August 24, 2010 at 17:51How to protect your e-business
Recently a very entertaining story has happened, which is very indicative of the current state of the business on the Russian Internet, and it may also help someone if it suddenly encounters an opportunity that happened to us.
To begin with, a little background - at the end of last year, we launched a fairly niche online store selling professional photo / video / audio equipment. Because this market is small enough and is already occupied by large enough players, and the crisis has not ended - to start you need to do everything in the best possible way, and this is not only a beautiful picture (more on this later), but also the content. As a result, it was decided to hire specialists who will make a beautiful functional picture, but also because we make a store from scratch to attract more competent specialists who will build the company's policy from the very beginning and the policy of working with customers at the highest level - as a result, we found such specialists abroad. They did everything, opened, started working, gaining an audience, good reviews, regular customers and here you are!
One of the buyers told our managers that there is exactly the same store on the network as we are, and aren't we? Of course, it became interesting to us, and in general, at first everyone took it as a joke, albeit a stupid one.
Well, they copied the template, well, they made a store, well, they dragged photos from a photo shoot - it happens, now, unfortunately, you will not surprise anyone like that. It is clear that the idea, design, corporate identity, even the logo is similarly stolen, but like any clone, it is always worse than the original. Naturally, first of all, they sent an official request to the store owners to stop this brutality, only in a decent official form of course.
But this turned out to be only the beginning of the whole story, unfortunately after some time we started to be informed about unflattering reviews addressed to us on the Internet, moreover, information about cases of fraud by the store administration (such as a one-day store and etc.).
Not only did they steal the corporate identity insolently, they also openly spoil their reputation - for an old famous big store this is not a big problem, it resolves itself over time, but if you recently opened, you have a narrow professional audience (and the equipment, which we sell costs like any professional equipment) that will not work with a store to which there is no trust and we very clearly understood this.
And here our western friends have helped us. The fact is that abroad, the problem of competition, as you know, between online stores is much more acute, and often one price for a product is not enough to start buying from you, along with the price it costs the same:
If, on all counts, most of the old and good new stores are not that lagging behind, and even sometimes a cut above, then somehow we don’t pay attention to trust, and this is a big mistake, because a lot of potential buyers from all regions of the country may have happily bought from you, and even made an advance payment and even waited2-3 days for them to have a long-awaited purchase, but there is still some kind of mistrust, because full of "scammers" prefer to go to a local store and buy there, albeit more expensive, but more reliable.
And what to do !? And here the time-tested bicycle comes to the rescue!
The usual on-line certification, which is provided by large, time-tested players. The meaning of certification is that a certain large company requires documentation from the online store company for verification, and after that, with a clear conscience, gives you a "label" to the site with the information that "yes, you are really verified, a store with all the pies in the authorities. ” For ourselves, we chose the ready-made VeriSign Trust Seal solution, which, in addition to checking, also promises to check the site for all kinds of “viruses” (I can’t guarantee that they check, but they write that they checked and there are no problems, although I’ve never seen a reputable site was malware). Perhaps this is not the cheapest, easiest solution for Russia, but we chose the price \ authority \ service ratio for ourselves. As a result, they demanded from us:
Sent, wait, it takes 5 days (instead of the promised 2 workers), but oh well, maybe we are from Russia, therefore, but still decided to unsubscribe to them. And then it began - this time the guys asked us to confirm the phones (stupid at first glance - they are on the site!) - for this it was necessary to provide either an invoice from the provider, issued to our company, or a link to the "yellow pages". It is clear that it is easier to register on the "yellow pages" - registered, sent.
We waited another 2 days, after which a request came to clarify the documents - we needed another document:
Sent, waited another 5 working days and, cheers, our long-awaited certificate. By the way, one more small remark, the domain must be registered precisely in the jur. The person to whom this certificate is issued (which also added us switching).
As a result, we can now honestly show and declare to everyone with a clear conscience that we are real, proven and that you can work with us in general - “we have a certificate”.
Unfortunately, we have never met with methods of counteracting different types of counteracting situations that happened to us, so we are probably the first (at least we haven’t found stores with similar certificates in RuNet) who came up with a similar procedure. If our experience helps someone in the future, we will be only too happy!
