On the bench where this is being written, there’s a Mitutoyo vernier caliper. It’s the base model with a proper vernier scale, but it’s beautifully made, and it’s enjoyable to see younger hardware hackers puzzle over how to use it. It cost about thirty British pounds a few years ago, but when it comes to quality metrology instruments that’s really cheap. The sky really is the limit for those in search of ultimate accuracy and precision. We can see then why this Redditor was upset when the $400 Mitutoyo they ordered from Amazon turned out to be nothing of the sort. We can’t even call it a fake, it’s just a very cheap instrument stuffed oddly, into a genuine Mitutoyo box.
Naturally we hope they received a refund, but it does raise the question when buying from large online retailers; how much are we prepared to risk? We buy plenty of stuff from AliExpress in out community, but in that case the slight element of chance which comes with random Chinese manufacture is offset by the low prices. Meanwhile the likes of Amazon have worked hard to establish themselves as trusted brands, but is that misplaced? They are after all simply clearing houses for third party products, and evidently have little care for what’s in the box. The £30 base model caliper mentioned above is an acceptable punt, but at what point should we go to a specialist and pay more for some confidence in the product?
It’s a question worth pondering as we hit the “Buy now” button without thinking. What’s your view? Let us know in the comments. Meanwhile, we can all be caught with our online purchases.
Thanks [JohnU] for the tip.
It is important, especially in this day and age, to remove liablity responsibilites from platforms such as amazon if we want to encourage their growth, and corrospondily the growth in GDP that the country badly needs. Amazon as a middleman, can’t be responsible for what a thrid party does (sells) on their platform, and it is in my opinion anti-capitalisitic to think otherwise. My welfare is nothing more than a crumb that has fallen off the table at which Jeff Bezos dines. Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. Be grateful that he allows you to still feed so close to his plate.
“It is important […]to remove liablity responsibilites from platforms such as amazon”
Quite the opposite. The number of scams and fake products on the website skyrocketed. Also sellers are being scammed. Amazon’s policies are directly responsible for this. Their algorithm promotes fake products and they are not screening their sellers properly. They need to be held accountable for this.
“Amazon as a middleman, can’t be responsible for what a thrid party does (sells) on their platform”
Customers purchase through Amazon, not directly from the third party. Customers cannot directly contact or sue the seller, especially if it is a foreign seller. Amazon therefore has a responsibility to check for scams and fake products and they don’t do that. Even if you get your money back after returning this still is a waste of money, time and resources (many returned products get destroyed). And many customers don’t bother returning a fake product and might not even realize it is fake.
Crime pays.
“it is in my opinion anti-capitalisitic to think otherwise.”
Amazon is not capitalistic as they force price controls on their sellers. They force sellers to change the price on other platforms. This is illegal anti-competitive behavior and Amazon is facing lawsuits for this.
I sure as hell hope that’s snark.
Or some AI nonsense
Agree!
It’s not, this is a standard line from people who sometimes call themselves libertarians or ancaps lately.
I’m a bit tired. I didn’t realize you were being sarcastic. My point remains that Amazon is not capitalistic.
Completely wrong on all counts, laughably so. For one thing, stores have a responsibility to their customers. Amazon is not a web host, they are part of the transaction, they process returns and shipping, and sell their own goods.
What should they be liable for? Simple, ensuring customers aren’t ripped off and illegal transactions don’t happen. Swapping what is being sold is fraud, if Amazon doesn’t crack down they are endorsing it, that makes them liable.
Nah, Jeff Bezos should be glad he’s not on my plate. Your claims are predicated on the belief that Amazon is a net benefit for society, or otherwise too big to fail. I reject the first premise, and assert that we must not lick the boots of “too big to fail” capitalists.
I’m not a dog, and Jeff Bezos is not my master. We must not allow billionaires to create power structures around them that make them invincible. You act like it’s already been done.
Buy now after reading reviews. Try it out. Not satisfied? Write a review so that others don’t fall in the same trap. Send it back and get a refund. Works great for a hobby, lnot for production.
Get buried by ten times the amount of fake AI reviews, and/or removed entirely by the moderators on the service.
Online reviews are of no value, because you can’t verify authenticity or lack of tampering.
My philosophy is to always expect the lesser, then I can be pleasantly surprised if they actually come through.
In other words it’s online sales, of course it’s going to be dodgy goods.
Online reviews are meaningless – they are more easily faked en masse than genuinely written and the genuine ones are often from people who have zero knowledge making either unreasonable complaints or facile praise.
