Online store scams

My mom is looking to buy a specific silver bag made by a specific company online.

Every single store (20+ of them) that is selling this bag online has Alexa N/A, almost zero backlinks, no company details, nothing. Just a basic WP theme with Woocommerce I suppose, a contact form, and shipping info. They don't accept Paypal, just credit cards and wire transfer.

I looked at majority of these stores and it seems that all of them are made on expired domains and most of them were registered in 2017. One used to belong to a French doctor, one of them was a non-profit website for brain aneurysm awareness, etc.

Tell me how trustworthy these stores are, so I can send a screenshot with your answers to my mom who is too stubborn to believe what I'm saying because "this purse is just too good and I want it".

Just let her waste her money. When the purse falls apart in 30 days and the site is nowhere to be found, she'll have learned her lesson.

I'm more concerned with the fact that she thinks you want this purse. I haven't ever seen a purse that made me fight with my mom. Was it sewn by blind orphans bathed in holy water that was blessed by angels?

You better buy from well known stores.

Reaver said:

I'm more concerned with the fact that she thinks you want this purse. I haven't ever seen a purse that made me fight with my mom. Was it sewn by blind orphans bathed in holy water that was blessed by angels?

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I think you misunderstood the OP and this: "this purse is just too good and I want it" was said by his/her mom.

@OP: Smells like a scam, more than likely those sites are operated by the same individual, but i guess if your mom doesn't listen to reason, she'll learn the hard way.

HoNeYBiRD said:

I think you misunderstood the OP and this: "this purse is just too good and I want it" was said by his/her mom.

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I didn't mean a literal fight. I meant a disagreement.

Purses are supposed to bring people together, not cause arguments.

What a time to be alive.

Tell your mum ( if she's from the UK ) to pay via credit card,so if it's over £100 you've got protection under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974.

Reaver said:

I didn't mean a literal fight. I meant a disagreement.

Purses are supposed to bring people together, not cause arguments.

What a time to be alive.

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Yea, but OP doesn't want the purse. Or how did you figure that he/she wants it?

Reaver said:

I'm more concerned with the fact that she thinks you want this purse.

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When you wrote this, it made me think that you think, that OP wants the purse, when all he/she wants is make his/her mom to change her mind about buying it.
This part of the last sentence: "this purse is just too good and I want it" is said by OP's mom, not the OP.

Anyway, it doesn't matter much.
It smells like scam, but some people cannot be helped and won't believe it until they're getting scammed at least once.

Please tell me you realize you are complaining about this kind of thing to a board full of street urchins who probably developed one or two of the sites you are talking about? These people are the lurkers who think that mixing the dropshipping methods with a PBN domain that has link juice is going to do something, when in reality it's just increasing the quantity of shitty spam sites on the Internet.

Send this screenshot to your Mom:

Hi Mom,

It's me, @mqsss. For the past five and a half years I have been a member of a community that actively churns out poor-quality garbage such as this due to naive visitors having an improper balance between an idea and a plan.

I apologize for my transgressions, and as a token of my appreciation, I will be purchasing this bag for you as a gift.

Sincerely,

mqsss

HoNeYBiRD said:

Yea, but OP doesn't want the purse. Or how did you figure that he wants it? When you wrote this, it made me think that you think, that OP wants the purse, when all he wants is make her mom to change her mind about buying it.
This part of the last sentence: "this purse is just too good and I want it" is said by OP's mom, not the OP.

Anyway, it doesn't matter much.
It smells like scam, but some people cannot be helped and won't believe it until they're getting scammed at least once.

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OK so stuff was lost in translation.

My point (and snark) remains valid. Cheap knockoffs abound on these stores, and the bags hardly last more than a month. Trust me. I'm a handbag queen.

I've bought namebrand purses from Amazon that have fallen to pieces on me within 60 days of use. I think the scam goes something like this:

Seller buys a mix of authentic and knockoff purses, and sets the price as something reasonable so that people will buy.

The first few purses are legit. People leave reviews saying so, and that they're super happy with the purses, blah blah blah.

After the real purses are sold, knockoffs are sent out. People will complain but they will just be offered a refund.

Negative reviews are usually ignored in these cases bc people see namebarnd handbags at good prices, so they buy them. The refunds are minimal, bc if I only spent $40 on a Michael Kors purse and it fell apart, I'm just going to chalk it up to the purse being defective. $40 for a namebrand purse is nothing.

FYI, Amazon knows these purses aren't real, but they don't say anything. You can't sell thousands of purses that retail $100+ at $40 without cutting corners.

Or maybe they are real, but they're defective. Either way you aren't getting what you paid for.

So there you go. When you're working with an online distributor, you have no way of knowing if they cut corners or not. In fact, I would hazard a guess that at least 75% of online sellers are selling cheap imitations.

