’Made in China, sold on Amazon’ gadgets from Aukey, Mpow vanish from e-commerce site
South China Morning Post - May 11, 2021

In January, China-based sellers represented 75 per cent of all new merchants on Amazon, according to a recent report by consultancy Marketplace Pulse. The share of China-based sellers on Amazon’s US site has surged to 63 per cent this year from 28 per cent in 2019.

As Chinese merchants flock to Amazon, some are bringing with them grey area practices common in Chinese marketplaces. These include making up fake reviews and inflating sales numbers, according to industry insiders

The disappearance of product listings from Chinese brands coincided with a recent report from antivirus product review site SafetyDetectives, which surveyed records from a breached server containing some 75,000 links to Amazon accounts.

The site’s cybersecurity team said it discovered messages from Amazon vendors soliciting positive reviews from individuals in exchange for free products. While it is unclear who owns the exposed database, some of the information was written in Chinese, leading the researchers to believe that the server is located in China.

 

 

Amazon has suspended over a dozen Chinese sellers for participating in fake review schemes. The list includes Mpow and Aukey, two of the biggest electronics Amazon-native brands out of China. The total sales by the suspended sellers eclipses $1 billion.

Amazon started suspending sellers at the end of April. More than ten days later, the sellers are still blocked. The suspension wasn’t temporary or accidental and appeared to focus on a few biggest brands. Mpow, for example, was sold by multiple sellers (some run by the company, some that identify as authorized resellers, some with an unknown relationship with Mpow). Amazon suspended all.

The brands suspended are Mpow, Aukey, VicTsing, Tacklife, Austor, Vtin, Seneo, Homasy, Homitt, LITOM, TopElek, OMORC, TRODEEM, Atmoko, HOMTECH, OKMEE, and others. More than a dozen sellers sold them on Amazon in the U.S. Additionally, Amazon has also suspended the same sellers on its international marketplaces.