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Comment by prima-facie | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is swamped with products from China of dubious quality. Just search for 'earphones' for example. All top results are very poor products from unknown brands. Amazon needs to handle this now unless they want to turn into Aliexpress.

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Dubious quality is one thing, but dubious legality is the stuff that worries me the most.

I ordered some food processing gadget, but it does not come with any kind of EU certification (i.e. not stamped or anything) and it is shipped direct from China in a box that says "gift". The same product on Alibaba have different seller and some claim they are selling the "food-safe" one and not others.

The brand from China are all mysterious from a foreign buyer point of view, so I cannot even buy from a brand and trust that the brand is serious about its reputation. Anyway, on Alibaba/express, there are often several brand claiming the same product despite using the same picture than another.

That's a mess, and indeed if I bother buying from Amazon (instead of Aliexpress), I hope the stuff coming to be at least legal. I can understand some amount of counterfeiting, not the current level though.

> it does not come with any kind of EU certification

They're already one step ahead and have just copied the CE Marking logo as well

https://www.cemarkingassociation.co.uk/ce-marking-and-the-ch...

When you ship a rebranded OEM product, you don't have to recertify it if the original white box product was.

It is ironic how all kinds of certifications, originally conceived as a mean to kneecap Chinese/Asian exporters, now play into their hand.

Now, it is Western companies that don't want to develop a thing on their own, or make any original products as such, as that will require them to undergo certification for every self-developed, original product. Unlike with white box designs that were specifically designed for OEM industry, and allow for all kinds of effortless customisation without losing certification, and reaping the benefit of economies of scale (one OEM design being sold to many customers under a single certificate).

On a somewhat related note, I recently bought a chocolate from a local discount store (in the EU).

Apparently the list of ingredients is a machine-translation of the original (unknown) language.

It listed "palm-oil" as an ingredient. Sounds reasonable, but my language has different words for Palm, the tree and Palm, the palm of your hand.

Apparently my chocolate was made from oil extracted from human hands. Pretty disgusting.

If I had the required time or energy I'd try to file some sort of complain, but unfortunately I don't. Mostly because that's outright dangerous (imagine a potentially lethal allergen lost in machine translation).

Maybe it was a mistranslation of hand-pressed oil rather than Palm Oil: https://www.piteba.com/en/

I understand what you're getting at, but do people actually buy those items with the understanding that they are getting something of a higher quality? If you pay $2 for headphones and all the ones in the store cost $10+, it's hard to argue that you thought the quality was going to be higher.

I know we're in the tech bubble so most of us probably do research before buying anything online, that's why I ask.

Yeah those don't bother me too much, you pretty much know ahead of time when you buy super cheap crappy products. Counterfeits are the real problem, and to an only slightly lesser extent fake reviews.

> it's hard to argue that you thought the quality was going to be higher.

Oh, but argue people will!

Some people have a fairly un-nuanced view and assume that instead of the cheaper option being a cheap knockoff the more expensive ones are attempting to rip them off (because if one company can offer X for Y, anyone asking more is creaming extra profit). And some pretend to be that naive when it comes to refund/replacement/negative-review-designed-to-encourage-an-out-of-warranty-replacement/refund time.

Hmm. The top results for me are:

    Gritin           - China - 12 Euro ~ 5 stars / 310 reviews "Amazon Choice"
    KLIM             - China - 20 Euro ~ 5 stars / 864 reviews
    Panasonic        - Japan - 8  Euro ~ 4 stars / 1.335 reviews
    Beats by Dr. Dre - USA   - 22 Euro ~ 3 stars / 172 reviews
    qubbi            - USA   - 10 Euro ~ 4 stars / 48 reviews
    Anker            - China - 20 Euro ~ 4 stars / 1176 reviews
    Mpow             - China - 20 Euro ~ 5 stars / 463 reviews

ALL of these companies manufacture most of their products in China.

Anecdotally chinese companies appear to outperform foreign companies on quality among the popular choices - if review scores are anything to go by.

You can't use review scores. They are not a proxy for quality at all. They are a proxy for perceived value. I have noticed, subjective of course, that people rate more expensive products more harshly. If I buy some $5 head phones and they work alright I am really happpy. If I buy $200 head phones and they are not perfect I am going to be disappointed, my rating will reflect that. So you have to compare products that cost a similar amount to get a real feel for the product quality. Reviews of vastly different costed items doing the same thing are kind of meaningless.

That is how reviews work, yes. When I buy $5 headphones for the gym, I'm happy they generally don't have static and seem to work. If I buy $200 headphones for the office, I'm going to complain if the 13khz range is a bit muddy. Likewise, I'm happy when my $40 bookshelf doesn't fall over, but I expect more from a $400 bookshelf.

