Competitive Sabotage in Online Business: What to Look For and How to Protect Your Company  I recently encountered a discussion in a forum on eBay in which an eBay seller described a scenario I was all-too familiar with: that of a competitor engaging in a sabotage campaign by pretending to be a buyer and placing orders, demanding refunds and writing bad reviews about the company.While I've observed this at eBay, the problem is far worse on eBay's competitors' websites (like Amazon for example - which is the main reason we do not sell there), it is not an uncommon practice for some unscrupulous sellers to engage in a tactic known as competitive sabotage as a means of preventing a new entrant into the marketplace from becoming established.
What they do is create faux accounts from which they make one or two legitimate purchases of items they most likely would buy anyway in order to establish some measure of credibility with the account. Then, they buy something from a competitor and either attempt to cancel the transaction after it has already shipped, or find something wrong with it and demand a refund. Of course, they also demand that the seller pay for the return-shipment, and even if the seller agrees to all of this they'll leave negative feedback (of a negative Seller Review, as is the case with the other marketplace mentioned above).
It's a catch-22 for the legit seller. Even if you adhere to their unreasonable demands, you lose money by paying for not one but two shipments, not to mention the time required to process the order, prepare the shipment and deal with all the emails exchanged between parties. Then you've got the negative feedback/review to deal with.
If you stand on principle and fight back their attempts at bullying you out of the marketplace, it gives them the ability to create doubt as to which party is really the nefarious one.
"What should have been a simple return turned into a nightmare..."
If they're really sinister (we're talking complete sociopaths, but in business one must be prepared to not only encounter but deal with people like this - both in the form of customers and competitors), they'll badmouth you all over the web at every third-party business directory, review site and so forth.
The best way to fight back is to keep meticulous records so that you can win the chargeback dispute should you decide to refuse the refund request, which is highly advisable that refund requests (they're really more like demands) from suspected competitors be refused. Otherwise, they'll bleed you dry with them, taking up all of your (or your employees') time dealing with preparing their orders, replying to the emails, processing returns/refunds, etc.
Also, make sure your online store has a blog to accompany it. A blog is a great way to get your company's name out there, and provides a forum whereby you can control the content and the nature thereof. You may even want to consider having more than one blog.My company has two blogs:
If you're a small business, the resources simply aren't there to continuously absorb those blows (shipping fees do add up, as does the human capital which could otherwise be used to grow your business). Additionally, they want you to issue the refund, and by doing so you're enabling and encouraging them to continue the fraudulent activity.
To fight competitive sabotage, here's what to do:
- Learn how to identify it when it occurs.
- Don't allow the competitor to bleed you dry: Don't give in to their demands for refunds, returns, postage and time spent dealing with them. All of this costs you money - money that your company needs in order to meet financial goals on time.
- Get good at managing your own reputation online: If this requires hiring an SEO / Reputation Management firm, be sure to properly vet them and make sure they abide by Google's Webmaster Guidelines in doing so. This applies as well if the reputation management / SEO is done in-house as well. Never engage in anything considered to be "black hat" in terms of tactical procedures.
- Open an eBay account and preferably also an eBay Store: eBay is generally pretty good at weeding out those members who engage in such tactics as those described herein. If our company were to be the victim of competitive sabotage and defamation (we've dealt with it in the past), all we'd have to do is point to our eBay feedback score of 99+ percent customer satisfaction in order to establish that either the bad review was at worst an aberration, or more likely the product of a sabotage campaign. For anyone interested, our medical equipment eBay store is located at the following URL: http://stores.ebay.com/egan-healthcare.
- Actively monitor your own reputation: When they post negative reviews, if the site allows the seller to respond, do so and make clear that the review was written by a competitor. If the site does not allow seller responses to negative reviews, ask your legitimate customers to go to the site(s) at which the review(s) were written and counter them with reviews written by real customers. Don't ask for a favorable review. Simply request that they be totally honest, and if you're good at what you do the customer will write a review that reflects well on your company. Enough positive reviews eventually will make the negative one appear to be awfully suspicious.
