I’ve never been a big fan of Buy.com. I think their prices are generally lousy, I think their customer service is pretty crappy and their web presence just never excited me very much because I’ve never had anything I actually, you know…wanted.

I bought this Wii Bundle from Buy.com. I have no idea if I’ll actually receive it.

So I was kind of surprised when they started selling Wii Bundles on Tuesday night. Selling a Wii with a “bundle” of accessories is a pretty cheesy way to increase your profit on a popular item while decreasing your inventory of crap that wouldn’t otherwise sell on its own. I don’t mind stores making a profit so I went to Buy.com knowing that bundles were basically crap and that I probably wouldn’t buy anything.

The bundle included a couple games, a Wii console and a remote charging station. I had no interest in it, but on a whim I called my sister-in-law who said “OH MY GOD!! I CAN’T FIND THOSE ANYWHERE!! I NEED ONE FOR YOUR NIECE!!” Yes, she actually spoke in capital letters, which is quite a trick. It turns out that my 12-year-old niece has been asking for a Wii since her birthday in August and my sister-in-law has not been able to get one.

I sighed heavily, knowing that if I bought this I wouldn’t be able to sell it on eBay, but would have to give it to a family member at cost.

I hate doing the right thing.

But I did.

I bought the Buy.com Super Mario Bundle that night. The charge went through, I received a confirmation page and later a confirmation email. Everything was hunky dory and I’d basically completed my sister-in-law’s christmas shopping three weeks early.

Until this morning… Buy.com sent me an email stating that the amazingly hard-to-get Nintendo Wii that they sold me really, kinda, maybe doesn’t exist. The email is kind of vague because the Nintendo Wii bundles includes a bunch of pieces, all of which may ship separately. But Buy.com just treats it all as one big item. The whole darn bundle is apparently on “backorder” which tells me that Buy.com may not have actually had the Nintendo Wiis to sell in the first place or there was, at the very least, a pretty awful misunderstanding somewhere along the supply chain. I can understand this happening from time to time, but when you’re offering something that is already known to be in short-supply, you really should have all your ducks in a row and know exactly how many you can offer your customers.

I don’t know if this is Buy.com’s fault, but as one of their reluctant customers I have to blame them for the moment. The scarcity of the Nintendo Wii makes this situation all the more frustrating and just a little bit suspicious sounding.

Below is the full text of the email. It really is pretty vague, but I guess I should be thankful they contacted me at all.

Hello Thomas,

We are writing to let you know that we are experiencing a delay in being able to fulfill one or more items on your order #xxxxxxx. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you.

The item(s) affected by this backorder notification are:

Order #xxxxxxx

sku: 205515545
description: Nintendo Wii Super Mario Bundle
qty: 1
——————————————————–

Items not listed above are not affected by this backorder notification.

Your order status can change quickly as we do our best to fulfill your order, and it’s possible that by the time you read this email the delay affecting your order might have been fixed. It’s also possible that the items you ordered could still be unavailable.

To check your current order status, please visit https://secure.buy.com/corp/support/login.asp. From there you can determine if you would like to wait for your items to ship or if you would like to cancel all or part of your order. From there, you can also track shipments already sent to you, change your account information, and update your ship to address and payment information.

If you choose to wait for the item(s) to ship, we will get your products to you as fast as we can and we appreciate your patience.

If you can’t wait and you choose to cancel, the cancellation will go through immediately as long as the item has not entered the shipping process. If it has entered the shipping process you won’t be able to cancel it. However, it will ship to you within a day or two and you can always refuse it or contact us for a return number so you can send it back to us for a full refund including shipping.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience. Please note you will not be charged for any cancelled items.

If you have any questions, please visit us at buy.com/support.

We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,

Customer Support
If you need phone support, we will be happy to email you our number.

I personally like the bit where they don’t even list a phone number to call. I have to email them asking for it. Nice touch. I’ll probably keep the order open for the moment and just try to snag another Wii online later in the month from a more reputable retailer.

Make your own judgment.

Me, I’m not going to use Buy.com again. Ever.

Note: I had every intention this morning of sitting down and writing up a quick little guide to some of the services I’m using to get a Nintendo Wii online. But this email from Buy.com really kinda ticked me off. I’ll write about how to get the Wii online tomorrow.

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Dude, I’m totally going to use this thing to measure out a gram of the good stuff. Damn, how many ounces is that?

