Monday 21 May 2012

When Imitation Isn't Flattery

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but in some cases, especially on the internet it's not always the case. With the world-wide web accessible in most countries, there's bound to be unscrupulous people willing to steal your hard work. We face it quite often with our site.

People setting up websites thinking it's an easy, quick way to make money, and frankly too lazy to do their own work. I've lost track at the number of times I've seen someone come along and copy and paste product descriptions in minutes, that I've spent hours working on.

The Mountain® came across another despicable imitation by an Indian website selling knock-off Mountain® t-shirts. While we're only a supplier and not the manufacturer of these wonderful t-shirts, it's still frustrating and does make me angry to see this going on.  I won't give the website the satisfaction of a free link to their site by giving you a link to it here. However; I will say be very careful who you purchase The Mountain® t-shirts from.

It's not only The Mountain® that suffers from these poor quality imitations, it's the artists who get royalties for their amazing designs, the customers who purchase in good faith getting t-shirts fit for dust rags. It's also affects  the genuine retailers who sell them, as it makes customers weary of purchasing them online.

There's a few ways you can check to be sure you're getting a real Mountain® t-shirt,  first before you place an order do a little homework. It's always best to check out the site you're looking to purchase from.  Do they have contact details, including a phone number you can get a hold of them on? Check the age of the website, this can be done by doing a search for domain age checker tools online.  Do a search on the website's address and see how many other sites are linking back to them. If it's an established site there should be quite a few links back to them. If you still worry then contact the Mountain® themselves www.themountain.me and ask if the site you're looking to purchase from is a genuine reseller.

Here's a picture showing the poor quality knock-off, would you be happy receiving this?


There's many websites out there selling The Mountain® t-shirts and most of the legitimate sites will use the stock photos The Mountain® provides for their retailers. These will include The Mountain® logo on the bottom right of the t-shirt. In the case of the above photos you can see they have removed them from the stock photo on the top left and replaced the tag with their own.

Summer is nearly here and it's t-shirt weather, so be sure to buy your shirts from a reputable seller. Ask questions if you need to, and if you're buying from us we only sell authentic products! 





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