- Create (or claim) a profile at every third-party business directory available: Pay for featured placement at those in which doing so creates additional links to your profile from within the same site, thereby increasing the strength of the profile as it pertains to search. For every such profile you create, you get one more web page that is under your control that can appear within the first or second page of search results whenever someone runs a search for your company. Ideally, you'll have control of every page customers can conveniently find should they search for information about your company (sure, they'll be able to find the negative stuff if they spend enough time looking, but they'd have to be specifically looking hard for something negative associated with your company name in order to find the reviews written by competitors).
- Don't let them get to you: If you become discouraged because your company's name is being unfairly ruined by competitors deliberately seeking to crush you while you're still small enough to do so, ultimately they will succeed.
- Make a decision to stay the course and endure: Sure, it is extremely frustrating to have to deal with, but in this era of global commerce conducted online via the internet, one must be prepared to stare adversity right in the eyes and refuse the temptation to blink.
- Put it into perspective: The fact that your competition has dedicated an employee to harassing your business by placing fake orders with a refund demand (and possibly provoking a response that legitimizes a bad review in the minds of objective readers) being the whole point of the order is ultimately a compliment to your efforts thus far. They wouldn't be devoting time, energy and resources to damaging your business if they didn't genuinely believe that your company poses a legitimate threat to their own status within the industry and within the marketplace in the long-term. Keep that in mind, and use that as a means of remaining positive throughout the ordeal.
- Remember that this too shall pass: Remember that their efforts to destroy you are costing them money too in the form of human capital. However, since they're presumably larger and more established, they can afford to take the short-term blow if it means preventing a new entrant from becoming an established competitor long-term. That said, they can only get away with doing this for so long. If it doesn't work after enough tries, they'll eventually have to give up. Don't assume that your business will have to deal with issues like this forever. It won't. Make clear to the competitor in your dealings with the "customers" placing the fake orders that you're here to stay, and ultimately if you play your cards right they're the ones that lose the money (by having to pay retail costs for products they presumably sell and by wasting employee time attacking a company strong enough to endure the assault.
 Campus Gun Bans: While We're on the Subject
Peter Egan - Re: Hullabaloo
The three letters (or more accurately pieces of coordinated hate mail) made up the entire op/ed section of the February 04, 2005 issue of the Hullabaloo, Tulane University's student newspaper. That particular week, the editorial staff made the decision to devote the entire section to a small sampling of the hate mail that had been pouring in since the moment the previous week's issue first hit the press.
The hate mail is directed specifically at yours truly, and one of the students who wrote for the paper told me privately that they received about 450 in all, the overwhelming majority of which were far too vividly worded to publish.
The reason? In light of a months-long spate of violent crimes against female Tulane students occurring as they were walking from campus to either their homes or vehicles (about a 15 total rapes and/or armed robberies occurring within about a 12-14 week period leading up to the issue preceding the Feb. 04 edition), I had the audacity and the gall to suggest that the Tulane campus gun ban was at best not helping put a stop to the violence, at worst (and the far more likely scenario) was a direct contributing factor to the confidence and opportunism armed robbers and rapists were so inundated with during this period in which every 100 yards throughout the campus there were signs announcing that guns on campus were strictly forbidden and that your right to keep and bear arms ends when you step foot onto the Tulane campus.
My editorial - which curiously vanished from the paper's archives though the response the following week has remained online for the better part of a decade - concluded with an assertion that not only should the campus gun ban be repealed, but that Tulane be held liable for damages to the persons, property as well as punitive damages incurred by the victims of these violent crimes who were attacked while leaving campus unarmed en route to their home and/or vehicles.
I still believe that colleges and universities which prohibit firearms in the possession of students on campus should be held liable for such damages and be court-ordered to offer the victims financial compensation for their suffering.
The student body at Tulane in February of 2004 was so outraged that approximately one in every 12-14 students wrote a letter the following week denouncing me for my flawed thinking and even more brazen willingness to express such an offensive opinion.
Of all my accomplishments in my 31 years, few mean more to me than having offended thousands of liberals, at least 600 or so (450 by the print deadline) of which so much so that they felt compelled to write and submit a direct response, almost all of which were unfit for print for reasons you can imagine.
