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> If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon? Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc. So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.) This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands. The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site. > And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted. I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in