Common Sense eCommerce

Ever since I did a partial sign-up for Doba I have been getting spam from them. I never finished the sign up; it was a little experiment to see how far I could get before they asked for a credit card (which I never gave them). Supposedly they have this 7 day trial offer (ooooo boy, a whole 7 days!) and I was trying to see it if was legit or not.I’ve read a lot of complaints about this company and I have to wonder. I see them everywhere — Doba here, Doba there. They must spend a fortune on Google adwords! I have them in my Squidoo Lens too in the places where I cannot edit them. Part of the sign up process had me putting in my email address. In fact, email and password is the very first step along the way. If you read the fine print below the sign up, here is what it says:

Doba will not disclose your email address to third parties. We use email only as a means of communicating with you.

Means of communicating is exactly what they use it for: illegitimately! Here is a snap shot of my Gmail spam box.

All Doba! And Gmail knows Doba is spam; it puts all their emails in the Spam folder straight away. These are not phish emails either; they really do originate from Doba. If you open one of the emails , the only thing in the email body is a hyperlinked image to their signup page. There is no way to ‘unsubscribe’ from their emails. Isn’t that a violation of the Can Spam law?

Am I going to do business with a company that has to resort to illegal spam? Don’t think so. And read what some eBay sellers have to say in the Doba Review forum (link here). Not very favorable and lots of truth in those guides. If you want to do real dropshipping, and make money from it (rather than loose money), you’ll need to work with real wholesalers directly in a niche. Not a middleman. Check out the WorldWide Brands Video Center. Look at Top 5 sourcing Tips, then Tip #2.

Tags: Doba Spam, Doba Scam, Doba Drop Ship, Doba Email

Well I keep hearing buzz about this company - StoresOnline - and have some time today so let’s take a look! It’s yet another Internet company that supposedly has a plug and play website waiting for you where you can just fire it up, load with products, and start raking in money. That is after you pay them about 6 grand for training and start-up materials. It’s just an old scam with a different face. Here is their website:

StoresOnline

The first thing you might notice is the lack of pricing information. This is red flag number one. No available usually pricing means ‘look out’ and run the other way.

Furthermore, there is no live chat and no toll free number. 2nd red flag. There is contact information on their Contact page, but it’s all email, and an 801 (Utah) phone and fax number. The number is not answered after hours.

It looks like you must go through some sort of live seminar presentation to even get to the pricing and structure of the so-called ‘opportunity’. Taking a look at their so-called ‘training page’, it looks as they’re taking the “it’s a dog eat dog world and you need training” approach to selling their ’system’.

Another thing to note is the plethora of reports at RipoffReports.Com (link here). 357 when I checked. And oddly enough, Ripoff reports has this disclaimer at the top of each of them:

Rip-Off Report Investigation: shows that StoresOnline & iMergent is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service. Rip-off Report gives StoresOnline a POSITIVE rating in customer support and quality assurance. StoresOnline pledges to resolve complaints and address any issues from the past, present and in the future - committed to 100% satisfaction - whatever it takes - say company executives.

I suspect Ripoff Report has been sued so many times that they must have to cave in to deep pocketed companies that can pay for waiver comments like that. I’m sorry, but the large amount of negative complaints casts a huge shadow over that ‘thumbs-up’ comment.

Reading through the complaints I see some common threads: high pressure ’seminar style’ sales tactics, an extremely short guarantee window, and a high startup price in the 6 to 7 thousand dollar range.

Now there are some real questions about Ripoff Reports which I won’t go into, but even if we ignore the 357 reports there, that still leaves lots of questions about this company. For example their record at the Better Business Bureau is hardly exemplary and even includes information about government actions against this company (link here).

Back to the StoresOnline page, you can read some testimonials there and of course they sound good. But they are prefaced by this comment:

Testimonial results are not typical and your individual results will vary. Your success depends on having the right price, product, and marketing efforts.

In other words, you will have to work your business and differentiate yourself just like you would in another other business effort. So why do you need to spend $6000 to $7000 with StoresOnline to get that when you can do it yourself for about $800 or less? That’s about how much each of my drop ship websites have cost me to start up (made up of setup fees for the website and merchant accounts, along with money I’ve paid for having someone help me with design).Then of course I have to market them, but you must do that with StoresOnline as their disclaimers says. The places I setup drop ship sites all have built in templates like StoresOnline so why the difference in price?

The difference is: big fat company and lots of marketing overhead to cover! Save yourself the unnecessary expense folks and do your own drop ship site(s); it’s just not that hard. And you will be more satisfied with your efforts and less likely to feel resentful toward a company like this.

