Front view of An-225, Lajes military airfield, April 2004

Even shortly before Easter, many stores advertise special offer prices, the reasons for which are meanwhile unknown and probably no longer questioned. Called Black Friday or Cyberweek at other times of the year, or Easter specials like now, these are fairly new occasions to motivate retailers. In the past there were clearance sales, sell-offs or closeouts, usually the manufacturer or seller wanted to get your products off the shelves to make room for new ones.

Anyway, I also became aware of such an offer before Easter. The goods were limited and time-limited, I immediately remembered the approach of these TV stores from the early years. However, the price seemed favorable to me that I had bitten. In advance, on the large known market places, at which many buyers romp, one cannot estimate the true product prices any longer, occasionally genuine fantasy prices are queried. I got caught up in a product from Revell, named Antonov, which was destroyed in Ukraine a few weeks ago. I quickly realized that there were two part numbers. At first I suspected a typo by the vendor, but Revell's own site also showed these two products, so they were real. Given the time constraints, I quickly noticed that according to the Revell site, the products were identical in quality and quantity. From experience, this didn't seem abstruse to me either, since this Antonov was, after all, originally from the time of the USSR, and was to find a new use in Ukraine after the breakup of the USSR. It was specially developed to transport the Soviet orbiter from the Buran space program in the troposphere. The transport system is comparable to NASA's modified Boeing 747-100 , which was used to transport the orbiter of the Space Shuttle system between different locations. There will be a separate post dealing with this, soon.

So I put these two Revell product pages side by side, and I basically saw nothing essential in which the price difference of almost factor 2 should find its justification.

Screenshots of the product descriptions of the Antonov at Revell

Nevertheless, with skepticism in mind, I still made sure on the page of Scalemates, whether I missed something. The time section presented by Scalemates always quite small, I did not invest deeper, I had the trustworthy product description of the manufacturer. With the mouse pointer over the images I could verify from the image description that the product 04958 is from 2018, the 04957 from 2019. From the "new parts" I wanted to have taken a model improvement, I did not enter a deeper analysis on this non-manufacturer page.

History of Revell's 04958 at Scalemates

So I had the cheap offer reserved for pickup at my local seller in town. In my memory, the local seller also had the same photo on his product page, as we, the Product Cluster also have it, since the offer was limited, in the meantime sold out, the page no longer exists at the seller. So as seen in the aftermath, these two products are found and displayed at Product Cluster, unfortunately we had not yet published our product portal on that said day.

Screen shots of the product descriptions at Product Cluster for Revell's An-225s.

I gladly collected the goods from the local dealer, but was surprised to see Level-3 on the cover, which I did not remember from looking at the Revell site, but was not suspicious enough. It wasn't until I got home that I verified my purchase. In fact, the intentionally purchased 04957 differed significantly from the Revell page: No Level-5 and also the number of 227 parts I had checked was not reached, but 114, which then also revealed the lower price to me.

The 04957 from Revell landed in my living room by mistake.

If I had not looked for the differences of the An-225 at the manufacturer Revell, but on our, still under construction product page of Product Cluster, I probably would have noticed the correctly reproduced box with the obvious level-3. With some pride, I realized that we were more error-free than the manufacturer itself.

Screen shots of the product descriptions at Product Cluster for Revell's 04958 and 04957.

Of course, I then noticed afterwards at the manufacturer's site that despite entering the two legal product numbers, products are also found, but for both product numbers also unfortunately the same product was deposited. I am sure that not even programmers would have noticed this in the forced haste of product verification. The search algorithm of the Revell site should have given a hint next to loud advertising banners: "Product not found", instead the extremely easy to confuse product was displayed. This case shows how important it is to have a good product description, as well as mature search engines in the product portals.

If you are interested into the history of toys, please feel free to find more information here. Or you rather would like to learn some tips about shopping online you may not know? Have a look here..