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>Amazon should be liable for the products they sell on their market place. They should not be able to absolve themselves of all liability just because they're a "facilitator" of these marketplaces. They have the ability to manipulate reviews, manipulate what products you see in your search queries, etc. etc. They're culpable in some way as well - since theoretically, if they're manipulating search and reviews, then they must be vetting the products in some way, right?

Amazon also sells its own products on its marketplace, which kinda negates the whole "we're only a facilitator" message they are desperately trying to push.

Ebay is just a facilitator. If Amazon wants to just be a facilitator, it can stop spending money trying to copy top selling products via its Amazon Essentials line of goods. Amazon doesn't get to straddle the line and pick and choose what to call itself depending on which way the legal wind is blowing on a given day.

Amazon is the poster child of having their cake and wanting to eat it too, and using lobbyists and lawyers to get their way.

> I'm not sure what the answer is

Stop buying from Amazon, at least for me it is - i pretty much go out of my way to actively avoid buying there and encourage others to do so.

For basic electronic components and fasteners, I use McMaster-Carr https://www.mcmaster.com/. Their website is also amazingly free of cruft.

For a broader selection of electronics components, one may also consider

https://www.digikey.com/ and https://www.mouser.com/

For a hobbiest, ebay or aliexpress is cheaper. Straight from china.

Yes. Aliexpress is cheaper, but they have the sample problem with counterfeit and mislabeled products. Furthermore, they also manipulate ratings and comments. I got an electronic filter from there that was seriously mislabeled and sent in a comment and rating based on that. It never appeared on the product page.

Amazon's electronic parts are a complete shambles of junk. Take, for instance, this page which is selling "Germanium Schottky diodes", a thing that does not exist. They have a part number for a Germanium diode, but are apparently selling a silicon based Schottky diode instead. This is simply fraud, but only different from vats of other frauds on the site because it is so blatant. Yes, the Amazon parts are typically more expensive than the Ali parts, but there is very little reason to use either one.

If you actually want to receive the part you ordered, go to Digikey or Mouser. The prices will often be better as well.

They're okay most of the time for non-critical hobby tinkering, but counterfeit/clone/approximate parts are very commonplace on those platforms.

The advantage that specialty electronics distributors have is that they have supply-chain relationships directly with first-party manufacturers. A part with a manufacturer's name on it will come from that manufacturer. By contrast, marketplace-type sites don't care about an item's provenance.

Only if your time debugging has no value.

If you are doing everything in China, you should at least go with LCSC (https://www.lcsc.com/) as they are bargain but generally not completely counterfeit.

Note: That "generally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'll use LCSC for hobbyist stuff or prototypes. I'll generally use Digikey/Mouser/Arrow/Future/etc. if I need intermediate production (up to about 10K units). Once you get above 100K units, you can utilize Chinese suppliers again as you have an on-site representative managing everything at that point.

This is some really nice UI - easy to understand, no cruft, searchable!

Does anyone know if they ship internationally these days?

It used to be (several years ago) that they wouldn't ship to Australia, and (I think from rough memory) they wouldn't ship to the EU either.

I'm not seeing info about that on their website when look around now though, so it may have changed. (?)

Was just browsing McMaster-Carr and got dark-patterned into an inescapable login or sign-up screen after looking at a few things. 0/10 will not do business with data rapists.

Yep. My wife stopped buying on Amazon before I did although I had already stopped buying most electronic things due to the large amount of counterfeit or unsafe products.

She took a while to convince me to stop using it at all. It just seems so convenient. Truth is I honestly don't notice any difference now. Maybe it's slightly more hassle to put my credit card number occasionally, but things get delivered about as fast as Amazon ever did, and I'm much more confident in what I'm actually getting.

Yeah, Amazon did its job by dragging all the other retailers kicking and screaming to a consumer-centric pricing and logistics model. That's why you don't see a difference because every other business has adapted to the same model or pricing scheme.

Same for Walmart. For example, the Pet Supplies Plus retailer in my neighborhood smashes WalMart's selection and prices. There is no service at Walmart, PSP has passionate, knowledgeable people always on staff.

Microcenter is another example. Service, price and ultimately convenience, make the online shopping experience feel like a waste of time.

> Microcenter is another example. Service, price and ultimately convenience, make the online shopping experience feel like a waste of time.

While I am a fan of Microcenter...it's a sort of pandora's box of product discovery to me every time I go, but...the closest Microcenter to me is about 30 minute drive away, without traffic, in a strip mall with a hellscape parking lot that's full 95% of the time. This is the very definition of waste of time.

I only go, if I need something right now. Otherwise I shop online.

I'm optimistic that if Amazon is liable then it'll probably sort itself out.

>I think it was Louis Rossmann who tested out some automotive fuses purchased from Amazon to see if the fuses were actually rated for what was printed on the label. I believe the fuses _failed to fail_ when running amperages higher than what was written on the fuses themselves.

Do you remember if he took his fuses' time-current curves into account? Fuses will generally pass more than their rating for some period of time, blowing faster if the current's significantly over the rating, slower (maybe much slower) if it's only a little bit over. By preventing nuisance blows it's considered a feature rather than a bug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

At your link I saw that my point had been brought up in the comments. The 2 amp fuse passing 8 amps for minutes is for sure a problem. I'm not sure about those other fuses, they didn't seem to be far off. And there was a 2 amp fuse that blew at 4 amps after a few seconds which is what I'd expect. I didn't have enough patience to watch all 31 minutes of the video though, I was jumping around. In all fairness I think he proved his point.

Here’s a trip curve chart of some Bussmann blade type automotive fuses for comparison: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/electrical-...

Generally speaking automotive fuses are oversized for their circuit and should be of 'fast-blow' type

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

> I'm not sure what the answer is

Don’t buy from Amazon!! This is not a difficult problem to solve. There are zero items that Amazon stocks that cannot be purchased elsewhere.

Specifically for fuses, Grainger or McMaster Carr can sell you damn near any fuse you need and it will be a genuine product.

Give your dollars to a business that still controls their supply chain.

How is this even a debate? There is no section 230 for products.

These debates are heald by lawyers and when dealing with companies as large as Amazon you're talking about a massive amount if expense getting anywhere.