A glitch in the matrix of online shopping

Or: why I reverse-image-search before buying anything

This is a story that begins with a lamp — though in hindsight, I’m not sure exactly which lamp I saw first.

The lamp I purchased was called the “Evelyn & Zoe”: a generic sort of floor light with a big drum shade that Walmart.com sold for $86. But before I found the Walmart lamp, I’d seen an identical product on Macys.com that currently sells under the brand name Hudson & Canal and costs $189. On Nordstrom Rack, the same item went by Addison & Lane. Homesquare and Bed Bath & Beyond sell it under the brands Henn & Hart and Heath & Cliff, respectively. 

All told, more than a dozen retailers sell some version of this lamp, each using the same staged product photos and uncanny, concatenated brand names. And that’s just one of many similar, vexing glitches in the matrix of online shopping.

This counter stool, sold under at least four brand names, costs between $183 and $446, depending on where you shop. 

This chaise lounge, meanwhile, was brought to you by either Four Hands or Haven Home or … nobody in particular, at a cost ranging from $950 to $1500.

As furniture and home goods sales have moved online, retail experts told me, more and more stores have sought a piece of the action. But instead of sourcing or creating their own products, many large retailers have relied on overlapping networks of manufacturers, distributors and third-party sellers — creating a baffling (and frankly, shady) shopping environment where many sites sell identical or near-identical items under different names and at wildly different prices.

“Sometimes it's literally the same product across multiple different sites,” said Michael Scheschuk, the former chief marketing officer at Jungle Scout, a sourcing and sales-intelligence platform for third-party sellers. “In general, they’ll put a new brand name on it, and each of the retailers differentiate based on [factors like] service.” 

A few different trends are at play here, and it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly which one you’re witnessing. When I first began looking into this phenomenon two years ago,¹ I assumed my lamp and its many, many twins were the obvious product of white-labeling — a popular and growing practice in which competing retailers purchase the same generic product from a single manufacturer, then market it to consumers under different brand names.

This is likely true for many doppelganger products — but certainly not every one. George John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, told me the furniture and home goods industries also have a long-time affection for a technique called “branded variance,” wherein they create slightly different versions of the same item for different retailers.

Both practices are old-fashioned, to a certain extent. Many of the retailers now selling furniture and home goods online don’t label or market (or indeed, source or ship or warehouse) their products themselves. Instead, to compete with online behemoths like Amazon and Wayfair, they essentially operate gigantic drop-shipping operations where customers place orders through their websites for products shipped and sold by third-party vendors.

In a 2024 survey of more than 400 retail executives, roughly 40% said their companies had invested in the third-party marketplace model. (And judging by the fact that I can now purchase a couch at Kroger, Best Buy or the Home Depot, should I want to, I’d hazard that some portion of said executives have targeted their investments at the home goods sector.)

“A lot of the big chain retail stores realized a few years ago that Amazon was eating their lunch,” said Robert Handfield, a professor of supply chain management at North Carolina State University. “So what they did was build out these websites and have third-party distributors handle” the fulfillment and shipping. 

But retailers seem to have built a certain amount of obfuscation into their new and expanded online furniture stores. As a consumer, it’s often difficult to tell whether you’re shopping with the retailer you typed into the address bar … or another, semi-anonymous third-party seller. The brand name rarely clarifies matters, since brands have lost all meaning in the age of Amazon: Is “Evelyn & Zoe” a Walmart line, sourced by professional buyers in Arkansas? Or are “Evelyn & Zoe” the kids of some anonymous drop-shipper reselling lamps sourced from Alibaba? 

Determined to answer those questions — or at least confirm that I didn’t overpay for this stupid floor lamp — I reached out to Jungle Scout for help identifying the manufacturer that made it. Using a massive database of U.S. import records, they pointed me to Dongguan Jiahui Lighting Co Ltd in Guangdong, China, a 16-year-old factory and showroom that claims to export table, task, floor, pendant, and buffet lamps to buyers on six continents. 

