Risky Online Purchases

In the modern era of online shopping, risky sites and businesses are abundant. 

Recently, I decided to purchase some T-Shirts off of a website that I discovered via an Instagram Ad. I have outgrown a lot of my clothing over the past couple months, so it felt like a good idea considering the price was good and I liked the shirts a lot. This was the first time I have ever bought clothing off of a website that isn’t a known trustworthy source, but the comments on their Instagram page made it seem like this wasn’t a scam, so I decided to take a chance on it because I really felt that I was getting my money’s worth. 

The idea was obviously too good to be true. I would soon realize that I had made a mistake after spending around $70 – which isn’t a ton of money but isn’t exactly money I am willing to lose as a young college student trying to make ends meet at the moment…

The first problem was that it was going to take them much longer to ship than they had told me. About a day after I put in the order, I got an email from them saying that they were delayed and that it would take a long time to ship them out. This wasn’t the end of the world by any means, but it definitely makes you worried. About a month later, they emailed me again telling me that they finally shipped and that they would be delivered about two or three weeks later. Seeing that, I decided to look up the brand on Google, where I was not shocked to find a thread of Reddit posts blasting the company and a Consumer Reports page flagging the site as extremely questionable. They all said the same thing, which is that they all coincidentally got delayed – where the idea was agreed upon that it was likely a “drop shipping scheme” that ships the product out of China and that is the reason for the lengthy “delays”. Ultimately, most people admitted that they got the shirts at the end of the day but would not purchase from the site again. 

However, the bigger shock comes from something that I myself noticed. When I ordered my shirts, the company told me that because I was purchasing their products that I was joining a club. This “club” was made out to be nothing more than a glorified email list that would alert people when new drops came out. I thought nothing of it, until I got an email late on a Sunday telling me that I would be subscribed to their “supporter” subscription service. Thankfully I am someone who checks their emails daily and was able to get the subscription cancelled before it ever taxed me for a whopping $28 dollars (a month????). It wasn’t a coincidence that when I Googled the brand later to research the delay issue – that there were many angry comments about being automatically subscribed to this same thing. 

Although this company did not (technically) do anything illegal, it’s no doubt that this is an extremely sketchy company and that their business practices are nasty, to say the very least. While I did eventually get my shirts and them seemingly being of good quality for the money I spent, it was not a pleasant experience to “work” with this company. 

For future reference I take it that doing heavy research on a website or business before spending any money (or even just giving them your information) is a necessary idea. I know for a fact that if I see something that I find so cool that I am compelled to spend money on it, that somebody else probably already has – and the internet serves as a tool to make sure that you are not being scammed in any way. I would strongly recommend that anybody in the same situation that I was do that, because although I just managed to stay out of being tricked… I know that there were people who weren’t so lucky.