#startupshift

In media, deception is not tolerated.  Especially for anyone shopping online, looking for a great deal for luxury items, its not ok to scam others. Its also a shame that a last minute shift on behalf of Amazon which decided on raising their shipping minimums, but its not the end of the world. Regardless, AMAZON will protect you against theft of faux retailers.

But how about the pinners of the world? If you have a Pinterest board that you use to direct traffic to your fashion sites, or simply because you love sharing your finery, you would naturally assume, thats great. Right? Sadly, the same online protection from redirecting or miss use of your images doesn't apply to smaller businesses relying on the strength of their followers or pins from their social media networks.  Tacking this issue should be at the forefront of the building blocks in most startups' solutions.

Businesses must rely on social media networks but are at greater risk from overseas manufacturer's rip off counterfeits or highjacking tags and US brand's logos/ videos ( such as beastie boys recent legal issues ) / images from sites overseas.  Entrepreneurs in the US need to work together to tackle this problem. Whether if you are on the seller side or the marketing to aggregating audiences side, we both need to play in the same wheelhouse. Although its old news that online shoppers need to beware, we cannot deny that its far worse than it was 6 months ago. And Globally, stiff penalties to protect their shoppers from fakes and stolen property need to be implemented..Like in yesterday. Discovering a need to fill in technology for shoppers decisions is as less important as the need to combat the abuse of stolen identity and highjacking images for inappropriate content on OPP (other peoples property).  

If you ever visit China, you will see thousands amongst thousands of products that look near identical to our products here in the US, but for a third of the price.  Policies to protect US partners are totally relaxed in China. So there, sales are everyday bottom dollar low prices...And it gets even cheaper for their online shopping sites. For mobile apps built in China for shopper's solutions, you would of thunk they used for shopping their stores.  Not true. They too mimic our experiences but radically invert their intention. They use their own engineering and Baidu ( China's equivalent of our Google) to pump up their Clicks, thus driving away sales from your sites... Labor is cheap but they also employ hundreds of thousands of people to seed and override your traffic. Because China's government is lax on regulations such as with the recent Bitcoin abuse, they truly believe they aren't doing anything wrong.  So if you decide to shut them down, you better Lawyer up and get ready to spend HOURS on getting them to stop....Fact is - they won't.  If you do manage to shut down a site, another will crop up ( built from the same group) almost as soon as you win your first battle.  Its stupid. For anyone from anywhere in the world working in technology startups, digital agencies or building mobile apps, it should be within the international protection act to stop anyone from collecting data against the direction from its original content creator.  Further to that point, It doesn't make it ok to take data and sell it to others because you were lucky to be funded, its never an excuse to fool audiences that are trusting you. Embarking on solutions for the protection of luxury businesses and its shoppers is categorically the most important online solution needed to be built.

Lets face it, we all love shopping online during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but lets be sure to practice control in overspending.