Yes. Obviously.

Though those headphones are mostly in the same price range, and certainly not vastly differently priced.

They're pretty much all low-end headphones. Yes. Even the Beats by Dr. Dre who like to pretend they're not.

They certainly outperform on gathering high review scores...

Key line there: if review scores are anything to go by

I use Mpow headphones from Amazon. They work really well for running. I have tried many different brands and settled on these for price/quality ratio.

The price also means I don’t need to worry about losing them which is a great “feature”.

Do you have an adblocker running? I did the same search, I got one result from Panasonic. The rest were nonsense brands I've never heard of: omnigates, mpow, gloue, arrela, otium, actionpie, byz, etc..

I do have an adblocker, but results probably differ between amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, etc...

Mine are the results I got on Amazon Germany.

> ALL of these companies manufacture most of their products in China.

As do Apple, Microsoft, Google and everyone else.

European and American brands have higher quality standards than Chinese brands. Whether the manufacturing happens in china or elsewhere is completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the product.

On average? Very likely. Probably.

For popular global brands in the lucrative consumer electronics sector - where good reviews are everything - I am not so sure.

> Whether the manufacturing happens in china or elsewhere is completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the product.

Completely irrelevant? What makes you think that?

Anecdotally again, most of those numerous bad reviews for Beats by Dr. Dre exist because apparently they tend to fall apart after only days of use. So much for western quality control.

I believe Anker is American, though obviously manufactured in Asia (which is true about most American brands).

I looked each company up when I made that list and Anker is a 100% Chinese company/brand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anker_(electronics)

> Anker is a brand of Chinese electronics company Anker Innovations [...]. Headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong [...]

Can you check all those on FakeSpot.com and add the FakeSpot review? Would be interesting to see.

Doesn't appear to work for amazon.de, but amazon.co.uk has most of these under the same product IDs.

Here are the grades according to that website:

    Gritin           - A (90%)
    KLIM             - F (62%)
    Panasonic        - A (90%)
    Beats by Dr. Dre - Not available on .co.uk
    qubbi            - Not enough reviews on .co.uk
    Anker            - A (90%)
    Mpow             - Not enough reviews on .co.uk

I spent far too long looking for a second USB charging block for my phone. The first page is full of < $5 chargers, none of them from a brand I'd heard of before, with mostly 5 star reviews from bots and a few 1 star reviews of "this caught fire and almost burned my house down"

You'd think to see an Anker product on the first page given their reputation for reliable electronics and (at least in my circles) popularity.

I wouldn't trust Anker too much either, I got an Anker 3-Port USB-C to USB-A hub + ethernet jack (because like you, I heard they made good stuff) and it blacked my wifi whenever I tried it use it. Maybe I got a counterfeit one, IDK, it was sold by "AnkerDirect" (the hub looked to be made pretty cheaply too). Either way, I returned it and got a charjen hub.

How true is this... and there are products with false ETL and other certificates and Amazon is not removing them from the marketplace... in the last 2 months I've started looking on Amazon like a bit better Aliexpress - at least for electronics...

I don't necessarily mind buying cheap goods from unknown brands. With something like earphones, I'm not optimistic they'll last that long before breaking or my wife losing them or something in the first place.

With earphones, if they get too loud for even a split second, they could damage your hearing or give you permanent tinnitus. I wouldn't put stuff of unknown provenience or quality into any of my body's orifices, ears included.

Chinese IEM's & earphones are actually starting to compete with the big guys in USA and some simple research can yield wonderful results. TRN, KZ, LZ, Tin Audio, are all wonderful.

Head-Fi forums are all the rage about them.

And the price is often vary drastically.

> At Newegg they go from $355 up to $446 but on Taobao and AliExpress they can be found as low as $130

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/msur-n650.21366/reviews#rev...

I'm talking more like $45. Can be found on Amazon too for a little more.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Original-KZ-AS10-5BA-HiFi-St...

The article mentions they're setting up their own brands in order to get a better grip on product quality. I'm quite sure Bezos does not want to be Aliexpress.

>I'm quite sure Bezos does not want to be Aliexpress.

I'm sure he really wants to! Otherwise why would he sent his people to China to beg major Taobao/Aliexpress operators to get on the Amazon train?

I'm sure Amazon margins are more substantial on these Chinese products than on well established brands.

Yes, Aliexpress does not have its own private labels.

I wish there was a filter to remove all the crap private-label items. If only

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