Another counterfeit issue they have that will not be solved by this is the “REPLACEMENT PART FOR OEM FOOBAR-123” listings.

I’ve had quite a few repairs over the last few years for household appliances and pool pumps and such. It’s very common to find a listing for a heating element for a Samsung dryer or a Heyward filter diverter being listed with a misleading title and often further listing the manufacturer as, say, Samsung itself.

I got screwed after buying a dryer heating element for $80 recommended via a reputable YouTube DIY channel. Silly me neglected to check the comments and lo and behold 50%+ are complaints that this heating element dies after 6-8 weeks, just past the 30 day refund window…

This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.

Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.

Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.

In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.

The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.

Occasionally the knockoffs are better than the "real" thing.

I once had a fleet of HP servers that had storage parts constantly failing. HP techs couldn't do anything useful about it, they just kept replacing the parts with authentic HP replacements.

Then HP ran out of the parts, probably due to the failure rates. Out of desperation we bought some cheap knockoffs to keep things running until the HP parts came back into stock. Those cheap knockoffs worked perfectly and were reliable, zero issues. Much better than the HP parts. We ended up buying enough of those parts to replace all the HP parts.

Many times the expensive official parts are literally the cheap knockoffs with more steps. And sometimes high-quality knockoffs are competing with the low-quality branded versions.

There would be enormous value in being able to trace the true provenance and supply chain for everything you can buy. It would be extremely challenging due to the incentives to misrepresent this information.