Facebook Ads – Beware Of Bargain Clothes Shops!

Will I get my goods if I buy from these scam clothing sites?

Poor quality clothes…

You may or may not receive the item. If you do, customers usually complain about the wrong size, shape, colour and poor quality etc. Getting a refund will be a nightmare and emails will go unanswered. Many people just write their purchase off as a bad experience, and scammers capitalise on that.

Completely different items sent…

Often you will receive a completely different item to the one you ordered. I know of someone who bought a pair of training shoes from one such site. All looked legitimate, but the first concern was that there was no purchase confirmation email. Emails to the seller asking them to confirm the sale went unanswered.

A couple of weeks later a plastic, see-through shower cap worth all of about 10p turned up instead of the shoes. It was like something you’d find in a really cheap Christmas cracker.

Getting a refund… or not

On behalf of the buyer I complained to PayPal. PayPal’s first response was that the shower cap had to be sent back to the seller ‘Signed For’ (to prove receipt), before a refund would be given. The cost of sending the shower cap back? £36, because the seller’s location was a building in the middle of Shanghai, in China. Of course, sending a shower cap worth all of 10p back to China was clearly not a viable option! On that occasion I’d managed to find the seller’s physical address – not from their website, but by looking up details of their domain name. Usually, however, such sites hide any contact information, precisely so that you can’t find them. 

When in discussion with PayPal, I outlined the arguments for not sending the shower cap back to China. I was also able to show them numerous bad reviews and complaints about the shoe company that I’d found on the Web.

Eventually PayPal was persuaded by my argument and refunded the cost of the shoes, taking the money from the seller’s account. They also managed to get the seller’s shop shut down.

The problem is, these scam shops keep popping up and it’s hard to police them. They use the same site or an extremely similar version, just put it on a new domain name and off they go again, fleecing more people. And once the domain name expires, the website will disappear a short while afterwards.