Yesterday, I was scrolling through Instagram, and an advertisement caught my eye. Like most things you see on Instagram, it was programmatically fed to my eyeballs through their constant monitoring algorithm. And, in this instance, it worked perfectly. It was an ad for the new Atlanta Braves City Connect jerseys at a substantial discount.
In my want for all things jerseys (mostly baseball and soccer), I clicked on it and started looking around. I found a Ronald Acuña #13 jersey, and was about to pull the trigger. But something nagged at me. I showed it to my son, and his fraud radar went off as well. Embarrassingly (to a tech guy), he told me to look at the URL. Sure enough, he was on to something.
| Fake | Real |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Check out the URLs at the bottom in the screenshots. Fanatics.com is one I know very well. We buy lots of merch from there. The other one was not quite that. And it almost got me.
Upon further inspection, things really started jumping out at me.
For one, look (above) at the jerseys themselves. The real one (from fanatics.com) has no small number on the front. This happens to match the real-world jerseys I saw at the Braves’ clubhouse store when I was at a game a couple of weeks ago.
Several others:
- “Men’s” is not grammatically correct.
- What is a “Cool Base” jersey? This particular jersey style does not have that in its name.
- Acuña’s name was spelled minus the “~” over the “n” in his name.
- The category of “Brand” was “baseball”. Huh? Not to mention, why would you not capitalize the “B” in “baseball”?
- The arrows you see (on top of) the image were not overlayed from the website. They were part of the image. That’s not a (legit) thing.
- There are arrows on either side of the jersey (even blocking one of the sleeves). But there’s only one image available (supposedly), so why would you need arrows at all? Much less one for “previous”.
- Same goes for the solid black dot below the image (normally used to visualize that this is one of N images available).
- Notice, also, that the real one has three available images, and it indicates that you’re viewing the first one. Hence, the arrow on the right is the only one showing. And it’s NOT part of the image itself. It’s a true overlay.
- The usage of the term “Reduced:” followed by the price you’re supposed to pay is not in keeping with convention. “Reduced to:” would be a better phrase. That indicates to me that the creator of this is not a native English speaker.
Now, for the web developer nerds out there. Look at the header for the fake site:
Now, look at the header for the real site:
Observations:
- There seem to be two “people” icons in the fake one. Normally, this is where “My Account” would reside. Signing in, seeing order history, that kind of thing. Why are there two? And why does one of them have a “+” on it? That makes no sense.
- The logo for “Fanatics” has a itty bitty trademark sign on the real site, but not on the fake one.
- The “hamburger” menu on the fake one has a weird non-consistent three lines. And it doesn’t even match the real site’s location.
- One of the top-level categories is “Nike NFL”. What does that mean? Another one is “Cap”. At this point, they’re not even trying.
The clincher for me, though, was the “Help” and/or “FAQ” section of each site. First, the real one:
It is very much in keeping with any e-commerce site out there. Categories spelled out, leading the user down a wizard-type path to achieve their goal.
Yet, the fake one:
- “FAQS” should be “FAQs”.
- The answer to number 1. is very disjointed grammar.
- If the “heading” for each entry is going to be a question, only the first word and any proper nouns should be capitalized.
- The phrase should either be “size do the jerseys” or “does the jersey” (singular vs. plural).
- No site would (or should) ever use “Plz” in their copy.
- “All of our jerseys size” is incorrect (again, singular vs. plural).
- “us” size should be “U.S.” size.
- The wording for “3.” is just such a generic sounding question that it’s almost as if ChatGPT wrote it.
Like I said, I was embarrassed I hadn’t applied enough rigor the first time I saw the deal. Admittedly, I was blinded by the price point and the hope of getting that good deal.
Kudos to my son for having the forethought to slow my roll.
