Vet Your Vendors!

It's not hard to understand the basic premise of service driving business results - it's good for business (more revenue) when customers are treated well and bad for business (less revenue) when they are treated poorly. This is my gospel.

So I was absolutely dumbfounded when I read the cover story in this morning's New York Times business section about a seller of faux-designer eyewear who builds sales volume the more he upsets his customers. It recounts the chilling tale of Clarabelle Rodriguez, who purchased counterfeit frames and contact lenses from an online retailer she found through a Google search. The retailer, Vitaly Borker of DecorMyEyes, calls customers "Psychos" who seek refunds (whether they don't like the product or it's not what they're looking for.) He meddled with disputes through credit providers, threatened her with a fake lawsuit and bodily harm, then harassed her by emailing photos of their front doors and a message of "I know where you live" (he claims he merely sent a screenshot of Google's street-view.)

It turns out the bully tactics are his marketing strategy. The worse he behaves, the more these customers vent about his monstrous behavior in consumer-watch chat rooms… and in a truly unfortunate turn, these complaints raise the search-relevance rankings for the front door of his business. Before this story came out, if you searched his business by name, you'd find the complaints. But when you plugged an eyewear brand or "designer frames" into the search box, his business was among the top three results – sometimes ahead of a brand website. The unhappy customers never return, but they unwittingly drive new business his way by complaining online – SEO gone horribly awry.

"When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses," he starts. "If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn't matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will come knocking."

 
The story points out a difficult-to-solve flaw in Google's search algorithm and failings in vendor-quality control of EBay, consumer watchdog groups, credit card companies and issuing banks… not to mention the inability of the New York State Attorney General and criminal investigators to pursue thuggish retailers (it should be noted that Amazon.com's affiliate program came off smelling like a rose in this story.) Mr. Borker found clear incentives for bad behavior and his story lends chilling truth to the old adage that "even bad publicity is good publicity."

This should all underscore the importance of the "Buyer Beware" manta and the need to investigate your vendors before making a purchase.



Photo courtesy of the New York Times