Low Prices

What’s wrong with a low price? In many cases: Nothing (and you might get a great deal), but in some cases it’s a sign that you should think both twice and thrice before clicking on buy.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. That might seem like an old and overused phrase, but it still holds true, especially when it comes to commerce.

A mystery box scam site could say that you will get (“at least one”) product worth $100 up to $1500 for the price of “just” $20 – $30. A scam site selling specific products (drones, LEGO, 3D-printers, etc) could list an item as reduced to $40, the “original” price listed as $149. But that “original” price can actually be undervalued, to make the reduced price more believable, where the actual price of the product is $800.

It doesn’t make sense for business to sell items at as low as 5%, or even at 20-30%, of their ordinary retail prices (or MSRP), since they would, most likely, loose money, and definitely miss out of potentially higher profits (especially at the volume some of these sites claim they have sold/have left).
This is still true for sites that claim that “they had to close down due to …”, because the goal should be to get as much as money as possible out from the liquidation, to pay creditors etc.

If a store lists very low prices for items it’s likely that one (or multiple) of these things are true:

• The items are stolen
• The items are counterfeit (like a knock-off copy of AirPods, or they are something like Lepin [LEGO knock-off])
• There are no items, at all
• You will get something (usually crappy) that isn’t at all what you paid for.