Are you misleading consumers who visit your website? You don't think so? I bet the guys at Intercept, LLC didn't think so either. Or at least they didn't worry about it.

Don't Mess With Texas

The Attorney General of the State of Texas, Greg Abbot, announced on Monday, Cyber Monday no less, that they've taken legal action against Intercept (and a second company, Everyprice.com) for misleading consumers.

The Charges

The issue is that these companies on several price comparison websites have represented to consumers that they are promising independent, reliable, and trustworthy information about online retailers when in fact retailers are paying for higher rankings.

The charges are that these companies have misled consumers describing merchants as reliable and trustworthy while representing themselves as neutral and unbiased. They have been using words like "Trusted", "Recommended", "Lowest legitimate price", and "Customer certified" to describe merchants when, as the attorney general asserts, these labels are in fact for sale not earned.

The Outcome

The prosecutors won an injunction.

According to Abbott, Intercept has agreed to cease this practice and pay $300,000 or cease business operations entirely in the State of Texas, which in practical terms means everywhere.

As such, Intercept has taken all of their websites offline, including Shopcartusa.com, Diduprice.com, Flyingprices.com, Digitalsaver.com and Pricingdepot.com. I guess $300,000 was too steep a price to pay.

How bad is bad?

I'd like to think that the offenses were egregious and deserving of such attention and prosecution. At the very least, they pissed someone off in Texas. Unfortunately, now that the sites are down, we cannot look to see exactly how the websites operated.

I don't know if it is related, but searching the Google for "ShopcartUSA" turns up no shortage of consumer accusations of "scams" by this company. Case in point:

I would like to say that I was a naive consumer when I went online to purchase a Nikon D200. I could only wish I had come across this website before expending much time and frustration in my persuit of finding a low priced D200. Yes, I am guilty of going on ShopCartUSA and falling for the BS of the low priced merchants (all in Brooklyn I may add). (source)

Make enough enemies like this and I guess this sort of action is a disaster in the making.

Check Yourself

The lesson here is pretty clear, watch how you represent information on your websites.

On the surface, these accusations sound a lot like the sort of behavior that many (many) publishers may be toeing the line on (or crossing it) without even knowing it.

Watch the video of the press conference held in TX on Monday.