Are You Sick Of All The Fake Brands On Amazon? Try This Free Browser Extension

Amazon’s search engine has been filled with gibberish-knockoff products in recent years. To make your shopping experience a little less stressful, developer Josh Pigford built Knockoff, a free extension that will clean up your feed by automatically hiding or dimming listings from all those sketchy, mass-produced products.

Knockoff is available for Firefox, Chrome and all Chromium-based web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave. It is also available as a Safari extension.

Pigford launched the tool earlier this month, and it’s been gaining popularity ever since, with tens of thousands of downloads. A few days before the launch, Pigford posted on X, “Created a small chrome extension that allows you to dim (or hide!) all the stupid, mass-produced, fake brands on Amazon.” The post received 22,000 likes.

It works very easily. Once installed, any products from fake brands, dropshippers or suspicious sellers are flagged and greyed out, highlighting the more reputable brands you don’t know. There is also an option to automatically hide fake brands so you don’t see them at all.

In an interview with 404 Media, Pigford says Knockoff builds on previous extensions that aim to do this, such as AmazonBrandFilter and Amazon Brand Detector. The extension, which works locally, does not require an account, does not send data to any company servers and costs nothing. It is also open source (since version 0.7.2), and you can find the source code on GitHub.

So, how well does Knockoff work?

Anything sounds good on paper, but the proof is in the pudding. I took the Knockoff to test how well it sorted mass-produced garbage.

My case was not very difficult. I searched for various brands in several categories using Knockoff’s stock settings to see how well the extension could filter knockoff brands without additional tuning.

The short answer is that it did very well. When searching for vacuum cleaners, it left many listings intact as they come from well-known brands, including Shark, Bissell and Dyson. Only a few listings have been grayed out, mostly because there is no product name listed in the product description.

The solar lights got worse. Knockoff blocked dozens of listings due to lack of brand names and also blocked listings from Jkimk, Technet, Tonulax and other unknown brands (most of them capitalized), while retaining listings for established brands, such as Brighttown, a real company based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Phone situations are where things start to get really complicated. The extension blocked brands like Supfine, Dumkery, Hiearcool and a few others. However, it initially also blocked Torras, a well-known brand with store stock at Best Buy, which holds thousands of patents on many of its products. It doesn’t get any more authentic than Torras, but the company’s products are branded because its name is stylized in all caps, which are tested by extension. Torras has been added as a reliable product in subsequent updates.

Knockoff listed some lesser-known but still legitimate earbud brands, such as Tozo and Linsoul, as genuine companies, while well-marking the trickier hand tool brands, including Wgge and Horusdy. Brands not recognized by the extension usually appear highlighted, but on the product page, the extension marks them as suspected fakes or not recognized at all.

It helps that Knockoff has a system to report brands that are incorrectly labeled as legitimate (or incorrectly marked as fake). If the extension flags a product as fake if it’s legitimate, you can click on the badge and “report as genuine product.” Likewise, if an extension flags a product as legitimate when it’s actually fake, you can click on the badge and “report as bad” when you click the badge over a product that the extension recognizes. You may need to turn on premium product badges in settings to do this.

Since the launch of Knockoff, Pigford has released an update that addresses user feedback, including a way to directly send feedback if you want to report a product. Later versions require a few more permissions, but they are usually for enabling new features.

Knockoff is a great starting point for sorting waste

Overall, Knockoff is a useful extension to a digital marketplace dominated by AI-generated goods and unverified third-party products.

When shopping, the biggest advantage is to avoid low-quality brands. Even if you’re not actively buying anything, it’s interesting (and scary) to see how many gray product listings you can find in any product category. We recommend that you turn on the badges of known brands, but if not, the stock settings do the best.

At the same time, Knockoff shows you products that may be fake on Amazon, but it doesn’t tell you which products are really good or bad. Counterfeit brands often come with fake reviews or bottle labels more often than legitimate products.

However, it all depends on what you are buying. If all you need is a pack of zip ties to manage a light cable or attach a tomato plant to a garden trellis, the ones sold on the ground will work just fine and save you a few bucks.

And while Knockoff makes it easy to buy quality items, the extension still requires some tweaking and human analysis. Updates to the extension seem to do just that, so if you’re getting a tool now, chances are the extension will be even better in the long run.

Avoid fake brands without an extension

An eagle-eyed buyer can spot a product coming a mile away if they know where and how to look for product listings.

The first step, according to Russell Holly, director of commercial content at CNET, is to look for a product outside of Amazon.com. “If it seems like a random string of letters and that brand name doesn’t sell anywhere else, chances are the seller isn’t the manufacturer,” says Holly.

Holly also says to pay attention to negative reviews, because products tend to fake only positive reviews. Negative reviews can be a better indicator of quality issues that can help explain why a product is cheaper than others in the same category.

Similarly, you can also check the product support of the product. If the only way to report a problem is to Amazon directly, Holly says you may be dealing with a dropshipper that doesn’t offer product support if something breaks.

Another way to spot a counterfeit brand is to find the same product sold under multiple brands. An example is this Broserengy alarm clockBluetooth speaker, phone charger combination. It is almost the same as this product from Fansbe, including the RGB lights on the bottom, the placement (and labeling) of the buttons and the auxiliary USB port on the back to charge the device. These are two subtly different versions of the same product.