As any savvy shopper knows, online marketplaces can be rife with knockoff products. If you don’t pay close attention to the listing you may end up paying for a less trustworthy version of the item you wanted. Sure, you can return it for a refund, but wouldn’t it be better if there were an easy way to avoid the knockoffs to begin with?
Enter Josh Pigford (@Shpigford on X, formerly known as Twitter). In a recent post, Pigford shared his new creation: Knockoff, a browser extension that pushes back against the slew of knockoff brands on Amazon and makes your online shopping experience run significantly smoother.
What Is Knockoff?
Put simply, Knockoff is a browser extension for Google Chrome that lets you filter out knockoff brands. When it’s enabled, you’ll have the option to remove all of those mysterious, all-caps brands from your search results. Based on the Chrome store description, “Knockoff detects those listings and hides, dims, or labels them, right in the search results,” depending on the filter settings. As of now, the extension “works on amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.com.au. English marketplaces only for now.”
How Can I Use This?
Pigford designed this extension to be a breathe of fresh air for online shoppers. Once you’ve installed it in Chrome, you can take a look at the different filter levels: Relaxed, Standard, and Strict. Per the web store, relaxed will hide “known pseudo-brands and your blocklist.” Standard, which is the default, goes a step further and also hides “suspect-looking names and unbranded listings.” And if you want to be incredible, well, strict, the Strict option is “allowlist-only; anything not a known brand gets filtered.”
You’re also able to decide how you want the extension to tag knockoff brands. You can opt for the filtered items to be “hidden (with a floating pill showing the count and a one-click reveal), dimmed (restore on hover), or just labeled.” So pick whatever makes the most sense for you visually; you’re not locked into just one setting.
Are There Privacy Concerns?
Pigford also has a section allaying privacy concerns. According to the store listing, “everything runs locally. No accounts, no tracking, no analytics. The only network traffic is a daily brand-list download and optional one-click misclassification reports (brand name, verdict, ASIN, marketplace; nothing about you).” So if data tracking is a concern for you, you can rest easy knowing that this extension isn’t harvesting sensitive information from you.
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