On this past Monday, I sent the following email to the customer service address at Lucky Gunner:
Sir or ma’am,
My screenname is Linoge, and I write at "walls of the city" (http://www.wallsofthecity.net/). As you may or may not be aware, I recently came into some information indicating that Lucky Gunner, Ammo.net, BulkAmmo.com, AmmoforSale.com, GunsforSale.com, and Military Ballistics Industries were all the same company, without any obvious, public disclaimer of that relationship. My posts concerning this discovery can be found at http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2011/07/online-ammunition-retailers-a-hypothesis.html and http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2011/07/lucky-gunner-hypothesis-confirmed.html, and if you have a moment, I have a few questions for you.
First, why do you operate several, distinct ammo-selling websites without disclosing their affiliation to customers?
Second, how would you answer the concerns of my fellow gunnies when they are shopping around for ammunition online and think they are getting independent price quotes from actual competitors by visiting your various sites?
Third, do you operate your own warehouse? If not, who do you use for order fulfillment? And, in both cases, where is the warehouse located?
Fourth, as its name indicates, GunsforSale.com sells firearms – who is the FFL for that webpage, and where is s/he located?
Thank you for your time, and whatever answers you can provide.
Linoge.
The only response I have heard in return was their automated ticketing system acknowledging receipt and assigning a case number ([25A-15B6FDD7-08EA], if you are interested); if I do not hear anything back by next Monday, I may take the more-direct approach of individually emailing the employees of the company.
Additionally, I would like to take a moment to share this comment from Brian Johnson, the editor at AmmoLand:
You and I are in agreement. I do not think that this is a good business practice. I personally would not buy from a website without more personal information published on the site to confirm the entity. I myself have been in the ecommerce business since 1996 and I have worked with thousands of small and mid size companies. Publishing your identity on the website is critical to the sites credibility. I also was the webmaster / web consultant for Aimsurplus.com for 8 years so I have a lil background in the ammo business and Aim took a different approach buy offering exceptional customer service and great prices, that worked for them and they grew. DO I think LG is doing the right thing, no Google webmaster guidlines identify this approach to marketing and they reject it http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.
I am indefferent to LG and their approach, they have advertised with us in the past and we appreciate thier business, They have sent us articles to publish and we published them when we thought they were a value to our readers. They do sponsor some gun shoots and they have invited ammoland to the meet ups. I dont think SEO is a crime and its clear that LG is all about SEO. setting up some “no follow” links will allow a pro gunner blogger to remain positive with LG while remaining pure to their objections.
I like reading about this on walls of the city because I have known about this issue for a long time and too many gun bloggers seemed oblivious to what was going on. As pro gun people, bloggers and information providers I think we have a responsibility to keep our enviroment clean of nafarious people or people who may be less then honest in their practices and discussion amoungst us all is the only way to achive that function.
So thanks for the reveal. its good work by all.
Brian Johnson
I dare say he strikes to the very core of this matter… When you are engaging in business with a company, you are exchanging your hard-earned money for a product they are offering. That relationship has always been based on mutual trust – theirs that your money will be good, and yours that they will provide a good product – and that trust can be all-too-easily destroyed by things that may or may not have any bearing, whatsoever, on the actual transactions being discussed.
Whether or not the practice of running not-really-competing, not-really-individual companies under the auspices of one master company is a matter you will have to settle for yourself, but at least now you know what the score is.
Agreed.
On another note, I’m not quite sure how I feel about the fact that Brian knew but didn’t bring it to light himself. Sure, they accept advertising from LG, but that’s a point against him, knowing that they are nefarious, and not an excuse.
Regardless, it was a brilliant piece of thinking and I am ashamed to say that, in the spirit of pushing the hobby/lifestyle, I put up the “bulk ammo” post when they asked me.. without even thinking about it. It was a legitimate website as near as I could tell. I admitted that I had never done business and was simply putting it forward, but after your “reveal”, I’ve taken it down and a little shamed that I was taken in by their “scheme”.
Sounds like they are using duplicate, saturation advertising in an effort to capture as much of the available ad-space and gun-space as possible.
I use AmmoEngine to find pricing variations, and LuckyGunner shows up next to ChaperThanDirt on most occasions – interestingly via that, AmmoNet and BulkAmmo don’t show-up at all.
@ Patrick: Brian may have concluded that it was not AmmoLand’s place to engage in the disclosure, his information may have been as loosely-connected as my initial post, or any number of alternatives… I do not know, and I cannot really speak for him. As I said, a person has to come to their own conclusions as to what is acceptable and not… and what they are going to do about it.
I do not think I would feel too bad about being suckered by LG, though – a lot of people were, myself included for a time. They were deliberate, they were careful, and if a person with experience in these kinds of things had not contacted me, we never would have known the truth conclusively. But, now we know, and now we can ensure everyone else knows.
@ DirtCrashr: You have pretty much nailed it in one – Lucky Gunner realized that their SEO was only going to boost them in search rankings so much, so the obvious alternative is to create “competitors” who would show up independently in the search rankings in addition to their main store. People are bound to click on one of the first returns, and if four of the first returns are theirs… well, bully for them.
Basically, it neatly circumvents Google’s rules about duplicate material/sites… at least, “neatly” if no one notices the four sites are owned by the same people…
Sheesh, all because of search rankings – it’s practically Facebookish…
*snerk* Well, there may have been other motivating factors (like the possibility of alienating people with one storefront but their still using another one), but, yeah, pretty much
.