Most of what goes wrong with a cheap purchase is visible before you buy it, if you know where to look. Here is the checklist we run every sample through before it earns a place in the catalogue.
Weight tells you more than photographs
Listings flatter everything. A product's stated weight and dimensions are much harder to fake than a studio photo, and they are the fastest way to sanity-check whether something is as substantial as it looks. If a listing hides them, that is itself a signal.
Read the one and two star reviews first
Five-star reviews tell you the product arrived. The low ones tell you how it fails and how quickly. If the same failure appears three times, it is a design fault, not bad luck.
Check what happens after it breaks
Replaceable parts, a real warranty, and a support address that answers are worth more than a slightly lower price. This is the part almost nobody checks before buying.
Packaging is a proxy for care
A manufacturer that protects a product properly in transit usually cared about the product too. Crushed boxes and loose parts are rarely an isolated problem.