Beware of Fake Sellers with this Amazon Scam
Beware of Fake Sellers with this Amazon Scam
I hate the fake that I feel compelled to tell you about an Amazon scam because I love Amazon. I do lots and lots of shopping on Amazon. I track thousands of prices on Amazon and watch for the best deals on items I buy all the time.
Here’s the scam:
New Amazon sellers are launching stores and selling popular selling items way, way below the lowest sale price! I mean ridiculously low prices. You couldn’t even ship the product for the price they are asking! They try and sell as many of these deals as they can. They say the item comes from out of the country so shipping takes a long time. Then they marked they item shipped, take the cash and delete their Amazon selling account. You are left waiting and waiting for a product that will never ship. You look at your Amazon account and realize the item shipped but you never received the item. You may even show it was shipped to a different state.
Amazon has amazing customer service so when you inform them of this issue, they will refund your money. Amazon is just awesome that way. You really can order with confidence but it really bugs me that these scams are happening. It’s a nuisance for sure.
Here lately I’ve been seeing friends getting scammed on Amazon so I feel it is my duty to pass along information to help you determine what could possibly be a scam.
I run a special deal group on Facebook and tell all the people in the group when I see a great deal on a product I’ve been tracking. These deals are legit and researched before I tell you about them. If I’ve told you about a deal in our Facebook group, you can bet I’ve already researched the seller! Feel free to join our group too. It’s called “Good Grabs” under Groups on Facebook. Request an invite here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goodgrabs
Here’s how to tell if an item marked on sale could potentially be a Fake Seller or Amazon Scam product:
Here’s an item I found today that raised red flags for me. Please don’t order these items. I 100% believe they are scams and would never want you to order them.
Here’s a Presto 16 Inch Electric Skillet with a Glass Cover on sale for $35.99 and the seller is Amazon.com. In this screen shot below you can see the sales price at $35.99 and the red arrow shows that Amazon is the seller of this item. Perfect! This is a legit item that is on sale and I can order with confidence.
NOTE: There are tons of 3 party sellers that sell products at good prices. Don’t turn away from a product just because it’s not sold by Amazon as the seller.
Here’s what you need to look at to determine if the seller is legit or not. You see the arrow in the screenshot below that says Used or new (55) from $3.99 and FREE shipping? This is were you find different prices and different sellers of the same product in this listing.
Once you click on that to see the other sellers and their prices, you will see this screen:
Notice there are three different sellers that are trying to sell this product for a very, very low price. I find low prices all the time especially if an item is used. The next thing you need to look at is the Seller Information located on the right side of that screen. The red flag for me on these listings are the “Just Launched” seller information.
There are two things wrong with this picture. If it is a legit new seller then it’s an error or a price glitch. I just know that a business cannot make a profit by selling this Presto Electric Skillet and shipping it for only $3.99! There’s just no way. I would not believe this for a new item. If it’s a true price glitch (which is very rare) then the seller most likely made a mistake. This is hardly the case from the research of done on these products. It is known that these are people from out of the country trying to get thousands of people to purchase this very low priced product so they can cash in on this scam. They want to take the money and close the account quickly before you even notice you didn’t get it in the mail.
Now notice the 4th and 5th seller on this screenshot above. These are legit sellers! One being Amazon and the other is Quidsi Retail LLC with a sellers score and a history of selling lots of products. I would order the lowest priced item from anyone of these legit sellers.
I’ve never seen this scam with an Amazon Prime product. If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time you will know that I am a big supporter of Amazon Prime! I use it myself and save lots of time and money by having items delivered right to my door.
I learned about this scam when I started selling used or new unwanted items on Amazon myself. I learned the selling side of Amazon! I recently moved and had so many books that I no longer wanted or needed. I decided to try and sell them online because books never do well at a garage sale. And you certainly don’t get enough from selling them to the used book store either. I decided to test out the Amazon selling platform for books and was amazed at how well it worked! In fact, I wrote an article sharing this experienced called “7 Ways to Make $1000 before Christmas” here. I show actual screen shots of books I was selling and the values of them too!
I want you to be able to order your favorite items from Amazon but I also want you to be well informed about the latest scams too.
