Is a website a scam

02.03.13: In  my review of web products, i am seeing websites that are relatively new and not known by the general public.

Remember the adage "If a price appears to be too good to be true, it generally is".

While these new websites may be honest and sell authentic products, there are a lot of knock-off products on the market and they appear to be growing every day.

I do a lot of shopping on eBay and find a lot of these non-authentic products to be worth buying as the risk is low due to low price.

However, when it comes to more expensive items such as golf equipment, I prefer to authenticate the site or buy from sites I am quite sure of.

eBay is a very good site to buy from, as they have buyer protection (thru Paypal and thru eBay).

I am now seeing much better golf prices outside of eBay and wonder if I will receive what I purchase and it will be as good as the authentic product.

I say "as good as", as I bought a set of Taylormade Burner 2.0 irons a couple of years ago at 1/3 the retail price. They played better than I expected and I wasn't concerned if they were authentic.

I am now looking at a new set of Taylormade Rocketbladez irons and a Taylormade R1 driver.

On these specific sites, the driver is approx $260 (including shipping via USP ... which almost assures me no duties or taxes) and the irons are approx $395 (9 irons).

Both prices are approx 1/2 the retail price and well below the eBay prices.

Very tempting...

However, in checking sites I noticed the following websites (price includes shipping via USPS) that looked very similar:

1. www.usgolfbuy.com (R1 $265, irons $395)

2. www.officegolfshop.com (R1 $260, irons $400)

3. www.golfpurchaser.com ($R1 $262, irons $392)

4. www.buygolfonlineus.com (R1 $250, irons $390)

5. www.buygolfbase.com (R1 $251, irons $381)
6. www.olfcheapsite.com -> redirects to www.sitegolfclub.com (R1 $250, irons $390)

(aside: all the above are accessible without the "www" in the address, as with most websites)

These are excellent prices and worth buying ... if a legitimate site and you are assured the authentic order arrives and they have an acceptable return policy and problem resolution process.

A lot to expect and very hard to confirm validity before purchase.

One approach is to use a site like www.scamadvisor.com to validate a website or www.mywot.com to identify or report a website. 

When I used scamadvisor to validate www.buygolfonlineus.com,

here is what it indicated.



If you have any question about validity/authenticity of a website, and would like my help, pls let me know.