How to tell an American shop is safe to buy from

Everything on this site rests on one uncomfortable fact: from Egypt, you cannot practically send anything back. A wrong or fake item has cost you the whole landed price, not just the annoyance. So the shop matters more than the discount, and this is what we check before buying anything on somebody's behalf.

The five checks

1. Who is actually selling it? On the big marketplaces most items are sold by third parties, not by the platform. The product page looks identical either way. Find the seller name, and treat "sold by a name you have never heard of" differently from "sold by the brand".

2. Is the price plausible? Genuine goods are discounted at predictable times and by predictable amounts. A designer bag at 70% off in March, a fragrance at a third of everyone else's price, the current-generation console below retail — the price is the warning, not the bargain.

3. Does the shop have a real returns policy and a real address? Not because you will use it, but because shops that intend to honour one publish it clearly. A site with no returns page, no company address and no phone number is telling you something.

4. How old is the domain, and how does it read? Sites built to run a season have thin, oddly-worded copy, stock photography, and a name that is nearly a famous one. If the English on the page is subtly wrong, that is a signal.

5. What do the reviews look like as a set? Not the average — the shape. Hundreds of five-star reviews posted in one week, all short, all generic, is a manufactured set. Real products accumulate mixed reviews slowly.

The categories where fakes are worst

In roughly this order: perfume, sunglasses, handbags, cosmetics, watches, headphones. All small, all valuable, all easy to copy convincingly.

For any of these, our advice is the same and it is boring: buy from the brand's own shop or a large American retailer. The saving from a marketplace seller is rarely worth the risk you are taking with the whole landed cost.

Words that mean counterfeit, whatever else the listing says: "inspired by", "replica", "mirror quality", "1:1", "unauthorised authentic". We will not buy those, and if you send us one we will tell you what it is.

Grey market is not the same as fake

Worth separating, because they get confused.

A grey-market seller sells genuine goods bought legitimately, outside the brand's own dealer network. That is why American watch retailers are cheaper than an authorised dealer. The goods are real; what you usually give up is the manufacturer's warranty, replaced by the retailer's own. That is a trade many people should take — see buying a watch from abroad.

A counterfeit is a different object pretending to be the real one. No trade, just a loss.

What we do about it

We buy from the shops themselves, as a customer, from a list of more than fifty American retailers we have set up — the list is here. If you send us a link to somewhere we do not know, we look at it properly before quoting, and sometimes the answer is that we will not buy from there.

One thing we will not do, and it is worth saying plainly: we will not disguise ourselves to a shop that does not want to be read by a company's servers. Some American retailers refuse an automated request, and the answer to that is a person visiting the site in an ordinary browser, not a better disguise. It is slower and it is honest.

If you are not sure

Send us the link and ask. A person will look at it and tell you what they think — including "we would not buy this one, and here is why". That costs you nothing and it is a good deal cheaper than finding out after delivery.