Webupon

Work-at-home offers have mushroomed on the web, to cries of “scam” in equal measure. There is even a site dedicated to exposing the scams, Ripoff Report, which itself contains numerous ads and links to sites which it covers! What is the truth? Is everything out there a scam? The simple answer is no: everything is not a scam. That does not mean that the legitimate offers will deliver what you expect from them. The good and the bad alike hype their wares to attract buyers in an overcrowded marketplace.

Scam sites have no real product to offer, and may even be promoting illegal activity. The most tempting are the drop-shipment sites. A particularly insidious form of this scam is the Ebay auction or listing site. You feel safe with the Ebay name, forgetting that the person who accepts payment from you for the merchandise that you list is neither Ebay nor the reputable name-brand company whose product you are listing. The sale of merchandise that you do not have in your own possession and yet accept payment for into your own account is high-risk. Lots of fly-by-night sites exist to entice you into this game; they never ship the product and you are obligated to refund the full amount to the customer, after sending most of it on to the website that gave you the listing. There is no chance that you will recover the funds from the website; by the time you file a complaint with the public authorities, the site will have vanished. 

The only way to do this work legitimately would be to have a direct link to the website of a known and respected product retailer, wholesaler or manufacturer, to whom you can confidently turn over your buyer’s payment, keeping an agreed portion as your commission, knowing that the merchandise will indeed be shipped as ordered. Even more importantly, should there be a need to provice a refund to your customer, you will not lose more than your commission, because the reputable merchant with whom you are dealing will gladly refund the customer’s money directly, to retain goodwill for future business. 

Image by danielbroche via Flickr

On the other hand, the cry of “scam” is too readily applied to internet offerings whose real-world equivalents are universally accepted as normal, though not necessarily worthwhile or desirable. The online marketing of ebooks is routinely cited as a scam, because the books in question are often books about how to sell a product or service online. Because it is marketed online in the first place, too many people rush to report such offers as scams.  Some are even branded as pyramid schemes. They are not. There is a true end product. Most people may see no value in it, but that does not make it a scam. Typically the ebook will be advertised with a lot of hype about how much money you will make by following its advice. You will see the same thing on the covers of most books in the ebusiness section of any reputable bookstore. Customers do not regard either the publishers of these books, or the bookseller, as scam artists, even if they consider that particular section of the store to be nothing but junk. Indeed, even the authors of the books are not usually thought of as scam artists, so long as they are upfront in the opening pages about what their readers can and cannot expect from their books, regardless of the hype on the cover.

Ebook websites are like the bookstore. They take a book from another website, the publisher and offer it for sale. The ebook that the customer sees has an author, a publisher and a seller. This is as true for a single-ebook site as for sites selling hundreds of ebooks. The difficulty these sites face in avoiding the scam label comes from a hurdle that all internet information sellers face: how to get payment for their goods. In a bookstore, the customers can thumb through a self-help book, even a book about selling on the internet, and decide for sure if they should buy it or not, before they pay for it. If readers could “thumb through” the books in an ebook store, they would not need to pay at all. Having to buy based solely on the advertising, with only a refund offer to fall back on, creates the perception of a scam, but the ebookseller has no alternative.

Online shoppers have noticed that some vendors will reduce their asking price if the prospective buyer clicks away from the payment page. This feature alone has caused some sites to be reported as scams. It is no such thing. The interactivity of the internet allows for individualized discounting. This is widely accepted in the real world, where it happens all the time but is never advertised. A customer may simply ask for an additional discount at checkout, maybe not really expecting anything, and be pleasantly surprised to get an immediate “yes.” It may be as simple as the sales associate giving the “nice customer” discount, or there may be an advertised discount coupon that day which the customer did not know about. The customer is supposed to bring the coupon, but most stores are happy to give the benefit of the coupon to any customer who asks. Indeed, the list of reasons for individualized discounts in stores is almost limitless. Customers do not turn on the store and accuse it of trying to scam them because they would not have gotten this discount except that they asked for it, so why should online customers be upset at getting the exact same benefit from a website?

Yes, caveat emptor certainly applies online with even greater force than in the real world, but we should not be so distrustful of the internet that we rush to judgment. Each website and product deserves to be evaluated on its merits, or lack thereof.