I'm not sure about Amazon Basics, but with Amazon's Choice products they're plainly not evaluating products before selecting them. LockpickingLawyer on youtube has done reviews on several Amazon's Choice locks and safes and they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.

Amazon's Choice is a purely algorithmic tag decided by the computer. It's utterly meaningless. I guess they change periodically on some reason known only to the code.

Amazon Basics must have had at least a couple of humans involved to agree getting it branded Amazon.

Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place. If Amazon is so careless with their brand in that case, as a consumer I'd feel like a sucker if I trusted there brand to mean much when their employees are evaluating products rather than algorithms.

Maybe the algorithm seemed like a good idea at the time but later turned sour. If that's the case, why hasn't Amazon yanked the program? If they don't terminate this program when it performs poorly, I don't trust them to keep other programs in line either.

> Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place.

On the premise, sure. But on the individual items, I've always assumed "Amazon's Choice" meant "Best for Amazon", i.e. high margin, low number of returns (which would reduce margin).

Not necessarily what I would choose.

excellent point, it's Amazon's choice, not yours

Well I might have had trust in Amazon as a brand maybe a decade ago, as it got to the brand and product I wanted to buy pretty effectively. They've intentionally diluted it by filling their site with endless marketplace shite, and dodgy searches that hide brand leaders to show no-name garbage, and littering it with adverts for other no-name garbage. It's quite often I struggle to find the listing for the market leader directly, but end up there via a few "customers also bought/looked at" links. I go to Amazon less and less as a result.

So assuming Bezos isn't a complete numpty, that's intentional. Maybe Amazon's brand is completely disposable to fund Blue Streak.

Today I got more trust in Poundshop and eBay that I will get the right product easily than I do in Amazon. The old department stores, many now failed, sank or swam on the strength of their brand being a real indicator of quality.

Amazon employees have complained to Bezos about the state of Amazon's search. Bezos' response every time I've heard it is along the lines of "meh, I think our search is pretty good, quit your complaining."

Maybe it's intentional, or maybe he's deluded. I don't know. But either way, I doubt it's going to get fixed any time soon.

Maybe an urban legend, but I thought I read somewhere that the version of Amazon that Bezos personally sees is quite different than the one you and I see, due to all his various little one-off complaints and product micromanagement. Legend has it that engineering gave up trying to make sense of the requests and just gave him his own environment that does everything he thinks it should do. If true, then the search he sees might actually be pretty good for him.

Like all urban legends, there is likely a core of truth in the story. Certainly Bezos is known for micromanaging and arbitrarily overruling employees' decisions on everything from strategy to product design. Now, if a leader really does have great instinct, this can work out for the better (like Jobs). And I think in some areas, Bezos does (he has done surprisingly well with their IT strategy). But I know that in others he doesn't, and he just botches stuff (like many horrible Kindle design decisions).

Something seems off about that story. What's the point of requesting changes to a version of the site only he uses? I can't imagine he spends a lot of time surfing amazon.com as a regular user. Plus, not seeing the regular site means he might miss issues with the public website that he would want to change. Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.

> Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.

Yea that was the gist of it—when you log in as Jeff you (unbeknownst) get a different frontend, with all his various special cases and bad ideas that the PMs wanted to keep out of the real Amazon. It does sound incredible so probably false, but amusing to think about. I admit to having wanted to do something like that a nonzero number of times.

It’s suggesting that Amazon literally shadowbanned him.

This sounds like a fable invented by someone familiar with the story of the phony villages that Grigory Potemkin built along the Volga to impress Empress Catherine II.

Why do you need to trust Amazon? Just look at the reviews. Most AmazonBasics stuff has thousands of 4+ star reviews. It’s clearly distinguishable from the products with 15 questionable reviews.

Amazon reviews have become almost entirely useless once they began bundling like items. I've had cases of ordering an item only to receive a similar item from an entirely different manufacturer or seller. Looking at the reviews you'll find a number of different products being reviewed all under one product page which makes it impossible to actually gauge the quality of what you're going to receive

"Amazon's Choice" was given to products in gross violation of US health and safety regulations, as revealed by a previous WSJ article.

I really enjoy the LockpickingLawyer's videos, but I'd imagine that the threat model of the average Amazon (or Walmart/Home Depot/etc.) buyer is such that any basic lock is enough deterrence for 95%+ of scenarios. It could just be that their evaluation criteria don't match his.

I get the "thieves don't pick locks" thing, but I really think it's sleazy as hell if a lock marketed as "high security" can be raked open in one second. That's a low-skill attack. In this case he didn't even have to rake it, because the locks were unshielded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1_P5oqf6Y An unshielded padlock may as well be a warded lock like you'd find on a child's diary.

