How to Check a Football Boot Website Before You Pay: A Six-Point Checklist
Search for a current football boot and you will find shops selling it for a third of what the brand charges. Some are legitimate clearance. Some are grey imports. Some are replicas with a convincing product page. The difference matters, because a €120 mistake is not recoverable from a seller you cannot identify.
You do not need to be an expert to tell them apart. Six checks, all on pages the shop publishes itself, will tell you most of what you need. We will use Crampons Elite as the worked example throughout, because it is a clear case and we already went through it in detail in our Crampons Elite review. The method works on any shop.
1. Look at the spread of prices, not the discount
This is the single most useful check and almost nobody does it. Open the shop's full boot listing and sort by price. In the real market, prices fan out: entry-level boots around €50–90, mid-range €120–160, current elite models €250–300. An authorised retailer buys each tier at a different wholesale cost, so its prices have to fan out too.
Now look for the opposite. If every boot in the shop costs the same, whatever the brand and whatever the tier, the stock was not bought through those brands' channels — a supplier charging one unit cost for every model is not making boots to five different brands' specifications.
On Crampons Elite, we counted 5,782 boot variants all priced at €120, every one shown as a cut from €260. Nike, Adidas, Puma, Mizuno, New Balance — same price. Shirts tell the same story at €45 from €90, tracksuits at €70 from €140.
What a healthy shop looks like: a real range of prices, a sale section that is smaller than the full catalogue, and discounts that differ from product to product.
2. Open the legal notice and look for a company number
Every e-commerce site in the EU has to identify its operator. In France the page is called mentions légales; in other countries it is the imprint or legal notice, usually linked in the footer. It should name a company, an address, and — this is the part to check — a company registration number: a SIRET or SIREN in France, a VAT number elsewhere in the EU, a company number in the UK.
A number means the business is traceable in a public register. No number means that if something goes wrong you are writing to an email address.
Crampons Elite's notice names EK LLC of Albuquerque, New Mexico, gives an email, and publishes no SIRET or SIREN — on a site selling in French to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the French overseas territories. Its disputes clause names no jurisdiction at all, only "the law of the jurisdiction of commercial operation".
What a healthy shop looks like: a named company, a registered address, a registration or VAT number you can look up, and a stated jurisdiction.
3. Check the returns policy against the law, not against other shops
Comparing one shop's policy to another's tells you nothing if both are poor. Compare it to what you are owed. For a distance sale to a consumer in the EU:
- A 14-day right of withdrawal, allowing you to return goods for a refund without giving a reason.
- A two-year legal guarantee of conformity on the goods.
Those apply whether or not a shop's policy mentions them. So a policy that quietly replaces them is telling you how the shop intends to behave. Watch for three substitutions: exchange instead of refund; a short "quality guarantee" instead of the two-year conformity guarantee; and a very short window to change anything.
Crampons Elite's policy offers exchanges within 30 days on unworn, unpersonalised goods, a one-month quality guarantee on boots, and a 24-hour window to modify an order. The 14-day withdrawal right is not mentioned anywhere.
What a healthy shop looks like: the withdrawal right stated plainly, refunds offered, and the legal guarantee acknowledged.
4. Read the delivery estimate as a location clue
Shops rarely say where their warehouse is, but the delivery estimate does it for them. Domestic delivery inside France, Germany or the UK runs 2 to 5 days. When a shop names a domestic carrier and still quotes 10 to 20 working days, the carrier is only handling the last leg; the goods are starting a long way away.
Crampons Elite quotes 2–5 working days of processing plus 10–14 working days of delivery, while naming Colissimo — a French domestic service that normally takes 2 to 3 days. Close to a month, door to door.
Long shipping is not proof of anything on its own. Plenty of honest shops drop-ship. But combined with flat pricing and a missing company number, it stops being a coincidence.
5. Look at which payment methods are missing
Most people check that their card is accepted. The useful signal is the opposite one: which dispute-friendly methods are absent. PayPal in particular runs its own buyer-protection process, and is the route most shoppers actually know how to use.
Crampons Elite accepts cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Bancontact and Shop Pay. There is no PayPal, which leaves a card chargeback as the realistic recourse.
Practical rule: pay by card or PayPal, never by bank transfer, cryptocurrency or a "friends and family" payment. Those have no dispute process at all.
6. Read the product feed, not just the product page
Most online shops run on Shopify, and Shopify publishes a machine-readable copy of the catalogue. Add /products.json to the end of the shop's address and you will usually see the raw listings: prices, variants, stock and the vendor field.
The vendor field is the interesting one. A shop that built its catalogue carefully fills it in. A catalogue imported in bulk often leaves Shopify's placeholder in place — on Crampons Elite, 294 products still list the vendor as "Ma boutique", Shopify's default for "my shop".
The feed also lets you count. It is how we knew every boot was €120, rather than guessing from the first page of results.
Putting it together
No single check is conclusive. A legitimate shop can have slow shipping, or no PayPal, or a sloppy vendor field. The pattern is what matters: when flat pricing, a missing company number, substituted consumer rights, month-long delivery and a placeholder vendor field all appear on the same site, you are not looking at a bargain, you are looking at a different kind of business.
And if you decide to order anyway — which is your call — pay by card, skip the personalisation, keep the packaging, and do not count on it arriving in time for anything that matters.
Frequently asked questions
Is a cheap price on its own a red flag?
No. End-of-season clearance and discontinued colourways are genuinely cheap. The flag is the shape of the pricing: one price for every model and brand, permanently.
What is a SIRET and why does it matter?
It is the French business registration number. A shop that publishes one can be looked up in a public register, which matters if you need to pursue a complaint. The equivalent elsewhere is a VAT or company number.
Does a .fr domain or a French-language site mean a French company?
No. Both can be set up from anywhere. The legal notice is what tells you who the operator is.
Is drop-shipping from abroad illegal?
No, and plenty of honest shops do it. The questions are whether the goods are what they claim to be, and whether your consumer rights still work when the seller is outside the EU.
What should I do if I already ordered?
Keep every page and email, photograph the parcel before opening it, and if the goods do not match the description, open a card chargeback promptly — the window is limited.
The shop used as the example here is at cramponselite.com, and our full write-up is in the Crampons Elite review.
Disclosure: this article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. That commission does not change what this article says. All figures were read on the store's own pages at the time of writing and may change.