Beyond Door-to-Door: The Implications of Invited In-Home Selling

Over the past 20 years, consumer groups and policymakers have expressed concerns about the high-pressure selling techniques used during in-home selling, often highlighting the distinction between typical door-to-door selling, and the type of selling that occurs when a salesperson is “invited” through a previous interaction to undertake a sales process in the consumer’s home. This article explores these high-pressure selling techniques in the context of the invited in-home selling (IIHS) of educational software and the consequences in terms of consumer vulnerability and consumer protection policy. We conclude by drawing upon earlier discourse in this field to argue that policymakers, consumer advocates and businesses consider a holistic, multidimensional contextualization of consumer vulnerability as a means to consider consumer protection in this, and other contexts.