The 'wool' M&S jumper that's only a third wool... and the 'silk' dress made of polyester: How big brands' products aren't always what they claim
29.06.2022 - 07:57
/ msn.com
Thousands of shoppers are discovering items ordered from reputable retailers are not what they expected. Complaints about goods that were poor quality, faulty or not as described rose by 138 per cent last year, according to the dispute service Resolver. In many cases, items were described as being made of quality natural materials, like wood or leather, but turned out to be constructed from cheap synthetic imitations.
Not only are these cheaper materials worth less, they tend to be flimsier and less durable. Here, Money Mail investigates misleading online descriptions and how you can avoid being caught out. .
. Caroline Blight, 43, spent £30 on three wooden shelves from Homebase. The website described them as ‘timber shelves’ with a ‘hard-wearing timber finish’.
But when the baking blogger, from Hertfordshire, collected the shelving, the packaging stated the products were actually made from the synthetic material melamine. ‘I said to the assistant I thought I had been given the incorrect order and she told me that things on the website aren’t always labelled the same as they are in real life,’ says Caroline. ‘I was really annoyed.
’Ratula Chakraborty, professor of business management at the University of East Anglia, describes misleading product descriptions on websites as ‘a modern twist on a classic bait-and-switch ploy’. ‘Traditionally, consumers were hooked by a marketing claim and then steered to buy something else, but here the ploy is to sell inferior items that do not match the intended quality,’ she says. She recommends shoppers examine the small print carefully for any clues that the product is not what it seems and look out for phrases such as ‘effect’ or ‘pattern’ next to words like ‘wood’.
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