You are correct. Locks keep honest people honest.

Locks keep lock-picking ignorant and insufficiently motivated dishonest people honest too.

I don't think that statement makes any sense. Why do honest people need anything to keep them honest?

Probably something more like: locks marginally aid in diverting lazy / opportunistic thieves.

> Why do honest people need anything to keep them honest?

Curiosity and children.

That should really be the takeaway from any of his videos. Anything you buy consumer-grade can be cracked instantly by a skilled locksmith or within maybe a few tens of minutes by an average thief. The number of locks that I've ever really seen him struggle to pick can probably be counted on a single hand.

Like a safe - a lock buys you time, and hopefully the thief chooses a loud method of entry that attracts attention.

Thieves don't pick locks, if they want to get in something they either cut or pry their way in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-9vWa-C44I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjHnklj6PAs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ViUdd-2LM

> LockpickingLawyer on youtube has done reviews on several Amazon's Choice locks and safes and they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.

So basically Amazon's Choice locks are about the same as 95% of consumer locks on the market.

>they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.

Isn't this just a property of most locks in general? I was under the impression that there are very few consumer locks that will stand up to someone with tools and a weekend of practice.

To be fair, they're generally around the same quality as Master locks. :D

Those two programs have nothing to do with each other.

It reflects poorly on the brand in general. If I can't trust Amazon's Choice, how can I trust anything Amazon decides to put their name on?

You can't, and you shouldn't. If this dichotomy is what raised the issue to our attention then we should be glad that it happened.

Like when prime simply meant two day shipping?

In fairness, very few locks can stand up to LPL for very long.

They recalled a quarter million power banks because they were catching fire.

Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn't have better quality control than anyone else.

To be fair, Samsung had to scrap a whole phone model because of battery problems. The Boeing 787 suffered with problems of batteries catching fire (and according to some reports still does). It's a tricky problem to avoid.

With a power-supply it's not a hard problem to avoid. You have to hire independent engineers to evaluate the product design and establish testing procedures to verify that the product isn't unsafe. And you have to do QA and design verification during receiving on all batches of product to confirm that the manufacturer followed the design. I've never had a power supply catch fire and I've done some really dumb stuff in my lab. Frankly it's a matter of paying for UL/CE marks(including testing) and actually looking at the component layout, and Amazon doesn't strike me as the kind of company to respect that kind of QA/Verification work.

Batteries are a different story because they're basically tiny plastic bombs. Somehow Samsung managed to deliver almost 15 years of Android phones before having their batteries catch fire, and that was almost certainly a result of skipping essential QA/Verification processes because they've never had a problem before.

How is a power bank different than a battery? Isn't the power bank just several batteries crammed in a casing, with a power-out port?

Most modern rechargeable batteries have fairly sophisticated chemistry and thus charge controllers needed -- you don't just dump electricity into them blindly and then take it out. It's not quite rocket surgery, but there's a reasonable level of engineering involved, especially if you want optimal performance with the newer standards (which increase voltage on devices which support it, etc.)

Often times that "reasonable level of engineering" only needs to be slapping a ten cent IC on a board with some manufacturer default application circuit.

jschwartzi was talking about power supplies (i.e., devices that transform mains AC power to DC power), not power banks.

Ah, I read "power bank", as that's what ikeyboy mentioned above. And when you search (google) "power bank" the results are all about portable batteries for topping up phones and whatnot. Does Amazon even brand/re-sell power supplies like jschwartzi is talking about?

Really? Do people describe chargers or power supplies as power banks? Surely the 'bank' part of it implies some kind of storage.

I do hear chargers with a large number of ports called "power banks" - I think the implication is that it's like a line of ATMs serving many customers.

No, the implication is that people don’t understand the difference. These are the people who call every photo with people in a “selfie”.

Anecdotally I've spoken to people who compete with Amazon private label in electronics and they tell me Amazon doesn't care about quality, and that the factories they were buying from were known to be lower quality.

I've also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.

The issue, then, is how do I guarantee that the Anker branded product I'm buying through Amazon is genuinely Anker manufactured. I'm of the understanding that Amazon comingle stock from different supply chains in their warehouses so presumably I can't trust them to be supplying genuine hardware.

Most Anker stuff is sold by only Anker, so that wouldn't be a problem.

In that specific instance, Anker also sells directly from their website, so you can shop there if you're concerned about counterfeited merchandise.

Perhaps products should include a tiny circuit (e.g. challenge-response) that can prove that the product is genuine.

