[smugworth]

The risk of counterfeits means I will rarely buy anything electronic from Amazon.

On the other hand, take a category like pet toys. Cheap plastic things where I'm not concerned with getting the genuine article, like a collapsible dog bowl. There are dozens of identical "brands" with thrown-together phonetic names for an entirely identical product with slight price differences. How do I began to choose? And who's to say any of them are produced with safe materials?

I'd really like to know how well Amazon's "put anything on the digital shelf" strategy works over a curated product inventory. Exceedingly well, I suspect, but it seems like the blowback over poor product will continue increasing.

[fmajid]

Same here. Amazon is a mess, and in many ways worse than eBay was when it got its (deservedly) bad reputation.

For many product categories, almost every single result flunks Fakespot.com with a D or worse, so it's too much work to keep going in the hope of finding some wheat in the chaff, and easier to just buy somewhere else like B&H Photo or Target.com. Two recent examples: Ethernet cables and sleep masks for airplane travel.

Then there are bizarre things like how when you select "Sort by price, low to high", the results aren't actually sorted by price, and half the results you saw in the default view don't appear in the sorted by price view.

[citizenkeen]

Pet toys and food were the first thing I stopped buying off of Amazon. I have zero faith in the quality control of the product coming down - in the United States, at least, pet food and pet toys are actually held to a decent standard.

[sct202]

Even American pet food/treats is riddled with frauds or questionable companies. There's a treat called No-Hide that people have sent in for DNA testing and other testing that is suspiciously similar to rawhide despite being claimed to be starch based The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture did an investigation and this person FOIA'd the documents and the testing shows a lot of discrepancies even though the government cleared them of misbranding. https://truthaboutpetfood.com/is-it-no-hide-or-rawhide-from-...

[CaptainZapp]

On the other hand, take a category like pet toys. Cheap plastic things where I'm not concerned with getting the genuine article

Are you sure that you're not feeding your dog some lead in the process?

It may be in the coating.

[freehunter]

How do you verify that anywhere else, though? Are pet toys a regulated industry? Pet food is, human food is, electronics are, are pet toys?