When you see something for sale for 1/4 the normal price, beware!
Mark wants to replace the microwave in the van with a combination microwave, convection oven, and air fryer. I was looking at microwaves at Walmart and the cheapest ones are $65. I remember only a few years ago, they were selling for the startlingly low price of $25. But someone told me there is now a "microwave shortage" (read: price gouging). Oddly enough, there were several dozen stacked up at Walmart. So much for the shortage!
And yes, they had a combination microwave, convection oven, and air fryer for about $225. And that is for a tabletop model, not a built-in unit with forward venting.
Anyway, we measured the opening and found a Furrion FR77AD microwave that seems to fit our existing opening in the cabinet. With the mounting bracket (faceplate) it comes to nearly $400 (!!). I searched online for cheaper alternatives and found most people were selling them for about the same price.
Then I found this. Not only was it less, it was a startlingly amount less - less than 1/4 the ordinary sales price! $87.80 - what an odd number. Who was "premiumrvparts.com" and why were they selling so cheaply? Going out of business? Well, it turns out the domain name is only a few months old, and the "trustmeter" on "scam detector" gives it a 5.7 - a very low score. I look at other products on their page and see that everything is selling for a quarter or less of ordinary retail prices. They are fighting inflation!
Notably missing is an address or phone number for the company. If it looks like a scam, smells like a scam, and sounds like a scam - it even tastes like one! - it probably is one, If these prices were real, someone could make a lot of money arbitraging these items on eBay and then having them shipped directly from this (apparently nonexistent) company.
And I was inclined to get reeled in, too. I was looking for a Genie, and Genies can be deceiving. There it was, like a mirage in the desert - a microwave combo that would fit the opening, cost less than a cheap tabletop model! Free shipping to boot! But Genies lie - there are no Casita trailers for $1957 or Harley Davidsons for $1500 - as you see (or used to see) all the time on Craigslist.
But why such penny-ante cons? Sure, they can cheat me out of $87.50 but is it worth the hassle? On the other hand, they probably pasted the code from some other RV parts site, and it took some third-world computer genius less and a day to set up the site. And once shut down, a matter of minutes to move the site to a new domain and start all over again. In the meantime, they can sell credit card numbers on the side.
UPDATE: I skimmed the site and saw dozens of products for sale for less than 1/4 of retail price (and I know pricing in the RV world!). E-Trailer lists the same items for far more money, often by a factor of four or more. They also put an "E-Trailer" logo hidden in all of their product pictures. Hey, guess what? Guess whose logo appears on the pages of "premiumrvparts.com"? Yup, the photos were "scraped" from E-Trailer.
I will have to revisit that site in a few months and see if they are still around. I am guessing that once they "sell" a few items, they will vanish like the wind.
UPDATE: Apparently my suspicions were correct. The same site is resurrected from time to time under different names, such as "getrvparts.com" or the like.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
