Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why online retailers all sell the same crappy products

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

If you do a lot of online shopping, you may be experiencing deja vu. Amazon, AliExpress, WalMart, Temu, eBay, the TikTok shop, even Etsy all seem to be selling the exact same, cheaply made products from China. How did this happen? Have we reached some sort of eCommerce singularity? And what does this say about the future of online shopping? Are we all doomed to have shitty cheap products forever? Taylor is joined by New York Magazines John Herman to discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you do a lot of online shopping, you may have felt some deja vu recently. Amazon, Walmart, Timo, AliExpress, the TikTok shop, even Etsy. They all sell the exact same, cheaply made products from China, sometimes at wildly different prices. How did this happen? And have we reached some kind of e-commerce singularity? And what does this say about the future of online shopping? Are we all destined to live with these cheap, shitty products forever? John Herman recently wrote about this problem for New York Magazine where he's a tech columnist.

John, welcome to Power User. Thanks for having me on. I want to set the stage a little bit. I mean, I feel like for years, Amazon was our dominant retailer and obviously remains that way to an extent in the U.S. But then all of these other competitors with strange names, you know, started to pop up. When did all of these secondary e-commerce platforms that focused on really cheap products start to enter the American market? I think you can trace their rapid rise to slightly before the pandemic. But the period of really high visibility for these alternative stores, mostly based in China, would be 2021, 2021, 2022.

That's when we started to hear a lot more about Sheehan. And also when we started getting a really big advertising push, tens of millions of dollars spent by companies like Timo, which advertised at the Super Bowl twice in a row. I mean, I feel so rich. Oh, yeah. I feel like a billion. I'm shopping like a billion. I mean, I feel like the defining characteristic of all of these newer e-commerce platforms is that they offer things for extremely cheap. How are these new platforms able to offer such low prices?

I mean, the main reason here is that these companies are mostly shipping goods directly from China. You've got companies like Sheehan and Timo that are pretty upfront about sources. most of their goods in China, but also they're familiarizing customers with a different set of expectations. Instead of pressing the purchase button on Amazon and expecting your package within a day or two, Timo up front is like, all right, this might take five days, this might take nine days, but we're also going to sell you this thing for a quarter of the price that you expected. So it's just sort of a different proposition, and it is entirely down to product sourcing and a smaller logistical footprint where Amazon has millions of square feet of warehouse space,

hundreds of thousands of employees in the United States. Companies like Timo are doing their warehousing overseas, leaning really hard on third-party sellers that are also based overseas, and, you know, just kind of throwing stuff on boats and planes. Differences that on Amazon, you get like one or two-day shipping, but you might pay twice as much. On something like T-Mu, you might get 10-day shipping, but you're paying much, much less. And you're sitting there looking, these are the same exact anonymous products. Well, that's what I want to get into is like my producer called it the e-commerce singularity. I'm wondering if we've reached that point.

And what is the benefit from buying over one platform for another? You know, if you're getting the same product from kind of the same supplier probably in China, what is the benefit from buying on Amazon versus TEMU versus whatever? I mean, are they all just kind of essentially the same? You might pay a little more in shipping on one or the other, but otherwise it's the same product? I mean, yeah, this is like a real, problem for Amazon, or at least it will be soon. Like, if you've been using Amazon for 10 years or 20 years, it could be 25 years at this point, you've probably noticed that it sort of feels a little, like,

junkier and more full of kind of random stuff. Like, you'll search for a category, like winter gloves, or a spatula, or a battery, or something like that, and you'll get dozens and dozens of items with these sort of nonsense brands. A lot of them look like the same product. But on the other hand, they're like, they're priced pretty well, and they might have a whole bunch of positive reviews. And you look at this and you buy like the $15 battery and you kind of move on with your life. Now, you saw an ad for Timu watching TV and you're like, okay, I'm going to check that out. You see the same battery and it's like $6 and says it'll ship in seven or eight days. And it really is the same thing.

