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weiming

Try to find the real manufacturer. If it's a no-name/no-brand seller from China, then you should know what to expect.

Example:

1. Search for "car battery charger"

2. "Amazon's Choice" result is a brand called Ampeak

3. Google "Ampeak trademark"

4. Ahhhh, "AMPEAK is a trademark of SHENZHEN JIADING ECOMMERCE LTD."

Exercise of trying to find any information about "Shenzhen Jiading Ecommerce LTD" left to the reader.

Also:

1. Try to find a website for both the brand and the manufacturer. "Ampeak" does have a website but lacks company information.

2. Note if the listing is dominated by gushing 5-star reviews and 1-star "what the heck did I just buy" reviews, something you can observe in the Ampeak charger listing.

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If this is really the only way to successfully shop at Amazon, I wonder why so many people are still doing that. It seems to me that it would be the role of the shop I am shopping at to perform this kind of due diligence and quality assurance.

> I wonder why so many people are still doing that.

Because a lot of people kept doing that their entire life. Just now, it's becoming normal for people in America

Last week I wanted to get my brother some stuff so he could try out making the electronics for a project idea he has. He’s in high school. I have a nice soldering iron from a reputable seller that has lasted several year and works well.

But I didn’t get him one of those because that would have cost more than the entire assortment of arduino, wire, power suppliers, soldering iron and other components that I got him.

If he really likes it, then I’d buy him a nice one, but here Amazon was great for the use case of I want to knowingly buy cheap stuff and risk it might break.

Many other websites are turning themselves into fairly open accrss market places as well, meaning you have to increasingly go through the same steps on them. A few examples: Newegg, Walmart, Lowes. Now, perhaps those 3 examples are better, but they seem to be determined to head the same way as fast as they can.

The role of the shop you are shopping at is to get filthy rich peddling shoddy junk made with effectively slave labor, while degrading both the manufacturer and consumer societies at the same time.

Indeed. Stores are not your friend. And its not like it was better before Amazon. In fact with online shopping I learned how those brick and mortar retailers were scamming me for decades with their middleman rent seeking.

If this is the “correct” way to shop Amazon, then the ops point is only stronger. It makes perfect sense to take your business elsewhere when these kind of shenanigans are required.

The trouble is that in many cases it goes a bit further. Steps 1-4 are as you say. But then

5. Keep looking down Amazon's product listings.

6. Notice that _every single thing in the list_ is a weird pseudo-brand whose products are presumably drop-shipped from China.

7. Notice that many of these things, although nominally having different manufacturers, are obviously pretty much the same thing, probably coming out of the same factory.

8. Try to find some suitable products somewhere in the list that actually come from companies you might have heard of and that aren't just reselling the same probably-low-quality Chinese products.

9. Give up and go to a bricks-and-mortar store.

(For me, looking at Amazon UK, for the particular search mentioned above there do seem to be a few real products in among the deluge of fake-brand junk. But often >90% of the products in the list are fake-brand junk. And of course then there's the possibility that the real products are actually fakes too.)

Wow, such an improvement, I shall even walk there to take it home, after I help prepare the materials and assemble the parts. Modern times.

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