One usually falls for the Amazon marketplace mind trick. you’re not actually buying from Amazon , but this fact is well hidden from most people . Even when Amazon says “Over 50% of all products orders are sold by our third-party selling partners.”
Buyer beware.
Amazon should act responsibly if they want to be anything more than a money making machine. What, they don’t want to be anything more than a money making machine? Caveat emptor.
Why would amazon want to be anything more than a money making machine? That’s the perfect machine.
Only one thing is missing: being the only money making machine available…
This is seemingly just an incident of someone switching out the real one for something that looks/weighs the same and then returning it, keeping the real one. Amazon’s returns process is often abused and I have received products which are clearly used but have been sold as new.
That makes a lot of sense. Amazon still shouldn’t be responsible. They didnt do it, the other person did! /s
Amazon must be responsible, this is fraud, and they are complicit in the fraud.
Tadpole was clearly being sarcastic (hence the /s at the end of their comment)
There is no /s at this time.
Yes, people who buy the Amazon pallets of returns find quite a few such items as well as boxes with enough rocks to weigh the same as the original item.
We got mailed a box of detergent instead of a laptop once.
Happened to me a couple of months back. Ordered an Osram car bulb, received an Osram box with a generic bulb inside. This supposedly being a new item as well, so how did a return get resold as new and not open box (I suppose the easy answer is the Osram box has no tamper seal so you can open and switch the bulb without any signs that it’s been opened).
Reminds me of the 5W power supply in a 50W case I bought a while ago.
“What a great offer… and its so lightweight”
*unit shutting off after some minutes of use…
And it never occured to me that it could have been a fake product. Until I read your article covering exactly this topic.
At this point anything with even a remote chance of being Chinesium with no further refinement and support from an EU (etc) company is not worth it. Even the simplest and already cheap to make products are being turned into garbage, and then sold at prices that imply quality, and often with that sort of product its not even possible to fix it to be functional…
Amazon and the likes are almost worse than playing the lottery for all their physical products now, as odds are good all you get is lots of transport costs and a pile of waste. At least the lottery just takes your money without all the additional costs!
Problem is, people want to think ( or are taught to ) that the cheap trash is good enough, and those that charge more are exploiting them ( but these same people will not accept a reduction on their wages or on the goods themselves produce ) .
Then the companies that produce itens with some quality end up closing shop, and people are left with only the shoddy items ( but will keep complaining nobody makes a good X anymore ) .
I don’t mind the cheap trash existing though I avoid buying it (or try to anyway) most of the time. Though things like a cheap crap brush for when you are intending to use it on epoxy or as a cleaning brush for your oily lathe chips is ideal (though if you have an old worn out but previously good one even better).
What bothers me is when that cheap trash is sold at the price as it if it was a much more premium product, sometimes even as a different brand that actually makes good stuff…
It’s a waste of effort and resources that also means the good stuff costs you more. It’s not even cheaper as it is because you pay for the logistics of items that are virtually unusable for any practical point.
That’s because there’s a ton of overpriced garbage, too, and so the “cheap trash” is just so ridiculously cheaper than the other stuff and only marginally worse. The whole key is getting a reasonable idea of what something should cost, and avoiding things that are massively overpriced and massively underpriced.
It’s not like any of this is new or unique to Amazon, unless you think those $100 bottles of wine tasted better.
The keyword is “uninformed consumers”.
It’s nearly impossible to know what some never-heard brand product is like until you buy it, which is why these manufacturers change their brands as often as socks.
Meanwhile, the known brands can charge more than the product is worth because people who don’t trust the fly-by-night brands have to pay the premium for the established name brand.
The idea is to keep the consumer uninformed so they cannot make rational choices.
“It’s nearly impossible to know what some never-heard brand product is like until you buy it, which is why these manufacturers change their brands as often as socks.”
It’s not about the brand. It’s about the product. You have to know roughly how much it costs to make something.
Plus it’s not like they change the actual product. Half the time it’s trivial to find the thing in a box store under a different name, then you find it online for like a third the price.
The bigger issue is just flat-out fraud stuff, but this isn’t a new problem. It’s why most box stores don’t restock returns.
That has nothing to do with it, as you can post any price for any product. Your belief as a customer about “how much something costs” is dependent on the market itself, so you don’t actually know how much something should cost – only how much they do cost as an average of whatever products you have seen so far.
If you think a light bulb should cost $2, that’s just your imagination. The real cost may be 50 cents, but that bulb gets sold at $5 and the bulbs you can buy at 50 cents real price are actually worth 2 cents because they’re factory rejects.
