Thread by @gravislizard

I haven't even hit 100k subscribers and this is what my inbox looks like. every day i get emails

I now receive multiple shill offers daily. Most are "from" electronics "manufacturer" storefronts on amazon that likely do not exist as anything more than a sheet of paper in a government office in China and one of hundreds of rollstamps at a factory in Shenzhen.

I can't figure out the scam, honestly. I'm positive these "businesses" don't exist in any meaningful way - all the six-letter names you see on Amazon and Aliexpress cannot have staff and offices. There have to be millions of them, it's unthinkable.

It's clear they do not make anything. All their "products" are coming out of shared factory lines that churn out 5,000 of the same unusably-bad flashlight every day, and they just switch out the rollstamp that prints the "brand." I have no proof, but it's just... obvious.

And yet, here is someone - not from "the company", which can't possibly exist, but from some marketing agency, which is even weirder - asking me to accept a free, terrible power tool or USB power bank in order to promote them.

But like... there are millions of these. They're literally *countless.* I'm *sure* there are far fewer actual companies behind them than there are names - it has to be, like, 5 actual employees for every 5,000 fake brands.

Nothing could convince me that "NEJE" or "DREO" have their own distinct staff. It has to be five guys in a stripmall office with spreadsheets full of thousands and thousands of "brands." so why bother with a marketing campaign for any one of them in particular?

All of this stuff is in some way centrally planned. The consistency is too high. In some universe, this could be hundreds of thousands of individuals all shooting their shot, nothing to lose etc. but that doesn't scan, IMO

Someone is pulling the strings, because it's all done in exactly the same way. The names are all being generated with the same algorithm, the listing pictures are being bulk-generated similarly - if it was all individuals, there would be wildly different methods and errors.

My personal theory is that there is an organization, probably run indirectly by Amazon or Ali, that streamlines all of this. They probably have an API endpoint, or at least have it trimmed down to "fill out this form and mail it to us, we do the rest."

They generate the name, file the business and US trademark paperwork, create the storefronts on all the standard sites, and all you do is give them a little money up front to pay the factories and sundry fees.

All these amazon storefronts supposedly have support staff - who are *very* frequently described as "outstanding" for reasons that everyone can infer - and my guess is that it's thousands and thousands of email addresses that go to one inbox monitored by a call center

If it were hundreds of thousands of individuals all trying this with no central guidance it would be *far* more chaotic. This had a distinct starting point. "Brands" like Uwaxil and PENTEE didn't exist in 2006, and then in like, what, 2011? They suddenly did.

I want to know who runs the "product farms." I can tell they exist, I can tell how they're structured, the whole thing is obvious if you stand back and cross your eyes. Any Amazon search results page paints the entire picture. But who is it, and what is it getting them?

It's clear to me that someone *specific*, some scumbag entrepreneur, decided it would be profitable to flood ecommerce sites with countless thousands of fake brands, I just don't get how that makes them money.

My best hypothesis is this: Someone, maybe in China, maybe in the US, realized that brand loyalty was extremely hard to compete against - how do you sell someone a generic tool when they're used to buying Ryobi? The answer is to eradicate the concept of reputation.

I think it's very possible that some person realized that since Amazon et al. have APIs, they can simply overwhelm legitimate brands - by which I mean "names that can be tied back to a fixed address and management structure"

If you can't get people to buy brands they don't recognize, get them to stop recognizing brands. Confuse and baffle them by flooding every outlet with sludge so that they never see the same name twice, and simply give up on the idea of keeping track of reputation.

It worked INCREDIBLY well. A typical search result on any website is just a list of names you will never see again. You want a flashlight - do you have any idea if you've seen IIWILL or Lifevoo before? Duracell shows up, you know that name... but are they still a real company?

This is all pretty "fun" to think about but truth be told it's likely much less intriguing. Things are usually less "twelve dimensional chess" and more "idk someone's just doing a thing and it had weird effects"

one of the recurring suggestions I've seen that I always forget about is the simple idea that this all started as a way to defeat the Amazon review system. it used to be that you could just flood listings with fake reviews, but that's tougher now, and you can't delete bad ones.

so, a twist on the idea - yes, the goal here is to eradicate reputation, but not by confusing the consumer directly. rather, if you simply sell the same thing under 500 names, you can delist any items that get bad reviews.

if Amazon won't let you delete bad reviews, but they won't stop you from relisting the product, then just relist the product every time it gets a bad review, and you've effectively just deleted the review. But frontload the effort to make it easier - just list it 500 times.