I see an ad for a steel iPhone case sold by Touch of Modern, and click the link. Oooh, a shiny hipster store full of nice… wtf? You’re requiring me to enter my email address to browse the site? Eat shit. Lick my wet, red taint. Choke on my cock while I punch you in the soul, shitbag. I am not signing up just for the privilege of looking through things I probably won’t buy.
I think it’s damned considerate of those sites to require my email up front, so that I know that I really don’t want to shop there. In a similar vein, if I have to make an account to shop at an online store, I realize that I can probably find the item elsewhere. I already have plenty of passwords to remember.
try mailinator.
At Mailinator you can use any address that YOU make up!
You can make any email address up on the fly, like BlowMeSidewaysOkPlease5555@mailinator.com . When they send you an approval link you (or anybody else) can visit mailinator and view the email. Even click it if you want. Then that’s it. If they receive spam, who cares? You’ll probably use a different address next time.
Completely on board. These stupid sites have proliferated ridiculously over the past year or so (or at least I’m seeing a whole lot more of them lately). Yeah, I get that it’s better for YOU if you get to send me an ad every week full of fresh! new! deals!, but I don’t have the time to look through 30 of them a week, nor do I care to. I’m just gonna go to Amazon instead.
Because I always have an extremely hostile reaction to this, I never sign up. I’m just assuming that these are, in fact, real stores, and not email harvesting operations.
I would try mailinator but going to any effort to get in seems not to be worth it. I’ll no longer buy something there on principle. I have one, tiny vengeance, and that’s to walk away without giving them a second thought except to hate them.
Wow. I guess I’ve been sheltered because I have never encountered one. OTOH, 99% of my online shopping goes to Amazon/NewEgg/ThinkGeek/eBay.
I have come damn close to starting a pit thread on this myself. Fuck those assholes.
I think most sites that want registration have been hip to mailinator (and its variants) for a long time now. I have certainly had attempts to use it rejected. 
I have not seen a site that requires login just to browse, but I agree that it sucks, and that they will not get my business. I get quite enough spam from sites I once actually bought something from, and now, several times a week ever after, keep trying to to get me to buy other things I have no interest in (or the same thing I already bought, so won’t want again). Because there is so much of this crap, I filter it into my spam folder, which is going to make it difficult if I ever should happen to want to buy anything from them again. I am afraid that if I did want to buy from them again, I would miss stuff like actual confirmation emails, and that makes me reluctant to deal with them. By spamming me, they are actually reducing their chances of getting my repeat business. (Quite apart from the fact that I now hate them.) :rolleyes:
How the hell do they even think this is a good idea? If the majority of people can’t see your merchandise, how are they going to know to buy it from you?
I agree that they must be email harvesters or something. It makes no legitimate business sense. Requiring sign up to buy at least makes some sense, but this? There’s just no way they can get people to buy from them, so the prices must be shit.
Nor have I. If I encounter one, I’ll immediately go elsewhere.
Then again, I’m not sure what a “hipster” online store is. Maybe discouraging business is the point. Profitability is so mainstream!
Hell, I won’t even sign up for free porn. Or even the websites where bored horny local women are looking for a quick hookup.
Though I am starting to reconsider my position on that.
It’s about more than that, in many cases. Providing an email address allows them to tag and track you, if not on that site, then through the big data aggregators. It may not be ShinyShitThatWantsToBeSharperImageForTheHipsters.com; it may well be being passed up to (sold to) aggregators like Google and Acxiom - and a datum like “JoeSmurf@AOL.com shopped for trendy phone cases” is a valuable one.
Kudos and applause to those who go out of their way to grit up the process.
OTOH, smugly saying you just go to Amazon, NewEgg and eBay means you’re already doing your browsing and buying in a tracked environment. Oh, well.
Why on earth would you not just unsubscribe from their marketing emails? Every email should have an unsubscribe link. You gave this company your credit card information, surely you are not afraid that their unsub link is malware or something?
Wouldn’t that block wifi and cellular signals to the iPhone? :dubious:
Duh. I suppose you want a phone that works properly like every John Q. Boring in gated-community hell carries around in his non-vintage pants?
Because that’s only one minor facet of the matter. The next minor facet is that you’re going to forever be on email lists for because your address was sold upstream.
Owners and managers go to business seminars, which promote shitty ideas like this. Since frequently the owners and managers aren’t the ones who have to deal with this crap on a daily basis, they fall in love with the idea.
When I was working in a dress shop, the owner went to yet another one of those seminars, and she came back with the bright :rolleyes: idea that we should copy down the name, address, and phone number of all the customers who gave us checks (this was the 80s). The check verification service that we used required that information on the checks, and everyone was used to this. However, the owner wanted us to make up a calling list, and when we had a slow day, we were supposed to get on the phone and start harassing (she called it courtesy calling) our customers to come in and buy! Buy!!! BUY!!! The store manager and I tried to tell her this would backfire, but she thought it was a wonderful idea. Then I had a bright idea of my own. Every time someone told me to quit calling them, I made a note, and especially if that customer said that she wasn’t coming in again because of the call. Next time the owner visited our store, I brought out my list. She was appalled. She said that SHE would certainly appreciate it if one of her favorite stores called HER and told her about a sale. I pointed out that she was on the road more often than not, and when she WAS at home, she rarely answered the phone herself, she had an assistant take her calls, and her assistant wasn’t going to put telemarketers through. Our customers, on the other hand, were deluged by telemarketing calls from everyone (again, this was in the 80s) and we certainly didn’t want to drive away customers.
The owner hadn’t considered that the customer would see this as telemarketing, and also see it as being very intrusive. She was very upset, because she’d paid a lot of money for that seminar, and that was the only new idea that she’d heard.
But unsubscribing would stop the emails you’re getting. If you’ve given them your email address, and they are going to sell it upstream, it doesn’t matter if you unsubscribe or not. They already have it.
I’ve been put on dozens of email marketing lists from companies and charities I’ve legitimately done business with. I can’t think of more than a few that have garnered me extra emails due to address sharing/leaking. Almost every email marketing list I’ve ever unsubscribed from has been completely successful. Except for the VFW, and I’m afraid to make a fuss about not wanting to hear from the VFW anymore.
Maybe because I work tangentially with the business of email marketing or maybe because I’ve dared to try unsub links and they have always worked, but I’ll never understand the mindset of people who complain about email marketing and don’t unsubscribe.
I mean there is legit spam for which you didn’t sign up, and you don’t click those unsub links due to potential nastiness. But any company you’ve legitimately given your email address to (or your credit card info) you should trust enough to click their unsub link. If you don’t want email from them, unsubscribe. Simple as that.
ETA: This post and my previous post were directly in response to njtt saying he/she got too much marketing email from companies he/she did business with, and let the emails go to spam, and was worried that future emails with receipts would go to spam too. My posts aren’t about whether or not you should give your email address to a company in the first place.
Well, I ordered something from Cafe Press a while back. The day I placed the order I got numerous email communications; are you happy with our service, look at these other things, etc. Then, each day I’d get several emails about what was on sale.
Once I got my item, I unsubscribed. Several times.
A year later I made another purchase and the same things happened. Sorry Cafe Press, you’re a pain in the ass. Will not buy again.
I don’t even like when online stores require you to “register” in order to buy from them. The invariably means creating yet another username and password.