Reliable "Country of Origin" Search in Web Shop? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Recently I was quite delighted to find out that galaxus.de has a "country of origin" filter. The delight quickly faded when I realized that it was quite unreliable, e.g. one size of a USB stick was made supposedly made in Germany while another was supposedly made in China (which I found quite unbelievable). To be fair, they do write "Specifications may include unverified machine translations."

Does anybody know of a (tech or other) online shop where this works? Or tipps how to quicker navigate real and fake/mistaken "country of origin" labels?

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe country of origin refers to the company that assembled the final product (or labeled some generic product with their brand, or designed but not manufactured it or...).

Correctly labelling the country of origin for produced, physical goods is hard, as often there are so many components from all over the world on a product.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Galaxus on their website: https://www.galaxus.at/en/page/transparency-regarding-countries-of-origin-34177

In the legal definition stated by the European Union, country of origin denotes «the country in which the major part of the value was added.» We’re guided by this interpretation.

But unless the majority of value was added in branding for some variants, I don't understand why the 64GB variant of https://www.galaxus.de/en/s1/product/goodram-ume3-usb-30-128gb-eco-friendly-128-gb-usb-a-usb-memory-sticks-17543048 is "made in germany" while the 128GB is made in China.

So I assume their "machine translation" hallucinates at some point.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

One could argue, that the majority of value is probably in the flash chips and/or flash controllers and as such the country of origin is probably always Taiwan (or another Asian state)

this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025

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