Counterfeiters copy $20 bottles too, so where you buy matters
It is natural to think counterfeiters only bother with expensive perfume: a fake Creed or Chanel, where the margin is large. They do not stop there. Inexpensive bottles get copied as well, and a fake of a cheap fragrance is harder to spot by price alone, because the real one is already cheap.
Even a $20 bottle has fakes
Lattafa sells some of the least expensive popular fragrances we list; a 100 ml Khamrah was listed between $19.99 and $52.49 across twenty shops when we read them in October 2026 (our survey). Even so, Lattafa Pakistan, a shop selling the brand, keeps a page on fighting counterfeits. It warns that "counterfeit products not only compromise quality but can also pose serious health risks", that "fakes often use poor materials and blurred images", and that "counterfeits rarely match the original fragrance". A seller does not write that about a problem it does not have.
Where fakes come from is no secret either. US Customs and Border Protection's figures for fiscal year 2023: "Seizures of counterfeit goods from China and Hong Kong accounted for 46% of counterfeit seizures and 84% of the value of counterfeit seizures" (CBP IPR fact sheet, FY2023).
Why it matters even when the money is small
Losing $20 is not the real risk. Nobody knows what is in a counterfeit. US Customs warns that "if you purchase counterfeit perfume, you don't know what's in it, or what chemicals were used to make it" (CBP). Our post on how to tell a fake from a real one collects what police and trading standards have found in seized fakes, and the checks to make.
Buy from a seller with something to lose
The safest bottle comes from a seller with a name and a track record: an established retailer, the brand's own shop, or a marketplace seller with a long, positive feedback history. A listing from an account nobody has heard of, in a social-media shop or a marketplace, at a price well below every other seller, is where fakes are most likely to be.
That is not a rule that every marketplace seller is bad. Plenty of eBay sellers are long-established shops. It is a reason to look at who the seller is before you look at the price.
How FragranceSeek helps, and what it cannot do
FragranceSeek lists the prices that named shops offer and links to them. It does not list TikTok Shop sellers. Here is what we do:
- Named shops, described. Our Shops page says who each shop is, so you know who you are buying from before you click.
- eBay listings, with the seller's record. We show eBay listings only when they are listed as new, and leave out ones whose own condition notes say otherwise. Each eBay row shows the seller's feedback, and we flag a seller with under 95% positive feedback over the last 12 months, or fewer than 10 ratings, as one to be careful of. Sellers with under 100 ratings are marked as not yet established.
- The whole spread of prices. Seeing every shop's price for one bottle at one size makes an outlier stand out. If one listing is far below all the others, ask why.
What we cannot do is inspect bottles. We do not handle stock, and we cannot guarantee that any listing is genuine. eBay's own Authenticity Guarantee does not appear on the fragrance listings we read, so a feedback score is the best signal there is. Use the price table to pick a seller you trust, not only the lowest number on it.