Pocket Change - Shopping Blog

The following post is courtesy of Aram Cretan, former researcher here at become.com. Aram has sinced moved on from his role here to pursue his dreams of piracy, and general swashbuckling. He has changed his name to Captain Danford Stevenson and is the terror of the Sacramento River (like all business, you have to start on the bottom in piracy). He brings us a post he wrote before leaving us that is still quite useful information for those who use Become, or pretty much anything out there in the vast world of the interwebs. Enjoy.
Seriously.
We got an email a little while ago from a woman named Kathy, who had been trying to order a handbag from a site that she found through us. It turned out the site didn’t ship to where she lived (UK) and when she tried to cancel her order, they clammed up and stopped returning her emails–although they were still charging her credit card.

Now, before I go any further, I should point out that this is not one of our merchants that you’ll see on the “Shop” side of Become.com. This was some random site that came up through our “Research” index, which, while we try to emphasize quality buying guides, reviews, blogs, etc., contains over four billion pages–some of them are merchants, and some of them are inevitably bad. I mean, have you SEEN the Internet? That place is HUGE!

Kathy naturally wanted some help, but there wasn’t a lot we could do. If it were one of our merchants, then sure, there’s a business relationship there that we could leverage on her behalf (not that our merchants would ever pull these kinds of shenanigans), but this was a site our crawler came across while indexing the web–there’s just not a lot of recourse. Ultimately, I advised her to ask her credit card company to reverse the charges, since they’re often pretty good about that. But as I looked at the site further, it occurred to me that this site just reeks of shady if you know what to look for–we see a bunch of these, and you get a pretty good Spidey sense after a while. I’m not trying to take anything away from poor Kathy, btw–these people make their livings off of looking just credible enough to part bright people from their disposable income. They’re pros.

So while I wasn’t really able to help Kathy that much (I emailed her about this post–Kathy, if you’ve got anything to say, please do leave a comment) perhaps Kathy’s experience can help you. Let me show you exactly why I probably wouldn’t spend my lazily-earned money at bagzandwatchez.com.

The name. OK, so a ridiculously-spelled name isn’t itself an indicator of untrustworthiness, but notice how the name in the URL doesn’t match the name on the page. If they were actually a store trying to build a brand and curry true favor with their customers, they wouldn’t want you to end up going to bagsandwatches.com (which is currently domain-parked), which you might do if you were to type their address out from your memory of their site’s logo. That lack of concern for repeat business is the same reason you shouldn’t buy speakers out of the back of a van.

The site copy. Read the following paragraph:

Indulge your passion for luxury with our louis vuitton replica handbags, cerise monogram Louis Vuitton replica bags and imitations of the original cerise monogram Louis Vuitton handbags with a trendy motif inspired by the fruit of the cherry blossom, Japanese art wedded to Louis Vuitton perfection.

You know how if you repeat a word enough in a short span of time, it starts to sounds ridiculous? (Go ahead, say “cow” 50 times; I’ll wait.) When you get to the end of the front page of this site, the words “Louis Vuitton” have become a meaningless collection of syllables–and for good reason. This page wasn’t really written for you to read. It was written to look vaguely acceptable to human eyes while looking extremely juicy to search engine algorithms. We in the biz (I’ve always wanted to say that) call it “keyword stuffing,” and while it’s one of the cruder techniques that webmasters use to achieve a good ranking in search engines, it’s still widely practiced. Black hat SEOs have gotten slightly more sophisticated than they were a few years ago–they can’t just repeat the word “sex” 500 times in white text at the bottom of the page–but words used in context like the above example are trickier for machines to pick up on. General rule: if a page reads like it was written by someone who missed class the day the rest of us learned how to use pronouns, it was probably written by a scumbag, for a machine.

No contact info. This is a biggie. They have a contact us page, which is nice, I suppose–except, as Kathy found, it’s pretty useless. It’s just a form to fill out. There’s no address or phone number, or anything that you could actually use to hunt them down and administer a beating. Even if you were to do a WHOIS on their domain, you’d see this:

Created: 2006-08-01
Expires: 2007-08-01
Last Modified: 2006-08-01 13:47:32

Registrant Contact:
Katz Global Domain Name Registration
Privacy Protected Domain Katz Global Domain Name Trust (domaintrust@katzglobal.com)
32 Maxwell Road #03-07 c/o bagzandwatchez.com
Singapore, SC, sg 069115
P: +65.67228356 F: +65.67258021

A couple causes for concern here:

1. A one-year registration on the domain which began two months ago. Again: not in itself damning, but not an indicator that they’re in this for the long haul. Spammers and scammers go through domain names as quickly as Paris Hilton goes through BFFs–as soon as one site gets discovered and booted from all the search engines (as this one has, at least from Become, as of…now) they move on to the next.
2. They’ve used an anonymous domain registrant service. Domain registrars are required to keep public records of who registered which domain, so services have sprung up that will register a domain for you in their name, thereby shielding you from the public eye. This is great if you’re a dissident in China who fears reprisal for your pro-democracy blog; it’s not so great if you’re trying to find someone who’s charging your credit card for merchandise they never delivered. There are certainly legitimate uses for these services, but I don’t think this is one of them.

And finally, there’s the matter of the item itself. A site selling “replica” versions of high-end designer goods should raise a flag, since selling such items is kind of a legal gray area. They do clearly identify them as “replicas,” so that’s good, but it’s a somewhat unsavory part of the Internet in the first place. If it’s counterfeit bags you’re looking for, I’d recommend the guy who usually sets up around Market & Turk, around the corner from the Crazy Horse. No teeth means no dental plan overhead, and he passes the savings on to you!

So anyway, I’ve been kind of long-winded here, but I hope I’ve been helpful. There are a number of other good resources on the web, too. For starters, try:

• About.com’s Tips to Protect Yourself While Shopping Online
• Consumer Reports WebWatch
• The FTC’s e-commerce page.

Aram