Complaint Review: Stores Online

This is one more report to add to the hundreds but I will add one new thing or something I haven't read here yet and also I only see 5 reports on EMS which I can't believe - they are King of Rip-Off.

I'm an SOL Merchant. Right now I have no merchant account on my SOL site - the bank (from the Phillipines(??)) that I was signed up with thru ECI Corp - who were the "deal" presented to us by SOL (btw in Canuck that stands for Sh** Out of Luck)was sold. I'm now waiting - 10 days & counting, for the new processor (from Singapore)being set up by SOL to get me an account. This processor is being negotiated by SOL and so far their customer service is on a par with ECI and by inference SOL and we all know what that is. It's taken 3 months to get my money out of ECI and eventually my last resort which is 99.99% counter-productive (but boy do you feel good) - raw abuse - worked altho' their accounting is wonky.
btw we signed up with ECI at 3.5% on Visa with a Cdn Bank in the back and were then told that special Cdn deal was no longer available and we had to pay 5% scam, scam, scam scam.

Anyway in the process of getting my money out of ECI I had an email from the mythical Sean Guy of SOL Customer Service fame - well, purported to be from him - trying to help me with ECI - I did fall off my chair, I thought I heard a heavenly choir as well! He's since returned to the woodwork so it must have been a purple haze moment.
I went into SOL eyes wide open - I knew I was being high pressured, I knew it was a song & dance attempting to walk the tightrope of legality and our seminar (T'O, ON) did mention the 3 day guarantee (this was after Texas bit a chunk out of them), 3 days is not enough anyway you haven't had a chance to check out the system at all so I have huge issues with that. I signed up anyway with my background I figured if only 50% was true then it would be OK.

Then I started doing our first site. What a shock, what garbage software (10% of expectation), I did most of that site with Dreamweaver and copied HTML code into my SOL site. Support is "call the programming dept" they are badly trained with little to no knowledge, interestingly all female, is that to try and deflect some of the hate thrown SOL's way? You can't get by them, calls for supervisors or managers are ignored.

We have the first site up and made a few sales and have gone thru a huge learning experience. I wrote up a 9 page report in detail on the deficiences and I never got an acknowledgement let alone a response - sent it twice and suggested an amical outcome - refund us 3 of the 6 licences as with all the work we'll need to do to make the sites operational we'll never get to 6.

I'm doing a new site right now on the SOL "Pro" platform and I've hit the same sort of idiot software - they've also clamped down on some of the access to underlying technology that you used to be able to mess with to get round the failures - the result - more loot for their programming dept - if you can wait that long. Back to Dreamweaver!

We also got scammed by EMS Electronic Marketing Services and for my vote they are 10 times worse than SOL. Our coach (Matt Rasmussen - nice guy, but ..)turned up 20 minutes late for every meeting, those meetings lasted 15-20 minutes only - he did no prep, hadn't looked at the site prior to the meeting, were useless just a reiteration of what was on the EMS site. They sold us 2 full marketing packages and a search listing package to "get us off to a head start inside 90 days". The listing package was included in the full packages so we did, after a ton of pushing, get the cash back for that but we're screwed on the others. They supposedly did a marketing banner for us and placed it on advertising sites - we never got to see it, traffic came to the site but it was all click fraud, they recommended a logo design company (fm: Orem, UT) who ran off with our money and produced a totally worthless banner that I had to rework to make useable. They also recommended the Shipper.com as a dropship/wholesale directory (from you know where!)another loser. Their SEO report on the site was the worst I've seen, their search engine listing on our behalf missed Yahoo (yup, Yahoo) on that first package they still owe us an email blast and the demographic they'll send it to is "Internet Consumers"! Now there's niche marketing for you and I'll probably end up blacklisted as a spammer. As one of their people said to me "nothing you can do, we have your money!"
This cost us more than the SOL licences (6 of them)! Total disaster. With my technology background I can just live with my huge SOL mistake but this - ughh!
We did miss getting taken by the Tax guys but we did get Links4Trade. They kind of work but they are inflexible, again lousy support and will be fired in the next couple of months as we move our link trading to a no external cost model and there's guys out there with good reps who'll make it easy.

My question in all this is what's the deal with Orem, Utah? I have a good memory of the place from 20 years ago negotiating a contract with Wordperfect Corp who were straight as arrows. Why does it now seem to be the scam capital? I had a guy call me to do some business and I liked what he was up to and then I asked for contact info and he said he was from Utah and I said I don't deal with any outfit from Utah, sorry. I'd like someone to explain it.

Finally: Any Cdn accountants explain to me why I paid ON PST on the SOL Services - as I understand things it should have been GST only? Did they pocket that 8%?

John
Shelburne, Nova Scotia
Canada

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