Anker are difficult to gauge, I've a few products of theirs, mostly bought a few years ago, with nothing recent - those have been excellent quality and value. Yet I've also started to notice precisely identical unknown brands for most of their products on Amazon.

So I no longer have any certainty. Are Anker merely badge engineering some random white label product, or are Amazon / Anker just not caring or able to do anything about dozens of clear counterfeits?

Are those identical products being sold as Anker, or under different brands? If it's different brands then it's not counterfeit just to make a product that looks similar to another one.

There's similar and completely indistinguishable, except for brand name and logo. e.g. their desk lamps, also their mice. Seems to be the case for almost every Anker product I remember looking at recently.

Nothing illegal about that unless Anker has a design patent.

You don't need a patent to protect a design. There's trademark, copyright and design protections, not just patents.

So maybe Anker are uniquely incompetent in selecting suppliers. Not specifying in the contract with factories not to copy whatever widget they produce for Anker, not registering any of their designs. Yet aside from a) products within the same group ostensibly from different brands and b) same idea but clearly made by someone else, few other companies seem affected. They'll have a few products counterfeited. Not most. It's the sort of thing that might encourage you to be very careful on third, fourth and subsequent products.

I suppose it makes a case to avoid Anker and the identical copies, as clearly inept. Few other companies appear to be quite so afflicted. I'm not convinced it's the answer though. Outside the purely generic: white T shirts, tungsten light bulbs and such, you see very few precisely identical products.

You said they were not copying the brand, so it's not trademark infringement nor counterfeit.

You keep using the word counterfeit when it does not apply. Copyright is also not applicable unless there's a work of art printed on the product (like cell phone cases).

Most brands making commodity products don't get protection for the design, because the design isn't that unique. Search for "fast chargers for Samsung" and you'll see tons of chargers identical to the Samsung charger except with a different name. Same for Apple.

Examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Pantom-Adaptive-Charging-Compatible-S...

https://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Charging-Charger-Compatible-...

https://www.amazon.com/Panmy-Foldable-Portable-Charging-Comp...

https://www.amazon.com/ByCallMax-Adapter-Original-Certified-...

There are well known, widely applied design protections that are not patents.

Here's the EU's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_rights_in_th...

Which protects "the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation". It applies if they are novel and/or if they have unique character.

The equivalent in the US is a design patent.

I appreciated your response but as far as I can tell, they were asking whether Anker is badge engineering generic products or is a victim of counterfeiting, which I think is a slightly different question that I'm also looking for the answer to.

The only way it would be counterfeit is if they sell it as an Anker product or print Anker on the product.

My assumption would be that the same factory that makes Anker products is also selling the same designs to competitors - it's also possible that a different factory just cloned it.

Note that even if it's the same factory, they could have different quality control for different clients. So quality can differ even on identical designs.

AmazonBasics isn't any more trustworthy than any of the junk you find on AliExpress or at Wal-Mart/Target/Best Buy. (Except that it has a good return policy backing it, I think)

Amazon is at least liable (theoretically, at least) if they sell an AmazonBasics product that winds up giving my kids lead poisoning, and will have a lot harder time disappearing into the wind to avoid a lawsuit. They disclaim any liability for third-party sellers.

Sure, but will a lawsuit unpoison your kid?

Unless Amazon is currently testing products for lead before recommending them, which somehow I doubt, then the potential of a lawsuit against Amazon isn't actually protecting your child.

There's at least someone with deep pockets to go after, which is very much not the case for some random drop shipper in China.

It makes sense- if Anker's batteries start exploding, nobody will buy Anker's batteries again, and that's a significant part of their brand.

If Amazon's batteries start exploding, it's not quite the same magnitude. People will still shop at Whole Foods.

Samsung doesn't have a problem selling phones

Samsung also has a very long track record of producing cell phones that are deemed safe which neither Anker nor Amazon can match in batteries. You either need an extensive positive record to easily bounce back or need to be willing to write it off as an auxiliary business (e.g. if Amazon had battery issues).

People buy Samsung phones because they're good phones, people buy Anker batteries because they're good batteries. If they start exploding people will find some other, better battery brand.

Admittedly a phone that explodes is a bad phone, but Samsung can still sell its "good phone" brand the same way Apple can still sell its laptops.

My understanding, and this might just be marketing PR I honestly don't know, is that Anker sends their own QA people to the factories in China, so they're able to meet a higher standard. I always rely on them for battery stuff, and now USB cables since apparently no one else can make cables that reliably work to connect my phone to my car except them. I went through half a dozen different brands before theirs finally worked and remained working.

