Yesterday’s New York Times reported on an unrepentant e-tailer with terrible customer service and an apparent hatred for his customer. This online reseller of real and possibly counterfeit designer eyewear relishes the impact his negative online reputation has gained him. Each complaint actually helps his online search rankings, so an innocent shopper who searches for a brand of fancy eyeglasses will find his online store highly ranked in the search results.
I visited the website to see if there might be clues to warn a savvy shopper to stay away. Yes, there are misspellings and grammatical errors. I did notice the name of the store appears in a different font size than the rest of the text, making it appear to have been cut and pasted in. This might occur if the store had a different name and for some reason, the proprietor found it most expedient to reuse the web pages of his old business with a new name popped in. But the display of trusted brands and logos from online security providers, and a claim of “highly trained customer service representatives” would reassure most internet shoppers.
When I did an online search of the store’s name, I found it appears clean to internet site safety tools, since it’s not apparently hosting malware. But easily found within the first page of search results are complaint pages dedicated to this particular vendor. The savvy internet shopper knows to search on the store name and look beyond the first few links to get the whole story.
What makes the Times story so disturbing isn’t that there’s bad customer service or that the e-tailer is gaming search engine algorithms. What scares me is the apparent harassment and stalker behavior the store owner engaged in with customers who made returns or disputed charges. Please read the article to see how difficult one customer’s life became, how unresponsive (initially) her bank was and how uninterested in her story the police were. To me, this kind of nightmare should be considered a crime, a cybercrime.
Online shopping should be pleasurable. It should be cost-effective. It should be safe. Often it is none of those things. Beware of low cost vendors on the internet. Do your homework to see if there are online complaints, poor online auction ratings, even dedicated social networking pages set up for customers to commiserate about ill treatment. Of course, there are always two sides to any story and it’s possible that the “angry online customer” is actually a competitor or simply an unreasonable person, but it’s left to the internet shopper to be their best advocate and take care before clicking “purchase”. Use the internet search tools like Norton’s free Safe Web Lite toolbar to be sure a site is malware free before clicking to it.