At what point is an on-line deal so good that you decide not to buy it?
And if so, why?
In the modern U.S.A., with markets dominated by cheap Chinese goods, is there still any such thing as a price that’s too low to be believable?
I have to write this one fast, as this amazing deal I’m looking at won’t last long. I must order now, or I might miss out on the deal of a lifetime.
A corrosive effect of cheap Chinese goods
For decades now, as an American, I’ve been stunned by the unbelievably cheap goods coming out of China. For a while, my high-water mark was the $39 microwave. Not a toy, not some low-powered device, but a standard 1500 watt countertop microwave. For $39. At my local big-box store, no less. This was the same era when you could get a room-sized (6000 BTU) window air conditioner for well under $100.
Those were, I swear, real offers, though they were only available for a brief period of time roughly half-a-decade ago. Offers that just left me shaking my head. How could they even refine the ore for the metal casing at that price, let alone ship the completed object to the U.S.? These had to be examples of “dumping” — selling below cost in foreign markets to support employment in the home market — but if so, nobody ever seemed to be charged with that.
As an economist, I’m supposed to point out how great such things are for the American consumer. That’s kind of the entire point of international trade. Or something. And I am contractually obligated to say that “this is why we don’t grow bananas in the U.S.”, as a defense of the traditional notion of comparative advantage as the driver of international trade. No matter how irrelevant that is to modern manufactured goods.
But as a side effect, the steady flood of such things has corroded my intuition about value.
Used to be, the world mostly functioned along the lines of “you get what you pay for”. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” And so on. And, to a degree it still does. Most stuff that appears to be cheap crap, is.
But these days, that ain’t necessarily so. Check out Harbor Freight, for example. They’ve made their mark importing cheap Chinese tools to the U.S. retail market. Of their offerings, everything is cheap. And some of it is good.
The upshot is that in modern America, it’s hard to dismiss some offer as being too good to be true, based on some intuition about value. About how much a given item, of a given quality, ought to cost. At least, as an old guy. I’ve seen too many items that seemed impossibly cheap, but were valid offers.
Today’s problem: A sensible spectrum of offers, for a potted plant dolly.
I need a potted plant dolly capable of moving a potted tree across an uneven surface.
I have a lime tree (long story). It’s in a big pot. It’s awkward and heavy. All winter, I have to move it into and out of my garage to give it daytime sun, without letting it freeze at night. To do that, I secure it to a standard appliance dolly with rope, and have at it as best I can. That’s getting pretty old. Or I am.
Prior to this year, the world of relevant potted plant dollies made sense, value-wise. Devices that might plausibly work, for moving my lime tree, fell into a nicely-sorted hierarchy of you-get-what-you-pay-for:
- $70: mass-market, flimsy, purpose-designed device.
- $80: mass-market generic light-duty hand truck.
- $200: industrial-quality hand truck
- $500: industrial-quality, purpose-designed device (“Potwheelz).
Given those options, I’ll stick with the hand truck that I already own. It’s a pain to use, but it kind-of does the job.
But in my heart of hearts, I want a Potwheelz.
Red-hot or red-flag?
Then, Google turned up this offer, when I specifically searched for the high-end Potwheelz plant mover:
Note that this is less than one-tenth the price that the manufacturer sells it for. With free shipping, yet. This firm appears to be selling it for less than the value of the shipping charges alone, for the name-brand Potwheelz device. (The device weighs 40 pounds and ships in a box that’s about 2′ on a side. That’s gotta cost somebody something, to ship.)
So, it’s the age-old tradeoff between Greed and Fear, writ small.
Deal of the Century? Bait-and-switch? Scam? Stolen goods? Typo?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Evaluation
Pros:
- My god that’s cheap.
- Claims to be the name-brand device.
- They didn’t steal the picture, or at least they had the good sense to alter it with AI. The picture for the $50 model sits at a different angle to the camera, relative to the picture of the original $500 model.
- The URL of the offeror appears to be a legit business, dealing in high-end outdoor products (for camping and such.)
