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Buyer Beware! Perfume testers are here. |
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Hello Avid Perfume Lovers,
You are shopping at a mall for a nice fragrance for someone you really love. Maybe it is his birthday today. Or maybe she just got that really important promotion
and you want to express your love by buying her a gift. You walk into a perfume store and suddenly remember how she loves the freshening smell of "Emporio She". So
you ask the attendant that you would like to test this perfume before you buy it. He eagerly reaches under his counter and pulls out a "new boxed" bottle of the perfume
and quickly opens it and sprays a little on your wrist. You really like it and you start admiring the taste that your loved one possesses. You decide to buy it and
ask the attendant to pack a new bottle for you. At that point, the attendant goes -
"Mister, if you buy the bottle you just tested, I can sell it to you a lot cheaper."
Now how would you like that? Well, neither would I. But hundreds of people end up buying cheap testers from online everyday, thinking that they got a killer deal this time.
But let me remind you that a tester is a tester, is a tester.
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But whats wrong with buying a Perfume tester? |
Nothing is wrong with that as long as you are a perfume reseller. But if you are a shopper who
buys perfumes, fragrances and colognes for personal use, then its a totally different story. You see, Testers,
as the name suggests, are fragrances that are used for testing out a particular perfume before you decide to buy it
at a store.
Nearly all famous brand manufacturers sell testers to their dealers because in the traditional "brick and mortar" business, the dealer has to let the buyer sample the fragrance
before he/she buys it. Therefore, testers had to be a cheaper version of the same perfume that the dealers would offer any customer to try.
But in the iWorld, where testing of products was nealy impossible, testers became a cheaper alternate to their more expensive original perfumes.
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But what makes buying perfume testers Risky? |
Now a days, many internet-based fragrance stores offer testers in their line of products. Most of them are genuine businesses and don't want to get involved in any litigations and
therefore are honest about this fact on their site and offer the alternate options to the clients, who make a consious decision to buy them or not. But what most of the stores don't mention
is why are the testers being sold cheaper when they can be sold at the regular price (if they are equally as good as the original perfume). Some possible reasons for selling fragrance testers cheap can be -
- Unboxed perfume or fragrance.
- Used or Expired perfumes. It is very hard to detect whether a perfume has expired or not. This makes it a lot easier to sell as a tester.
- Returned inventory, which cannot be sold as new perfumes by law.
- Worst of them all - Fake imitations of the original perfume. They usually have a "Our Version Of" written under them.
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Are there no Laws to protect buyers from such possible business practice? |
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So far the only law that an end-user has to follow very carefully is BUYER BEWARE. Intentionally buying a lower quality product at cheaper price has some inherent risks that, according to the Law,
the buyer agrees to take, because he/she made a conscious decision to buy inferior quality goods for lower price. The sellers have fulfilled their responsibility by mentioning "Tester" in the product's description.
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Conclusion |
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For the records, I am not against buying or selling of tester perfumes. All that this article intends to do is to make the buyer aware of what he/she is buying when they
opt for testers. I personally believe that a well-informed customer is a valuable customer.
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