4 ms·

There’s a dive torch popular amongst newbie divers, the LED Lenser Frogman. I actually have one myself, they’re pretty neat, tho’ obv no substitute for my Light

by gaius 8y ago

There’s a dive torch popular amongst newbie divers, the LED Lenser Frogman. I actually have one myself, they’re pretty neat, tho’ obv no substitute for my Light Monkeys. It should retail for £35-40 but you see knock offs on Amazon for <£7. Now this is potentially a piece of safety-critical equipment, and it’s totally unacceptable for Amazon to not police it better. But commingling the stock so even genuine buyers get the knockoffs is plumbing new depths of sleaze.

petra 8y ago
Does Amazon get the price difference in the case of commingling ?
xbkingx 8y ago
Flashlights (including anything that has a battery and led bulb) and batteries are almost in how brazenly they falsely advertise on Amazon. I would have to say that well over half of torches on Amazon exaggerate their claims by at LEAST 100%. You'll see the same exact 5-mode style with 20 different max output numbers. Most sellers get a counterfeit LED that's half as bright as the real thing, then list the max straight from the CREE spec sheets, ignoring that the numbers come from properly cooled, properly driven, and much more efficient legit bulbs. Battery sellers on Amazon generally tack on 30-80% capacity, but some go bonkers. Go ahead and search for 18650 batteries for those flashlights. Amazing! Panasonic and LG can't get past 3600mAh for theirs and charge ~$25 for a pair, but multiple sellers have 9000mAh+ options for ~$2/cell. And they ALL have 4+ star reviews. It used to be that the garbage sellers would claim around 3500mAh capacity so that there was some plausible deniability, but now they're probably bordering on nuclear fission energy densities. They're selling a 2 liter bottle of water and claiming there's 3 liters in it. Oh, and any 'emergency' or safety related product is fair game. If it fails, either they'll rationalize that it wasn't properly maintained prior to the emergency or the buyer isn't around to complain about it. Needless to say, I don't order anything I actually care about from Amazon. I actually just looked through my 2018 purchases and it reads like the orders I used to place through cheap Chinese sites 5 years ago. I guess I now treat Amazon like a shipping option - $2 premium to get the same junk, but I don't have to wait a month.
- gaius 8y ago
  Yep, it's amazing how many pocket-sized 10,000+ lumen torches with hours of burn time for ludicrously cheap prices there are listed there. A common trick is they not only fit a knock-off LED unit, but running it at higher than rated voltage of the genuine unit too. 10.5v or 12v units run at 14v. As for 18650s I would never buy anything but Panasonic or similar, the risks are just too great, but commingling robs you of the opportunity make an educated decision - you might get genuine Panasonics sourced through Amazon's own supply chain, or counterfeits from anywhere. A lot of this stuff is obviously coming out of the same factories too... reputable brand X will order Y units of their product, which will be made to spec, then the factory will simply keep the production lines running afterwards with much cheaper materials/components and dump that into the supply chain too. Whether it's electronics or clothing or anything else. It's inevitable at some point that someone will die of hypothermia in a fake North Face jacket when the genuine version would have kept them warm.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Not all fakes are worse. Some fake products add features, especially the best features from the competitors product that the 'genuine' products couldn't include for licensing reasons.
    - gaius 8y ago
      Do you have an example? If you are trying to buy product X and what you get is a fake made with inferior materials, what use are extra features that you didn’t even expect to have?
      - xbkingx 8y ago
        I think we middle-aged/older geeks like to harked back to a time when you could drill a hole in the corner of a Double Density floppy disk and it would work fine as a High Density floppy. Subverting the dominant paradigm and sticking it to Big Floppy 1.44MB at a time! But seriously, the reason these Amazotrash sellers get away with it is in part due to consumers not actually needing top of the line stuff. So, if you thought you needed 1000 lumen, but in reality you only needed 500 lm, and then get tricked into buying a torch advertising "5000 lm", but it does the job and has extra modes, plus a bike mount, you kinda come out ahead. It also coexists with that old marketing trick used in movie theater concession sizes to get people to spend more than they intended. (Which is the best deal: S: $5, M:$10, L: $12? Most people would opt for medium, but large is only $2 more (at nearly zero cost to the theater). From that perspective, most of the counterfeits are better because you could either afford more of them or afford counterfeits of higher priced versions. Looking to buy a legit 16GB flash drive for $15, but find a seller with what you think is a legit 32GB version for $15? If it's not broken and actually has 32GB, but is slightly slower than the brand one that was faster than you really needed anyways, seems like a win for you.

