Shopping on Wish? Avoid These Wish Scams
Author: Nichlaus O.
Wish is an online shopping store that boasts 100 million active monthly users according to their Google Play Store listing. It also claims to sell 2 million items per day, serves 100 countries and has its headquarters in San Francisco, USA.
Very Impressive statistics, right?
Wish.com sells clothes, fashion accessories, household electronics, computers and related accessories, smartphones, jewelry, shoes, watches, fishing equipment, and all kinds of electric tools.
Wish is a platform that connects merchants to customers. If you take it at face value, you’d expect great things from Wish. But what do the reviews say? What are the experiences of actual users of the site? That’s where we see the other side of the Wish coin.
Deceptive Advertising on Wish
When you visit Wish, you’ll be surprised immediately at the prices of items. Everything seems like a great bargain right from the start. All the deals are too good to pass. Any sensible shopper will want to buy something because it comes really cheap. But, like every deal that is too good, there is a catch. Here is how they drive their sales:
- Deceptive photos: All the photos are professionally created and look appealing. The shock hits you when your product is delivered. Clothes are hardly ever like the photos that wowed you! The designer dress you chose comes delivered oversize, poorly sewn, made from cheap fabric and looking nothing like the photo. Smaller sizes than ordered is a common complaint by customers.
- Misleading product descriptions: Common with electronics and tools where site descriptions do not match what is delivered. This is a known tactic with scam ecommerce sites to give misleading descriptions and it’s similar to bait and switch scams.
An ad for a 1 Terabyte external hard disk advertised at $20 might arrive as a hard disk case minus the drive itself.
An ad for an electric bike for $12 arrives only as a bike LED head light! That was one shopper's terrible experience. Then upon checking again, the buyer finds the ad description changed to show only the hard disk case or only the bike light for the price.
- No Quality Control: Buyers complain regularly about the poor quality of products on the site, which would explain the low prices. The truth is that quality is a bit pricey. Clothes have the cheapest and least durable fabrics.
- Poor Customer Service: Whenever customers file complaints, it takes a long time to get a response. Then an even longer process that to have it resolved, some waiting for months.
- Counterfeit goods: Common with electronics such as smartphones, video games and headphones. Goods advertised as genuine often turn out to be fakes.
- Refunds take too long: Customers who reviewed Wish claimed that the wait time is too long.
Wish.com Customer Reviews
SiteJabber and Trustpilot paint an entirely different pictures of Wish.com. SiteJabber rates Wish at 2.37 average with lots of negative reviews while Trustpilot has an abundance of positive reviews at 3.75 average out of 5, with more positive reviews.
Here are examples from Sitejabber:
The Trustpilot positive reviews are much more recent. Here are a few:
Many buyers do agree that the quality of most products is just low, but it seems worth the price as they are really cheap. Hence the positive reviews. As a customer, it is your duty to check products and merchants before buying. Also knowing if a platform has a return policy and how efficient their delivery systems work. Wish has many complaints about long shipping times and late delivery.
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