To this day, I take a tremendous amount of pride in the article the Hullabaloo won't show you because it is too persuasive for lefties to allow it to exist under the guise of free speech or freedom of expression. Few moments of my life have been more enjoyable than opening that February 04 issue and looking with shock at my own name in extra-large font sprawled across the top of the page as a shared headline for everything published in the opinion/editorial section that week. At no point during my five or so years attending that school did I ever walk so tall on campus or with such a spring in my step as during the time between when the below issue was released and eventually replaced the following week.
The least profane of the 450 submissions received by the print deadline are below. To read them in large font, run a Google web search for "re: peter egan jr".
For what it's worth, I emailed Kira McCalister after reading her letter. She declined to accompany me on my walk home from campus.
 The first of the Hullabaloo's three least offensive letters objecting to Peter Egan's proposed lifting of the campus gun ban.  The second in the series of angry students' denouncements of my audacity.  The third letter denouncing Peter Egan Jr.
 A software company that is supposed to protect people's computers against malware, viruses and the like has apparently decided that it is above the generally agreed upon principle that downloading and installing software onto someone's computer who doesn't want it and didn't ask for it is wrong.
Well, AVG, maker of anti-virus and computer security software has essentially hacked into my laptop and inserted itself all over everything. It has hijacked all of my web browsers --- against my will I might add --- and made it so that the AVG homepage is the first thing to appear whenever I open a new window or tab, and I cannot change that in the browser settings (I can change the setting, but it has no effect).
So now that my computer's been infected with the AVG virus, exactly what am I supposed to do to get rid of it?
How do you rid your computer of an anti-virus virus? Does AVG make any program that will protect my computer against itself? Does McAfee (which I'd never install either because it's just as bad)?
These antivirus software companies have been doing this for a while --- maliciously downloading themselves onto the computers of people who have software installed that's made by a different antivirus company. The two software sets will fight for control until the computer is dead, thrown out for being too slow or ceasing to function altogether.
Is there anything at all that can be done to get AVG off my computer for good? If not, anybody wanna join me in a class action suit?
U.S. Funded ($20 Million) Pakistani Sesame Street Cancelled Amid Corruption Allegations
 Americans Who Pay Taxes Paid for THIS! With each passing day, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the United States of America is no longer a global superpower, or a global any kind of power. The good ole' U.S. of A. has been broken and co-opted, and there's no hope for fixing it. Most Americans know that their nation is badly in debt, and close to half recognize that even in the best-case scenario, it would take 4-6 generations to pay off all of the money the rogue government has spent (it's really not accurate to refer to it as "our" government, because it does not represent Americans' best interests). However, that will not happen, as there will likely be some sort of drastic military intervention by the Sino-Russian coalition with an assist from Iran and Venezuela, not to mention Mexico's gangs.
For anyone reading this that may be still in denial, consider the following story --- and I couldn't make this up if I had the imagination of Dr. Seuss, and I don't. This really happened.
The U.S. announced June 05, 2012 that it would be terminating $20 MILLION in funding earmarked for the development of a Pakistani version of Sesame Street amid allegations of corruption and abuse involving the production of the children's television program.
Of the $20 million, $6.7 million was actually spent on the series. $6.7 million of money earned by American taxpayers, then taken from them at gunpoint by the government, which thought nothing of giving it to the country that for years following 9/11 harbored Osama Bin Laden.
I'm not sure what's worse: The fact that the United States government, which is widely expected to undergo a complete economic collapse that will closely model that of Greece in the next 12-36 months, or that the alleged fraud and abuse involved allegations that pale in comparison to the money laundering, embezzlement and fraud that makes up the corps of the Democrat party. For those of you who are bona fide ignoramuses, the democrats steal money from taxpayers, give it to unions and human organ and stem cell-harvesting farms (Planned Parenthood) where live people are killed for profit, with the organizations receiving the stolen/embezzled money fraudulently filed with the IRS as 501-C3 tax exempt charities even though there is not a single person in the United States that could argue with a straight face that they're anything other than hyper-partisan political lobbying groups, which by law should NOT be tax-exempt. These lobbyists (the unions, abortionists and "leaders" of the various parasite communities) then launder the money by giving it back to the democrats who stole it from the people that earned it under the auspices of forceful taking of other property, life and/or freedom should the legitimate owner of the money refuse to hand it over to the bullies.