Yes, they do. Even if the product is good, they will stuff in 5-20% dodgy products and off-spec parts with the knowledge that the consumer does not know how to tell the difference, or they don’t know how to claim the warranty, or they just don’t bother to claim warranty on a two dollar item.
If you have a LED light bulb that is supposed to last 25.000 hours, and it breaks after one year, do you still have the receipt to claim the warranty? Even if you do, you simply get the same bulb in return. When this happens, people pick another brand that is equally cheap and equally bad, rinse and repeat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
” the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, which ultimately leaves goods that are found to be defective after purchase in the market” (…) “Adverse selection is a phenomenon where sellers are not willing to sell high quality goods at the lower prices buyers are willing to pay, with the result that buyers get lower quality goods.”
Put simply: the Chinese sellers are deliberately cheating with a large portion of shoddy products on the market, while the western buyers are aware of the cheating but unwilling to boycott entirely because of the chance to get a “good deal”. The low prices are more attractive than the risk of a bad deal, but this causes the “lemon market” effect where good sellers cannot compete with quality over bad sellers offering extremely cheap prices, and the average quality of offerings keeps dropping down until all you’re buying and selling is pointless trinkets.
I have had nearly 100% good results with Alibaba, AliExpress, Temu, Taobao, etc. You have to examine the items closely and a have an application that fits. Also realize most itmes are offered by people who 1) have no English and the translations are terrible with odd words used often. Like “weld” for soldering and 2) the listing might be their first attempt at sales outside China and they have no experience with the shipping process. Number 2 has improved a lot with Ali and others offer a complete shipping and tracking solution for the seller. These days I have contacts in China who can inspect bigger more expensive items like machinery and also make sure they are actually inside the crate when they reach the ship and the container is actually loaded. (The police in China tend to think they only work for the people who live in their district. If you are from outside they will give you the contact info for someone you can pay to beat up whoever is giving you problems.)
If you can adjust the bar, everything can fit.
the two great evils of the modern e-shopping experience are fake products and poor search. i hate how amazon and newegg (et al) have degraded into federated garbage. it absolutely obliterates all hope for the search function. and then you don’t know what you’re getting, but they are trying to make you think you know what you’re getting, and that is very frustrating. if half the listings have an unreasonably low price, it’s because they’re fake…but then if you buy the one with the reasonable price, that one is expensive-and-fake!!!
the mind-boggling part is that amazon could easily solve this problem by putting more scrutiny on their relationship with their vendors. they can ban vendors for a whole list of easily-detectable deceptive practices, and they don’t have to allow vendors to sign up in a way that permits ban-dodging. amazon is destroying its brand on purpose. just like walmart before it.
i actually find it is a big improvement to simply go to the more transparently low-quality marketplaces. for example, i hate federated amazon and newegg but i am perfectly happy on ebay, which has been essentially federated since its inception. it doesn’t feel deceptive on ebay. and the same for going to temu to buy knockoff goods — i am getting the knockoff i ordered so there’s no cognitive dissonance.
the odd thing is, ebay’s search function works is almost always hole-in-one for me. i don’t know why that is, but it’s great.
they have little to no incentive to improve the marketplace when it’s only 12% of revenue, let alone profits. The store is more of a marketing gig for the brand at this point.
12% is not enough to worry about? 12% of Amazon revenue is $73 billion.
Indeed, the last time I looked at their SEC reports (a year or two ago) they made 100% of their money on AWS. They lost money on retail – they’d make more money if they parked the gray vans. They made a small fraction of a percent on real estate. Evidently they lease out a little bit of space they aren’t using anymore.
I don’t think it’s too surprising that eBay’s search works better.
The less cynical aspect of this is that eBay was always an auction house that focused on connecting buyers and sellers of.. well, pretty much anything, especially stuff that people couldn’t easily buy elsewhere. Amazon and Newegg were big first-party businesses that started out competing with specific types of brick and mortar stores, so they didn’t have the incentive or in-house experience to develop search until much later.
The more cynical part is that they have their own giant first-party businesses competing on the same platforms as third party sellers, but of course not by the same rules. Keeping search mediocre, limited, and opaque makes it easy for Amazon et al to game the system and steer you toward the product they want you to buy, whether it’s first or third party, rather than make a truly informed decision.
I like that Ebay has never thrown a “you need a new computer/different operating system/browser” screen at me.
You got your credit card numbers and a shipping address? Bueno.
We’ll happily take your money without complaining about your computer.
