This New Browser Extension Blocks All Those Junky, Fake Brands on Amazon

If you’re an Amazon shopper, you’ve probably seen fake brands flooding the website in recent years. A new extension by developer Josh Pigford promises to hide fake, cheaply made products and let you shop like a normal person again.

The extension, called Knockoff, is available for Firefox, Chrome and all Chromium-based web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave. Since Pigford launched the extension on Tuesday, it’s already running, with tens of thousands of downloads. A few days before this week’s launch, Pigford posted on X, “Created a small chrome extension that allows you to blur (or hide!) all the stupid, mass-produced, fake stuff 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’s also open source, 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, leave most of the list 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 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.

Knockoff listed lesser-known but still legitimate earbud brands like Tozo and Linsoul as genuine companies, while well-marking crafty handheld 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.

There are some minor flaws with this method. For example the product tool is Spec Ops, which is a real product, but Knockoff lists it as unknown and only gives me the option to “report as spam.” According to the GitHub page, all reports are logged and handled manually, but it doesn’t specify whether reports are logged based on which version of the report button users click.

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.

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 brands often have positive reviews that aren’t true. 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.