Case of Mistaken Identity

Interesting effect of PPC ads

[hannamyluv]

I was wondering if this happened to anyone else out there...

A customer surfs the web and comes to a PPC ad listing with multiple listings (one of which is yours). They click on the first ad (which is not yours) places an order. Several weeks later, when they have not received their product, they return to the web to the same listings. Only now you are bidding on the top spot and your non delivering competitor is in spot number 2. They click on your ad and call your customer service to complain that they have not gotten their products.

We get 3 - 4 calls a week like this. I know the average consumer is not the brightest bulb in the house, but... well, do they really have that short term of a memory and that cleaned out of an inbox?

I was just wondering if any of you (or your clients) had run into this?

[Shakil]

ditto

4-5 times a week, convinced it was us and quoting mysterious Order #s etc etc

Shak

[webdiversity]

not experienced this.

What d you do get them to do a charge back and redo the order?

[Shakil]

no, slag off the competitor, tell them its countefeit goods.

then...get an order :)

Not really, we only have 1 or 2 competitors, and I usually point them in the right direction (after domaing some questioning about the client and his needs/requirements etc etc)

Shak

[hannamyluv]

There isn't much we can do. Our customersare a bitolder and just confused anyway. They are sure we are trying to rip them off. You can explainamillion times that it isn't us, and they just don't believe it.

[chiyo]

Related but not directly. We find that competitors who cannot rank near us on google proper, use adwords with very similar first lines to the title of our e-mags, company name and such. Many times our identity has been mixed up with these, and we get complaints about our "service". Our e-mags do have "relevant" titles such as "Widget International Magazine" or "generic word1, wordd2, word3" for example, so using such generic 3 word terms Adwords is an easy way to ride on our brand equity.

This is quite acceptable to us, (all's fair in love and war) but it did force us into the paid Adwords game...

[bodine]

I also get that often...usually not 3-4 times a week, but maybe once a month. And, we reply saying that we never received an order. And, they email again asking where the order is. And, we email back saying we never got an order. And so on...

Sometimes we get people who click on our link and think we are the manufacturer of that product...ever get that?

[hannamyluv]

All the time! I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't start incorporating the cost of time the customer service people spend on the phone with these people trying to explain we only sell the product (not make it) and we haven't sold it to them.

[bcc1234]

I actually sent out some merchandise like that once :)
A guy called and said that something came in broken and he wanted to replace it. He gave me an order number and all other info.
I could not find any of his records (neither for cc transaction, not for the warehouse invoice). My accounting was really bad at the time. Basically, 3 excell spread sheets full of names a numebrs.

So I thought I did not enter the order or something like that and shipped him what he asked for.

After a week or so, I got another similar call... well I didn't ship anything that time :)