It costs less than $5 to replicate a purse. If it looks real enough to the untrained eye, and the price is reasonable (or even cheap) people are going to buy it.

Reaver said:

I think the scam goes something like this:

Seller buys a mix of authentic and knockoff purses, and sets the price as something reasonable so that people will buy.

The first few purses are legit. People leave reviews saying so, and that they're super happy with the purses, blah blah blah.

After the real purses are sold, knockoffs are sent out. People will complain but they will just be offered a refund.

Negative reviews are usually ignored in these cases bc people see namebarnd handbags at good prices, so they buy them.

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Congratulations, @Reaver , you just described in the above quote the issue with 50% of sellers providing "samples" on BHW.

It's the old adage if something looks too good to be true, then it usually is.

If these products are usually $200 from the high street, or direct online from the branded store, how and why is someone selling them at $40?

If they're last seasons stocks, maybe a retailer went bust and it's bankrupt stock, perhaps these are overstocks and fell off the back of a lorry or as mentioned above, they're just fakes.

Reaver said:

Purses are supposed to bring people together

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I'm going to buy a matching set for the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Please link me to one of those 40.00 Kors purse sellers as I'll only buy the Sox a knock off.

Sherbert Hoover said:

Congratulations, @Reaver , you just described in the above quote the issue with 50% of sellers providing "samples" on BHW.

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Yep. It's not a new method by any means, but it does work.

Fortunately for me I fight like hell when a purse falls apart on me. You buy namebrand for the quality, so I expect my purses to last 10+ years. If they don't I'm throwing a tantrum bigger than an obese toddler that ran out of birthday cake.

This is what taught me to read and pay attention to the negative reviews in the case of purses. Some people on AZ get REALLY mad and take pics of the POS they bought and post them with their review.

Those people are my heroes.

BassTrackerBoats said:

I'm going to buy a matching set for the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Please link me to one of those 40.00 Kors purse sellers as I'll only buy the Sox a knock off.

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If you've got $40 to piss away why don't you just throw it into your lake?

Reaver said:

If you've got $40 to piss away why don't you just throw it into your lake?

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Lakes don't bring people together anywhere near as fast as purses.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Lakes don't bring people together anywhere near as fast as purses.

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Tell that to Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne.

Reaver said:

OK so stuff was lost in translation.

My point (and snark) remains valid. Cheap knockoffs abound on these stores, and the bags hardly last more than a month. Trust me. I'm a handbag queen.

I've bought namebrand purses from Amazon that have fallen to pieces on me within 60 days of use. I think the scam goes something like this:

Seller buys a mix of authentic and knockoff purses, and sets the price as something reasonable so that people will buy.

The first few purses are legit. People leave reviews saying so, and that they're super happy with the purses, blah blah blah.

After the real purses are sold, knockoffs are sent out. People will complain but they will just be offered a refund.

Negative reviews are usually ignored in these cases bc people see namebarnd handbags at good prices, so they buy them. The refunds are minimal, bc if I only spent $40 on a Michael Kors purse and it fell apart, I'm just going to chalk it up to the purse being defective. $40 for a namebrand purse is nothing.

FYI, Amazon knows these purses aren't real, but they don't say anything. You can't sell thousands of purses that retail $100+ at $40 without cutting corners.

Or maybe they are real, but they're defective. Either way you aren't getting what you paid for.

So there you go. When you're working with an online distributor, you have no way of knowing if they cut corners or not. In fact, I would hazard a guess that at least 75% of online sellers are selling cheap imitations.

It costs less than $5 to replicate a purse. If it looks real enough to the untrained eye, and the price is reasonable (or even cheap) people are going to buy it.

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Well, i don't know too many things about purses.

I just know that i haven't seen anywhere that many fake sunglasses sold as original, what you can find on Amazon and it's what you say, there's no way that Amazon doesn't know about this. People are always afraid of getting fakes on eBay, when in fact nowadays there's a lot bigger chance to get fakes from Amazon. No wonder that Bezos is or was the world's richest man for a second yesterday, selling fakes is a profitable business.

But it's not Amazon, not even eBay in this case, but random WP sites with no history (20+ of them according to OP). Needles to say, reviews can't be trusted in this case at all, if there are any. They don't even need to hand out originals, they can just take the money and run after not sending anything, not even fakes. I'd look into the credit card processors those sites use, i bet it's some shady company.

Sherbert Hoover said:

Tell that to Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne.

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Omg.

You are going to hell with gasoline drawers on.

You have several websites that look like copycat,
have shady history and slippery payment methods.
It's only 20 of them.

So you basically want to say that these websites are doubtful and unsafe? Unreliable? Misleading?

No.

They are dishonorable and fraudulent.
Or to put it in plain text they are devious, deceitful and treacherous.