Globalisation reaching the point where an individual can jump onto a digital device connected to the internet and order pretty much anything from around the world and have it delivered sounds great, and in some ways it has been.
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Assuming that thing is legal in your home country, of course. And whether it's an issue of safety compliance, size, the materials used to make it or some other characteristic, this is not always the case.
With the globalised online platforms that allow anyone with an internet connection to start a retail business of buying things and reselling them at a mark-up, or factories with no website (or reputation) of their own selling directly to people in other countries, we've pretty much gone from the old adage of buyer beware to buyer don't bother.
On reflection, I guess I'm presenting one of the arguments as to why local physical stores will continue to have a valid place in the market for a long time to come, assuming they don't fall into the same trap of lowering quality too far in order to compete on price.
Let's back up a little bit though.
Long before the internet, there was mail ordering. Well over a century before. The first mail order company was established in 1861, whereas packet switching for computers to communicate with each other over distances was invented in 1965, eventually leading to the invention of the world wide web in 1989.
Through mail ordering, any business could reach an audience of their choosing by advertising through the most suitable form of media. Such advertising would either promote a single product with details of how to order it, or tell you what number to call or where to write to be sent a mail-order catalogue which would contain the form necessary to place your order, and details of where to send it.
However, such businesses were still proportionally big enough, and usually domestic enough, that they would earn a reputation, good or bad, which would keep them in business or sink them fairly quickly as the number of disgruntled customers stacked up enough for local or national newsrooms to notice and hold them to account with a bit of investigative journalism.
The world wide web made it easy enough to put those catalogue items online, whether the business wanted to sell them through their website or just promote them for customers to buy in their nearest relevant stores.
Subsequently, various online platforms emerged where small sellers could list one or more items (new or used, depending on which platform you're thinking of) among others and users search for what they want.
It's this latter format that has proven to be an issue. Capitalism relies on competition to keep prices low, but one potential downside is it encourages a race to the bottom where the main way to make a profit is to start cutting corners (or for big companies, just wear losses longer than your opposition to drive them out of business; this tactic has been used to create many monopolies or duopolies throughout history and is still being attempted today by some entities we might think of as disruptive).
Another thing it seems to encourage is making wild claims about performance, capacity, or other technical specifications of the product. And in the world of electronic goods such as batteries, jump-starter packs, camping solar panels and controllers, audio hardware and much more, it's gotten so far out of control that it seems the only places worth buying from are those with a genuinely good reputation to uphold.
Seriously, wildly-implausible numbers that trick the less tech-savvy members of the general public promote goods which have absolutely no hope of achieving them.
While brand snobbery (for the products or the places where you bought them) can simply make things more expensive, the lack of a brand's reputation to uphold has the opposite problem where you're basically just buying ornamental pieces that simply pretend to do what they claim to.
Other problems can emerge as well. More than one licenced automotive repairer has been caught out trying to be helpful to customers, installing parts that are not ADR compliant. An act which is not legal and can get them into quite a lot of trouble.