by gaius 8y ago

petra 8y ago

Does Amazon get the price difference in the case of commingling ?

xbkingx 8y ago

Flashlights (including anything that has a battery and led bulb) and batteries are almost in how brazenly they falsely advertise on Amazon. I would have to say that well over half of torches on Amazon exaggerate their claims by at LEAST 100%. You'll see the same exact 5-mode style with 20 different max output numbers. Most sellers get a counterfeit LED that's half as bright as the real thing, then list the max straight from the CREE spec sheets, ignoring that the numbers come from properly cooled, properly driven, and much more efficient legit bulbs. Battery sellers on Amazon generally tack on 30-80% capacity, but some go bonkers. Go ahead and search for 18650 batteries for those flashlights. Amazing! Panasonic and LG can't get past 3600mAh for theirs and charge ~$25 for a pair, but multiple sellers have 9000mAh+ options for ~$2/cell. And they ALL have 4+ star reviews. It used to be that the garbage sellers would claim around 3500mAh capacity so that there was some plausible deniability, but now they're probably bordering on nuclear fission energy densities. They're selling a 2 liter bottle of water and claiming there's 3 liters in it. Oh, and any 'emergency' or safety related product is fair game. If it fails, either they'll rationalize that it wasn't properly maintained prior to the emergency or the buyer isn't around to complain about it. Needless to say, I don't order anything I actually care about from Amazon. I actually just looked through my 2018 purchases and it reads like the orders I used to place through cheap Chinese sites 5 years ago. I guess I now treat Amazon like a shipping option - $2 premium to get the same junk, but I don't have to wait a month.

gaius 8y ago
Yep, it's amazing how many pocket-sized 10,000+ lumen torches with hours of burn time for ludicrously cheap prices there are listed there. A common trick is they not only fit a knock-off LED unit, but running it at higher than rated voltage of the genuine unit too. 10.5v or 12v units run at 14v. As for 18650s I would never buy anything but Panasonic or similar, the risks are just too great, but commingling robs you of the opportunity make an educated decision - you might get genuine Panasonics sourced through Amazon's own supply chain, or counterfeits from anywhere. A lot of this stuff is obviously coming out of the same factories too... reputable brand X will order Y units of their product, which will be made to spec, then the factory will simply keep the production lines running afterwards with much cheaper materials/components and dump that into the supply chain too. Whether it's electronics or clothing or anything else. It's inevitable at some point that someone will die of hypothermia in a fake North Face jacket when the genuine version would have kept them warm.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Not all fakes are worse. Some fake products add features, especially the best features from the competitors product that the 'genuine' products couldn't include for licensing reasons.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Do you have an example? If you are trying to buy product X and what you get is a fake made with inferior materials, what use are extra features that you didn’t even expect to have?
    - xbkingx 8y ago
      I think we middle-aged/older geeks like to harked back to a time when you could drill a hole in the corner of a Double Density floppy disk and it would work fine as a High Density floppy. Subverting the dominant paradigm and sticking it to Big Floppy 1.44MB at a time! But seriously, the reason these Amazotrash sellers get away with it is in part due to consumers not actually needing top of the line stuff. So, if you thought you needed 1000 lumen, but in reality you only needed 500 lm, and then get tricked into buying a torch advertising "5000 lm", but it does the job and has extra modes, plus a bike mount, you kinda come out ahead. It also coexists with that old marketing trick used in movie theater concession sizes to get people to spend more than they intended. (Which is the best deal: S: $5, M:$10, L: $12? Most people would opt for medium, but large is only $2 more (at nearly zero cost to the theater). From that perspective, most of the counterfeits are better because you could either afford more of them or afford counterfeits of higher priced versions. Looking to buy a legit 16GB flash drive for $15, but find a seller with what you think is a legit 32GB version for $15? If it's not broken and actually has 32GB, but is slightly slower than the brand one that was faster than you really needed anyways, seems like a win for you.