Of course always check the images and if it’s the actual item, great.
27 tabs open and they all have the exact same three images? ah, well good luck with our decision.
That’s usually around the point when ebay throws a damned captcha screen on me. ;)
I still take these gambles because Amazon has a decent return policy. eBay has been like this for a while with all the cheap Chinese crap. PayPal returns strongly favor the customer. Wield that policy like a hammer.
When I don’t want to waste time or effort it’s straight to the “authorized distributor”. Always more expensive but always the product I asked for.
I bought a Mitutoyo vernier from ebay from a seemingly reputable seller with good feedback. was a great buy, but not so great i suspected it was fake. All looked amazing, until the battery died. Changing it revealed some very suspicious markings on the circuit board. There’s a lot of comments online about how to spot these fakes, I seem to remember it’s the reset function that behaves differently.
Whether it’s a genuine Mitutoyo, I couldn’t say, but if it has batteries, it’s presumably not a Vernier caliper…
Like the OP, I do use a Mitutoyo Vernier caliper, and part of the reason I prefer it to a digital scale, despite my crumbling eyesight, is that there aren’t any internals, and 100% of the quality is right there to see and feel. I don’t have to care whether it’s a knockoff, because whoever made it has done an excellent job.
Of course, the issue is that if I had only ever used something like my crappy Silverline caliper, I wouldn’t realize how much better-made it could be, and I might well be fooled by a fake. And that would go double for a really specialized gizmo. Plus, even if you can spot a fake straight away it’s still hugely annoying. So I’d only buy this kind of thing direct, or from Digikey / Mcmaster / etc. Who wants to ruin workshop xmas for themselves?
I don’t use “AliExpress”… The name itself suggests problems, so never use it… As for Amazon, I ‘try’ to buy local first, other focused places on web next, and then if I have to then use Amazon as last resort. I’ve not had much, if any problem with Amazon other than sometimes the product must come by stagecoach stopping in every town across America to get here.
Amazon (fulfilled by Amazon) for name-brand. AliExpress for clearly Chinese stuff found on Amazon, and Temu/Ali for random punts on stuff seen in ‘postbag’ yt videos.
I tried to use AliExpress once. Their chosen payment processor demanded my social security number in addition to my credit card details. I told them to f*** off.
The issue I have is trying to find the OEM products in the first place. I had to buy some 30/40A automotive fuses, and was fairly keen (especially given the recent Rossman video on the subject) to get some made by a reputable manufacturer.
Try finding known brand automotive fuses. Its near impossible.
Ben probably already has his fuses, but for the benefit of any readers that are in the same situation, in the US you can get known Littlefuse or Eaton parts from Mouser Electronics…
https://www.mouser.com/c/circuit-protection/fuses/?product%20type=Automotive%20Fuses
In the rest of the world, you can try your local RS Components franchise
https://rs-online.com/
(As an aside, c’mon, RS, it’s 2024, can you please get a better search engine)
Not being an asshole here, just autistic: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/fuses/139?s=N4IgjCBcoCwJxVAYygMwIYBsDOBTANCAPZQDaIAzGAGxxgBMIAuoQA4AuUIAyuwE4BLAHYBzEAF9C9AAwAOWYhApIGHAWJkQMaQAIAgszadIIAKpCB7APKoAsrnTYArn1wTJIRpHKoneZuJAA
https://www.newark.com/c/circuit-protection/fuses-fuse-accessories/fuses/automotive-fuses?brand=littelfuse&fuse-current=40A
Littlefuse has been around 50+ years, maybe a century, and is 34 cents.
Mouser/Farnell/RS/Whoever should be roughly the same, but of course check.
Nono, it’s LittELfuse, not LittLEfuse. Because Littlefuse would just be too common for trademark protection, unlike that super-unique “Analog Devices” or “General Electric.”
This is absolutely Amazon’s problem. You don’t have this problem if you buy from an old-style traditional web retailer like a B&H or Adorama (maybe even Newegg if you ignore the marketplace).
I have recently shifted the majority of my online purchases from Amazon to eBay,
after reading about the unethical tactics Amazon uses against their own sellers.
As an aside, I once ordered a Victorinox SwAK from Amazon but but a cheap Chinese imitation was sent instead. I did get my money back.
“in out community”
I/O, as in the Hackaday.io community!
B^)
Amazon’s substantial systemic failures have been padded by their nearly no-questions-asked return system and fast subscription-model deliveries.
