Web scam or aggressive marketing at Buy.com? You decide

Imagine shopping at a brick-and-mortar store and, after you've paid, not being able to leave until you listened to a salesperson's pitch. You wouldn't put up with that and neither would most people. But that's how Buy.com treated me recently, after I made a purchase while following up on my recent alert for online shoppers.

That posting described a massive web scam from which hundreds of sites, including some household names, had profited. Buy.com was among the sites cited by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation as having taken in more than $10 million each from aggressively marketing membership clubs that charge consumers' credit cards monthly.

While the "sales pitch at the store exit" that I encountered at Buy.com wasn't as sneaky as the pitches the Senate Committee complained about a few weeks ago, it's still way too aggressive a way to treat a paying customer. A spokesperson for the Senate Committee told me that they still have "serious concerns" about this sales technique.

Just what's so aggressive about the marketing at Buy.com? Normally, when you finalize an online purchase, you can immediately view a confirmation screen. But at Buy.com, I had to read through an entire hard-sell screen (above, click to enlarge it) to find the small, not very prominent, "No thanks" section at the bottom to get my confirmation.

Click to see signup portion of the screen.
Source: Screen capture

The sales pitch for Shopper Discounts & Rewards, shown at the top of the first popup screen above, makes it more obvious that your credit card will be charged monthly than did the pitch at Classmates.com shown in my previous posting. And, unlike Classmate.com's pitch, here you must enter the last 4 digits of your credit card, as well as your e-mail address, to sign up.

But forcing customers to read through all this ad copy is an affront. And those who don't carefully read all the copy before take advantage of its offer may not realize that they are authorizing Shopper Discounts & Rewards to charge their credit card.

The site's sales pitch didn't end when I got to the confirmation screen, either. As shown below, I was offered a second chance to join a club before viewing my detailed receipt.

Clicking on the offer, or even the "Continue" button (below), I was presented with a nearly-identical pitch for a second club, Complete Savings. As with the Shopper Discounts & Rewards screen, this one's "No Thanks" button is not so obvious. And the button doesn't say that you'll get your receipt by pressing it; it just says "click here to continue." The first "continue" button misleads, while the second is confusing.

A second pitch on the confirmation screen.
Source: Screen capture

The pitching didn't stop even when I got to my detailed receipt, which looked similar to the detail at right. As with the confirmation screen, clicking on the pitch or the "Continue" button led me to yet another sales pitch, this time for the first club, Shopper Discounts & Rewards.

If you want to avoid having to navigate a minefield like this, shop for your electronics elsewhere.

If you've had experiences similar to mine, or would like to alert fellow consumers about other online traps, please do so below.

—Jeffrey Fox