Why you shouldn't shop at Banggood or other China-based wholesalers

October 16, 2023

If you shop online at China wholesaler websites such as Banggood, you may be shocked to learn what is going on behind closed doors with these companies. I wasn't aware of the scale of this problem until recently when i came across a video about electric motors for the remote-controlled drone industry while researching parts for a build-it-yourself multi-rotor/drone aircraft. But first, a little of the back-story...

Remember when the big-box stores such as Sears, Grants, and later, Walmart, actually sold good quality products? Unless you're in your 50s or older, probably not, but i happen to have been around long enough to be able to observe the massive decline in the quality of the products they sell. You see, it used to be that when you bought a refrigerator, a washer, or a lawn mower from a store like Sears, your kids might have inherited it because it was built to last. My father once bought a garden tractor that has been handed down to two generations and is still running. I have seen many appliances that were still operating fine after three to five decades of use and there are light bulbs that have been powered almost continuously for over 100 years. Today however, in our "consumer" driven society, it is common to have to replace our appliances, tools and electronics every few years because we live in a world of planned obsolescence where products are specifically designed to fail. Worse, it seems the public at large doesn't mind spending their cash on the same gadget over and over again, as though this is normal. Of course planned obsolescence makes perfect monetary sense from a business point of view because it is obviously far more profitable to sell consumers the same product multiple times than it is to design products they never have to replace.

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Ignoring the ethical problem of planned obsolescence for a moment, we can realize a much larger problem in the fact that we live and depend upon a precious little planet which holds a finite amount of resources such as coal and oil, both of which are critical in the manufacturing of the widgets we buy, and yet our economic systems are based on an infinite growth model. Obviously this cannot continue because it is simply not possible and yet manufactures and wholesalers, like Banggood and many others, continue to add to the problem by designing and marketing junk which is largely manufactured by cheap Chinese labor. And it gets worse. It isn't just that they sell a lot of junk, they also sell a lot of fake junk that is marketed as the real thing. These Chinese wholesalers are targeting products which are in high demand and hiring China-based companies to clone them using sub-par components and then selling the copies on their international websites for the same price as the originals. Like myself, you may have known that the Chinese are great at replicating things, but what you may not have known, and i certainly didn't, is the scope of the problem. These cheap forgeries are showing up en masse among some of the largest on-line retailers on the web and it gets even funnier, or sadder, depending on how you look at it.

As i wrote earlier, i learned about these shenanigans whilst watching a video of a guy talking about the electric motors that are used in the hobby industry, specifically the multi-rotor aspect of it (so-called "drones" or "quad copters"), but in no way whatsoever is this problem limited to the hobby industry. In the video below the author discloses information that was obtained directly from various engineers regarding these Chinese wholesalers, some who live and work in China. The discussion of the topic starts at about the 26:00 mark, but if you happen to be an RC drone or electric motor enthusiast, you might want to watch it in its entirety.

Video: Motor Construction - LOT of info, mostly correct

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