Like virtually every company named in this piece, Dongguan didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. In the U.S., however, a handful of companies account for the vast majority of its shipments: the home goods producer and importer Nourison Industries, for instance; Newton Buying Corp., a branch of the company that owns TJ Maxx; and —ding ding — Hudson & Canal, a Florida-based “B2B e-commerce company” that I recognized from the pricey Macy’s version of my lamp. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hudson & Canal has little online footprint outside the stores that stock its branded lamps and coffee tables. (In addition to Macy’s, QVC sells them under the name “Hudson & Canal”; so do a number of regional furniture stores.) The company’s executives hail largely from finance and Florida; in 2020, they sued the federal government over losses related to its trade war with China. 

Based on those tidbits, a sparse website and an old job posting on LinkedIn, I suspected that Hudson & Canal imports furniture in bulk and then sells it to consumers through different third-party marketplaces. The importer appears to generate its own blandly aspirational product photos and un-Googleable This & That brand names. 

Alas, an executive at Hudson & Canal declined an interview request. So instead, I did the next best thing: I ordered three more versions of the lamp.

Sure enough, each product — sold by Amazon, Best Buy, and Lowe’s — arrived in an identical, unbranded box from Cranberry, N.J., with Hudson & Canal’s name on the return-address label.² It would appear that, in all three cases, Hudson & Canal was operating as a third-party seller. Or, as the company puts it, “a value-added distributor with a strategic focus of supplying products exclusively through the rapidly growing eCommerce channel.”

This arrangement has grown so common, Scheschuk told me, as to be unremarkable: On Amazon, for instance, more than 60 percent of sales are made by third-party merchants. Some are as large as Hudson & Canal; others are one-man shops. Scheschuk himself has maintained a tidy Amazon sideline reselling private-label dog collars sourced from Alibaba. The night I received my final order, by the glow of my Evelyn & Zoe/Hudson & Canal/whatever & whoever lamp, I briefly tried to persuade Jason that we should get in on this hustle. (He countered that we are hustling enough on Substack.)

But online shopping is already ruined for me. These days, I find myself reflexively reverse-image-searching every product I shop. The technique is far from foolproof, since generative AI makes it cheap and easy for sellers to commission custom images and merchandising copy for each of their markets.

Still — the tells are there, if you look for them. The care and cleaning manual for this Wayfair-branded rug references the manufacturer and importer Nourison, for instance. The product images for many white-label goods share an aseptically, generically tasteful aesthetic.

Then there’s that telltale ampersand, which — in virtually any context, I’d argue! — signals that someone is trying awfully hard to appear artisanal and cool.

Lo & behold: My lamp (which I do generally like, for the record) turned out to be neither.

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Weekend preview

I’m enormously sorry for dropping last week’s Saturday edition, but I’m safely back to Buffalo and ensconced in my office once again. I am, candidly, NOT a very experienced business traveler, and though I believed I’d have lots of slack time to write the newsletter and work on other assignments while in D.C., I instead found myself engaged in pressing business travel tasks liiiiike … getting drinks with old colleagues and friends. Sometimes it’s good to get out and touch grass, yeah??

Had I sent last week’s newsletter, it would’ve included this update on the Pennsylvania deepfake cheerleading scandal (which left me wondering: what is truth, even?); Brendan Koerner’s deeply entertaining account of his adventures inside the OnlyFans chatter industry; and Anya Kamenetz’s dispatch from the Facebook groups where men who are either very generous or profoundly narcissistic freely share their swimmers with women looking to have children.

This week, I’ve been reading about the fall of DeviantArt, the toxicity at “Love Is Blind” and Sam Altman’s inadvisable obsession with “Her.”

More this weekend! Until then — warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

1. Long-time/long-memoried readers have perhaps already recognized this as an expansion of a newsletter introduction I first wrote in 2022. I’ve been digging into it on and off ever since, so — excited to share this new reporting with you!

2. I then proceeded to lose one of these three unopened boxes in the empty bedroom where we store miscellaneous junk, meaning I whiffed the return period and now own TWO of these “glamorous” and “stylishly fashionable” products.