In our pandemic-altered 2020, it’s felt essential for many of us to be able to buy almost anything from home. One thousand varieties of shower curtains at our fingertips!
But being a truly informed online shopper now requires us to have an advanced degree in internet scams and the business of how products are marketed, sold and transported around the world.
This is a pattern with online news, entertainment, merchandise and more. Seemingly endless choice is amazing, but it has also introduced more confusion and the risk of being fooled.
I still think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but I’m also tired from thinking so hard about buying a pressure cooker or whether that photo from a political protest is real or forged.
My exhaustion reached a peak in the last few weeks. I wrote last month about bogus reviews on Amazon, and now I find myself eyeballing every online review for clues that it was bought off. I’ve always been skeptical, but now I don’t trust anything.
Then this weekend, I listened to this podcast about the Chinese mystery seeds. Remember all those news articles months ago about Americans who received plant seeds they didn’t order that arrived from China or other foreign countries?
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It turns out that it was probably not a nefarious plot but rather the result of a surge in online ordering, paranoia about China and a common internet scam known as “brushing.”
Brushing essentially involves a seller fabricating online orders to make a product appear more popular, and then trying to avoid detection by shipping a cheap and low-weight product, such as plant seeds, to a real person. Here is a more detailed explanation.
Not long ago I also had to explain to a family member why an item he bought on Amazon arrived on his doorstep in a Walmart shipping box. Short answer: The merchant on Amazon probably took the order, bought the same item for less on Walmart’s website, had it shipped directly to my relative, and pocketed the price difference as profit. This is another common e-commerce moneymaking tactic in the sea of complicated ways to game the system.
Online shopping is a massive industry, complete with consulting companies that advise on fake reviews, software sold for people to spot and take advantage of price differences and towns filled with warehouses to repackage online orders. This is how shopping works now.
The New York Times