Fake Websites to Artificially Inflate Stated Savings

LOrderInWrongWordsThe on 30/06/2019 - 22:49

I was cruising through my phone notifications this morning and saw one from cashrewards showing what might be a good deal for silk pillowcases which you can find here https://www.groupon.com.au/deals/bdirect-716663323

The listing shows RRP $229 current price $39 which is an incredible 83% off the normal price. Wow what a saving, better get onto that quick before the savings finish! A bit more digging through the listing shows the following

• Price compared to www.bdirect.com.au

So I looked up www.bdirect.com.au and sure enough they list the product at $229 and it's in stock so case closed it's a great deal. Nah something just seems off with bdirect.com.au. It's a nice looking page on the surface but some of the links don't work, like "Terms and conditions" that's just text on the homepage. It's a link on some other sub-pages but that's pretty bad for an online store. Hell if you click on contact us it brings up a popup that says "Live help is displayed for demo purposes only. To add it to your store please refer to the template documentation or Olark Live chat official website."

Who would trust a place like that enough to buy from if they can't even make their website work right. Well fear not, you can't buy anything from this store. Put an item in your cart, click on proceed to checkout in your cart and be greeting by a page that says "Checkout System disabled: Checkout is disabled."

bdirect.com.au doesn't appear to be a online store at all, it's just a way of providing comparison prices which can be artificially inflated to whatever the hell they want to provide people with a "Wow what a saving" moment. This stinks of raising the price just to lower it with fake discounts. Looking at the groupon link it even states bdirect in the URL so it wouldn't surprise me if they sell their products on marketplace websites and run their own one purely to provide an artificially high "was" price.

This sounds a bit like misleading pricing according to the ACCC and I would think matches the definitions on their website which can be found here https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/prices-surcharges-receipts…

This seem super dodgy to anyone else?

General Discussion

Related Stores

BDirect
BDirect

Comments

  • Nalar on 30/06/2019 - 23:28
    +4

    Yes, report it, lets see what ACCC can do!

  • Yoo on 01/07/2019 - 02:02
    +2

    That's how Groupon and other websites work. Fake websites with huge RRP and massive discounts to attract clients. Those pillowcases are sold from Aliexpress for less than $3. According to Groupon there were 70 units sold today for $39… Easy money

    • Donaldhump on 01/07/2019 - 07:05

      Incredible, are they exactly the same.

    • Clear on 01/07/2019 - 07:17
      +2

      Same crowd operate on Catch selling inflated Chinese crap. There are heaps of these kind of sellers on Groupon now.

  • AustriaBargain on 01/07/2019 - 08:34

    pretty clever. Lets see Google take a million years to combat this kind of thing.

  • Typical16-bitEnjoyer on 01/07/2019 - 09:27

    Looks like they have a bunch of online "shops"

    https://abr.business.gov.au/ABN/View?abn=42175149181

  • Seraphin7 on 01/07/2019 - 09:31

    That Bdirect site is dodgy AF.

    And the items on Groupon look eerily similar to those on Aliexpress.

    To be fair, buying from China and marking up doesn't bother me that much. That's basic retailing. But operating a "shadow site" solely for the purposes of price comparison would surely be illegal?

  • singingwolf on 01/07/2019 - 18:36

    Oops, something went wrong.
    What happened?
    Checkout System disabled: Checkout is disabled.
    What can I do?
    Press the back button on your browser.
    Return to the previous page.

    hahahahahhahha

    Looks so good but soooo fake

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