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new money/financial/experiment blog. I’m not going to list the name here, but it has a descriptive title, kind of like “TheSimpleMilkshake.com.” I was having fun until last Sunday when I received an email from a guy saying that he had “SimpleMilkshake.com” and wanted me to cease and desist by midnight on November 2nd or he was going to “go to the next level.”

I checked out his site and it appears to be nothing more than a static page that’s part of a link farm. He slapped some Adsense on it to make it look legit. He seems like a smart guy in his email. Then I Googled him. He has an MBA and he’s a Senior Data and Systems Analyst, so I guess he really isn’t that smart after all.

I did some research and spoke to some legal people. They laughed at him. I was so concerned that I ignored him.

A day later he sent another email.

This time I responded with some of the points making sure that he understood that buying a domain name doesn’t mean you “own” the words. If that were the case than the owners of “simple.com” and “milkshake.com” could sue him. I mentioned that a link farm is not the same as a blog and I even tried to be nice. I offered to give his ring of static pages and some traffic by linking to them, I offered to let him write articles and I even offered to put “Not affiliated with SimpleMilkshake.com” on my blog. Then he wrote back telling me how he had sold domain names in the past and how his site “simplemilkshake” was a trademarked business name. He boasted that he even had a magazine sent to “simplemilkshake.com.”

That’s when I started to suspect this guy was a little unhinged. I’ve had magazines sent to my cat, but that doesn’t make my cat a business owner or force him to pay taxes. The key is this guy has never really had a business run under that name. He just has a domain name. And having a domain name is not the same as running a business.

And that’s when I spoke to a lawyer. And my lawyer laughed at him. So I’m going to ignore him. I’m going to hold off writing any more articles on this financial blog until next week, just to let him think I’m concerned and then I’m going to start writing, ignoring his threatening email.

These sort of things are usually resolved by the ICANN-Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy and it should cost him a pretty penny to file the complaint.

To respond I could use a lawyer but I don’t have to. Both the lawyers I spoke to figure I have a pretty good case, so I’m going to call his bluff and see what happens.

On a personal note, this whole situation makes me kind of sad. I remember when the Internet was the great Wild West of freedom and liberty and self-expression, but now it’s just like every other frontier we’ve ever discovered: filled with jerks and lawyers who want to be given something for doing nothing and making life less savory for the rest of us.

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I don’t really ask for much in return for the hours of sweat and hard work I put into this blog. I appreciate comments, I like all the photos of themselves naked that are sent in by my readers in adoration and the large cash donations are always put to good use (mostly buying more photos of naked people).

So when I write a clever little blog post and I take the time to put in a clever little graphic I expect that everyone who views my image is at least reading my words or visiting my domain.

And in the realm of the “internetz” it has been a long-standing No-No to link to someone else’s image on your website because you’re basically stealing their bandwidth without them getting any credit for it. Granted, this was back in the day when bandwidth actually mattered, but old traditions die hard. Using an image from someone else’s site is the web equivalent of plugging all your appliances into an extension cord which you secretly plugged into your neighbor’s outside outlet.

This is sometimes called “hotlinking” and it’s impolite and rather rude.

That has not stopped one blogger who shall now remain anonymous from linking all over the web, including to one of my own images. He seems like an intelligent guy, but he should really know better than to link to images all over the place. Ignorance of the rules do not exempt you from having to follow them.

He should instead do what most bloggers do: copy the image, fiddle with it in Photoshop and host it on THEIR OWN SITE.

So I decided to have a little fun.

I took the image he linked to and simply swapped it out for another one. You can see the before and after below:

You can click on each photo to see a larger version or you can visit his blog at: (okay, I removed this…read the update below) to see the fun yourself, assuming he hasn’t figured it out.

No, that’s not a live link. That might tip him off sooner.

And that’s impolite.

Update: Someone let the guy know about my little prank and since that time we’ve been trading email and comments back and forth. He’s apologized and told me several times how unfunny I am and he’s asked me to take this post down. I won’t do that, but I will obscure the text so no one knows it’s his blog and I’ll erase his comments. I wish him no ill will and purposely didn’t do anything harmful to his site. To prove that I really don’t hold him any ill will I’ve taken out all references to him and his site… Though to be fair he probably got a decent amount of traffic and even some regular readers from this silliness.

Eh, join the crowd.

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