The bargain hunt is on. For four weeks, consumers will be able to take advantage of the winter sales in both physical stores and online stores.
A favorable period for low prices but sometimes hides scams and false promotions. Here are some tips to avoid unpleasant surprises and a bank account that is too dry.
• Compare prices upstream
If you already know what your purchases will be during the sales, do not hesitate to visit the sites of your favorite brands several weeks in advance, even several months. With Black Friday and the holiday periods at the end of the year, the prices of certain items could fluctuate a lot during the last months of the year.
Some brands are particularly adept at “fake promotions.” The principle is simple: the brand increases the original price on the site and therefore shows a reduction equal to or slightly less than the base price. A practice regularly denounced by UFC Que Choisir.
But the consumer association has decided to further regulate this misleading practice. To comply with the European Omnibus Directive, brands are now required to indicate the lowest price applied in the last 30 days as the original price.
• Use price comparators
Tools are in place to ensure that online merchants do not attempt to circumvent the guidelines. The Keepa extension allows, for example, to analyze the evolution of the price of a product on Amazon. This free tool is available on all devices and browsers and offers detailed price history for more than 3 billion products.
You can also use specialized price comparison sites, such as Idealo or Le Dénicheur, which list the price history of millions of products.
• Don’t be too quick to make (too) good offers.
Some promotions shown during sales can sometimes be too good to be true. Like, for example, the latest generation iPhone for less than 500 euros, unimaginable. To be sure that your future purchase will not be a scam, absolutely check the site and product reviews. Although some reviews may be fake, they generally give an idea of the trustworthiness of the online merchant.
Because as in any online purchase, it is essential to check if the site is safe and official. Many brands are regularly usurped by sites that look exactly like the originals. The lock at the top of search bars is no longer a reliable indicator of whether a website is trustworthy.
Therefore, the website URL should be closely examined. Some usurpers take, for example, foreign alphabets to use modified letters similar to ours. Another common technique is to play on the similarity between the capital letter “i” and the lowercase letter “l”.
Special attention should also be paid to SMS, emails and other notifications sent by brands, which may turn out to be phishing attempts.
Source: BFM TV
