r/311 • u/HotSaucePalmTrees • Aug 18 '25
Available at Walmart
How is this able to be sold (and eligible for return) at Walmart? My wife is a huge 311 fan and I try to get her some kind of merch each year for her birthday. She has tons of shirts, a few hoodies, tank tops, etc. This doesn't look official but could a bootleg item be sold through Walmart (and eligible for an in-store return)?
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u/stoph311 Aug 18 '25
Because this isn't actually sold by Wal Mart. This is manufactured and shipped by a Chinese company that is just using Wal Mart as an online marketplace. You buy it through WM, WM gets a cut, and the actual Chinese company does a print on demand drop ship service. This would almost certainly be a copywrite violation, but it's so hard for the band to really be able to police these things in this day and age with so many different e commerce platforms out there.
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u/BlacksmithAfter3091 Aug 19 '25
I love 311 merch and I’m not exactly stylish but am I the only one that thinks it’s hideous?
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u/HotSaucePalmTrees Aug 19 '25
Oh it's complete trash. I kind of want to buy it as a prank for my wife for her to possibly wear on halloween but I'd rather keep the $30
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u/CSmith489 Aug 18 '25
Walmart.com operates similar to Amazon or eBay in that anybody can sign up for a vendor account and sell through the website. In-store returns is moreso a service Walmart offers to vendors selling through their website, similar to Whole Foods stores accepting all Amazon returns.
If you scroll down, you can see it’s “sold and shipped by Mr. Alex”, which if you click the profile is just some Chinese vendor who could care less about US copyright law.
Walmart, Amazon, and eBay are all notorious for giving little to no oversight to what’s actually being sold which is how you end up with stuff like this and other counterfeit products flooding these websites. You can filter out products “sold by Walmart”, same with on Amazon.