Which? waging war on the ugly side of online marketplaces

But, as Which? investigations have consistently found, there’s an uglier side to the online marketplaces many of us use so often.

Our latest research found that illegal and potentially dangerous scam ‘eco plugs’ are still widely available to buy on the biggest online marketplaces - despite them repeatedly failing our safety tests and being subject to multiple government product recalls.

Sales are boosted by adverts on social media, some bearing a fake endorsement from Elon Musk.

These products entice customers in two ways. First, they’re cheap. Some are only around £5. And this aids the second lure: their impressive-sounding energy saving claims.

We found listings that claim to ‘stabilise’ voltage and ‘balance’ the electric current to ‘optimise’ the performance of household appliances. Enough perhaps to make some people conclude the product ‘must be worth a try,’ for only a fiver. There must be a fair chance it will work if it’s being sold on trusted platforms like Amazon and eBay, right?

Wrong.

The tragedy isn’t just that these products don’t do what they say on the tin. It’s that they are potentially dangerous to customers who buy them.

Most of the items we looked at were so poorly constructed the plug pins could simply break off.

They had poor quality soldering, containing too much lead which is tightly regulated due to potential health side effects, and had unmarked non-standard capacitors indicating they were not manufactured in the UK and therefore potentially unsafe.

Consumers who understandably want to save money on their energy bills and make greener choices are being preyed on by unscrupulous sellers - and online marketplaces simply aren’t doing enough to prevent these listings from appearing on their sites.

The unsafe products for sale on these online marketplaces are certainly not confined to just ‘eco plugs’. In recent years, we’ve found dangerous carbon monoxide alarms, which could fail to go off if there was a leak, for sale on several platforms, including eBay, Amazon and Wish.

We’ve also found electric heaters, sold on TikTok and Temu, that could explode, cause electric shocks or start house fires. Again, consumers trying to make budget-friendly decisions are unwittingly putting themselves at risk of severe injury, or even death, due to a lack of checks on these products.

Time and again we’ve reported these types of products, but marketplaces continually fail to take significant enough action to address the wider problem. The solution lies beyond the whack-a-mole method currently deployed. While removing specific listings for recalled products is good, it isn’t sufficient to keep consumers safe.

Consumers shouldn't have lower expectations for safety of, and face the risks of, products they buy from online marketplaces compared to the high street. That’s why Which? believes that the government must strengthen the law to ensure they have greater legal responsibility to make sure these products don’t make it onto their sites. Backing that up, the regulator should have the ability to take strong enforcement action against businesses that don’t comply.

Until then, our advice is to avoid buying unbranded products online, particularly if there’s a safety consideration - such as with electronics, baby and child products, and cosmetics. However, even products with apparent brands attached are not always safe and that is why we need the online platforms to take responsibility for the safety of the products in their platforms.