Yet when those that harbor the terrorists the democrats so admire --- these same democrats who launder money forcefully confiscated from its rightful owners only to funnel it back to the democrats' campaign funds without being taxed along the way --- have the audacity to act as though the Pakistanis are doing something that they themselves don't do on a scale thousands of times larger than the petty $20 million for Sim Sim Hamara.
Not that the Republicans are a whole lot better. They may not be actively laundering money and embezzling the way the democrats do, but they do look the other way while they do it. They (elected Republicans) also lack the testicular fortitude to publicly accuse them of the very crimes they commit out in the open for everyone to see, creating this massive, latent gay Republican elephant in the room (no offense to gays - just using the term to illustrate the hypocrisy) that is the refusal to criminally indict, much less acknowledge the existence nor the severity of the criminal acts being committed by the President, his cabinet, and members of the U.S. House and Senate like Charles Shumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Joseph Biden and countless others who a century ago would have all been beheaded for treason without one single exception.
They control the world's most dominant military, and as much as we'd like to think of ourselves capable of invoking our Second-Amendment right to overthrow them, it's just not realistic to expect any --- even a miniscule measure of success were the militia to go on the offensive.
The nation's founders did not envision satellite technology and the capability to wipe out a quarter of the earth from a weapon permanently fixated in orbit ready to strike on a moment's notice. Nor the they envision fighter jets, which is far more than it would take to quell (kill) the 10 million or so Americans who actually care enough to fight for their freedom.
Wake up America! There is no voting our way out of this mess. One option may be slightly less treasonous than the other, but they're both headed down the same path and neither seems interested in taking a detour.
If Americans really cared about freedom, they'd all stop working at once, and remain unemployed or for the business owners keeping their companies in a temporary suspended state in which no business is conducted for as many years as it takes for the 537-horned monster in Washington to starve to death.
If you don't work, you don't earn any money. If you earn no money, you don't pay taxes, you receive them. Those who pay into the system and are ultimately responsible for enabling and supporting the aforementioned monster (I'm guilty too) must all simultaneously put the shoe on the opposite foot, declaring unemployment all-at-once, and attempting to collect our confiscated funds in the same form that the parasites have been siphoning it away from us for decades.
If there is even one grain of sand's worth of hope on the beach that is America and its standing as a free society and a world power, it is the working class (not the unemployed parasites who claim to be the "working man" even though they do not work and have not in years) joining together in a coordinated strike against their government (it's definitely not ours) in which we disable the mechanism by and through which they take our money and use it against us.
As much as this lifetime NRA member hates to say it, our guns and ammo are worth only the value of the metal. As a check to balance government's power the 2nd Amendment no longer serves its purpose, which is why if this is not done now (if every taxpaying citizen and undocumented immigrant) stops working tomorrow or at the very latest next week (or next year, as soon as we can get everyone to agree to do it, which is about as likely as me picking one grain of sand off the beach and it being the only one that is different from the others), we will end up being killed by Russian, Chinese and/or United Nations "peacekeeping forces", while our wives and daughters are raped, our sons carved up and served to the troops who killed us and raped our women before killing them too.
Sound a bit too gloomy to be real? Oh how I wish that was actually the case.
Perhaps a look at Pakistani Sesame Street, compliments of the 8 weeks you didn't get to spend with your family because you were working to pay for Sim Sim Hamara may help convince you of the dire reality of the situation as it pertains to the imminent demise of the U.S. and its citizens.
 Covington Police The Covington Police Department has taken more than its share of heat over the course of the past year or so, largely due to a scuffle between police and the owner of a Covington pharmacy. The city boasts one of the nation's lowest per-capita crime rates, yet is nonetheless a source of controversy among media and residents, with the most common complaints being allegations of police brutality and general disrespect of citizens. This author makes no statement in defense or critique of either the department or critics with regard to these matters.
However, one thing most of us should be able to agree on is that they are due some kudos for the city's unusually low crime rate. We'd all like to believe that Covington is largely free-of-crime because its residents are such good people. However, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the fact that our city is so safe is entirely because we're such great people and has little to do with those whose duty it is to keep the rest of us safe.
