CHARLOTTE — Buying baby essentials secondhand can be a smart way to save money, but a new Consumer Reports evaluation finds online marketplaces can be full of dangerous and even banned or recalled children’s products.
CR evaluated four major platforms – Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Craigslist and Mercari, and found banned baby products on all four marketplaces. It’s illegal to sell recalled products, including on the secondhand market, but buyers and sellers may not understand the law, or even know if a product has been recalled.
CR’s investigation found unsafe products such as drop-side cribs, padded crib bumpers, infant inclined sleepers, and in-bed sleepers, with particularly troubling listings found on Facebook Marketplace.
CR’s evaluators stopped counting after finding 50 in-bed sleepers in 65 search results. These products have been connected to suffocation and asphyxiation risk and should not be used for infant sleep.
In a statement to Consumer Reports, Meta said recalled products are prohibited by their policies, and that policies are enforced through both automated detection and human review.
CR’s advice for buying secondhand is to use the exact product name or model number to check recalls.gov for recalls and safety alerts. If you’re selling, make sure the item hasn’t been recalled before posting it online.
Consumer Reports says to be especially careful with used child car seats. A child car seat may look fine, but it could have hidden damage, be missing parts or labels, be past its expiration date, or have been in a crash. In most cases, child car seat experts say the safest thing to do is buy a new one.
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