Tags: Internet Ripoff Companies, StoresOnline Internet Ripoff, StoresOnline Ripoff, StoresOnline Scam

What happens when you get your GPS stolen from your car and then you go to shop for a new one on eBay, but see your stolen GPS up for sale? That’s what happened when Danial Rangkar (eBay ID ‘nydannysjewelry‘) tried to resell the GPS he allegedly stole (I’m supposed to use that word ‘allegedly’ in good form). One of the ‘customers’ who shopped his auction also happened to be his victim!

Well not surprisingly, nydannysjewelry is now NARU. But it’s stories like this that probably keep many buyers suspicious of making purchases on eBay. While eBay plays “Whack a Mole” with bad sellers, its reputation of being a marketplace rife with fraud continues to persist.

A lot of effort on eBay goes toward preventing certain kinds of fraud (such as intellectual property infringement and shill bidding), but what are they doing to make buyers feel good about doing business with a previously unknown seller? The seller in this story had a decent feedback rating of 179 with 2 negatives so there were no real red flags there.

Should eBay start to qualify sellers with something more than a bank account? That would certainly favor people who are actually businesses trying to do business on eBay but they might need to make some allowance for the ‘basement cleaning’ seller as well. I’m not sure the Whack-A-Mole approach will ever work in a marketplace the size of eBay.

Link to story here.

Tags: eBay Business, eBay Selling, eBay Fraud, Stolen Goods on eBay

If you browse the web for business opportunities, you will often come across businesses advertised as ‘drop shipping’ opportunities.  Drop Shipping businesses are set up so that someone else does the handling of the product for you and sends the product directly to your customer, without you (the business) being involved in the shipping.  While this sounds great in theory, it rarely works in practice when presented as a service - a common approach for drop ship scams.

The biggest problem with these kinds of services is that the are “middlemen” and the prices they offer are NOT wholesale (even if they say they are).  It’s hard to compete when you’re buying products at retail to re-sell.

Another problem with them is competition. In these scams, everyone who subscribes to their ‘drop ship’ website will have access to the very same set of products.  That means you will have a difficult time differentiating yourself and carving a niche for your business.

The only way to do Drop Shipping as a business is to do the product research yourself, find your own suppliers who will do the drop shipping and get yourself setup with them.  Sounds hard? Well there is no easy money and who said Common Sense E-Commerce would be easy?

Shill Bidding is a fraud problem found in all types of auctions. It’s a problem of collusion, where a group of people bid to artificially inflate an auction. Wikipedia describe shill bidders as follows - driving prices up with phony bids, they seek to provoke a bidding war among other participants. It’s not limited to eBay; it’s been around for probably as long auctions have.

But eBay has a substantial methodology in place for detecting this kind of activity. They look (at among other things) the IP Address of the bidders and the feedback record. New user IDs with Zero feedback are considered suspect as well as a pattern of the same group of users bidding on different auctions of one seller.

There are legitimate eBay users with Zero feedback. There are also legitimate reasons that the same group of users might bid on different auctions of a seller. If that seller has attained loyalty from his or her bidders, they may keep coming back - that’s just good business.

It would seem that shill bidding, unless done on a large scale, would be difficult to prove. Large scale would be like that of Kenneth Walton. But the occasional shill would probably go unnoticed by eBay.

I knew it. I keep a daily Google news alert for the terms ‘home business’ and ‘home-based business’. Approximately one half of what I get are limp press releases announcing the latest and greatest home business opportunity.

On name that kept coming up (over and over) under this category was Prosperity Automated System. Now it looks like the long arm of the law is finally catching up to them.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking to shut down a network of 25,000 websites, accusing operators of running a $15-million pyramid scheme that promises to shower participants with easy cash. Prosperity Automated System, which bills itself as a marketing network, “is destined to collapse and leave the vast majority of investors with substantial losses,” the SEC said Wednesday.

Visitors to the sites fill out forms and are later called by representatives selling memberships for as much as $3,895, the SEC said. New members are issued their own websites and eventually can receive a share of the money when more people buy memberships via their sites, according to the allegations. “Websites that come with the memberships do nothing but sell more memberships,” said Stephen Donahue, an SEC enforcement official in Atlanta.

Article here

I stand behind pursuing the uphill road less traveled in ecommerce home based businesses, because these schemes always come crashing down at some point. A house of cards such as this is precarious but a well structured business will have a strong foundation. At least their press releases should stop now.

– Frank Ross