And what Timu is doing and what Ali Express is doing and to a lesser extent, I think what Sheehan is doing, although that feels a little different because it's fast fashion and you're not getting as much like one-to-one exact same product type of stuff. It's showing how much this stuff really costs to manufacture and how much of the cost of a lot of things you buy on Amazon comes down to like Amazon's huge network of delivery infrastructure and warehouses and employees and all this other stuff. It sort of emphasizes that a lot of the time on Amazon, you're buying really, really cheap stuff.

And that's kind of a problem for them. Like, that's not totally their brand, or at least I don't think it's the brand that they want. But for now, it is the direction. they're going. So I don't know, it does sort of seem like it's just moving in that direction and everyone is following along. I mean, across the e-commerce landscape, unless you're buying direct from brands or, you know, deliberately shopping small in a very sort of like, you know, quaint 90s way, you're seeing this everywhere. Every big commerce platform, including the old

big box stores, including, you know, Walmart.com and Target.com, they're filling with this exact same stuff. It's so funny. You mentioned that. Dylan Page, who's a ticker, influencer was posting actually about Walmart on TikTok recently and just how there's all this merchandise with his face on it being sold at Walmart. He was kind of like, where did this come from? Like, I didn't do a deal with Walmart. How is this allowed? Walmart.com. Look at this. How are you allowed to sell me? And when you started to look into it, it was basically like, yeah, one of these random third-party sellers that sells on Walmart now. I didn't realize Walmart had become so much like Amazon, but when you shop on these major e-commerce platforms,

how can you ensure that you're actually getting like products that are sort of like vetted in any way? If you're buying something on, let's say, Walmart.com, there's a decent chance that you're buying it from a seller. And there's also a real chance that that seller is operating on Amazon and maybe even on TEMU as well. Like, it's, it's, totally plausible that you could have a seller operating across five or six different platforms selling the exact same thing and completely different. And this sounds kind of silly and weird and new in the context of these like online stores. I mean, if you think about how like most commerce worked in physical retail for a long time, the idea that you can buy the same thing

in different stores is totally, totally normal. This isn't like recognizable brands with, you know, MSRPs selling at different supermarkets or whatever. This is sort of unbranded stuff or rebranded stuff, being sold in different environments in kind of different ways for different prices with different marketing. It's really sort of strange and new. And it's kind of disorienting. Like, it's hard to tell what you're buying. It's hard to tell if you're getting a good deal.

Weirdly, in this age of like convenience and one-taft shopping and whatever, it's kind of like requiring a little bit of work that wasn't there before. After the break, we'll tackle the question, why is every e-commerce site selling the exact same dirt cheap stuff. It seems like so much of this is driven just by like consumerism culture. I feel like today people just buy so many more like products. And these products are made so poorly that you have to keep buying them over and over again. I mean, I don't know. I just had to replace my toaster for the third time in three years, which seems weird. Like you used to be able to have something for decades. Yeah. I mean, you can you can definitely put this in the longer context of like low cost

outsource manufacturing. But I think the more recent shift is from a world where Amazon had this thesis. And it's, you know, it's not like an especially nice thing to think about, but it does seem to be bearing out. I mean, it seems like we're just taking the problems of fast fashion and scaling them to a really scary degree. I mean, we know that this has major ethical concerns, moral concerns. Like, where do you see those things fitting it? Yeah, I mean, we've talked a lot about price and how much people care about getting a deal and all that sort of stuff. But there are a couple other important ways to look at this. One, if you're in the business of selling things, if you're like a company that makes stuff that people buy, you'll notice that this world that Amazon is sort of getting into here has no respect for intellectual property, trademarks, things like that.

