Re: Someone has hijacked my store

Well, I have some ideas. The economic incentive might be simply that
they have Google adwords on al their pages. It seems as if they've gone
to an awful lot of truoble, though, and their site actually seems to
function well (although slowly), so I wonder if they're actually
planning to charge for inclusion on their site once it has built up
some popularity.

(As you've probably noticed, it's not just your store they're
displaying products from.)

Their site is a bit short on contact information, so I looked up their
whois record. Looks like they're fairly new and the contact info is in
the Ukraine. Although that raises some alarms in my head (the Ukraine
seems to be a relatively safe place to perform fraud if you're going to
do it), I'm having a little trouble imagining what the scam might be.

In any case I'm just speculating.

There's a good chance they don't actually pass muster as a Froogle
merchant; I seem to recall that you're supposed to have a buy button on
your page that lets the customer buy from your site . They have a
"buy" button that simply links to the actual seller's site. So you
might point them out to Froogle and see what they think. (Personally, I
think it confuses the search results, if nothing more).)

I've seen something a bit similar before. We sell products through
Amaazon as well as through our own web store. Sometimes I'll see our
Amazon offerings show up on Froogle. It's always another site that's
using Amazon's web services to offer a store (they get commission on
sales from Amazon, I think). And they typically disappear not too long
after I see them. I don't know whether it's Froogle or Amazon that puts
a stop to it in those cases, though!

- Amy