Why You Shouldn’t Buy Drip Irrigation on Amazon

As people that make and sell drip irrigation equipment, I want to have a heart-to-heart with you, our customers. I want to ask you to think twice before buying your drip irrigation equipment on Amazon.

Before you say it, this isn’t the ”wah, I’m a small business and Amazon sucks” rant you’re expecting. That ship sailed twenty years ago, if not more than that. My dad started The Drip Store back in 1996, when Amazon just sold books. In that time, my dad used the money he made here to spend more time with his kids and have a fulfilling life, while Amazon and it’s famous founder used their money to force poorly-paid delivery drivers to pee in bottles in the name of same-day delivery of cheap junk.

I’m not here to tilt at that windmill. I’m here to have a frank discussion with you about drip irrigation, and to give you some concrete reasons why buying your irrigation equipment on Amazon is a really bad idea.

1. Who Made This Junk?

If you’ve spent more than three seconds on Amazon, you know it’s basically AliExpress (or Temu, or Shein, etc) in an Uncle Sam hat. While reputable brands absolutely do sell their product on Amazon, the vast majority of the drip irrigation equipment you’ll see listed there is made by companies neither you nor anyone in the drip irrigation industry in the US has ever heard of.

If you search for “drip irrigation”, you’ll be met with a huge number of results for kits and products from fly-by-night overseas manufacturers who have no web presence outside Amazon. That might not sound like a big deal, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. Drip irrigation equipment is just plastic stuff after all, so it’s probably all made overseas anyway, right? Wrong!

The not-so-dirty secret about drip irrigation in the US is that most of it is made here! The major vendors you’ll see on The Drip Store are DIG, Tempo, and Netafim. DIG and Tempo are both based in California and manufacture the vast majority of their product offering there. Netafim’s US branch makes a huge amount of their product in the US as well.

The products that are not made domestically are usually made in Israel, where drip irrigation was invented and where many of the large multinational drip irrigation companies are headquartered. While these companies do carry a few products made in China (or sometimes Mexico), they are simple things, and they are still designed by the major brand name companies. Why does this matter? Well…

2. Specs Are Important!

When you buy a book on Amazon, there are only a few things that can go wrong. Sure, the book might not be any good, but there’s no real way to judge that based on the specs. However, the listing for the book will tell you if it’s a paperback, hardcover, or e-book. It’ll also tell you the name of the book, the name of the author, and the language it’s printed in, at the very least. If any of those things are wrong, you’ll immediately be able to tell, and you can easily swap the book out for the right one.

The same is not true for drip irrigation. The specs of your irrigation parts are integral to how you use them, which means you really want to buy product from a manufacturer that knows what they’re doing. Buying your product from Amazon is a great way to get items that aren’t compatible with any domestic drip irrigation equipment. As some of the people our customer service team have talked to can attest, this is really frustrating.

To put it in book terms, this is like buying what you expect to be a book and getting a scroll of parchment, or a thumb drive with the story on it in an encrypted notepad file. Or maybe you do get a normal book, but the whole thing is written in an obscure cipher. To make matters worse, when you go to swap the book out for the thing you meant to buy, the vendor informs you that you that they don’t sell books with paper pages or ones written in English. That is the experience of buying drip irrigation on Amazon.

There are a lot of ways this issue can manifest, but let’s narrow it down to one: fittings and tubing. Getting the right fittings for your tubing is difficult even in the best of times due to nominal sizing and the number of differently sized tubing products that exist in the US market. Even within the category of ½” tubing, there are multiple different sizes, all of which only work with fittings sized specifically for them. When you buy product from a random manufacturer on Amazon, you’re introducing another factor to this process. For one thing, China uses the metric system, which means there’s ample opportunity for measurements to get lost in translation. Second, every country has their own standards. ½” .700 OD poly tubing is standard in the US.

Unless it’s the same in China, you may find that the ½” tubing you bought from Amazon is made to a different US spec, like .620 OD or .710 OD. Or you may find it’s .500 OD exactly, which is not a standard size in the US at all, which makes fittings nearly impossible to find.

Disclaimer: None of this is to say Chinese manufacturers are doing anything wrong, and in a lot of cases they do manufacture their products to the specs they state. The issue is that they aren’t the same specs that are common in the US. It’s a compatibility issue more than anything else.

Now, you may be thinking “I’ll just ask you guys for help. You advertise your phone number all over the place and call yourselves experts, so you’ll be able to help, right?” That’s a great idea, and we’d love to, but…

3. Customer Service? I Barely Know Her!

Amazon is great at getting your stuff delivered quickly (and providing internet infrastructure, but that’s a different blog post), but it’s terrible at basically everything else. That includes customer service. See, Amazon wants to have its cake and eat it too. Amazon loves being the marketplace where everyone buys stuff online, but they don’t do anything other than facilitate the sale.

