Thursday, December 14, 2006

Suckered. Don't trust Yahoo shops without better verification.

It's near Christmas, and I wanted to give myself a present, so I ordered a coffeemaker from ipriceshop.com (aka ismartshoppe.com). You know what comes next.
Long story short: they are a scam --- so I called my credit card company and cancelled the sale.

But why did I buy from these guys when there is evidence all over the internet saying they are frauds, you ask? Because their site lists them as a Yahoo store, and links to Yahoo. That seemed to provide some assurance that they were honest.

But be aware --- read Yahoo's terms of service. They guarantee nothing. Not even help with conflict resolution. So the logo essentially means nothing. And there's no place on the Yahoo site to register a complaint-- so you can't even report a dishonest site advertising in their name.

I guess I should have known better, but the Yahoo logo made me think the place was legit.

There was also a Bizrate logo on the site, but as I learned, that guarantees nothing as well. (Bizrate is now Shopzilla, and I'll stay away from both.)

AND on another matter, I also got suckered into using blogger.beta for this site. It offers few improvements over blogger, and makes posting through the Google toolbar or through the Firefox blog this extension more, not less, difficult.

I live and learn --- most of the time too late.

1 comment:

S said...

Sorry you got ripped off, that's terrible, and Yeah.. I'm not getting what's so great about the new blogger ? It's still slow to upload files, and nothing much else has changed except other people seem to have a harder time posting to my blog..

Hmmmmmm