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Tips / Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule
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Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule |
| By: admin, November 25, 2004 |
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| Views: 239 |
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Q: Who is liable for Rule violations caused by a fulfillment house or
drop shipper?
A: The seller is. This is because the person soliciting the order, not
the agent fulfilling it, is the seller under the Rule. The person soliciting
the order can control -- among other things -- the shipment representations
made in soliciting the sale and the choice of fulfillment houses. The
seller can adjust the shipment representations to include the time needed
to transmit orders to a fulfillment house and for the fulfillment house
to respond.
However, staff considers the following circumstances when deciding whether
to recommend an enforcement action:
whether the merchant made all reasonable efforts to prevent violations,
including, e.g.,
contracting with the fulfillment house to require it to comply with the
Rule (or, at least, require it to promptly inform the merchant of any
problems that could involve the Rule);
"seeding" orders with the fulfillment house to monitor its fulfillment
time; and
monitoring customer complaints for unusual surges.
whether the violations were genuinely unforeseeable and beyond the merchant's
control to prevent;
whether the merchant, from all objective circumstances, did not know and
did not have reason to know of the violations when they occurred; and,
whether the merchant promptly took all reasonable steps to remedy the
fulfillment, notification, or refund systems failures as soon as it discovered
them, and to remedy any resulting customer injury.
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