The luxury resale market is a broad and varied space, with thousands of professional resellers looking to seize their investment in luxury handbags, especially in the French brand Hermès handbags; the Birkin, Kelly, and Constance. 

Although luxury resale offers many ways to earn back the investment you have made, there are also some details that you must pay attention to if you want to buy or sell luxury products in this market. To make sure you deal only with professional resellers, we want to show you how to identify resellers' bad practices so that you can avoid them and look for more trustworthy resellers.

1. Avoiding answering messages and calls
2. Asking for money in advance to reserve a handbag
3. Hiding details about the bag
4. Not providing authenticity elements
5. Acting sketchy about the payment
6. Reluctant to ship the handbag

Avoiding answering messages and calls

When contacting a reseller either to buy from them or sell to them, you must always have any kind of response, it doesn’t matter if you’re communicating through Whatsapp, Instagram, mobile calls, or any other communication form, you should always receive an answer in a reasonable amount of time.

If a reseller tries to avoid your messages and calls, they are most likely hiding something, or they don’t want to make deals with you, but instead of telling you about it, they hide and even block you sometimes. This is a big warning and it shows that you shouldn't do any business with this person.

If you have already purchased a handbag from them and are waiting on the shipment, or if you’re waiting on their payment to ship a bag they want to buy, you must be alert, share your experience in forums or reseller communities and contact the authorities if the problem escalates even further.

Asking for money in advance to reserve a handbag

When you’re interested in buying a handbag from a reseller, sometimes the bag is being requested by many people at once, and if you’re lucky you may be the first one to ask for it, that being said, a professional reseller will save it for you for a period of 24 to 48 hours. This usually doesn’t require any payments in advance, and if it does, it should be a very small amount of money.

However, if a reseller tries to convince you to pay half of the value of the bag or the whole bag to reserve it for you, you shouldn’t make a deal with them, these people are most likely scammers that try to make you think that their products are too coveted to get money from you, when in reality, they may not even have that bag, and it may be a picture they took from the internet. 

This is why it is very important to be alert and check every behavior of a reseller, to identify if you may be falling for a scam, or if they are asking for a reasonable thing.
 

Hiding details about the bag

While checking on a handbag that a reseller wants to sell, you’re completely allowed to ask as many questions as you like, since you’re looking to make an investment in a luxury product, so it is not a decision you should take lightly. If you’re asking questions about the status of the bag, the stamp, the skin, color, hardware, or any other element, you should always receive an honest answer from the reseller.

This is important because they shouldn’t keep any information, they should always point out the positive characteristics of the bag, and tell you about any minor scratch or sign of wear that it may have. If the reseller avoids answering questions or if they assure you that the bag is completely new and unscratched, but it is labeled as pre-loved, you should definitely be warned about this behavior.

In these situations, some scammers or unprofessional resellers may use pictures from another bag they found on the internet to trick people about the status of the handbag, so pay attention and always examine the pictures, you can even try to make a reverse search in Google Images just to make sure it doesn’t come from another website, or if it does, that it is published by the same reseller that is trying to sell it to you.

Not providing authenticity elements

If hiding information about the bag is already a very wrong behavior, then hiding the authenticity elements is completely unacceptable. Every respectable and professional luxury reseller knows that authenticity is the most important aspect of any luxury purchase because it guarantees the sale of the item in the future and it demonstrates that it is an original piece that will revalue over time.

So if you pay for a counterfeit without knowing, you’re not only going to lose your money, but also lose any possibility to sell the item in the future, because it is a counterfeit, and it can even put you at risk if the authorities know about it.

When you’re trying to buy a handbag from a reseller and they act completely oblivious about the authenticity elements, not offering you the official invoices from the Hermès store, or not even the original orange box the bag came in, it is definitely a bad sign and you should back off from this deal. We recommend you spread the word amongst other resellers so that they can be warned about this person and avoid any contact with them.

Acting sketchy about the payment

If you’re selling a bag to a reseller, there must be an agreement about the way they are going to pay and how long is it going to take them, to later proceed with the shipping of the handbag. However, if a reseller that you’re selling a handbag to is acting weird about the payment, taking too long to do it, or putting out many excuses, you should be alert and avoid shipping the item.

Sometimes there are resellers that want to make the payment after the handbag has been shipped, but this is very risky and shouldn’t be accepted, since they can be scammers that never make the payment and steal from you. Pay attention to all of these strange behaviors to be warned and avoid making any deals with this type of resellers that may be scammers or simply incompetent.

Reluctant to ship the handbag

Luxury resale is a business that must be taken seriously, and like in any transaction there needs to be an agreement on how it is going to be conducted. If you’re buying a handbag from a reseller and you agreed on them making the shipment once the payment was sent, they should be able to give you details about the shipment and send you the tracking number once you have paid, because they are supposed to fulfill your agreement. 

However, sometimes there are resellers who after you have paid for the handbag refuse to ship it, or they always make excuses about it. This is definitely a big warning, and although you don’t have a way to know if they will behave like this before you make the deal, you can always try to research the resellers you’re going to buy from before you do it, look for their name online or ask the luxury resellers’ community, they will be glad to help you with it.

If a reseller refuses to ship the item and they take too long to do it, or they don’t do it at all, we recommend you speak directly to the authorities and try to make a call to your bank to try and make a refund to your account before it is too late.

We hope we were of help with how to identify bad practices from luxury resellers. Unfortunately, the luxury resale market is still full of scammers, counterfeiters, and thieves that take advantage of honest investors, however, it is everybody’s responsibility to expose them and warn other resellers about these practices, so we can keep a safe environment to thrive with this business. 

Discover these signs that you're dealing with a professional reseller.

If you want to be part of a safe community for professional luxury resellers, we invite you to become a member for free. You will get access to our updated Hermès handbag list and many other benefits. Don’t miss them!

Make a safe investment with Resellers Connector today!