The next time you arrive at work in the morning to find your place of business exactly as you'd left it the night before, consider that there were men and women keeping an eye on your interests while you were at home in bed, and these brave citizens were prepared to thwart any effort by anyone seeking to rob, burglarize or otherwise damage or harm the establishment through which you are able to feed your family and pay your mortgage.
I work very late, and I've had several recent first-hand experiences with an extremely polite and courteous Covington police officer who thrice in recent weeks visited my business establishment in the wee hours of the morning to investigate the fact that a car was in the parking lot and the building lights were on.
For the sake of full disclosure, in his own words he "thinks the world" of my mother, Covington Primary Care NP Pamela Egan.
Granted, virtually everyone who knows, knows of or has ever met Mrs. Egan has tremendous respect for her. She revolutionized the worldwide medical/scientific understanding of the difference between Vitamin D2 and Vitamin D3, as well as the medical-scientific establishment's understanding of the role of vitamin D3 in the prevention of disease (this is 100% factual and the claim can be proven by virtue of the fact that the two oldest newspaper articles ever written on the aforementioned topics were both authored by NP Egan while she was writing a weekly health column for the St. Tammany News, which at the time was known as The NewsBanner). Her first three articles on these topics have been plagiarized by literally thousands if not tens of thousands of wanna-be journalists and D-list bloggers over the past decade or so. Her website receives tens of millions of unique visitors each year as a result of her cutting-edge health columns, many of which are still referenced (without proper citation of the original author, a growing trend in today's increasingly irrelevant and untrustworthy media) as sources for reporters who assume everyone from Louisiana is too dumb to figure out how to track down copyright violators on the web.
We're not. It's simply not worth the effort and cost required to pursue litigation against a list of defendants that would number in the thousands for something as relatively trivial as copyright violations. To be clear, the word trivial is used in terms of the negligible damages and awards likely to be acquired through the pursuit of such litigation. It's not that we wouldn't be able to prove that Pam's work was plagiarized. The challenge resides in proving damages, but I digress.
The officer only learned of the relationship (the mother-son relationship between Pam and myself) toward the end of our third (and most recent) encounter, which occurred Wednesday, April 25, late in the evening. He never stays to chat with me, and I respectfully refrain from engaging him in conversation as we both know that mine is not the only business in need of an extra set of eyes watching its back while the owners are at home or otherwise away from their bread-makers.
One man and one incident do not reflect or define what I believe to be among the nation's best law enforcement agencies - particularly when the two sides of the story (the Braswell story) are in no way similar, and nobody other than those who witnessed the altercation (or were participants therein) knows what really happened and in which order those few events acknowledged as fact by both parties and witnesses occurred.
For every news story about a controversial incident involving a Covington cop and revered owner of a local pharmacy, there are thousands of unreported, untold and largely unseen instances in which the men and women of this department --- of whom I know not one by name and am in no way affiliated in any capacity --- go out of their way to ensure that OUR homes and businesses are SAFE from criminals while we're comfortably at rest in our beds resting up for the following day.
Once you've had an experience in which you hear voices outside late at night in a secluded area, attempt to identify them pistol-in-hand, only to find a police officer who is there to protect you, not hurt you, it becomes much easier to appreciate the quality-of-life Covington has to offer. No small part of that unusually high quality-of-life is the fact that our city features little-to-no serious crime in which anyone actually gets harmed beyond the point of being inconvenienced.Sure, the Tchefuncte River may be the most appealing asset the City of Covington has to offer, however let us not discount the lack of crime. Believe me (I lived in New Orleans for five years), when you're surrounded by crime, the peace-of-mind one can attain here in Covington is impossible to be in possession of for more than a few manic minutes at a time. It is this author's personal opinion that a growing number of Northshore residents in general have forgotten what life was like on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain, lest they'd be more tentative to complain about the police in whose jurisdiction there is no "real" crime to speak of.
