I'd like to point a few things out I've learned from over 15 years on all sides of the specialty retail sales and manufacturing industries and it's love affair with china. A lot of people seem to have some misconceptions here. I'll keep it basic, they are variations. Sometimes the process involves more wheeling and dealing.
Players involved:
Retailers, like Elev8 or the shop down the street.
A middleman, like Clouper. They'll select factories, distibute, and help market. They may have another layer of distubuters depending on the country.
Small service electronic assembly factorys. Take your pick, there're 1000's and the competition is fierce. For something like this they'll go to the quantity over quality factories. This means many many different ladies working their fingers to the bone assembling and soldering. soldering and assembling 9-12 hrs a day, 4-6 days a week. This is were things get risky as no one device is 100% exactly the same. The production value goes down as speed is a key and all they'll test is seeing if the devices fire and measures about a 1.9 coil for half a second. Then it's put in a bubble sleeve and tossed in a large box with a few dozen others or more. Clouper provides the indivbidual packaging from another contracted facility.
Most of us get lucky but enough won't to keep a stink going. Higher end retailers, especially B&M's will test theirs oob further and offer some warranties but probably not for free beyond the mnfr limited warranty. Pump and dump retailers like we find on the internet probably aren't taking the time to test everything. Or anything. That's cool. You get what you pay for. Caveat Emptor. I'm happy taking the risk. If you aren't, please just drop it and move along.
