Avoid Buying Chinese Products on Amazon With This Chrome Extension
In the last few years, boycotting Chinese products has been quite a hot topic in many countries including the USA, India, and the UK. Although countries are unable to fully drop China imports, many people are individually avoiding buying China products. If you are among those people who are looking to condemn China’s abuse of human rights or simply want to avoid Chinese products due to their low quality, then I might be able to help.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to completely avoid buying Chinese products because even if the product doesn’t have Chinese origins, it may still use components made in China. However, as far as your shopping on Amazon is concerned, you can detect China-made products there with the help of a Chrome extension. Keep reading and I’ll show you how.
Detect Chinese products on Amazon
The name of the extension is Chinese Product Detector, and it is still rather new and underdeveloped. Currently, it only supports Amazon, but the developer says more eCommerce websites will be added in the future.
Although the developer has not officially provided details on how the extension detects Chinese products, he did make a comment about adding more companies to the list. So I guess he has created a list of Chinese and non-Chinese brands to confirm the location of the brand from which you are buying. I have contacted the developer regarding this and I will update this post once I get a reply.
That said, the extension seemed to do a great job of detecting Chinese products when I experimented with it. When you are on a non-Chinese product, the extension shows a checkmark in green color confirming it’s not a Chinese product. When you are on a Chinese product page, it will show a red cross mark and a pop-up will also come up asking whether you want to proceed or not.
The extension is definitely not perfect, but you can help further improve its accuracy as well by reporting products that are Chinese but not listed as one by the extension. All you need to do is click on the extension and click on the “Yes, I will report” button to immediately send the report (no need to write anything).
Ending thoughts
I am sure this little extension will help you at least avoid some of the China-made products you buy on Amazon. You should also do your own search before buying a product if you are boycotting Chinese products. A simple search about the brand name, images of the item description, and item name itself can really help in detecting its origin country.
Interesting concept. Thanks for providing this information. By Gregg L. Friedman MD
Riiight. I looked up several products and found they are Chinese made for sure, and it showed the green check mark. What this really is, is an app to increase your purchasing of Chinese products.
Permissions required by this extensions “read and change data on all websites”. No thanks.
“read and change data on all websites”. I know it sounds alarming, but it’s really nothing to be concerned about. Browsers just don’t have a good way of sandboxing features, hence the broad permissions. All extensions are open source by nature since they run in the browser and need to pass a review process and you need to submit your code. I maintain my own extension.