Increasing annoyed with SHEIN items on Amazon

[Towerinthegarden]

I’m getting increasingly annoyed with buying things on Amazon, or other websites only to find when the item arrives it is from a Chinese seller selling their SHEIN or Temu items for an inflated price.

For children’s toys and clothing I think it’s especially important to buy from somewhere reputable, but increasingly with sites acting as marketplaces you don’t actually know whether it is a Debenhams, B&Q or Amazon sourced item or if it it a SHEIN or Temu item.

Im not so bothered about overpaying but I am really worried about the chemical content.

Etsy is like this now too.

5% bespoke handmade products, 95% mass produced crap.

I don’t understand why people get so up in arms about Shein when loads of things are from there.

Such as these collars.
https://thecollarcollection.com/

You can get some marble planets for £7 or for £42 but feel all middle class because they also sell amber teething necklaces.

Yes it’s a swamp of junk, whenever looking for anything at all. I wish there were actual shops, like there used to be. I don’t want to look at 200 tin openers, when mine breaks.

It means you have to filter all searches, by brand.

YABU for only noticing this now. Amazon was temu before temu was in fashion.

It's usually pretty obvious which is the 'crap from China' if you decide to order it. The hard part is finding genuine branded items, if that's what you're looking for, especially for things like memory cards, power banks etc. I wouldn't buy anything like that from Amazon etc any more.

But for clothing, the main benefit of getting it from Amazon is that you can return it and get a refund for free, and the reviews are generally more reliable, especially if you can see one with a photograph of the actual item rather than the AI/photoshopped versions. I've had some really decent swimwear from there that I wouldn't buy from Shein, because the chances of it fitting and me liking what turns up seems so low it's not worth bothering with.

Agreed OP. I do try and point it out to the Shein/Temu haters who think that stuff from Amazon is magically better regulated for safety/quality. It's not.

I've bought a few items from Etsy and agree the quality is variable and not cheap. I've alway bought items from EBay as you can get your money back fairly easily, but agree it's the same shite. Anything I spend a lot on I go to a shop to get it or just buy from an online retailer where returns are easy.

I've never bought from TEMU or SHEIN because you get a shit ton of weird, annoying pop ups saying everything is free before you even get a chance to look at anything. Obviously there's the other issues as well but I haven't even been able to be curious with all that crap popping up.

My issue with SHEIN is that products repeatedly fail safety tests either for small parts or chemical components. You then buy from a UK based retailer only to find rather than it being one of their products that will have had to comply to UK safety standards, you are buying directly from an overseas company skinned as Amazon or whoever, their marketplace is adding legitimacy.

Honestly if I am buying a garden spade, that’s one thing, but children’s toys is another

If you must use amazon, check who the seller is and what the brand is. If it is unclear, assume it is untested, unregulated Chinese slop. Similarly for ebay and etsy.

Of course lots on Amazon is no better. It is a marketplace just like shein and temu. All equally awful.

Whenever you find an item of clothing/product etc that you like, take a screen shot and search on Google lens. I find a cheaper seller 90% of the time!

You also regularly find alternative images of the item, which can reveal it’s not as nice as you thought. Or that it’s also being sold on shein/Temu and isn’t the level of quality you originally believed!