Here's my Amazon challenge: Find a phone charger on Amazon that:
* Isn't one of Amazon's own
* Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded
Amazon is completely happy selling poor quality or even counterfeit goods, phone chargers are a particularly bad area of the site but others exist as well. There is no way Amazon could claim ignorance of this - there are 100s of reviews on some products such as "Samsung" chargers saying they are fake. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than 1) complying with British law when it comes to product descriptions 2) complying with EU safety laws 3) the safety of their customers.
> Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded
Well, it is a case of every mass-produced good that if it has 0.001% of catastrophic failure, and a million of people will buy it, it will explode in the hands of ten of them, and maybe one will get and write that review. The others probably won't bother writing 999990 reviews saying "it worked as intended".
Can you even begin to imagine what hell it would cause Amazon, at their scale, to be burdened with policing that? It would require a whole building full of Amazon compliance officers who won't always get it right - and when they don't they'd be liable which would cost more even more money and create ill feeling between Amazon and its customers as they'd be making assurances that they could not possibly keep (the story of every consumer protection law ever, btw.)
Seems to me the review system - by your account, not mine - is working just as intended.
What is the burden on every smaller shop that operates in this country and manages to obey these laws? Without Amazon's economies of scale, it costs them far more per item than it would Amazon. Just because the absolute cost to Amazon would be huge doesn't make it unfair as they have a lot more money total, in fact it's completely unfair that only smaller companies have to deal with this.
If it genuinely isn't possible for Amazon to sell chargers and obey the law, then they should stop selling chargers. No-one's making them do it.
Well, they are obliged by law to make sure whatever they are selling is not counterfeit and is safe to use. And no, the law does not care how that is enforced - but I imagine that when they order a batch of chargers from China, someone could take a look at one and see if it's genuine or not?
* Isn't one of Amazon's own * Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded
Amazon is completely happy selling poor quality or even counterfeit goods, phone chargers are a particularly bad area of the site but others exist as well. There is no way Amazon could claim ignorance of this - there are 100s of reviews on some products such as "Samsung" chargers saying they are fake. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than 1) complying with British law when it comes to product descriptions 2) complying with EU safety laws 3) the safety of their customers.