I think most of us are pretty happy to have traditional big box retailers being willing to price match items that we find cheaper online as long as it is from an authorized retailer. Imagine my surprise today when I was reading how there were people creating fake listings on reputable online retail sites where products are listed at rock bottom prices. Afterwards, people would go to a tradition retail store and ask for a price match such as printing out a copy of the page or having the retailer visit the site to verify.
One of the most prominent examples I was reading was how people were buying Playstation 4 consoles for extremely cheap. The example starts like this where a person uses a site like Amazon and creates a fake listing as you can see here:
To the untrained eye this looks perfectly legitimate where a product that is normally say $399 is on sale for $89.99. So a customer can then bring this into a company like Walmart and ask them to price match this. In many cases, people have successfully got the transaction to go through.
I’m one for saving money, but this is just wrong and a scam where it will ruin legitimate requests for others. So if you are a store owner who has price matching policies here’s a very easy way to tell if it is legitimate or not. Take a look at the screenshot I have above for example. Usually on sites like Amazon you can clearly distinguish if the item is from them or a third party by looking at the field near the price where it says the item is “Ship from and sold by.” In this case, the company is “AmzonElectronics.”
That should be an instant auto reject for a price protection as it is almost no different than an Ebay listing in many ways which a retailer would not price match. This information can be useful for the regular shoppers too where if the price looks too good you can use the same information to determine if it’s actually from the online retailer or not. If you are one of those retailers that these people are targeting train your employees please to lookout for those details.