> What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken.

The sellers are in China and the products are ordered internationally. The sellers don’t care about your local return laws.

Then the fix is simple. Buy it locally or from a company from there. They might not care but then the local seller (amazon for example) is on the hook (in any country with a proper customer protection at least).

In France, for example, it's legal for the customer to be on the hook for return shipping. This is often the case with smaller merchants, but even bigger ones have this policy. Example: Darty [0]

So if you have to pay for the crap to be shipped all the way back to China, I can see how that may become expensive.

[0] Darty return policy, in French: https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/ind...

Return shipping is usually up to the customer and shipping back to China is much more expensive than the initial China to the US charges. Sometimes it exceeds the cost of the item itself to try to send it back so it's just cheaper to eat the loss.

> Return shipping is usually up to the customer

Not for orders from Amazon or Wal Mart, the two biggest places you'd tend to buy cheap Chinese products from.

That's down to store policies though not any legal requirement. And in the case of Walmart you're not shipping back to China anyways you ship back to some distribution hub/return center in the US. Amazon too often the products are staged and returned to the US.