Grey Areas In Making Money Online

Posted on April 18, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing related, Make Money Online, Online Spending |

Anyone that is interested in making money online would know and probably use Google Adsense as a monetization method.

And the past few days, we have seen Joel Comm promoting the 4th edition of his highly successful ebook “Adsense Secrets” that used to sell for USD97 in the earlier editions which he now sells at USD9.95.

Sounds like an incredible deal and great value for money.

Those that bought the ebook were asked to pay with their credit card and Joel Comm gave some bonuses to those that buy Adsense Secrets 4.0 - and guess what? One of the bonuses was a 1 month trial subscription to his newsletter called The Top 1% Report. Once the one month expires, unless you as a customer cancel, you will be automatically billed USD29.95 per month until you realize what is happening and do some admin work.

So what’s the BIG deal? I heard 2 sides to the stories. There are many unhappy customers out there because they were not made aware of this “forced continuity” when they purchase Adsense Secrets 4.0. If they are first time purchaser, they were ‘blinded’ by the unbelievable low price of the ebook and just went ahead to buy it without reading everything thoroughly. Those that have bought from Joel Comm before, did not bother to really read the sales page and just hit the buy button.

Now, I do not plan to buy this ebook because I would like stop buying how to ebooks until I get my basics right.

The other side to the story was that most people realized about the forced continuity issue and decided that the onus is on themselves to cancel the newsletter subscription after the free trial of one month.

So, you have 2 camps, those that are unhappy with the sales tactic and those that did not realize about the automatic subscription after the free trial but is okay with the sales tactic as long as they can cancel it in time.

So, what do I think? I think as business owners and marketers, we should be honest in our dealings so that we can sleep well at night. If there is such thing as recurring billing, it should be made very clear (apparently in follow up auto responder emails from the seller, the monthly billing matter was not explicit).

I don’t think any laws were broken with this sales tactic because I went to the sales page and it was clearly stated out in the Fast Action Bonus #3 about the free trial and recurring billing unless there is cancellation. But it did not stand out and I took notice of it only because I knew about this issue before heading over to the sales page.

So, as consumers the only way we can protect ourselves these days is to read through all the fine points contain within sales pages, terms and conditions (boring I know) to protect ourselves from ‘grey areas’ online and offline.

For any information product that truly interests me, I take the time to read through the sales page however long because I want to fully understand what I am really buying.

In this case, I have a strong feeling that Mr Joel Comm might have lost a few returning customers because of this issue.

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