Discount-Mats.Com: A Lesson in Business
By now, you have heard of the story about Discount-Mats.com (I won't link to the site for reasons that will become apparent later). A soldier in the military wanted to order mats from this website and asked if they shipped to APO addresses. Someone at the company emailed back saying that they do not ship to military addresses, and if they did they wouldn't ship to Iraq and that the Army should pull out.
I own a small business and let me start by saying that I ship to APO (military addresses) but only reluctantly. It's a pain in the butt to do so. You have to fill out customs forms, for some reason. You have no idea when the package will arrive - only recently has the USPS enabled tracking for such shipments. And, an international company handles the mail for much of the way (a customer/soldier informed me of this months ago) and they are not reliable. So, your shipment can arrive in a week or it can arrive in a month. Who knows. Most customers with APO addresses understand this, some do not. I like having a certain delivery date and I hate filling out customs forms. But, still, I ship to military addresses.
The guy at Discount-Mats.com said they would not ship to Iraq. How does he even know the package is going to Iraq? APO's go to New York (I believe) then are forwarded to their final destination. Putting your personal feelings behind your business is a very quick way to put yourself out of business. I've learned this a long time ago. More recently, when customers have personally threatened my life (maybe I'll tell the story another time) for no reason at all, you have to stick to your nonemotional responses or you will eventually lose control of what you have set up.
Discount-Mats.com may well be out of business in a few months. Or it may not. This is a very short term story and no one will remember it in 2 months. The internet's memory is long, but peoples' memory is short. What Discount-Mats.com HAS earned because of this is a ton of incoming links to their site. And, as we all know, incoming links help you rank in search engines. So, this blog will not honor their insult by linking to the site. I know I'd love to get inbound links from WSJ, NYTimes - oh wait, I have those, and other major papers. But that doesn't happen by properly running a business, unfortunately. Controversy will probably propel Discount-Mats.com to the top of the SE's in no time at all. Congratulations pontificators!
So, once again, (eventually) there is no such thing as bad publicity. Every major paper online links to this site now and will, for at least, a while.
A story yesterday suggests that Discount-Mats.Com did not fire the employee as they had said.
All of the research I have done shows this to be a one or maybe two man operation. A search of the workers compensation database shows no company by that name listed. That means either they don’t pay out over $500 a year to employees, or… they have no employees. I very much doubt the assertion that someone has been fired. The rest of the media has just accepted this story and moved on. I have placed calls today to both Faisal Khetani and Sajid Nasir (the person listed in the article as the vice-president of the company) and have yet to get a phone call back.
I did not do the same research, but I'll assume its accurate. It is VERY easy to run an internet based business with one or two people. You can easily mask how many people you have by having generic email address (cs@domain.com, contact@domain.com) and no one knows you are working alone. I did this the first few years I was online. I bet the guy who wrote the email was the owner, possibly the co-owner of the company. There is, simply, no one to fire.
But, the customer claims to never have received an apology from the company. The company says they did apologize. I'd tend not to believe Discount-Mats.com.
Either way, this is a good lesson in business. About being emotional in your business dealings. Benefiting from controversy. And making headlines for yourself.
All-in-all, if the company can survive through this short period of turmoil, I'd say it has a bright future ahead of itself. Especially since the offending employee no longer works there *wink wink*