Don’t fall for these online shopping traps

The festive season is here, and with it comes a general desire to go shopping. With the season of festivity comes the season of many sales, discounts, and offers on products all over the market, from cars to electronic devices.

However, many of these sales and offers are not everything they seem, and therefore, they often bait customers into getting a bad deal.

Yet there are several commonly-found tricks used to bait customers which, when known, can be easily recognized. These are six online shopping tricks that one should never fall for when looking for a good deal on a product.

Many huge, eye-popping advertisements can be found in any newspaper, claiming massive discounts on products that are quite tempting.

However, these discounts often have a catch, such as only being available on select credit cards, or only being available on select products.

Instead of offering a discount, some products have exchange offers instead. Many are tempted by these offers, but they can often result in people giving up perfectly good products in return for another.

Discounts on flight tickets are often deceptive. Although they may seem tempting, the discount may only be on the base price, without counting the addition of taxes. The discounted tickets may also be nonrefundable.

Notifications from apps that tell about limited-time sale offers, or “flash sales”, are often very tempting, since there is only a very short time window in which the discount is available.

This can lead to people unknowingly spending more money than they could have spent on a different discount.

With limited-period offers, advertisements will often start popping up about the “final days” of a sale on a certain product or products. This can lead to people rushing to buy the items under these discounts before the offer ends, even if the offer is not very good.

Online retailers often change prices on the fly as per demand.

The price of a product may surge one day and then plummet on another day, creating a very confusing environment for customers.

Prices may even change multiple times per day.

Photo by mohamed hassan from Pxhere (Free for commercial use / CC0 Public Domain)

Image Reference: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1440159