Online shoppers can slash every £52 they spend to £11 thanks to legal trick

Online retailers are charging shoppers up to THREE TIMES more than other stores for the exact same item. Customers are paying up to three times more to buy items from certain online vendors compared to buying them from the original stores.

On Google, a single search brings up dozens of retailers selling that item. But customers are unaware many of these sellers are actually selling the exact same item for a huge range of different prices, according to a Sun newspaper investigation.

The probe found one denim co-ord set can be bought for four different prices on AliExpress. Kafiloe is selling the item for £52, but the cost is slashed to as little as £13.99 on Amazon. Chinese-owned AliExpress has sellers flogging the exact same matching outfit at four different prices, with the cheapest being £10.99.

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Andrew Priobrazhenskiy, shopping and savings expert at DiscountReactor, told the newspaper: "Many entrepreneurs use AliExpress as a source for products resold at higher prices on Amazon or other platforms. They utilise the low prices on AliExpress, which they then resell with a markup after further re-branding or re-purposing."

"This is a subset of a greater business model of dropshipping, where the vendor never handles the product physically but has it shipped directly from the supplier to the customer," he added. "There are a lot of sellers on these sites who sell products at very low prices, sometimes creating a red flag that it could either be counterfeit or poor quality," he said.

"While there are those who sell real and high-quality items, one is very likely to come across a knock-off or something that never resembles the image and description shown." He added: "I always tell them to check the seller rating and reviews from other customers for whatever product they're looking to buy."

"Plus, I would love to say that with a lot of really good deals comes a lot of caution—two things are real. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."