I’m sure Amazon’s competitors are the best source for unbiased feedback about the quality of Amazon-branded products.

>It's a tricky problem to avoid.

Its really not though, its just that between insurance and the courts its currently cheaper to enter products into the stream of commerce that will catch fire x% of times and hurt Y people costing $z, than it is to manufacture/supply/distribute/retail a product that won't catch fire in 100% of cases.

Hell even when z exceeds the cost of proper manufacturing, these companies are significantly more likely to spend money lobbying for changes to insurance and/or products liability litigation than fix the products to make the current formula work rather than spend more money on the cost of the product(s).

You’re assuming nothing bad ever happens with the “name brand” product, which is patently bullshit. Every consumer product I. The shelves is cost engineered to death.

I replied to a comment talking about defective Samsung and Boeing products...those are name brand products.

However, knock off products are usually worse, at least if you are burned by an exploding Samsung or die in a defective Boeing...you and/or your family will be compensated as these companies are identifiable and insured. If you are burned by an exploding knock off, odds are: 1) you won't even be able to identify the manufacturer or seller; 2) you won't have jurisdiction to sue the manufacturer or seller; and 3) they probably aren't insured and will just fold up shop and start anew.

To be fair, "bringing manufacturing back to America" would bring these problems back as well. Yes, it's the manufacturer's fault. It's really the company hiring the manufacturer who's at fault, though. Cash Rules Everything Around Me and all that.

If the company writing the checks can write checks to people who are going to cut corners, people will die. Full stop.

Amazon take egregious shortcuts on oversight for counterfeit goods, which they are compelled by law to not sell, so expecting them to suddenly practice due diligence on stuff coming out of a factory in China is just laughable.

Most US goods come manufactured from China. While China has a large counterfeit market, it's mostly restricted to inside the country.

>While China has a large counterfeit market, it's mostly restricted to inside the country

There are a huge number of online retailers where you can purchase chinese counterfeit items in the US. If you're in Seattle I can take you down a few streets where you can openly buy counterfeits as well, and I experienced the same in LA and New York. It definitely isn't mostly restricted to China, there is a massive market for counterfeit goods from China in the US

Compared to China, there really isn't. Literally everything in the stores in Chinese markets is counterfeit. I've been there. Fake gucci, fake airpods, fake drones, fake action figures, etc. I doubt you'll find any of this as wide spread, even in major cities, in the US.

And most of counterfeit items online are obviously from China or from Chinese sites. They aren't from the US.

And considering nearly all US clothing comes from China and is not considered fake and is largely the same with electronics and even toys, it isn't so much a quality issue when you get things from China. It more has to do with what company you get it from.

The other vendors who bought from that factory and rebranded them had the same problem did not issue a recall.

Amazon almost certainly has better quality control that most of the sellers on their platform. The vast majority of their sellers are extremely low effort, one or two person companies who take advantage of how easy it is to source and ship goods in the modern age.

If you weight all sellers equally, sure. If you weight by sales volume, I suspect they'd come out behind.

Anecdotally, all the amazon basics products I've tried have been garbage and were promptly returned

actually having an entity to do the recall is quite an improvement!

At least they recalled them! I don't think random no-name brand #12345 would have done that.

For most (70-80%) of the Amazon basic products I've tried, the quality and durability has been significantly lower than the product that it tried to copy. Not to mention no one wants wants their gear branded with Basic on it. I usually try to avoid Amazon basic products if possible.

Amazon Basics are white label products or specifically contract manufactured for Amazon. I am using an Amazon Basic keyboard right now, works great and was a few bucks cheaper than the Logitec Model. So far, I am a fan of them.

Not sure about that. 2 out of 3 Amazon Basics speakers I bought (cheaper, USB powered) died within a year. And none of the Amazon Basics USB cables I've ever tried support quick charging properly.

Clearly anecdotal, but I bought Amazon Basics USB cables that were absolute garbage.

They're the only brand of USB-C cable I'm willing to buy right now for my MBP chargers. The Apple branded ones all heat up too much and do the yellow discolorment thing, the Anker branded ones didn't hold up for more than a couple of weeks, and I had bad luck with some of the random brands I found, too.

My only complaint is I charge at 65W instead of 87, but it seems to only be slightly slower in practice.

But, it's also the nylon braided stuff, so it's probably built to different quality standards and by different people than the vanilla USB cables.

> Amazon Basics products

haven't had much luck with their Amazon Basics keyboards... went through 2 and then gave up and bought an IBM one...

Then why are they fiddling with the results to favor Amazon products, instead of just ranking by quality?