The author of the article is not me, so if you have questions, please contact here - Kazbek Tleuzhev kazbek@dastore.ru
Prologue
To begin with, a little background - at the end of last year, we launched a fairly niche online store selling professional photo / video / audio equipment. Because this market is small enough and is already occupied by large enough players, and the crisis has not ended - to start you need to do everything in the best possible way, and this is not only a beautiful picture (more on this later), but also the content. As a result, it was decided to hire specialists who will make a beautiful functional picture, but also because we make a store from scratch to attract more competent specialists who will build the company's policy from the very beginning and the policy of working with customers at the highest level - as a result, we found such specialists abroad. They did everything, opened, started working, gaining an audience, good reviews, regular customers and here you are!
Tie
One of the buyers told our managers that there is exactly the same store on the network as we are, and aren't we? Of course, it became interesting to us, and in general, at first everyone took it as a joke, albeit a stupid one.
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| Shop dastore.ru | Dicont.ru store (now blocked, but rucell.ru appeared ) |
Well, they copied the template, well, they made a store, well, they dragged photos from a photo shoot - it happens, now, unfortunately, you will not surprise anyone like that. It is clear that the idea, design, corporate identity, even the logo is similarly stolen, but like any clone, it is always worse than the original. Naturally, first of all, they sent an official request to the store owners to stop this brutality, only in a decent official form of course.
Do you think this gave any result? Hmm, of course not!
But this turned out to be only the beginning of the whole story, unfortunately after some time we started to be informed about unflattering reviews addressed to us on the Internet, moreover, information about cases of fraud by the store administration (such as a one-day store and etc.).
And here we were not at all having fun!
Not only did they steal the corporate identity insolently, they also openly spoil their reputation - for an old famous big store this is not a big problem, it resolves itself over time, but if you recently opened, you have a narrow professional audience (and the equipment, which we sell costs like any professional equipment) that will not work with a store to which there is no trust and we very clearly understood this.
What to do in a similar situation ?!
And here our western friends have helped us. The fact is that abroad, the problem of competition, as you know, between online stores is much more acute, and often one price for a product is not enough to start buying from you, along with the price it costs the same:
- The most complete description of the product, ideally with a detailed video instruction and overview
- Convenient simple interface accessible to everyone
- Certified Product
- Delivery (this is still a problem in Russia, so part of the problem can be solved by points of issue (here you can give a link to the company that makes the issue))
- The trust
If, on all counts, most of the old and good new stores are not that lagging behind, and even sometimes a cut above, then somehow we don’t pay attention to trust, and this is a big mistake, because a lot of potential buyers from all regions of the country may have happily bought from you, and even made an advance payment and even waited
And what to do !? And here the time-tested bicycle comes to the rescue!
The usual on-line certification, which is provided by large, time-tested players. The meaning of certification is that a certain large company requires documentation from the online store company for verification, and after that, with a clear conscience, gives you a "label" to the site with the information that "yes, you are really verified, a store with all the pies in the authorities. ” For ourselves, we chose the ready-made VeriSign Trust Seal solution, which, in addition to checking, also promises to check the site for all kinds of “viruses” (I can’t guarantee that they check, but they write that they checked and there are no problems, although I’ve never seen a reputable site was malware). Perhaps this is not the cheapest, easiest solution for Russia, but we chose the price \ authority \ service ratio for ourselves. As a result, they demanded from us:
- $ 300 per year subscription
- Registration certificates of legal entities
- Certificate of Registration
- Extract from UGRL
- Scan of the first pages of the charter
Sent, wait, it takes 5 days (instead of the promised 2 workers), but oh well, maybe we are from Russia, therefore, but still decided to unsubscribe to them. And then it began - this time the guys asked us to confirm the phones (stupid at first glance - they are on the site!) - for this it was necessary to provide either an invoice from the provider, issued to our company, or a link to the "yellow pages". It is clear that it is easier to register on the "yellow pages" - registered, sent.
We waited another 2 days, after which a request came to clarify the documents - we needed another document:
- Certificate of entry in the Unified State Register of legal entities of persons
Sent, waited another 5 working days and, cheers, our long-awaited certificate. By the way, one more small remark, the domain must be registered precisely in the jur. The person to whom this certificate is issued (which also added us switching).
As a result, we can now honestly show and declare to everyone with a clear conscience that we are real, proven and that you can work with us in general - “we have a certificate”.
Unfortunately, we have never met with methods of counteracting different types of counteracting situations that happened to us, so we are probably the first (at least we haven’t found stores with similar certificates in RuNet) who came up with a similar procedure. If our experience helps someone in the future, we will be only too happy!
The author of the article is not me, so if you have questions, please contact here - Kazbek Tleuzhev kazbek@dastore.ru