Terms and Conditions, Meet Free Speech
Michael Fertik
Serial Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist michaelfertik.substack.com "Robinhood of the blogosphere, Sherlock Holmes 2.0 of Databanks" - Handelsbatt
An expensive court case. A plummeting credit rating. All because of a negative review you left online.
Seems like the stuff of fiction, but as recently reported, it is reality for the Palmers, a real-world couple. According to the piece, Jon Palmer bought Christmas gifts for his wife that never arrived from KlearGear.com and PayPal cancelled the transaction. His wife left a negative review and the company sent them a note three years later: remove the review within 72 hours or pay a $3,500 fine, per a clause in its terms of use.
What?
There are so many elements to this that merit discussion but – spoiler alert – it all comes down to the company being in the wrong.
What can small businesses take away from this debacle?
Terms and conditions, meet free speech. It’s well established that people don’t read the fine print. Terms of service, terms of sale, terms and conditions – it typically doesn’t matter – they’re not reading. But while these agreements do protect you, they don’t give a company carte blanche to sneakily insert suspect clauses. Especially ones that fundamentally contradict core American values and probably won’t bear up to legal or public scrutiny: “Your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts KlearGear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees.” Sorry, truthful statements are typically pretty bulletproof.
Small you may be, but you are still a Goliath relative to your customer. Every company, regardless of size, can be a Goliath to a customer’s David. In this case, KlearGear.com does an excellent job donning the mantle of corporate bully (indeed, is there another interpretation?) beating up a nice, sympathetic Utah couple. There was no allegation that this was a fake customer or a review left by a competitor. Is a court case and ruined credit rating justification for a review grounded in truth? No. It’s especially egregious given the review site doesn’t allow the removal of reviews once posted – so even if the Palmers wanted to (and they tried), they were not allowed to delete the review in question.
Victory at what cost? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. CNN, ABCNews.com, TechCrunch, The Consumerist and numerous others have covered the KlearGear.com issue. That is the epitome of costly coverage: embarrassing, highly visible, and likely impacting sales. As a result of public outrage, the company has shuttered its Facebook account and locked down its Twitter, sacrificing two important social marketing channels and digging in – instead of doing the right thing, dropping the issue and apologizing.
Have you ever written a bad review? How did the company in question respond – and what impact did it have on your perception of that business?
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10 年Complaints should always be a gem for your business, a way to make your customers happier and keep coming back. Nowadays customers have so many competitors to purchase their goods from; businesses need to know complaints are not a money making consequence. Word of mouth will connect people and business together that create goodwill and happiness for each other. “Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.” ~Zig Ziglaria no
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10 年It's not the mistakes you make, it's how you deal with them. Any corporate botch provides a company with an opportunity to impress and even delight a client. Confrontation can rarely be the right choice.
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10 年There are always so many unequal treaty in daily transactions, if you give a bad review they just ignore or insults you, too bad, alway been hurted by these behavior.
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10 年State law than obey the EU law, or federal law in US. Many companies try to convince the customer that they do not have some of those rights for some strange reason. They try because it pays of. But as company you only shows the disrespect, not only for the law, but mostly for your customers. If you are not ready to go with the everyday business reality, you probably should not do business. I won my fight (thanks to a solid EU regulations). So I would fight, not for myself, but to show that they canot do as they please just because they hpen to be a "company"