Online Fireworks Sale
I work on an online fireworks store and contrary to what most people think, we don’t sell fireworks to minors and we go to great lengths to ensure that our products only reach adult hands, as it’s required by law.
Because of the ease of online transactions, and the fact that Internet is widely available to almost anyone and anywhere, a lot of people think that minors can just send and e-mail or visit our webpage and buy fireworks that they wouldn’t be able to buy from a regular store.
Nothing farther from the truth. In order to protect our costumers and ourselves, we have taken a lot of safety measurements that are carried out before an online fireworks sale is approved. And we even take some precautions after it in order to comply with the law.
After all, it’s also in our interest. If a minor somehow managed to get us to carry out an online fireworks sale for him, the authorities would come after us. And in case of an accident, we would be filled with so many lawsuits, we’d go out of business, or worse, to jail. That is not something we want to happen.
For that reason, we have set up a system that supervises every step of an online fireworks sale process. First of all, we need to activate an account for each of our costumers, without which, we can’t offer online fireworks sales.
Costumers who arrive to our physical store get their accounts activated right away, after they present their ID. For those who want to buy from us for the first time, we ask them to fax us a copy of their driver’s license or their passport. The copy must be clear enough that we can see their date of birth. Only after we receive and go through their copy, we activate their accounts.
That is not all. When they get their account and log on to our system, we ask them to pay the online fireworks sale with a credit card. In addition, the holder of the credit card has to be the holder of the driver’s license as well. We believe that this makes an online fireworks sale much safer, because it’s difficult for a minor to get someone else’s driver’s license and credit card information.
Finally, after processing the online fireworks sale, we send our packages through our special courier service. The courier is instructed to deliver the package only to the person who made the online fireworks purchase. If the person is not there, he will not deliver the fireworks. He’ll try two more times and then send the package back to us.
So, as you see, we have made it impossible for a minor to process an online fireworks sale with us. It’s much more complicated that just sending an e-mail.
