I use Adblock plus, Defender and NoScript and none of them freaked out, but I don’t think it’s that kind of bad site. I think it’s more a steal your credit card info or send you crap you didn’t order thing.
I found this link off Google while searching for 1/35 scale models. The first thing I noticed was how low the prices are. Like incredibly low. Fifty to seventy-five percent lower than I could get anywhere else.
I googled reviews for the company and there is not much there. What there is bad but no reviews from anyone that was an actual customer. No customer reviews on the site at all that I could see. Seems to only have been in business for about 6 months.
Just in general, what makes you think some sites are dodgy? Are there clues that a more computer handy person would pick up that I wouldn’t? If you have a good being ripped off story to share, I promise not to laugh.
A while back, my gf told me she was expecting a package, clothes she’d ordered from a Facebook store.
I told her I thought those were all scams. She explained many are, but overall there were enough that weren’t crap, so that in the long run she was doing ok. She gives about 30% of what arrives to charity, but for what she’s shopping for (clothes) it’s worth it.
If I followed that rule, I would rule out about 98% of AliExpress stores.
Good catch! I didn’t get that far. I wonder if there is a reason that Canada is the default country?
I know! You could furnish your whole house with the stuff they have.
Yep, that was in the OP. Thing is, the sites doing the rating are sites I never heard of. And their opinion is based on computer stuff I don’t understand rather than anyone with any experience dealing with them.
Good for her. I don’t use Facebook, are they actual stores like Etsy or just people trying to get rid of stuff?
This is a pretty good indication. I sometimes see websites advertising $500 Lego sets for like $39.99. They are clearly not going to send you the product you think you are buying, if they send anything at all. A typical tactic is to show an expensive well known product but send a cheap copy.
I had the same experience years ago. I was shopping for a Roomba, and some site called something like accessories-store-dot-com turned up in Google with a price for a higher end model that was cheaper than the prices I was seeing in legitimate stores for the enter level model. The description said something like “to celebrate out store opening we’re offering this Roomba at a discounted price”. In spite of that explanation, the fact that I’d never heard of that store before and the too good to be true price made it seem fishy, and I assumed that thing about the discount to celebrate the store opening was B.S. The site also said something like “only 5 left at this price”. I checked again a few days later and there were still “only 5 left”. That confirmed my suspicion that it was a scam.
I’m kind of tempted to get a Visa gift card and order something just to see what I would actually get. With @running_coach pointing out that they want you to disable your firewall to order, I think that they just want a credit card number and wouldn’t send anything at all.
Yeah, you see that on ebay a lot but the numbers change all the time and they even let you know when the item is sold out.
I wonder why after all that effort to set up that site and listing all those items, they couldn’t find someone who spoke English well enough to do/check all the spelling and phrasing. And if they just scrape other sites for titles and photos, why don’t they get the original descriptions too? Seems it would be much easier to just steal everything at once.
Obviously people fall for this stuff all the time so maybe they don’t feel they need to make the effort to have the site look better.
Quickest and easiest way to tell for me is to go to the About Us page and copy a block of text, then paste it into Google with quotes around it.
If reading the actual poorly-written About Us content doesn’t tip you off, seeing that it’s used on a dozen other web sites should seal the deal for you.
Is there any real reason to be suspicious of a site that’s been in business less than a year? The rating sites see that as a red flag, but every business would have that at the start-up. If people won’t buy anything in the first year the business isn’t going to last until the second year.
I agree about the combination of poor writing and other sites but there are legit sites that have different names but are pretty much identical. LTD Commodities and The Lakeside Collection seem to be the same business. Of course they have a lot of online reviews since they have been around so long.
For some reason I’m really tempted to order something with a gift card and see what happens. Of course, if they ask me to turn off my firewall that’s not going to happen. Then again, maybe this is how they make half their money.
Well then use the About page as a starting point. If you search the About text and there’s a bunch of other sites and they all look sketchy, then there’s your answer. If there’s 2 sites and they look legit through other clues.
Personally I wouldn’t order from that LTD site because
They have bad BBB reviews*
They say they are a part of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce but there’s no mention of them on the Aurora CoC business directory
Their Norton seal link is broken
Their PayPal seal link is broken
I wouldn’t order from the Lakeside one because:
Their BBB reviews are bad*
If LTD is legit then they ripped their content off the LTD site
Their Norton seal link is broken
Their PayPal seal link is broken
They don’t list a physical address on their site
Maybe they’re both legit. Maybe you get their print catalog even. But I don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to find out, so as a new customer I would skip those sites and not put my credit card info into their system.
*The BBB is not any sort of official group, they’re just a listing site. They offer no government protection. I don’t take “listed on the BBB” as any sort of assurance HOWEVER it’s definitely a good place to go to find out how other people’s experience went with a shop. These two stores have reviews about waiting forever to get their goods and getting extremely cheap items that don’t look as expected. So there is some value in BBB ratings.
The vast array of unrelated products is simply not possible for a start-up to have in stock. Especially at such drastic discounts.
Also, one page says they only take Visa and Bank Transfer, elsewhere, they say they take Visa, MC, JDM and other forms of payment.
They are both legit. My wife has been ordering from them for years. Mostly solar lights, gnomes and other garden stuff. Everything is just as it looks and is described. Never had a single problem. I don’t know if she keeps a credit card with them or just enters it when she orders but we’ve never had a problem that way either. So I guess you can be legit and still have dodgy stuff on your website.
I’m always a bit leery about BBB reviews. Probably about 20+ years ago, a friend of mine had a job in NY where all she did was repeatedly call BBB and leave good reviews for different companies. At the time, office rumor was that her parent company was BBB, but no one really knew. It was out in the open to the BBB employees too because they would take several calls a day from the same people so they recognized their voices and would joke around with them. As a business owner many years back I found BBB useless.
I understand that, but the ratings site say nothing about that, just that they have been active for less than a year, as if that in itself is suspicious.
I’m probably going to be embarrassed, but what is JDM? Is it anything like Jack Dean Tyler? Cuz no way am I doing the Tug Ahoy thing just to order from a dodgy website!
The BBB stopped to see me twice, each time I threw them out and threatened to call the police if they returned. They want businesses to join (for a few) in exchange for good reviews. They are a scam, IMHO.
That’s pretty much my experience. If you “join” BBB for a fee, you miraculously get a good rating no matter what the reviews by customers say. They’ve been in trouble for bad practices many times but they keep rolling along.