The search system has been gamed since the beginning and has gotten worse with multiple listed vendors (named by random-letter combinatorics) selling the obviously-identical product…and very odd results (likely the result of bad keyword listing by those vendors or their bots). The results can often be maddening and occasionally comedic – a recent search for double-slot shelf standards returned a bevy of Chinese fanny packs with two zippers.
The counterfeiting/fake products/copycat game has been an ongoing evolution – tales of bricks being put into returned graphics-card boxes, mislabeling, misrepresented and outright dishonest listings are legion. I once got a series of hard drives that had obviously been taken out of service (and one that looked like it had been used as a dinner plate). The vendor offered me a partial refund to retract my critical review…which brings me to …
The reviews. These are very obviously fake in many cases, can be gamed (or as in my case bribed into improvement), but are mostly some of the best unedited reviews of a particular product you can find. On many occasions reviews have pointed out a valid, less expensive/better quality/more efficient alternative to the listed product and that’s truly golden. Look in any bricks-and-mortar retail and you’ll find people looking at the Amazon reviews of what they’re holding in their hand.
The result? It used to be said that Best Buy et al. (electronics stores) were showrooms for online purchases and this has reversed and re-established equilibrium to the point that Amazon’s value creation (other than AWS) seems to be in the content of its reviews that drive in-person sales.
The irony of online sales is that once you factor in shipping costs, your price benefit vs. brick & mortar stores vanishes or gets reversed.
Especially for the cheaper items, you can pay 10-50% extra just to get it mailed to you, and they still won’t deliver it to your door. You have to fetch it from a random packet automat within a range of 50 kilometers to your actual delivery address, wasting the same fuel and time as you would going to the local store in person.
I do try to keep the local hardware store in mind when purchasing what they may have in stock. Yes, they are more expensive and not open 24 hours a day. But I am on first name basis with the owner/manager.
In what region of the world? Because Amazon especially pre-covid made a big fuss about being able to reliably receive small orders at your residence within a couple days without huge shipping costs. Of course, they and others sometimes just fold the shipping cost into the price of the item, or split it across a certain minimum quantity. But generally, unless you just don’t have a decent residential delivery service, online retailers will try to use whatever there is before they try and offer some kind of pickup scheme, unless they have real stores that they’re trying to get you to visit.
This is why I don’t buy from online marketplaces if I can avoid it.
If I walk into a K-Mart store (yes they are still a thing in Australia and no they don’t have any connection to the US company although they used to back in the day) and buy an Anko product I know I am getting a genuine Anko product and not a knock-off.
If I walk into a Toymate store and buy a LEGO set, I know I am getting a genuine LEGO set and not a knock-off.
If I walk into an Officeworks store and buy a new cartridge for my Canon printer, I know I am getting a genuine Canon product and not a knock-off.
If I walk into an Ikea store and buy a HÖNSNÄT I know I am getting a genuine HÖNSNÄT and not a knockoff.
The various top online retailers know their success depends on feeding suppliers and the multitudes of logistics companies.
I am sure Amazon is quite depending on the Flannagan Brothers to provide a specialty internal engine ring to be delivered via BTEW Specialty Couriers over to Pratt & Whittney so that a 777-300 can be delivered. But I honestly don’t think Amazon will make a nickel on this part.
Reading the Reddit posting, this was far more likely a return scam, rather than a fake sent from the factory: someone ordered the real Mitutoyo, swapped in a new, in the packaging chinesium calipers and returned it for a refund, and the poor slobs working for the contractor that handles Amazon returns didn’t notice and tossed it in the ‘good, still in packaging pile’ to go back into stock as the real thing.
Weirdly, I recognize that chineseum caliper, I have two just like it I got a few years back at someplace on sale for $25 for the pair. Just pulled one out of my desk drawer to check; yep exact same one.
Since I greatly value my time, money, and reputation, I waste none on places like Amazon or AliExpress. If some hobbyist wants to risk losing theirs to either vendor, that’s on them; I’m not going to stop them. But I’ve yet to regret buying through reputable vendors, and especially with instrumentation & measurement tools, I almost always buy in-person.
The article should mention that there are widespread counterfeit Mitutoyo digital calipers on Amazon, and the only way to tell the difference is to look at the internal pcb or certain hints like the battery brand.
While most machinists know to buy their calipers from proper non-Amazon suppliers, it shouldn’t be like this.
Likely return fraud — order a genuine one, remove the real caliper, put a replacement caliper in its place, send back for a refund. The return checkers aren’t experts and will just see a box with a caliper inside and declare the return to be completed. The box gets put back into inventory to be sent to the next customer.