t forget you can finance it! And who doesn’t want to brag with their “Expensive Brand” labeled something, that mostly doesn’t have any inherent benefits or quality over the cheaper Chinese OEM stuff.
This is stupid. There are lots of great products from sellers without an established “brand”
Unless you know what you look for, choosing the white label products from Amazon can be risky. For someone like me with extensove experience working with China I can usually tell what is crap and what is good enough, but the average person might take postings at face value or choose a category of product that is high risk of causing harm (e.g. I won’t buy any no name plastic or rubber items that come in contact with food)
I can give another good anecdote for this.
Crank shaft holder for Toyota/Lexus. You attach it to a breaker bar, that you can let pin itself against the frame or ground, while reefing on a torque wrench to get the crank nut back on - something like 283 ft-lb for my truck iirc. Not a small amount of force if something breaks or slips and things go flying.
One of the good, brand name options is made by Oni. It’s also over $60. You can get a knockoff for between $15 to $25. The bad knockoffs are just the ring portion shoddily welded to the “arm” (where you connect your breaker bar), and those two halves often come apart at the welds under use. The good knockoffs are obviously cast as one piece from a mold that was probably made from an Oni or similar. They get a questionable dull black coating, lacking the polish and clean finish of the name brand, but they’re still a singular solid tool.
Not knowing which one will hold up and which one might give you summer teeth is a huge risk for any uninformed home gamer just trying to DIY some auto repairs on the cheap.
That is true, but sometimes you want the established brand because of the warranty.
it just dims the listing by default, you can also allow the particular brand for you.
