Wednesday Morning Rant

Not in quantity, but in reliability and quality. This decline is not universally true, but it is increasingly true in large online marketplaces. Where an eCommerce outlet has become a platform rather than a store as such, things are increasingly going screwy. Knockoffs abound, outright scams are more common and there is an apparent absence of accountability. The mechanism that is supposed to check excesses - purchaser reviews - are gamed more than ever thanks to AI, shills and the sheer volume of content.

I have experienced several - if you'll pardon the pun - prime examples of this on the largest retailer-cum-platform, Amazon. Whatever you need, you'll find it - sort of. You may find something real or something fake. You may find a reputable brand or you may find something with an unpronounceable name strung together to form some unique string that can be registered as a business name. You may find genuine good deals, or you may find dangerous trash and outright fraud. It's often impossible to tell which is which, and it's become a serious problem.

One example is batteries. 18650 batteries are rechargeable lithium batteries that power everything from flashlights to RC cars. They're found inside many power tool battery packs. Tons of rechargeable products from blenders to air blowers have them buried somewhere inside the works. The 18650 is an industry-standard form factor with myriad uses and fairly well understood and fixed rules. The ways they are rated - capacity in milliamp hours, discharge amperage, protected or unprotected circuitry, etc. - are also industry standard.

Go buy an 18650 on Amazon. I dare you. You'll find tons of products, like high-capacity 3300mAh unprotected cells for just six bucks a piece, or stupendous capacity 9900mAh cells for the same price. Unbelievable, right? Well, yeah. It's because it's a lie, and it's endemic on Amazon. The numbers are fiction. You'll get an 18650 cell, and it will fit, but it sure as hell isn't going to be 3300mAh, much less the preposterous nearly 10,000mAh I see on offer. If you look at reputable manufacturers, you'll find that the top manufacturers' cells top out at around 4,000mAh, and most don't get that high. I made the mistake of buying "3,500mAh" 18650s on Amazon and, after testing them, found that they were 2,000maH - nothing special, and bad value at the price. They probably aren't dangerous, but it was still a scam.

How much is a real, actual 18650 from a reputable manufacturer like Panasonic or Samsung? A real, good, unprotected, 3,000mAh high-drain cell from Samsung purchased from a specialty online retailer will run you about eight bucks. The low-drain versions with higher capacity will run you half that - less than the fake batteries. The fakes on Amazon and Walmart aren't even cheap, they're just plentiful and lie in wait for unsuspecting customers on the country's largest sites.

Batteries are rife with what is at best deceit. Electrical connectors like lever nuts are a sea of unknown lookalikes of real products. Flashlights claim impossible output levels approaching full daylight. Car horns claim to be loud enough to be heard in the next county. Leaf blowers claim to push preposterous quantities of air. Fans claim to be quiet but you'll have to shout over them. Actual counterfeit goods seem to pop up more than ever, if people who claim to receive them are to be believed.

It's endemic. If you want fake goods that, charitably, overstate their marketing, you can find them on the big eCommerce platforms. From batteries and electrical equipment to can openers and dry-erase pens, it's a sea of undifferentiated noise. It's become increasingly difficult to separate out the signal and find something that does what it says on the tin, performs well and is priced competitively. "Real products with decent value" appears to no longer be the business model of any eCommerce "platform."

The large platforms apparently embrace the "Temu, but faster" approach to operations - so when I need stuff like batteries, I get them from specialty stores now. When I need stuff like a multimeter or lever nuts, I'm going to my local Ace or Home Depot. It may cost a few dollars more, but at least the products are real - and often, it doesn't even cost more.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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