Ok, I will admit that I am an avid online shopper. I love looking for interesting things that I wouldn't be able to find in my local stores. But, my real addiction is shoes. I love shoes, and spend more time that I would like to admit looking at different shoe sites. I really love designer shoes and the couture shoes are my favorite. Unfortunately, I will never spend close to a grand on something as frivolous (to me) as footwear. Plus, as a writer, I don't spend much time in high powered business situations, and I don't think anyone at Trader Joe's would be impressed with my Manolos.
But, shoes have become big business online lately. It is interesting, because in 1998, a 24 year old Tony Hsieh had just become a multimillionaire after selling his company to Microsoft. He was contatcted by another young professional, Nick Swinmurn, who wanted him to invest in an online shoe company. According to Hsieh:
“Nick left a message saying he wanted to start a company that sold shoes online. I didn't think consumers would buy shoes sight unseen, and Nick didn't have a footwear background. It sounded like the poster child of bad Internet ideas. But right before I hit “Delete”, Nick mentioned the size of the retail shoe market - $40 billion. And the more interesting thing was that 5% was already being done through mail order catalogs. That intrigued me.”
Of course, after investing $1 million in the company that became Zappos, Hsieh took the job as CEO of the company. In the wake of Zappos being purchased by Amazon for a total of $928 million in a mix of cash and stocks, many other companies are looking to a little piece of the shoes sales that are happening online and hoping to find ways to set their companies apart from the competition. There is no denying it, online shoe sales are big business.
Such big business in fact, that there is a new shoe scam that is causing many women to get conned out of hundreds of dollars. With so many new discount designer shoe sites popping up, scammers have been very busy creating loads of websites offering deeply discounted shoes from Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo and Manolo. The sites look professional, although some of them have poor quality product photos. They have a large selection of Louboutin shoes that retail for $853 on sale for $199. It sounds too good to be true, right? Well is it to good to be true.
I am very web savvy and typically can spot a scam from a mile away, but these sites almost had me fooled. I wouldn't have purchased the shoes, even at the ridiculous discount, but at first, I didn't see any obvious signs of a scam. I was a bit skeptical because of the low price, and I thought that even in this tough economy, I can't believe that Christian Louboutin would let his shoes go at such low prices. The next thing I found suspicious was that in the FAQs there were no questions along the lines of “are these shoes authentic?” I would think that would be the most frequently asked question. But what convinced me was that when I clicked the tab to see what payments methods they accept, they said that while they accept MasterCard and Visa, they will give customers who buy two or more pairs an additional 15% discount if they send their payment via Western Union. Any site, email, business, Nigerian Prince or long lost relative who asks you to send them money through Western Union or MoneyGram is scamming you.
I decided to do a little online research on the matter and found out that these sites are popping up all over and conning many women out of a great deal of money. Some of the sites actually send shoes, they are cheap knockoffs that are made in China, but they are actually shoes that look like the desired shoe complete with the signature red soles. But the unlucky customers of the worst of these types of online merchants never see a shoe. Emails to the company through their website never get responses and there is no form of recourse.
The problem is so severe, in fact, that Christian Louboutin has created a site to inform customers about these fake discount sites. They have compiled a list of the sites they have been successful at having shut down. The list has 40 sites on each page, and over 18 pages of sites. According to the site:
“We are working closely with Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN and others to identify the sellers of fake Louboutin shoes. The program has taken down hundreds of sites, adverts, both sponsored and unsponsored links that take you to sellers of fake goods. We use copyright, trademark, design rights or other claims to achieve almost unprecedented assistance from the search engines to take down sites.”
“The bad guys are clever. Lately they are using blogs that appear to write articles but really are just another way to lead you to fake sellers' sites. We take them down. We monitor all the social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. where the counterfeit dealers are found as well. When we find, we take down.”It is a shame that counterfeiters and scammers are making legitimate retailers look bad. The main thing you can do to keep from being taken advantage of is to understand what people who work in retail already know. That is this, when items are marked down considerably, there is a reason for it. Sometimes it is last season's merchandise or items that aren't very popular. Typically, these items are put on clearance and marked down until they are gone. Highly desired designer shoes don't fall into either of these categories.
Have you seen any of these scam shoe sites? Let me know in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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