A lot of the stuff that you find on a site like Timo, but also increasingly on Amazon, it's basically, you know, kind of a rip off. or at least more generously, like, a dupe. And it's going to make it harder for Amazon to work with big brands that people have relationships with and stuff like that. In a much bigger sense, it's also kind of a nightmare ethically, environmentally, and in terms of human rights. Like, a place that sells stuff mostly through third-party sellers where you have no visibility unto how stuff is made,

where it comes from, where it's sourced, is just a recipe for like zero accountability. It's already hard enough to get information about how a company like Nike or Uniclo makes their stuff. It's like a complicated, you know, process of lawsuits and diplomacy. And it's just like this, it's already a mess. When you add these extra layers,

there's just no visibility at all. I know I'm struggling to find the silver lining. I mean, I do think it's great that people are able to find more affordable options. I hate price gouging. Like, I certainly. do the, you know, Google image search before I buy something online if it, you know, just to see if it's out there on another drop shipping website maybe. Is there any upside to this new ecosystem and this new kind of disastrous e-commerce environment that we live in now? It's hard to know how this type of thing will play out, you know, culturally and politically. I could certainly imagine a world where the, this, we're being confronted constantly with just sort of

of unrealistically, unbelievably cheap stuff could lead to a generation of people thinking a little bit more about where things come from. This has happened before in the past where people become aware of like global supply chains and, you know, labor conditions in different countries and things like that. And there is real political action around that. On the other hand, though, this really generally feels like an acceleration in, as you said, international consumerism. This is sort of a move away from worrying about or engaging with ideas of sustainability, environmental consciousness. After a pretty long stretch where a lot of big corporations were at least under pressure to at least talk about this stuff, the fact that quietly all the biggest e-commerce platforms are just charging ahead with race to the bottom ultra-treat goods is not a super encouraging sign. So, no, I wouldn't say that I necessarily see like a silver lining here right now.

You know, the planet's going to burn, but we'll have the cheap earbuds. If you're worried about, you know, overconsumption and waste and labor conditions and stuff like that, no, this is mostly kind of bad news. And I don't want to suggest that it's not. It's just, it is what it is. Are there other parts of the Internet that this is affecting? I mean, we saw, if we sort of think about it as this fast fashion model infecting all of the e-commerce. world. And if we also think about just like the shifting notions of consumerism and adopting this level of consumerism that I think maybe we didn't have a couple decades ago, do you see that

bleeding out elsewhere on the internet or this e-commerce, this cheap e-commerce model being applied to other areas? I think the most obvious secondary effect of all of this, at least to, you know, how people use the internet and communicate with each other, is that commerce and social media are becoming linked in deeper and deeper ways. Platforms like Timu rose to popularity by spending huge amounts of money on advertising on social platforms, which is one thing. But then you have TikTok launching its own store, which is now, you know, pretty big and pretty visible when you use TikTok. Like a lot of influencers are incorporating TikTok shop into what they do. They're selling you stuff. Like it's sort of knitting commerce more closely to just your general entertainment experience and your general social

experience. I would say the rise of affiliate marketing has also played a role in this. Like every single person is now selling things. When you see a person using a product in a video on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, you expect to be able to buy it. You expect for them to have the link. And I feel like as these platforms integrate more shopping, we're all like also promoting products, doing more halls. I was just watching some 13 year olds back to school hall, which is full of just tons of cheap crap. Like, it seems like social media rewards the newness of new products, too, and rewards this like fast consumerism internet because it's also boosting it.

Yeah. And I think in the same way that Amazon is like acting totally rationally by prioritizing a lot of this sort of cheaper stuff, it makes total sense for platforms like Instagram or TikTok to really like nudge creators towards selling more stuff. it also makes a lot of sense for certain types of creators to really move into this space, too. Like, it's hard to make a living. This is a way to do that. And like Amazon, there is a real sort of long-term risk that your audience or your customers,

however you think of them, gradually stop thinking of you as this person that they can sort of trust who will occasionally recommend something, who they know and have some sort of relationship with for reasons that don't have to do with commerce, to starting to think of everyone as just like, a salesperson, everything as an ad. And everything online, whether it's a social environment or a retail environment, is sort of converging on the same kind of stuff and the same styles. And it's, I don't know, it's, it's interesting, but it does sort of suggest that maybe like we're reaching a point at which something has to give or something starts to feel saturated or just things start to feel kind of boring. Yeah. We're living in a TEMU world. That's everything. Well, thank you so

much for chatting with me today, John. Great to be on. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jelani Carter. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week. See you then.