My wife turned 26 recently.  For her birthday I bought her a certain type of sneakers she wanted.  The shoes are something of a rarity so I was forced into the bowels of the internet to find the exact model and size that would be obscure enough to satisfy her discriminating taste.  I’m a huge fan of e-commerce and have never had my identity stolen so am generally willing to input my credit card information in even the least reputable of sites so undertook my search with an open mind.

In this case the shoes I really wanted were only available on a Japanese site which looked somewhat disreputable but which I trusted based on its representation that it sold “Nike Sneaker in good quality and come with original boxer “.  The process of ordering the shoes from this site proved interesting because it required both that I convert my purchase to Yen, and also that I select from the one shipping options that were available for a mere $22.

For the first time in my history of internet usage I was nearly driven from the site out of fear of identity theft when the site disclosed that while it made “strong efforts” to ensure the shoes it sells are authentic, it gets the shoes from China, and therefore, cannot guarantee their legitimacy.  Given the murky shipping details and the fact that my wife insists upon opening her presents on her actual birthday, I decided to take go ahead with the order.

The shoes eventually arrived, several days after her birthday, in what definitely appeared to be an original boxer, which, combined with the shoddy construction raised questions of authenticity. While the shoes were red, as promised, there were a) two sizes smaller than I’d ordered, and b) almost as fake as the North Face jacket I bought a few years ago from a charity auction that conveniently lost all of its zipper tabs upon its first exposure to cold.

Given all of these factors, I tried to contact the site about an exchange.  The site advertised that it “have developed some return and exchange policy for customer services” but I found those policy to be somewhat confusing.  I sent a message to the alleged customer services people.  Once I had done that I got a letter from a place in London explaining that it was merely a credit card processing company and couldn’t help me with any problems relating to an order.

Eventually, I got in touch with an appropriate party and explained my situation.  He explained that as long as I paid $22 and put the shoes back in the mail to China,  he would refund my money, as long as it was determined that it was “factor error” and not my wife’s fault for ordering size 8.5 when she’s really a 7.

The carbon footprint issues on these shoes notwithstanding, my experience with the site has been basically terrible.  The one positive is that my identity has not yet been stolen, however, my order loosed a flood of emails from a guy called Lamont Scholler from the company “Gooderectile” who frequently informs me that he has new products that are “nice as nine pence”.

The odds I get my money back are not good, but at this point I don’t have a lot of options.  I could always try to sell them on Ebay, but the headache associated with that will probably be something that even Lamont Scholler’s magic pills won’t be able to solve. 

This experience has been somewhat frustrating but hasn’t changed my love of e-commerce.  Just yesterday, a trip to Staples to buy a printer reminded me of why I’m willing to suffer the slings and arrows of Gooderectile-affiliated websites to obtain the things I need. After 15 minutes of struggling to find anyone to help me I came upon a nice-looking man who seemed eager to please.  I gave him a 15 second explanation of the things I wanted in a printer at which point he repeated the words “want preen-teeng?” adopted a blank expression, then led me by the sleeve to the back of the store where a 17 year-old kid with spiky hair was able to walk me back to the aisle of printers and read information about the various printers on the cards in front of them.

Eventually I picked a printer, but was disappointed that it was not in stock.  My convenient options were to travel to another store to pick it up, or have the clerk order it online and have it delivered to my house at a future point.  I decided to make the trip and am glad I did.  The printer is nice as nine pence, and as an added bonus, it’s large enough to house the original boxer of Nikes that are still on my desk.