UKC

I saw an advert on Facebook for a clearance sale of Rab products.  It is advertising 90% off on clothing, sleeping bags etc.  It seems too good to be true, and some of it looks very suspicious (e.g. the "about us" and "contact us" pages).  It could be a scam site, effectively a clone website pretending to be Rab, but nothing to do with them, so I thought I'd post a warning.  

The website is www   dot  raboffseason  dot   shop 

Hmmmm.....

Out of focus small png logo, an "about us" page that doesn't actually mention Rab and the only contact is mailbox(at)customerservicesface(dot)com

All looks perfectly legit to me.

And a £620 sleeping bag for £62 - great offer - I'll go ahead and enter my bank details straight away!

If you can't get through at that email you could always try the address on the "Customer Reviews" page (assuming you've got a large enough envelope): 201, 2nd floor, building C (Shilin building), Taiwan Indsustrial Zone, 2132 Songbai Road, Shiyan street, Bao'an District, Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province. Contact information: 18126324875, contact person: customer number (F000 * * Yifan logistics), zipcode: 518100

Very odd, seems to be same site/person as rabclearance dot online (which redirects to storeclosingsale dot online) and raboutlet dot online (on google cache).  Seems to be Chinese origin as hosted on ymcart.

Could be a triangulation fraud??

https://fraud.net/d/triangulation-fraud/

Saw a similar thing (on FB) about a Mountain Hardwear clearance sale. They were only offering 80pc off though - cheapskates.

Obvious scam is obvious

Lots of these scams about....why you shouldn't trust anything on Facebook.

Just to be clear about the price side of things - online retail margin as a reseller is normally about 40-60% depending on product.

This means that if you see these products selling for more than a 60%-65% discount it's either a scam because businesses don't sell at a massive loss (90% would mean they are losing minimum 30-40% of the trade price on perfectly good product) or they never cost that much in the first place and have an inflated MSRP to incentivise sales via huge 'discounts'.

Either way it's best to avoid as these falsely inflated products are usually very cheaply produced OEM products (not in all cases, but many) and the quality is generally poor. 

The Rab sale outlet which I saw on FB actually had a phone no with an  0994 code

Seems perfectly reasonable  to me that the Rab distributor in Azerbaijan has loads of surplus stock to get rid of

There've been several of these ads for a few different outdoor companies on FB recently

Reminds me of what my Dad told me when I was about 18, "If it sounds too good to be true it probably isn't"

These are pretty well known scam/sham sites that keep popping up on Facebook if you follow outdoor groups. Mountain Equipment also gets it photos stolen and used in the same way, as do Mountain Hardwear - as was mentioned by someone else.

I know plenty of people have let ME and Rab know that they are seeing them - but it has been going on for a few years so I imagine it is hard for brands to be able to get Facebook to stop this.

Surely "is"?

If it sounds to good to be true it probably isn't not too good to be not true.

It's also a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. I work for a brand that has had similar issues in the past (it's relatively quiet at the moment though) and the moment you have them take one site or shop down another one pops up.

That's why you see a lot of brands have a list of certified resellers on their websites nowadays. They know who they have been wholesaling to so anything else is probably a scam. 

And yeah, as stated above, anything over a 40-60 percent markdown is probably fake. You could just as well set your stock on fire as sell it at those discounts. 

If it is liquidated stock you may sell stuff at 90% off retail price. 
Receivers often do this and also companies like JD Sports taking over companies ( Blacks).

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true

"... anything over a 40-60 percent markdown is probably fake."

Generally, yes, but also, 'markdown from what?'- 60% off what price?

Nowadays so much gear buying is done internationally online, with significantly variable pricing, that any kind of RRP can be meaningless across currencies.

If an Arcteryx jacket here in Australia was sold at 40% discount in an Australian shop, a North American would look at that discounted price and see it as normal. If an Australian saw an Arcteryx jacket in a Vancouver retailer's website at 40% discount, in CAD, it would be so cheap as to possibly seem a scam.

So an Australian could see something very very cheap online, that is effectively 60% cheaper than they pay locally, but only 30% cheaper than the seller previously had it at in their country, so it might seem suspiciously good, but it's completely genuine. 

There are also plenty of retailers selling genuine gear online that are not major names, chains or in any way 'recommended retailers' by the brands.

So if you get a combination of these things, it can sometimes be quite difficult to tell if it is actually 'too good to be true' or just the vagaries of international commerce.

I've scored some absolute bargains over the years, got things at 30-40% of what they would have cost me locally, even with shipping, because our local prices are so high.

So you really have to look at the seller, go by their brand or reputation, and judge the authenticity of the site itself - typos, lack of contact details, poor imagery or design etc - rather than just be instantly warned off by price.

Fair enough, but even then 80-90 percent off coupled to a very sketchy-looking website is a pretty clear indicator of a scam...

But the grammar works like this:

If it sounds [attribute], it probably is [attribute]

If we're not careful, we'll be saying "I could care less" like the Yanks...

Tell me about it.

Sometimes I care a little, but I can be persuaded by events/responses to care a little less. In the same way that I could eat less, I could care less. Sometimes I don't care at all, occasionally I don't have a care, and rarelyI care a lot. Sometimes all of the above about the evolution of language 

But the expression "I couldn't care less" means that you really don't care about it at all. Which is the point of the expression. Americans use "I could care less" in the same circumstances. Clearly, if they could care less, then they must care about the subject to some extent. Which is not the point of the expression.

I couldn't give a shit.

Does that mean, if I did care, I'd give you a nice fresh, steaming turd? 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

'I couldn't care less' & 'I could care less' obviously have different/opposite meanings, by the inclusion of a negative.  If anybody uses the latter when they mean the former, their meaning is likely to be misunderstood. I use both expressions with their different & distinct meanings. Full stop (or period)

My entire point was that Americans generally use "could care less", where we would use "couldn't care less". i.e. wrongly.