"Amazon Sellers Price Gouge" — Woman Pays $44 for Sweater, Finds Same One on Shein for $15
Updated Nov. 7 2023, 4:07 p.m. ET
Whether you're trying to find holiday discounts or even just trying to save money on a purchase, all of us internet shoppers tend to try and find the cheapest prices on the things we want. It's not as if we're settling for low quality or expecting to find the best products for unreasonably low prices, but no one would blame you for finding ways to avoid breaking the bank on certain items. And hopefully, you'll be able to spot the difference between a fair price and some severe price gouging.
Brianna on TikTok (@bri4nn4.mp4) was able to do just that when she was shopping on Amazon. While she was shopping for clothes, she noticed an absurd price gouge with a sweater she had her eye on. Here's what Brianna found.
This woman found an expensive sweater on Amazon. Then she found it somewhere else for way cheaper.
In her TikTok that was posted in early October 2023, Brianna was fully ready to put Amazon on blast.
"Get in loser, we're exposing Amazon," she proudly proclaimed at the start of her video.
At the time, she'd decided to order a sweater from Amazon that she once saw someone wearing and liked. Brianna admitted that she didn't really balk at the $44 price tag at first. Then she did some digging.
According to the comments and reviews for the sweater, some customers complained that the material for the sweater seemed "pretty thin" for being nearly $50. After she reverse image searched the sweater, she found something pretty shocking.
Brianna found a copy of the same sweater on Shein and bought it for only $14. What's more, the difference between these two sweaters is pretty staggering.
Brianna claims that the sweater from Amazon is made from thinner material. That's almost surprising, considering what else she found.
She then presented evidence that the Shein tag from the Amazon sweater was poorly cut off, suggesting that Amazon simply repackaged a Shein sweater and oversold it on their site.
She ended with a PSA for Amazon shoppers to reverse image search all of their items before hitting checkout.
While we might not recommend shopping at Shein specifically due to their history with copyright infringement and copying artistic designs, people have corroborated the idea that Amazon marks up their prices by an absurd amount. Most folks in the comments claim that they usually find the same products on shopping sites on Shein for way less money than at other places.
"I bought a $75 cow print crop from a boutique and then saw it for $6 on Shein," one TikToker claimed.
Many claim to already employ reverse image searches in order to find the same products on other sites for cheaper.
After all, these price gouges aren't much better than when Amazon came up with fake discounts for Prime Day 2023.
Amazon is already a controversial place to shop at as it is, but if you can buy the same thing for cheaper on another site than you would on Amazon, I'd take the other site any day.