It’s deliberately designed to keep the actual sellers as vague as possible because being able to go elsewhere to buy things would mean Amazon would have to share its cake. Amazon wants you to stay on their site and buy from them, but they don’t want to do anything to support those sales. It’s all selling and no support, which is a recipe for pulling your hair out when it comes to a technically involved product like drip irrigation.

There’s a reason we’re constantly telling you to call or email us with questions. Drip irrigation is really complicated, especially for beginners, and we know that you’re going to run into things that confuse you. We spend a lot of time talking to customers and answering their technical questions, which range from simple things like “how do I connect ¼” tubing to ½” tubing” and “which way does my filter go?” to troubleshooting whole systems that aren’t working right.

If you look back to the first two points, you’ll see why this is an issue. If you’re in the US (which almost all of our customers are), then everyone you can contact for technical support is also in the US. All of us – The Drip Store, Drip Depot, Dripworks, Sprinkler Warehouse – are US companies. We sell product made for the US market to US standards and specifications by reputable manufacturers.

If you ask us about a Netafim emitter, DIG dripline, or a Tempo fitting, we will know how to help you. We have access to their documentation, we know their color coding, and we are familiar with their product lines and terminology. We also have contacts at those companies that can get answers from their staff engineers and product designers if we need to. The manufacturers, distributors, and retailers form a support network that helps to get you answers when you need them.

Now think about the random company selling a drip kit on Amazon. Sure, it’s cheap, but what if it doesn’t work? Will you be able to contact them? Can they converse with you even if they wanted to? Is there any incentive whatsoever for them to care at all about your satisfaction with the product? Remember, Amazon is deliberately designed to keep the sellers obscured and to prevent them from having any other web presence, not to mention the fact that Amazon’s review system is so heavily astroturfed it might as well be a football stadium.

If you don’t like your product, Amazon will force them to refund it regardless of what service they provide, so why would they try? Amazon’s entire system is designed to make customer service irrelevant. All of this is not to say that you can’t figure it out on your own. We know people love to do their own research, which is why we put so much useful info on our product pages and blogs! But…

4. Product Description? I Barely Know Her!

Yep, I am reusing the same lame joke from the previous point. I don’t feel bad, either, because even that is more effort than Amazon sellers put into their product descriptions. Go read one and you’ll know exactly what I mean. Even in the best case, you’re going to find a whole lot of words saying absolutely nothing.

Between bad translations, poor understanding of the product being described, and generative AI, the descriptions of drip products on Amazon are often worse than useless. If the AI used to generate them has managed not to hallucinate anything blatantly incorrect, you’ll find that they deal exclusively in generalizations and avoid any hard specs.

Let’s compare two things. First, here is the description of one of the top-selling drip irrigation kits on Amazon:

Even if you’re a beginner, what does this description tell you that’s actually useful? I’ll bet you already know that the kit waters plants considering that you’re searching for drip irrigation. It says it’s easy to install, but it doesn’t say how or why. It doesn’t say what comes in the kit, and the only spec that it gives is “240 FT”.

What is that referencing? Is that the amount of tubing that comes in the kit? If so, what size is the tubing? Is it referencing the square footage that it waters? You don’t know, and neither does the AI (or under/unpaid marketing intern) that wrote it. Sure, it has a model number, but that’s the model number of the Amazon seller, not the manufacturer. Who even is the manufacturer? Probably some ghost-kitchen brand that shares the same megafactory address in Guangzhou or Ningbo as brands that make bike tires, plastic forks, zip ties, and a million other things.

Let’s contrast this with our mini landscape and garden kit:

The description states the types of parts that come in the kit and what they do. It even mentions specific items (pressure regulator, filter, drippers, tubing, etc). It also links to other items that you can use to enhance the kit. If you go to those links, you’ll see even more useful information about those items. The description prompts you to read more by clicking on the manual and parts list links, both of which include more specific information about the kit and the parts in it.

We build the kit, so the model number is our own, but the product page for each of the components lists the manufacturer part number, which you can use to research the individual components if you want to. The final prompt to read more directs you to this additional information:

Even more useful info! Flow rates, tube sizes, and rationale for why the various kits are designed the way they are. In contrast, if you scroll down on the Amazon product page, you get stuff like:

I might have jumped the gun assuming this is made in China considering that it’s a l’irrigation system, which clearly means it was made in France. Jokes aside, does this graphic make you trust that this company knows what they’re doing? This product listing has no useful specs on it, and the copy on it is riddled with spelling errors. Even if you can get ahold of them, do you trust them to be able to help you? And even if they can, will they be able to communicate it to you properly?

Business is business, no matter where you’re from. If this company cared about the English-speaking market, they’d have paid more attention to their English ad copy. Now, to be fair, they do have some nice illustrations and a parts list a bit further down. However, none of that mentions any of the specs of any of the parts in the kit. Call me old fashioned, but that kind of feels like it defeats the purpose of a parts list.

