alt Hacker News>> Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.
There's tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I'm at the point now where I avoid Amazon because the last five things I bought there were all counterfeit and the products were not limited to one industry. They were across areas you wouldn't think you'd counterfeit stuff.
Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:
- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category
- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.