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The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.
by jastanton 7y ago
The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.
- ikeboy 7y agoThey 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.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoTo 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.
- ikeboy 7y agoAnecdotally 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.
- VRay 7y agoAmazonBasics 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)
- ceejayoz 7y agoAmazon 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.
- partialrecall 7y agoSure, 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.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThere's at least someone with deep pockets to go after, which is very much not the case for some random drop shipper in China.
- roywiggins 7y agoIt 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.
- bluedino 7y agoSamsung doesn't have a problem selling phones
- roywiggins 7y agoPeople 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.
- vinay427 7y agoSamsung 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).
- dpark 7y agoI’m sure Amazon’s competitors are the best source for unbiased feedback about the quality of Amazon-branded products.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoAnker 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?
- ikeboy 7y agoAre 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.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThere'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.
- ikeboy 7y agoNothing illegal about that unless Anker has a design patent.
- vinay427 7y agoI 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.
- ikeboy 7y agoThe 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.
- Spare_account 7y agoThe 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.
- ikeboy 7y agoMost Anker stuff is sold by only Anker, so that wouldn't be a problem.
- jfim 7y agoIn that specific instance, Anker also sells directly from their website, so you can shop there if you're concerned about counterfeited merchandise.
- amelius 7y agoPerhaps products should include a tiny circuit (e.g. challenge-response) that can prove that the product is genuine.
- otakucode 7y agoMy 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.
- jschwartzi 7y agoWith 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.
- alistairSH 7y agoHow 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?
- nokcha 7y agojschwartzi was talking about power supplies (i.e., devices that transform mains AC power to DC power), not power banks.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoReally? Do people describe chargers or power supplies as power banks? Surely the 'bank' part of it implies some kind of storage.
- Pxtl 7y agoI 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.
- throwaway_law 7y ago>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).
- TylerE 7y agoYou’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.
- throwaway_law 7y agoI 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.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoTo 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.
- benologist 7y agoAmazon 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.
- jshowa3 7y agoMost US goods come manufactured from China. While China has a large counterfeit market, it's mostly restricted to inside the country.
- okmokmz 7y ago>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
- jshowa3 7y agoCompared 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.
- jandrese 7y agoThe other vendors who bought from that factory and rebranded them had the same problem did not issue a recall.
- liveoneggs 7y agoactually having an entity to do the recall is quite an improvement!
- toasterlovin 7y agoAmazon 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.
- DangerousPie 7y agoAt least they recalled them! I don't think random no-name brand #12345 would have done that.
- partialrecall 7y agoI'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.
- kortilla 7y agoThose two programs have nothing to do with each other.
- partialrecall 7y agoIt 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?
- Spare_account 7y agoYou 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.
- mattrp 7y agoLike when prime simply meant two day shipping?
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoAmazon'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.
- partialrecall 7y agoPresumably 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.
- zip1234 7y agoClearly anecdotal, but I bought Amazon Basics USB cables that were absolute garbage.
- cthalupa 7y agoThey'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.
- hahamrfunnyguy 7y agoAmazon 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.
- babaganoosh89 7y agoFor 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.
- OrgNet 7y ago> 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...
- PavlovsCat 7y agoThen why are they fiddling with the results to favor Amazon products, instead of just ranking by quality?
- tracker1 7y agoNot 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.