5. You’re Just Nitpicking

Am I? Maybe a little bit. How bad could it be, right? Well, I did a little research on my own while writing this article to see if maybe I’m being unfair by assuming that kits like these are badly designed. It’s difficult to get exact specs on Amazon stuff for all the reasons I outlined above, but the sprayers in this kit looks very similar (in design, at least) to the adjustable drippers that we sell. The flow rates on our adjustable drippers range from 0-10 gph per dripper to 0-35 gph per dripper. Some sprayers I found on Amazon that look similar to the ones in this kit say they are 18 gph.

Why does this matter? The kit in question comes with two sizes of tubing, which I will assume are ½” tubing and ¼” tubing, but no splitters. This means that the flow capacity of the system is capped at 220 gph, which is the max capacity of ½” drip tubing. (Note: if the tubing is actually half an inch, as in .500 OD, instead of the standard .700 OD, then the flow capacity will be a lot lower!).

The kit also comes with a total of 30 sprayers, 15 “stream” style and 15 “vortex” style. We don’t know the flow rate of the sprayers, so let’s be charitable and assume that they are all 0-10 gph, which is the lowest common flow rate for sprayers of that design. That puts the total flow of the system at 30 x 10 gph = 300 gph, which is more than the capacity of the ½” tubing!

This means that if you install everything in the kit, it will not work correctly. Furthermore, the “nice illustrations” I mentioned earlier clearly show four of these sprayers on individual lines of ¼” tubing, which has a max capacity of 30 gph. That’s too many on one line assuming they’re 0-10 gph, and way too many if they’re a higher flow rate like 0-18 gph. Will this technically work? Yeah, sure. You can’t have all the emitters open all the way, but if you close them all partway, you should be fine.

The problem here is that they don’t say that anywhere! Our kits clearly state things like this. That’s because we not only care that your system works right, but we are also responsible for helping you troubleshoot it if it doesn’t. Your Amazon seller doesn’t care because they don’t have to, so they’re fine selling you the irrigation equivalent of a car that turns off if you press the pedal all the floor.

6. Will You Please Just Wrap This Up?

Let’s recap a bit on why you shouldn’t buy drip irrigation products on Amazon:

• You don’t know what you’re getting or from whom. Amazon sellers peddle a lot of stuff that’s made by nobody manufacturers. This isn’t a big deal for a lot of product categories, but drip irrigation requires products made to specific standards. Big, reputable companies like Netafim, Rivulis, Tempo, DIG, Antelco, and others are popular and successful because they understand the importance of making product that adheres to these standards.
• With drip irrigation equipment, the specs really matter. If you buy a shirt on Amazon, you can be reasonably sure that it will have two arm holes and a head hole. When you buy irrigation equipment on Amazon, you’re at risk of getting a product that isn’t compatible with anything you can buy locally, and because the product descriptions on Amazon are so bad, you might not know just how weird your product is until you try to use it.
• In shirt terms, imagine buying a shirt that shows up with six arm holes, no head hole, and doesn’t include any opening at the bottom to let you actually put the shirt on. Then, when you try to take it to a tailor to fix it, it turns out it’s made of some alien material that can’t be punctured with a needle, so you’re totally out of luck. But hey, the description said “shirt,” so how could you have known?
• The people selling drip irrigation equipment on Amazon don’t know or care about the product. It’s hard to get ahold of them due to the way Amazon is set up, and even if you can, you are now asking for help from a company that doesn’t care how incomprehensible or useless the information on their product listings are. You can’t even talk to them anywhere outside Amazon’s awful interface because Big Daddy Bezos can’t abide sellers directing people to their own websites.

Listen, I am the owner of a small company that sells drip irrigation. Of course I hate Amazon! Of course I’d rather if you bought it from us. But that’s not my only motive here. I also do a lot of tech support, and I don’t like having to tell people that I don’t have an answer. Even when someone comes to us with a system they bought at a competitor (looking at you, Drip Depot and your lack of a phone number), we still try to help.

If they bought it from someone in the US, I can at least reference their website, or the manufacturer model number of the item. But when you buy from Amazon, there’s nothing I can do to help. I don’t have any fittings that will work with your weirdly sized tubing, I can’t tell you why your off-brand sprayers are wonky, and I can’t suggest any fixes for your system because I don’t even know what its capabilities are.

Amazon is cheap, and that’s nothing to sneeze at when things get more expensive by the minute. All I ask is that you think about what you’re buying and the kind of support you might need down the line. The plants in your garden depend on your irrigation to keep them alive, so I think you should buy your irrigation from someone you can depend on.

And if all of that falls flat because money, well, just remember that you get what you pay for.