Amazon has become effectively owned by Chinese sellers

As someone who has recently designed and launched a product on Amazon, I have been shocked to learn how China "owns" Amazon. There is a war on an unfathomable scale from Chinese sellers to destroy US sellers showing slight success. Their weapons are:

1) Copy successful products and sell them at a loss until the US seller is driven out of business.

2) Spend massive amounts of money on advertising to assure that competitive products never appear on the first few pages of search results.

3) Use pictures, titles, and descriptions that optimize search results to assure their products make it on the first page, irrespective of how inaccurately it represents the actual product.

4) Hire armies of fake reviewers to produce 5 star reviews (the recent Chinese seed scandal is part of this).

5) Modify listings of competitors to include trademarked language in product titles so the listing gets inactivated (yes, in most cases one can modify other seller's listings). Have you ever seen reviews of a product with a large number of 5 and 1 star reviews? This is a sign that Chinese counterfeit products with the same item bar code have been sent to Amazon and are commingled. It's then a matter of chance whether you get the 5-star genuine product or the 1-star knockoff.

I knew counterfeiting was happening on high volume products, like Apple charging cables, but I'm amazed to find it's happening on low volume niche products now. Any product showing sales growth will likely get brought down. What's laughable is that it's evident counterfeiters often have no idea what the product even is or does. They just manufacture copies of widgets that are selling.

Jeff Bezos isn't too concerned though. It's what made him the richest man in the world.

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