Fake Finders: Avoiding Counterfeit Goods When Shopping Online

No one likes the idea of getting something which doesn’t match what they ordered when buying things online. Opening a package to find that the items you’ve invested your hard-earned cash into aren’t real can be a terrible feeling, though it can be hard to avoid this if you don’t know what to look out for. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring the world of counterfeit goods on online stores, giving you the chance to start avoiding them during your own sprees. Of course, though, most of this work will be down to you.

Too Good To Be True

The very first trap which people will fall into when they are shopping online is buying items which are too good to be true. When you find a garment from a brand which usually charges a small fortune, but the example on your screen is very cheap, it’s probably going to be fake. Even when they have sales or want to get rid of older clothing, big brands simply don’t reduce their prices that much. This is very common with sunglasses, handbags, and other accessories which can be made with little cost.

Untrustworthy Sellers

There are countless ecommerce stores around the web, and most of them work hard to ensure that they are giving their customers the right experience and goods for their money. Of course, though, there are always going to be examples which ruin the fun. Thankfully, review websites make it nice and easy to spot the companies which are selling fake goods, and a quick search for the name of the website which you’re thinking about using should yield plenty of results.

Inconsistent Photos

Most large brands have their own websites, even if they don’t sell things directly. This makes it easy to find genuine photos of the products you’re looking to buy, enabling you to compare them with the items you find online. Fake designer clothes often have bad product photos assigned to them. You can often tell that the items are fake from the images you see, and this is a simple method which can be applied throughout all of your online shopping. If you can’t find an item on the original brand’s website, this probably means that you’re looking at something counterfeit.

Logic

Finally, as the last thing to consider, it’s time to think about logic. Does it make sense for a website you’ve never heard of to be selling a branded item at half the price found elsewhere? In most cases, the answer to this question is no. You should work hard to look for things that might be wrong with the items you buy, asking yourself questions throughout the process. It isn’t always easy to spot a fake from images alone, but you can often figure it out from other aspects of the product page.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling more confident in your ability to avoid fake items when you’re shopping online. No one likes to be cheated out of their money, but you have to be willing to stand up for yourself if you’re going to avoid this entirely.