Cons:
- My god that’s cheap.
- The website actually shows pictures of two different, but quite similar, devices (below).
- The URL for the offer does not show any direct link to this particular device. That is, you can’t go to the offeror’s website and end up at this particular web page via links on that website.
- The “number sold” data is obviously nonsense, as it keeps changing at random, but that’s true of everything offered on this website.
- There’s a lot of “hurry up and buy” pressure, including crude animations, time limits, and so on. But again, that’s just standard for this seller. Every item offered is in the same format.
- The shipping time estimate suggest direct-ship from China.
These are the two different devices depicted at the $49 price point. One appears to be the genuine name-brand Potwheelz. The other isn’t.
Best guess, this is just another unbelievably cheap made-in-China good. In this case a knock off of the genuine Potwheelz device.
Having been down this path before, I can guess where they’ve skimped. Those will be tubeless tires, so that if they go flat, you’ll have to buy tubes for them. The tires will be cheap plastic tires, not rubber tires. The bearings on the wheels will be poor-to-nonexistent. Every metal piece that can be replaced by plastic, will have been, and so on.
That said, much like the $39 microwave of old, I cannot even begin to fathom how they could send me that weight of metal, at this price. With free shipping, yet.
I’m not worried about this being a credit-card-related scam, because it’s aimed at such a limited market. The number of consumers who truly want an industrial-quality potted plant mover has to be pretty small. If this is just for harvesting credit-card numbers, there are lots of better ways to go about that.
Really, my biggest hesitation is the potential for bait-and-switch. That what they send will look nothing like what’s been offered. My $50 gamble will buy me some ultra-flimsy device not capable of moving a full-sized potted lime tree.
Decision.
I bought one. Or so the website tells me.
With tax and shipping, this is less than 8% of the cost of the genuine article. No matter what miracle-of-the-modern-world you think Chinese manufacturing to be, if this is as-depicted, somebody is taking an economic beating on this.
I can only hope that somebody, somewhere, created a bunch of knock-offs and couldn’t sell them. And this is the result.
After ordering, I now know that the seller is a Hong Kong based entity. Not that it makes a lot of difference.
Delivery by November 16, that’s the promise. Sometime in the next two weeks I’ll find out if I got the Deal of the Century. Or if I got scammed.
Addendum: Nope.
I’m now pretty sure that this is a scam, it’s just an extremely odd scam.
Once I was charged for it, I knew the firm was located in Hong Kong. Googling for Potwheelz Hong Kong, I found the exact same ad attached to yet a different website: https://testde.runshopstore.com/collections/new-in/product/standard-green-potwheelz-garden-dolly/
Only, this entire website only offers products costing just under $50. Any kind of product you can imagine. Amongst which was the Potwheelz plant mover. Estimated shipping for each product, no matter what the product is, no matter what the destination is, is $10.
I can only guess that they’ve determined that nobody will come after them for a charge of less than $50. And so, what you see is a large, random collection of objects of specialized appeal to some small subset of Americans, all listed for just less than $50.
And so, for any given item, it will appear to any random buyer just as it did to me: Who in their right mind would try to scam you over an item with such limited appeal? I did not think that, in the modern world, you could run the scam by offering thousands of such limited-appeal items. And that, while any one item didn’t matter, in aggregate, such a scam could make enough money to make it worthwhile. All you need to be able to do is steal the pictures and ad copy from enough different items, of roughly the right value, and you are in business.
The item is no longer listed in a Google Search for Potwheelz, suggesting that it only popped up there for a day or so. I just happened to have been unlucky enough to have seen it, on the day that it was a featured ad, and dumb enough to have fallen for it.
I tried to cancel the order, but there was no way to do that on their website, and an email sent to their customer service address came back as “no such email exists”. I’ve started the process with my bank to dispute the charge.
In hindsight, I could have tested the customer-service email address before I bought the item. That, and there were enough other red flags that I should have left well enough alone.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
