Fake spark plugs

I can't say that I buy much of anything from Amazon these days. All my Toyota parts are ordered online through Larry H Miller Toyota in Lemon Grove, CA.

 

Yea honestly didn’t expect such a large company to sell possible counterfeit parts

 

It's not that they sell counterfeit parts - it's that Amazon bulk stores same items. I don't blame Amazon for the process - it would be insanely expensive to store EVERYTHING by vendor. So Sixity may submit genuine stock, but it gets stored with plugs submitted by other dubious "sellers" that participate in "shipped by Amazon. Regardless of who the "perceived seller" is (to the buyer), Amazon pulls the plugs from the same stock. So it becomes a crap shoot of whether you get the genuine, counterfeit, or mixed. Unless Amazon is able to sort the issue of vendors providing counterfeit parts for shipping (admittedly EXTREMELY difficult these days), I PERSONALLY would not buy such parts from Amazon. I do buy aftermarket/off-branded items all the time though - just not critical/important parts.

Ebay is different because there are some verifiable dealers that sell on Ebay, and the part gets shipped directly from them. You have to do a little homework though. For example, I recently bought mud flaps for our Rav4 and wanted OEM. List is about $150, online on dealer sites is about $100 with shipping, and I found a listing selling them for $85 shipped. I didn't bother doing too much research being mud flaps, but sure enough, tracking (UPS) and shipping information showed it was from a dealer in FL (IIRC).

 

How many miles on those?? Thanks !

 

Amazon is a marketplace first. You generally aren't buying *from Amazon*, just like you aren't buying *from eBay*. You are buying from sellers who are *listing* their products on Amazon. That's how bad products get into the mix.

You can find the official Toyota and Denso stores on Amazon and order from them with confidence that the parts are legit. Dealers are another option, although I find that the parts dept. at dealers are often sneaky. The local Toyota dealer here tried to tell me I needed 6 gallons of coolant to do a drain and fill on my 1gr-fe when the system capacity is just under 4, and insisted that it was important to use only super expensive Toyota differential oil because 'anything else will void the warranty'.

 

I buy the copper Densos from the dealer

$7 90919-01235 Toyota Genuine Spark Plug

90919-01235 (4.0 V-6). Very cheap, never disappointed. I just looked the plug up, $4.04 a plug, pretty reasonable and from a Toyota dealer.

 

I've had no issues buying NGK on Rock Auto- and waaaay cheaper than buying locally. I'd never buy them on Ebay, or Amazon from a third party.

 

If the Amazon seller is Denso, you are good to go.
If the spark plugs are fake, you run the risk of the electrode breaking off and ruining a cylinder.
Denso's website shows information about why fake spark plugs are inferior.

 

27k the grease I used caused those brown stains.

 

I got the ones I currently have from advance auto when they closed .

 

Just putting this out again because there seems to be a lot of confusion about buying products from reputable sellers that suspect seller also sell where the sellers (good and bad) participate in the "shipped by Amazon" program.

When multiple sellers participate, they send the product (Denso spark plugs in this example) to Amazon for warehousing and delivery.

The problem is that under such circumstance, Amazon stores the product(s) in ONE PILE. The process is called "commingling" or "stickerless inventory," and some refer to it as "bulk inventory."

When you place an order for a Denso plug, the order picker just grabs x plugs and sends them on their merry way - there is no differentiation for what seller submitted the plugs. So if one seller sends in counterfeits, and the other seller sends in genuine, it becomes a crap shoot of what you get.

There IS an option for sellers to opt out of this, and the seller or Amazon puts a unique barcode, ASIN, etc. as identifier and it is stored separately as a different product - BUT THAT COSTS MONEY, so not many sellers opt out.

The only way I have been able to figure out who has opted out is that it looks like it creates a separate product page because the SKU/ASIN/whatever is different so the system sees it as a different product, and there will be no "available from other sellers" box on the side, but I'm not sure. So to be safe, I never buy stuff from Amazon where I need to be sure that I'm getting name brand genuine.

If anyone has figured out a way to definitively tell, let me know, but as far as I have been able to tell, if it says something like the seller is Denso, Sixity, or even Amazon, if it gives you the choice of other sellers, it's definitely piled in the same pile as potentially counterfeit goods.