Hhreview Pickup – deceptive selling

I need new trail shoes. My friend Tim B, a serious trail runner, suggested the La Sportiva Slingblade, which is being replaced by the Skylite. I’m into very lightweight shoes, so these at 250 grams look perfect for me.

The only place I can find them online is a place called Moosejaw. When I first looked at them in late March, the site had the “estimated ship date” as 4/1/2008. I almost bought them thinking “hey, that’s just a couple of days away, cool”. Except something told me to just wait until they showed as actually shipping/in stock. Good thing. Every two or three days since then they’ve just moved the estimated date back a couple of days.

This is not cool.

Nobody else has them, so it is clear this is just a ploy. I dig more and there are other things that smell-bad about this place. They registered a fake company called AAA Outdoors Online so they would show up first in searches that just links directly to them. The page itself is loaded with SEO keywords at the bottom of the page.

I totally understand they are trying to compete, but it is a big turnoff and I’m not going to be buying from them if I can help it. Remarkably Google’s product search (formerly Froogle) has 2,066 reviews for this place with an average of 4.5/5.0 stars. Needless to say, given the tactics I’ve seen, I’m suspicious of those.