I was irate, having paid $10 for these. So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again.
I've been far more aware as of late that whenever I search for something (say the staple gun I recently got my wife) all I get are offbrand or knockoff results showing for often several pages. I have to go, figure out which brands are reputable and then come back to actually make my purchase.
I'd rather just go to a brick and mortar at this point. I'm definitely not renewing my amazon prime.
I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.
I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba.
It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.
This is normal.
For instance, when I work on my bicycle, I have to use a $40 Park Tool to cut brake lines and shifter cables. The $40 tool delivers far better results than you could ever get from a conventional wire cutter.
I replaced them with $5 Stanley wire cutters that had 0 issue dealing with guitar strings.
So what happened is I was given a 10c piece of junk and paid $10 for the privilege of being ripped off.
https://www.stewmac.com/Luthier_Tools/Types_of_Tools/Pliers_...
https://www.knipex.com/nc/en/products/?page=group_detail&par...
If you ever try to cut a spring, you will get the same issue.
A few people have told you that wire cutters come in two forms: hardened and not hardened, and that if you wish to cut steel you should buy cutters that are rated for steel. The price does not tell you this information. The data sheet for the tool does.
Here's a pair of snips that cost over £50. I'd be displeased if you borrowed mine and used them to cut guitar wire. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/
One thing you can't see in the images is that these cutters tell you what wire you can cut on them: https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE
If you want to cut steel you need snips that specifically say they can cut steel. These don't have to be expensive: Here are some for £7. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/
I recognize I don't have the heaviest duty cut-through-anything shears that I could have with more money, but where I'm mainly doing light jobs like speaker wire and guitar strings it's not a problem... unless the snips themselves are terrible.
I don't expect to have to replace the Stanley set unless they become rusty from disuse.
It was just me getting ripped off.
The $5 guitar string tool will work every time, though.
Side note: I'm sad to see NewEgg headed in this same eBay-clone direction.
I can look up a seller to make sure he's sourced an item properly, for example, newegg sells SD cards on ebay so I know newegg is sourcing SD cards properly and I'm good to go. Or I look up a seller and they claim to be a licensed Nikon supplier I know I'm probably ok or I could even call up Nikon to verify they're a licensed supplier.
If I want something fake/cloned I know I can just buy cheap from the chinese supplier and I don't have to pay a markup to a middle man. But if I want it right away, I can order from someone in the same state as me and pay a couple extra bucks, and I know it's the clone cuz the picture is the exact same.
You get a lot of information on ebay that you don't get on Amazon.
Amazon to the best of my knowledge does make you return items for refunds even when they are frauds.
Which means it's not fine for Electronics. Their returns policy seems to be assuming that everyone attempting a return is malicious and trying to cheat them.
The lack of free shipping seems insane given how much the products already cost, and the "Return minus 15% restocking fee" really doesn't make me want to come back.
Who do you recommend for electronics?
One of the weird things about Amazon is that it doesn't give you an easy way to provide photos for the item you yourself are selling (e.g. your used copy of a book), and if your item is similar enough to an existing item (e.g. same UPC or ISBN or whatever), Amazon will railroad you toward using the existing listing (but will still put you in the "new and used" list).
In other words: the same Amazon quirks that seem to benefit counterfeiters also seem to benefit my grandpa's charity, so I guess I should be grateful and appreciative when I get a knockoff at my doorstep.
But that then leads onto the whole fake component issue. For example the component will be a optocoupler but the dirt cheap knock off supply may not be using the same level of quality or a knock off component as those found in genuine power supplies which _could_ create a High to Low voltage path if that part failed.
Even a very cheap and simplified design can do that. I wouldn't say "a lot" at all, maybe a few percent of the cost at most. It's a corner that could possibly be cut, but it's not one of the bigger corners.
> Neither Sinar Harian nor its English-language peer the New Strait Times asserted that the youngster was electrocuted by the earphones he was wearing, but that was the conclusion reached by a number of international publications, including widely-read U.S.-based Vice and Teen Vogue, both of whom aggregated the story.
...
> As an emergency room doctor, Uren& stopped short of calling the notion impossible because “I have seen some strange things in my career thus far,” but he added the story that the teen died from being electrocuted by earbuds “strains credibility.”
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/electrocuted-by-earphones/
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/store-which...
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-o...
"According to the suit, the site operated by Gentile offers to provide fake “verified reviews” for a premium, telling the sellers that they can ship empty boxes to reviewers involved in the scheme, to trick Amazon into thinking that the product had actually been purchased."
But searching for products in the local area / at local stores is nearly impossible.
Using google is useless, everything is e-commerce listings.
And even if you search many local stores directly they make it nearly impossible to determine if the products are actually in stock/in store vs part of their ecommerce offering / available in store in 3-5 days.
Does anyone know any decent options?
You can also return or exchange items at a different Walmart if you keep your receipt.
The Canadian Wal-Mart website was impossible in this regard, but in the US you can search only in store, today and within xx miles. Appreciate it.
At one point I considered doing this as a business - paying people to walk through the store recording video that's then used to fill out a catalogue. Maybe offer it as a service to businesses.
The good news is that there are plenty of smaller online stores that tend to be a bit more specialized, and as long as they accept something reasonably secure like PayPal or Bitcoin, I'm a lot less nervous about shopping on those sites instead.
I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, sifting through reviews that can no longer be trusted.