9.3.2012
I have been around web development for a while, working in various industries, and also have worked at a few very large eCommerce shops, and the more I know the less I actually trust online shopping, which is really ironic. My experiences have finally piled up that I decided to write a post about it.
Here is a few rip offs that I have experienced over the years:
Out of stock item: you are looking for a certain item, and you see that some stores have it and some don't, so you buy it from the one that has the item "in-stock" and few days pass by, and you get an email that item is back-ordered, and come in 3 weeks. Now you are screwed because you already placed an order, so you have to pick up the phone and call to cancel the order, in the mean time you just lost a few days, so you have to do the whole think over again. This happened to me whey I was shopping for a digital camera.
Up-sell call: this is a trick that the Brooklyn based camera stores are famous for: you do a product search on google, and find the best price of a camera you want to buy, you order it and later on that day you get a phone call from the store, trying to sell you some accessories. You know this store had the best price on the camera so your guard is down, and since you just saved a few hundred dollars, you go crazy with buying accessories like extra lances or camera filters. Ater you hang up, you check the prices and find out that the items that you bought where totally over priced. You call the shop again, that you don't want these the extra stuff, and after a long argument, they agree and cancel even your original order saying that they are actually out of stock.
Over priced shipping: This "rip off trick" is actually used by majority of online stores that sell low priced items. You are looking for an iPhone cable, and you find it for $0.99, add it to the cart and after you go through a few pages, you final charge is $6, because the "shipping and handling" is where the guy makes money of you! The initial price was to SPAM the product search engine.
More than 1 week delivery: if an item than more than 1 week to ship, that most likely means it is coming from China. The online store might even be US based, but it's using Chinese drop shipping company. This is not really a rip off, but you might just as well go on http://www.chinavasion.com and order it from china yourself, without a middle man.
My advice: unless it's amazon.com or similar size eshop, that actually has a QA team, server admin team, security team, and customer service, do not place orders online. There are just too many traps, and it's not worth the trouble. The solution, look online, order on the phone