Virtually everyone alive today that has or has ever had a credit card is keenly aware of the recent explosion in credit card fraud and theft. We hear the endless radio commercials from companies claiming to protect consumers from identity theft and fraud, and many have had the misfortune of having a credit card (or the information therein) stolen. What many remain unaware of is why this is happening. For most of my adult life I fell into this category of cardholders. However, after taking over the retail medical equipment and supply division of my father's Metairie, LA home health care company in January of 2011, I have seen far too many attempts at fraudulent purchases that were paid for with stolen credit cards. Just this week alone we've seen three cases in which over $1,000 total was charged to the victims' cards. In two of these cases, we were the first to notify the credit card companies that their members' cards had been stolen. The third charge occurred over the past weekend, and I learned about it Monday morning while driving in to work from my condo in Long Beach, MS, when the cardholder called to notify me that the purchase was placed fraudulently. The thieves operate under a formulaic approach. They usually buy the highest-margin medical equipment products I have in stock (presumably to entice me into actually shipping them the items purchased). The buy in quantities of multiples of 10, and the total purchase amount is usually somewhere in the range of $150-$450. The billing address and shipping address obviously aren't the same, and there is usually some tie to either the Miami area and/or southern California. One recent order involved Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I haven't yet checked the area code from the phone number provided at checkout to see if it is/was based in the Miami area. The criminals are not afraid to call the business pretending to be the cardholder, and are usually of Hispanic descent. Each time we suspect an order was not placed legitimately (and we've become quite good at identifying fraudulent purchases), our first step is to call the credit card company and report that card as stolen on behalf of the cardholder. Our next step used to involved the notification of law enforcement in hopes that a police department, sheriff's office, Crimestoppers or a federal law enforcement agency would work with us to catch the criminals. Unfortunately for all Americans with credit cards, this turned out to be an exercise in futility. It's not like it would be difficult to make an arrest with compelling evidence that would almost certainly win a conviction. The thieves use stolen cards to purchase retail goods. The goods are then shipped to the destination of the thieves' choosing (assuming the retailer doesn't catch the fraud or doesn't care that the order was not legitimate). The thieves then retrieve the package and sell the stolen goods on the black market. Note that within this process the thieves must at some point come into possession of the shipment of the goods purchased using the stolen credit cards. In order to catch at least one member of the theft ring, all a law enforcement agency need to is stake-out the shipping address and wait for the package to be delivered. When the thieves go to retrieve the shipment, the cops could arrest them and offer them a sweet plea deal in exchange for turning in the other members of the group and testifying against them. If only law enforcement had an interest in catching the criminals. The unfortunate reality is that every single time I or someone on my behalf contacted a law enforcement agency the response is always the same. This is true both of local law enforcement within the same city, county or locale as the shipping address specified by the criminals, as well as federal law enforcement. The call is quickly ended, usually with the person on the other line opposite myself informing me that it essentially isn't there problem, and that I need to contact someone else. Unfortunately, I've contacted everyone that could possibly have jurisdiction over such crimes and nobody is willing to make an arrest much less prosecute. So as a result, the number and severity of crimes involving credit card theft continues to skyrocket as the thieves operate with total impunity. The crooks are well aware that nobody (save for the cardholders) seems to care that they are doing this, and none have any interest whatsoever in putting a stop to it. So it continues. I've given up on trying to figure out why no law enforcement agency that I've contacted (and I've contacted a LOT of them) is even remotely interested in arresting someone known to have made purchases online using a stolen credit card or at minimum acted in coordination with those who stole the cards and made the fraudulent purchases. The would-be evidence against them is compelling enough for me to call to report them to the agencies one would think would be charged with making such an arrest and protecting the public from financial ruin at the hands of someone who stole their life savings. I've tried everything I can to get the situation to make sense, and nothing does. The bottom line is that credit card fraud in America will become increasingly prevalent as long as local, state and federal law enforcement agencies are more concerned with passing the buck than catching the criminals. It is most unfortunate that there is absolutely zero indication that anyone with the authority to make such an arrest has any inclination whatsoever of actually doing so. As long as credit card theft and fraud remains a de facto legal practice, Americans should only expect the frequency and severity of such financial crimes to increase. If you have a credit card, please protect it with your life because no one else in the country seems to care whether or not it gets stolen and your life ruined as a result.
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