I'm especially annoyed at the electrical equipment category. 20 years ago it would be hard to find even a power strip or AC adapter for sale in America that wasn't UL listed. Even dollar store merchandise usually had the label.

Today, you can only buy two kinds of such products: The (I assume Alibaba-sourced) Amazon Marketplace, fulfilled by Amazon items which are never UL listed, and brand-name items from a brick and mortar store, which cost 8x the price of the equivalent 'Amazon special.'

I know "UL" is just a label and that not having it doesn't necessarily prove anything, but absent any form of certification, an device on Amazon Marketplace may come from a vendor that has literally never even submitted a sample for quality testing to anyone. BigClive on YouTube has shown some shocking (literally) teardowns.

I've heard that insurance companies will deny a claim if your house burns down due to a non-UL-listed device causing a fire. Terrifying.

"UL" is not just a label, it's one of the biggest nongovernmental product safety testing organization. I don't know where it stands relative to consumer reports.

> insurance companies

UL stands for underwriter's (aka insurers) laboratories

Consumer reports does reviews, whereas underwriter's laboratories (UL) performs failure testing. What UL does is a magnitude more in depth, even considering how much more in-depth Consumer Reports reviews are than most news sources.

Sure I just meant by volume and scope

I don't think they mean "just a label" as in "not worth caring about", they just meant that the label is an indicator of quality, not the cause of quality, and as such products without the label aren't automatically bad products, they just have less evidence about their quality.

For that point, yes it is "just a label", even though the context behind the label / the label's meaning is very important.

While technically true. Companies are in the business of maximizing profits and they will cut corners if they can get away with it. A company interested in selling on the quality end of the spectrum will get the UL certification. A company interested in selling at the cheep end of the spectrum won't and likely cut corners to make the item as cheep as possible.

That's what I meant -- it's a pretty important label in my opinion.

ok, that makes sense.

That's because Amazon is, in large part, a front end over Alibaba with exactly zero enforcement of regulation. But they do manage to charge way more!

Indeed! Amazon, it seems, is just a hyperscale fulfillment plugin for Alibaba (etc). It's like a CDN layer for physical goods, moving them to the edge and delivering them at a speed few can even dream of touching due to the cost of having that many POPs.

I think if you were to ask them, being a "Marketplace" means they have little responsibility. "Retailers" have much more legal responsibility in terms of vetting manufacturers, supply chain concerns, product safety, etc

Does Amazon also contact and reimburse the customers who bought the recalled products?

Anecdotal but Amazon tends to notify me when something is recalled. They do not, in my experience with battery packs and children's toys, replace it themselves (they defer to manufacturers).