Salon sold gift cards online after closing

Businesses can live on in cyberspace long after they're dead in the real world, misleading customers and even costing them money.

Such was the case with TC Salon & Spa. Until the Watchdog stepped in, the long-closed salon still was selling gift cards on its website.

The salon's Bethlehem location closed in 2010. The Allentown location closed in June. In December, Timothy Porcelli ordered a $100 gift card as a Christmas present at http://www.tcsalonspa.com. Of course, he never got it.

He said he emailed the salon through its website several times in January. When those emails were not returned, he called and found the phone numbers were disconnected. That's when he poked around and found my report from last summer about the salon's closure.

"I find it highly unethical that their website is still able to process gift certificate orders despite the business no longer functioning," Porcelli told me in a recent email asking for my help. "I have an unhappy feeling I will not be getting my money back, but at the very least they should take their website offline to prevent this from reoccurring."

I get a lot of complaints about people stuck with gift cards for businesses that have closed, most recently the Center Valley Club golf course. But this was the first time I'd heard from someone who had bought a gift card for a business after it had closed.

I was just as surprised as Porcelli to find the TC Salon website not only active, but still taking payments.

Porcelli lives in New Jersey and didn't know the salon had closed. He told me a friend had recommended the spa when he was looking for a gift for his girlfriend, who lives in Bethlehem.

"I thought a massage or something would be good for Christmas," he said.

He intended to buy the certificate in person, but ran out of time and went online.

"They should take the website down, at least," Porcelli said.

It's down now, but only because I asked about it. I never got to the bottom of why it still was up and making sales.

TC Salon owner Frank Shipman told me he had left messages with his website developer, the former NURD Inc., months ago asking it to take down the site. He said those calls were not returned.

"I have no desire to have it up," Shipman told me last week, while the website still was active. "I would have preferred it to come down a long time ago."

NURD owner Jason Pijut told me Shipman never called about taking down the salon website.

"He never asked us anything," he said.

Pijut said if he had been asked, he wouldn't have been able to kill the site because he doesn't own the domain name. The salon does.

I relayed that information to Shipman, who told me he wasn't knowledgeable about that process because he was not involved in that end of the business: "I did hair. I didn't do the office stuff," he said.

He said he thought Pijut, as the site's developer, could do anything with the site, and said if he couldn't take it down, he at least should change it so it no longer sells gift certificates and makes it appear as if the salons are open.

I relayed that suggestion to Pijut. In a matter of minutes on Friday, he disabled the site. It now displays only a login screen for a Web hosting service.

"It's not pretty," said Pijut, who now owns Killer Interactive design in Bethlehem. "It solves the problem. At least no one else is going to push an order through there."

But it doesn't resolve Porcelli's problem, which is getting back his $100.

He said he paid for the gift certificate with a debit card and asked his bank for a refund, but was told too much time had passed.

Shipman said Porcelli should seek a refund through PayPal, which processes the orders. Porcelli told me he would try that. I tried reaching PayPal on his behalf but was unsuccessful.

Pijut has access to the salon's PayPal account and said there were other unfilled gift card orders there besides Porcelli's. He said he previously had heard from several other people who had ordered certificates around Christmas, and he walked them through the PayPal refund process.

Shipman told me he heard from one person who bought a certificate through the site after the salons were closed and that he told them to request a refund through PayPal.

As impractical as it may be, if you are not familiar with a business, it's a good idea to call to make sure it still is open before ordering a gift card through its website. A merchant's online heart can beat long after its storefront falls silent.

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