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My husband and I started our journey with Unim LLC in February 2005. I have been so frustrated with this company for the past six months. It seems they never have any answers to the issues you are having with the website builder. I refused the mentoring, Thank goodness. But we have been building this website for a while now. I also have to say that I had the same issue with the webmail that the gentleman from Washington experienced.
I went in to check my email and there it was another persons mail, it happened around the same time too. But, when I logged out and went back in there my mail was. It was weird but I really didn't think anything of it until I read the report about the same incident here. I'm really glad that I found these reports for the longest I thought it was just us that were having these issues with unim. When you call them they act like you are the idiot on top of being rude. I got tired of them treating me like I didn't know anything so I took a course and became SEO certified and now know the ends and outs of building and marketing websites. Especially dealing with search engines as they are going to be the biggest means of your traffic. If you don't get the traffic you don't make profits. With the way unim has things set up there is no way to ever maximize your presence on the web and they don't care.
I have learned that they are not here to help you succeed in this business, they are here to make sure they succeed. Here are the issues with the builder that they refuse to fix that are necessary when getting a business up and running. I have dicussed the issues many of times with them and they say they can't fix them. They are simple adjustment that CAN be made but still they refuse.
URLS
1. If you notice in the urls of your webpages (not your home page) look something like this. http://www.yourcompany.com/custom.em?pid=123456
Well there are 2 reasons this is a problem
1)The search engines do not recognize the ?(question mark)in urls and will not rank those pages.
2)The page name should be equipped with the top keyword or words for that page. Example
http://www.yourcompany.com/leather-briefcases.html
If you are trying to get your website out there, optimizing every page is essential. In any other web builder you are able to name your own pages.But not with Unim LLC builder. They refuse to fix this.
This is something simple but necessary for the best search engine results.
Metatags
Unim only offers the title, keyword, and description tags. Although these are the necessaries, they alone are not enough. You should be able to have a robot file, revist file, author file, content file in the head html.and a few others that the search engines look for. You are only able to alter the html code for the body html in the builder, not the head html. In a competitive market this can make you or break you. If you are selling the same type of products that many other companys are, the company that has these tags set up properly will of course go before you and out rank you every time. Therefor generating profits that could be yours. Do you think unim cares, of course not this is not about your profits its about theirs.
They use this piece of the website business to get you involved with the bigger picture. If they told you about the mentoring program and the price tag along with it you probably would have gotten up and walked out right then. So they use this e-commerce business to lure you in when in all they trying to get to the bigger picture the mentoring. They don't care about the websites that is just bait for them.
And if they lose a few customers they still have made tons of money off of others. There are so many out there that was just like me and thinking I must be doing something wrong and of course that is what they make you think everytime you call to get help. But now that I know what I am talking about, they refuse to talk to me and get rude everytime I call and tell them what all is wrong with there builder.
Webpages
In the unim builder you can have unlimited pages but the thing here is that every page you put on is listed on the navigation bar. lets take for example your website is professional supplies
and you have a page in that website that is briefcases, but you have a hundred products of briefcases. you cant put them all on one page, potential customers DO NOT like to see more that 20 products on one page. so you make extra page called briefcases-2,
briefcases-3 and so on. The problem here is that those names are going to be on the nav bar also. This looks unprofessional when you should just be able to have those pages hidden and linked from the main briefcase page with out them being seen on the nav bar. If you go to most websites that offer alot of products you can see that the extra pages are hidden and you can click on the bar at the bottom of the page to continue browsing for those products. Example:
1 2 3 next>
They dont have those pages labled on the nav bar.
Shipping
Unim does not have a shipping calculator. This limits business from getting international orders and let me be frank, if you are selling anything online you are international that is why it is called the worldwide web. Its world wide. People from all over are going to be looking for your products not just the United States. But unim only allows you one price with shipping. This is bad for business. You may have multiple shippers like ups, fedex, etc. Their prices are different. Well unim doesn't care about this either. When I called to question them about this this is what they told me.
After the customer makes a purchase add the additional cost for shipping to their credit card and then approve it.
I asked them how ethical is that. The customer should be able to to know up front the total of the charges before anything is approved.
Again, they stated there is nothing they can do.
There reply was rude and unhelpful.
Unim once again is limiting the profits you may can gain, by not implementing a shipping calculator for international orders and different carriers
I am in the process of swithching to a host that doesn't have these issuses and offers quality support services. In other words a real Hosting service, where these things are a given and they understand the necessaity of them also.
I hate it for all of us who have dealt with unim and I pray that something good comes out of this for you all.
I would be more than happy to answer any questions or help any of you with consturcting the things mentioned here. Most people charge hundreds of dollars but Im not out for money and not looking to make a profit from Unim's mess. I am happy to help any of you FREE OF CHARGE. email: ce_mccoy@yahoo.com
Carren & antoine
Huntsville, Alabama
U.S.A.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Carren & antoine
Huntsville,Alabama,
U.S.A.
Unim ripoff Boca Raton Florida
#2Author of original report
Sun, September 25, 2005
There were a few things that I left out that I also wanted to add about the services of unim.
Downtime
I think unim has a 25% uptime, seriously. This has caused many problems with my link exchanges. As we know link exchanges are a great way to get quality traffic to your site and also gets you ranked. The fact is if there are no outbound links (links from other sites linking to your site) there is no hope for you to get in the top pages of the search engines. The number of links to you, tell the search engines the importance of your site. Well with unims down time I have tried to trade links with very high ranking sites and on more than a couple of occasions when the business I was trading links with went to view my site it wasn't there and they denied me. How good does that look when your trying to conduct business with other businesses or customers.
Search Engine Button
In the unim smart start book they give you with the hosting package on page 50 it says there is a button in the builder where you can submit to the search engines this is a LIE there is no such button anywhere and when I confronted them they said oh well the book is wrong you can't submit from the builder.
Also I wanted to let everyone know that you don't have to be stuck with Unim you can switch to a company that will allow you to implement all these things I have discussed.
If you think like I was thinking: I have spent so much time building this site to start over somewhere else well guess what its easier than you think.
Lets take yahoo merchant solutions for small business (I am not endorsing them just want to show you more options and that your not stuck with this mess unim has put on all of us) You can transfer your domain with them and swithch servers with the registar of your domain name so that browsers will point to your new site with yahoo. Here is a trick. even though your domain name that you registared with the unimwebsite is transferred to yahoo. You still have the domain name that unim gives you for instance: http://www.yourname.unimwebcenter.com. That means that your website with unim is still up under this domain (until you cancel service with them) you can now copy all your files and images straight from your website with unim to the new site with yahoo.
Also you can open up a new merchant account with yahoos merchant account and get away from innovative. If you choose to keep innovative or if you use another merchant provider you can transfer them for use to yahoo and DONT have to pay a gateway fee.
Also yahoo and many others offer everything and more that I have asked unim to implement into there builder and GET THIS, for either the same price or less.
If you do choose yahoo they have a 50 dollar set up fee which is waived and if you get to the site where it doesn't say waived let me know and I'll tell you how to get to the place in yahoo where it is waived. Hosting services all have issues but I have researched many and I know that there are many out there that offer the things that are necessary for your business to succeed. UNIM IS NOT ONE OF THESE. Please do the research on any of the host you may be considering. I do know yahoo may have some faults but they seem to be minumim compared to others. I have researched and I do know there uptime is about 98% and 1 in every 8 businesses on the web are hosted by yahoo.