arbingsam

I'd always recommend new sellers to not buy or fake reviews. Not just from a moral view point, but also from a business one - if Amazon catch you (which they're quite good at now) that's it, no more selling on Amazon for you.

I totally agree with you that the Amazon review system needs a complete overhaul. I've had fake reviews from competitors damaging my sales, and have seen people get hundreds of reviews in a few hours. The issue is that it's too easy to leave a fake review (you don't even need to buy the product), and too few customers leave a real one. Less than 1%.

They open and repack everything. Amazon requires a specific Amazon barcode, you can either pay them to do it for you for 20c an item or pay someone else to do it. I found I could get the item quality checked and barcoded for the same price as Amazon would do it.

As Vibrelli says, I use an extra step where the freight forwarder quality check every item before sending them to Amazon.

Hello. I'm the guy who wrote the article. Just created an account as I saw I was getting some traffic from Hacker News.

In answer to you question: They do sell on Amazon FBA themselves. More and more so in the last year. In fact, in the seller center there are two choices for language, English and Chinese. That is why I suggest focusing on creating your own products or improving on existing ones rather than just reselling stuff from Alibaba.

Even then you need to do your own marketing. As a consumer in your own market place you should have an advantage over a Chinese seller who can only speak broken English.

It's also worth pointing out that these factories aren't in the business of creating brands. They're in the business of mass producing other people's brands. As such the more people who work with them the better, regardless of where they plan on selling the final product.