Yikes. If you are following along, you know I just got back on Facebook after several years away. When you don't have many friends, a bunch of garbage shows up in your feed. Maybe it still shows up in your feed when you have friends? I wouldn't know. Ask me in a few months.
I am finding the AI "tiny houses" absolutely hilarious. My recent favorite was one that had an "L" shaped sofa that completely blocked access to the kitchen, and apparently had no bathroom. Most of them don't have bathrooms, and some don't even have entry doors. Clearly some AI is just generating these things with pithy comments like "absolutely beautiful." Then "people" in the comments say things like, "I love this, where can I get it?". Like I said, hilarious and basically harmless.
Far less hilarious is the trend I have seen where some person who is supposedly an artist is "going out of business" and they are "heartbroken" and need to clear out all their inventory. In reality, you are going to get some crap drop shipped from China that is most certainly NOT handmade or of the quality/materials claimed. How can you tell a real artist from a fake? AI is making it much harder. The site I almost fell for was a leather maker with beautiful photos of an older woman in what looked like a work shop. I took a closer look. On second inspection, the photos looked a little fake (AI). The items also looked mass made, and then I found reviews elsewhere that said the bags weren't real leather and it is basically a scam site. Whew! I dodged a bullet there. I probably would have ended up with some pleather bags made in China that I paid about the right price for. I would not have gotten a deal on handmade leather bags. If you want to buy junk, that is fine, but know what you are getting!
Unfortunately, Etsy is also full of "handmade" drop shipped jewelry that costs less than my wholesale cost of materials to make a similar LOOKING piece. You can follow the steps below to weed out bad Etsy sellers, too. If you want to shop on a site that only allows handmade items, check out Artisan's Cooperative. I do sell on Artisan's Cooperative, and I can attest that they vet their sellers very closely. It was started by a dedicated group of people who were fed up with Etsy. It is a coop and pretty cool!
Watch for:
• Prices that seem like a really good deal or are heavily discounted. Low prices that seem too good to be true are a big red flag. Real artists need to charge prices that are in line with the cost of the raw materials, the time it took to make the piece, and the hours and hours of experience and education they have put into their craft.
Hot Tip: real gold is currently about $2735 an ounce on the wholesale market. That is the cost for gold that has not been formed into wire, sheet or any other easily useable form. Silver is about $33 per ounce. It is much less expensive, but it still adds up, especially on larger pieces. So if the piece you are looking at doesn't reflect these base material prices, there is no way it is real. You can expect a basic narrow mass produced (but good quality) 18K gold band to start around $200 retail.
• Vague descriptions that say things like "silver" or "gold" with no info about whether that is the color, whether it is plated, fill or the real deal. Worse, the description will say nothing substantial at all. It will give no measurements or any meaningful description of the materials used.
• Perhaps most enlightening and helpful: Do a reverse image search on some of their website images. (just click on the little camera icon in the google search bar and drag and drop your photo). For example, I did a search from a site advertising on Facebook called "Mary's Gems". Mary claims to have been making jewelry by hand in Mattituck, NY for the past 20 years. She is of course, closing her site and is heartbroken, but everything is massively on sale. Poor Mary! Reading Mary's bio, it is pretty clear to me it was written entirely by Chat GPT or similar. Chat GPT has a certain overly florid and repetitive way of writing that is easy to spot once you get the hang of it. Though using AI to write copy doesn't necessarily mean the site is fake- not everybody is comfortable writing copy. The image search is far more enlightening. You get results for the identical ring set (with prices ranging from $1.90 to $995!) from Ali Express, Walmart and a bunch of other similarly misleading jewelry sites. If you click on "find image source" at the top of the photo, Google will list all the places there is an identical match (second image below).
In contrast, here is what you get if you search one of my images. I used a photo of my sterling silver and blue kyanite stud earrings as an example. You get a bunch of sort of similar looking blue stone stuff but nothing that looks like the earrings I made, or an exact image anywhere on the internet (though you don't get to see the actual image from website because for some reason Google doesn't want to index my site properly, but that is a post for a different day.)
A note about websites that scan for scams: There are several sites that will put an URL through some kind of engine and supposedly tell you if it is a trust worthy site. This is probably pretty accurate for larger retailers, but is not for small independent artists. We get downgraded because we don't have much of a web presence or a long history of searches and reviews. This alone is not necessarily accurate. Use your eyes and do some image searching! I also suggest reaching out to the contact info and seeing what kind of response you get. A real person will answer your query with real words and actually answer your question. They probably won't sound spammy or like a chat bot.
I hope that helps a bit! Happy surfing.
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