Points of Articulation

Monkey Boy

You know that joke about how our parents taught us to look both ways before crossing the street, and not to talk to strangers, and now it's our responsibility to teach them how to recognize stupid AI Facebook posts and how not to fall for scams on the internet? It's great, and frames things in a very understandable way, but it's not just parents we need to worry about - we also need to look out for each other.

Take, for example, this post found on Reddit:

(Yes, the poster doesn't know how to spell "irked," let's pretend it's just a typo. This dude has much bigger problems, as you'll see.)

One of the replies put it very succinctly:

Now, I'm not going to say if you thought Walmart itself was suddenly selling a 480-piece SDCC exclusive from 2012, then you deserve to be taken advantage of...

...but someone might.

Walmart and Target both have features to filter out third-party sellers, but those are often hard to find. For instance, on Target's results page, you have to click on "Filter," then "Sold by," then click the box of "Target," hit the "Apply" button, and then finally "See results."

For Walmart, it's "All filters," then "Retailer," then check the box for "Walmart" but not the box for "Marketplace Sellers fulfilled by Walmart," and "View results."

And on both sites, you have to do this for every. Single. Search. Every. Single. Time. Search for Jurassic Park figures, go through all the steps to narrow it down to the actual results, then search for Star Wars, and go through them all again.

Walmart and Target do it this way because it allows them to do a corporation's favorite thing: make money for no work. These third-party sellers pay for the privilege of appearing in the search results of a more reliable name, so of course the real stores are uninterested in protecting you from these glorified coattail-riders. If you buy a Marvel Legend from a third-party seller because you saw it in the results of Target.com, Target gets money without having to pay for warehouse space, workers to process it, or shipping. The end goal of every online retailer is to be a list of products with no responsibility beyond collecting a check, and anything that gets in the way of that is a distraction. Everybody wants to be eBay, just without that pesky "auction" process.

If you don't want to deal with the hassle of filtering results for every search, you need to be able to recognize those third-party listings and avoid them. Fortunately, there are a few very easy ways to tell something is from an outside vendor on a major retailer's website:

• Not something the store would usually sell.

  For instance, someone else's exclusive. This should have been our Funko-collecting friend's first clue. Walmart.com will not sell Target exclusives. Target.com will not sell Walmart exclusives. Neither of them will sell Walgreens exclusives. And for certain neither of them will sell Comic-Con exclusives, unless those were announced as a shared store/convention exclusive ahead of time.

  But this also means certain brands and manufacturers. Right now, doing a search for "Spider-Man" action figures on Walmart.com returns 2,303 results. Filtering that to just Walmart items, it drops to 301. So what's in that two-thousand-figure gap? Well, have you ever known Walmart to sell Tamashii Nations figures? Of course not, but there's movie Green Goblin right in the listings. Does Walmart sell Mezco One:12 Collective? Never, but there's a listing nonetheless. The quick, shorthand version is if you wouldn't expect to see it at a local store, it's not going to be for sale on the website, either.

• Old product.

  The Reddit post quoted above doesn't say he bought the faux POP! recently; it's possible he's had it for a decade-plus and only now decided to post about it. But if not, that should have been his second clue.

  You missed a DC Multiverse Batman from last year, and you've been trying to find one. Why, look, there it is in Target's search results! How lucky! Well, no: retailers don't keep ancient product around; if they can't sell it, it goes on clearance so they can have room for new merchandise. If there's older product and it's not at dirt-cheap prices, it's not from the actual store.

  Take this handy pop quiz: searching for Eternals action figures on Walmart's site brings up a few for approximately $5, some others between $10 and $20, or a full set of seven for $149.99; without looking anything up or thinking for more than three seconds, which ones are sold by Walmart, and which are third-party trash trawling for suckers?

• Suspiciously high price.

  If that new NECA figure you've been waiting for appears to be available on Target's site, but instead of $35 it costs $60? That's not Target. Real retailers don't inflate their prices for shortpacks or in-demand items: they don't care that much. A small store may recognize the difference between, say, Spider-Man's enemy Chameleon and Spider-Man's clone Kaine, and price them accordingly, but to Walmart or Target, every item in that case of Spider-Man Legends is the exact same product, and they don't have the time to adjust individual prices even if one is more popular than another.

  In short, if something is selling for any price above its MSRP, doubt that it's a real listing.

• Not eligible for the same free shipping as other products.

  This one you may not spot until the end of the transaction, when you're looking at your cart just before clicking "confirm," but it's an infallible tell.

  Target and Walmart both offer free shipping on products they sell through their website, usually once you hit a certain threshold: you know, "spend $35, items ship free." That. Third-party sellers may offer "free" shipping (which honestly just means they've already built the extra shipping costs into their price), but it won't stack with the real product.

  Imagine you find a $30 Transformer you wanted, and then you add a $25 Black Series Stormtrooper to get you over the minimum. But your cart still shows a shipping fee; why? You look closely, and you see that Transformer was being sold by Spunky's Trading Card Depot, not by the site you were on, so even though it claimed "free shipping" it doesn't count toward the website's total. (This is also true on Amazon, for the record.)

There's nothing wrong with buying something from a third-party merchant who's just squatting on someone else's digital real estate, as long as you know who you're buying from and what that might entail. And while finding that out can be tricky sometimes, it's ultimately not very hard to tell good listings from bad ones. Take the time to learn to recognize the clues, and you'll never have to worry about the veracity of your Blone Trooper or Slaue Leia.