Amazon might be one of the most popular stores, but it’s far from perfect. It has constant issues with knock-off products, especially in one category: SD cards.
Amazon allows third-party sellers to list products on the store with little oversight, and even pay for advertising to artificially place them higher in Amazon search results. That means low-quality or outright fake items are common, and even if you specifically purchase something from a reputable brand, you could still end up with a counterfeit.
The Fake Brands
There are a lot of SD cards on Amazon from unknown brands, some of which try to imitate the design of more popular competitors to trick potential customers. It didn’t take me long to find one example after searching “sd cards” on Amazon: a 1TB card from “5-Star,” with the same red and gray design language as SanDisk cards.
Clones of popular products are common on nearly every online store that allows third-party sellers, including Amazon, Temu, and eBay. However, sellers can optionally pay Amazon more money to push their listings higher in search results. That can make the products seem more legitimate, with only a small “Sponsored” text badge differentiating it from actual search results.
Not every product using sponsored ads is fake or a scam, but it is an indicator that the product’s position in search results has been artificially manipulated to some degree.
Many of these products from unknown brands might appear to work at first, but often have reliability issues or fake storage capacities. For example, fake portable SSDs with ridiculously high storage capacities occasionally show up on Amazon, alongside SD cards and other types of flash memory.
In theory, you should be able to avoid these problems by only buying SD cards from reputable and high-quality brands (Samsung, SanDisk, Patriot Memory, etc.). That mostly works, but there’s still another problem: fake cards getting mixed with real cards.
You Can’t Escape
Many products you buy from Amazon, even ones from third-party sellers, are stored in Amazon’s own warehouses. The company runs a “Fulfillment by Amazon” program, where sellers ship their products to Amazon, which in turn store and ship them to customers as needed. That means legitimate products and fake products are sometimes in the same warehouses, and sometimes, they get mixed together in storage.
There are many reports over the years of people buying real SD cards from Amazon, but instead of the promised product, they get a counterfeit clone. There are also reports of Amazon deleting customer reviews that point out they received a fake card. Amazon’s customer support representatives might still help you if you get a fake card, but they can’t recover lost data.
Amazon’s fulfillment program is the likely culprit for this inventory mixing, but smaller-scale return fraud could also be a contributor, which affects most retail stores to some extent.
Just Shop Somewhere Else
The best way to avoid counterfeit and fake SD cards is simple: buy them from another store. Best Buy, B&H Photo, and other stores do not allow third-party sellers (though Best Buy does in Canada), so you’re not scrolling past a sea of off-brand and white-label products every time you try to buy something. You can also buy SanDisk SD cards straight from Western Digital, and Samsung sells SD cards on its own online store.
You’re still at risk of defective products and occasional counterfeits at any retailer, but Amazon has a much rougher history with those issues than other big stores. Personally, when I need a flash drive or SD card, I just go to my local Target or Best Buy and buy it off the shelf.
If you absolutely need to shop at Amazon, the best way to stay safe is to buy from a reputable brand, and make sure the product listing says both “Ships from Amazon.com” and “Sold by Amazon.com” under the buy buttons. Avoiding third-party sellers should minimize your risk of receiving a counterfeit product.
Amazon might eventually work out its issues with off-brand and counterfeit products, but in the meantime, you’re better off spending your money elsewhere.
