"Here, is a real review about Office Auto Pilot. We signed up for it because of their amazing intro video, I absolutely loved it, and whoever made it did an awesome job. Their 90 day money back policy sounded promising.

You know when you give your credit card to a company they doesnt really need it, and it doesnt feel right? Well this company sets an example why you should avoid giving your credit card out and NEVER SIGN UP FOR SOFTWARE THAT ASK FOR PAYMENT IN EXCHANGE FOR TRIAL. Ill get to that in a second, first let me talk about their product.

I only wished their actual product was as good as their introduction video. Our company specializes in IT and we are power users when it comes to software. It took us a month just to get around their user interface. I dont think there is a word for their user interface, except for COMPLETE GARBAGE designed by a Junior High School student at his programming 101 class. I dont even understand how a company can release a product with an interface that is unusable. I am not even joking around, this interface is so confusing that they make you watch 10 hours of video (2 hours of it has sarcasm), just to get around simple functionalities. You need to have 5 tabs open in order to add one contact.

Their interface is so confusing that their own staff would laugh at it when you call them with a question. I called once to find out how you tag a contact since it wasnt straight forward, and a staff member joked around saying probably an Indian wrote this one. To tag a contact, you would have to make 15 clicks before it happens. Seriously, I think you can figure out how to develop a nuclear weapon before you figure out how to add a new contact properly. I am not even going to start if you want to try to put HTML in your email, their HTML editor was from an open source project that got abandoned a decade ago.

So it took us 2 months to learn their rocket science user interface and launch a campaign. This would normally take about 2 days on a regular Mail chimp auto responder. We thought we got it, but then we get more surprises from this joke of a company.
1) Their mail server Office Auto Pilot aka Moon-ray is blacklisted on 50% of the email networks from all the spammers that send out garbage on their platform.
2) The auto responder reports were so bad that their automatic auto responder became completely useless.

I didnt even try integrating anything else because Office Auto Pilot should be wiped from the internet.
So then the fun part comes CANCELLING! They hid their cancellation button somewhere so deep in the admin section that would you first find gold in the ground before you find the cancel button. After spinning our wheels for two months setting up a campaign on their garbage software, and running a campaign to find out it was a complete failure, we asked them for a refund.

First they were nice about it and said here is where you find the cancellation button:
1. Log in to your account at www.sendpepper.com or www.officeautopilot.com
2. Click on the ""My Account"" link at the top right-hand corner of the screen
3. Click on the ""Change Subscription"" link
4. Click on the ""Please close my account completely"" link and follow the on screen instructions.

I know this sounds simple, but go try to find this on your own with their beautiful user interface. After cancelling their subscription 1 day past their 90 day policy, they said SORRY you dont qualify for a refund. Here is their official response:

We provide OAP clients a 90 day refund period to see if the software meets their needs. Within that window you can claim a full refund.
That is not the case here. These terms are listed and can be referred to here:http://www.officeautopilot.com /terms-of-use/
When your account was open you could always reference the ""My Account"" button: In case you forgot when you signed up or next charge would occur.
I can not process the refund as it is not within the 90 days grace period we allow for all our OAP clients.

The Service is billed in advance on a monthly basis and is non-refundable. There will be no refunds or credits for partial months of service or refunds for months unused with an open account. In order to treat everyone equally, no exceptions will be made.

If your account is open on your billing date the account is charged. Please reference http://www.officeautopilot.com/terms-of-use/ if you are unclear.

I was one day late, and they would not refund anything. They didnt even refund the charge they made one day earlier for a month that I wouldnt even be using. DO NOT GIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD TO THEM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. We lost all of our money with them and got nothing in return, except for a nasty experience. This company should not be in business.

I dont have better software to recommend. I can only recommend using Mail chimp for your email marketing at the moment. If you do decide to try Office Auto Pilot (I HIGHLY DISCOURAGE YOU FROM EVEN TRYING), then be prepared to find the CANCEL BUTTON as soon as you get frustrated, which will be 3.5 days. Make sure you dont wait until the 90 day period because you will have the same story as I did."

Click Here to read other Ripoff Reports on Office Auto Pilot

9 Updates & Rebuttals

OP Employee

Santa Barbara,
California,
United States

SendPepper/OfficeAutoPilot

#2UPDATE Employee

Fri, December 22, 2017

Evening everyone.

I don't have much to say on this other than the fact that a lot of this information is very incorrect. There was never a Trial period for SP/OAP, we merely have a 90 day money back guarantee if you cancel within your first 90 days. In the terms of service it also states this, so cancelling on day 91 is outside of the agreement and is something we have to uphold. As I'm sure many business owners and entrepreneurs know first hand, if you make one exception to the rules and it becomes known, everyone wants you to allow that exception for them as well.

Seeing as this post was written back in 2012, there's been years of changes such as us no longer offerring SP/OAP after ONTRAPORT was created. As for the emailing reputation, we've maintained a near perfect record for the last 9 years. The only time our server reputation gets damaged is when one of our clients starts spamming using our system. Fortunately we have a strict review process of all imported contacts, as well as any use of our open API.

As for the videos and tutorials, if you purchased SP/OAP back in 2012, I agree with the frustrations on the interface, but there's a lot of over exaggeration in the post. If you needed to have 5 tabs open to add a Tag to a contact, it sounds like you didn't watch any of the tutorials or read a single article. What this comes down to is if you're an entrepreneur or not. If you need us to hold your hand to add a tag to a contact, then you're probably not cut out to be managing a business, nor do you have the go-getter attitude of an entrepreneur.

Our team is trained by reading the articles and getting first hand experience with the app. There's nothing that we know, that someone can't find out themselves by doing a quick search in the knowledge base.

Luckily now, we no longer sell SP/OAP as I mentioned, and are only offerring ONTRAPORT. At the time SP and OAP were created, Infusionsoft was the only other company in the world that was an "all in one business automation platform", and to this day that still holds true.

Mark

Hemet,
California,
United States of America

I Love Office AutoPilot

#3Consumer Comment

Tue, November 13, 2012

I just want to start off by saying I completely understand where you are coming from. There is indeed a learning curve to Office AutoPilot. However, in my experience, it is not as difficult as you are making it sound. I have been using Office AutoPilot successfully for the past two months and have not run into too much trouble. Any problems that I have had, I start a chat with support and they help me out or point me in the right direction.

I have had nothing but an amazing experience with OAP. There is so much versatility to the system. I am not an IT guy, but I sit down and figure it out. Thank you OAP!

alonzow

Dayton,
Ohio,
United States of America

Office Auto Pilot aka Fraud aka Scam aka MoonRay LLC aka Sendpepper!

#4Author of original report

Wed, October 03, 2012

So
let me get this straight, first you claim that you have a policy that extends the refund period to 95 days. Here is your quote from the message above The reason I suggested that you identify yourself or get in touch is because our actual policy is to give clients 5 business days grace period after the refund period is over in order to ensure that we're being fair and to avoid situations like the one you're describing.

I asked you
to show me proof of this policy, and now you are taking your words back that you dont have this policy and you basically lied on the very previous message you posted on this same board. GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE! This is the typical crap Ive been dealing with this award-winning company which provides an industry-leading service to thousands of businesses around this world.

It is funny
that they are using negative SEO to send one way links to their award-winning article to try to get some ranking on it, Pathetic! And what exactly did you get an award for? Claiming that you made some money without showing proof to INC? or the fact that you ripping off your customers with your software that I call garbage ware.

This claim
here To reply to your demands specifically, we will not change our refund policy from 90 to 95 days. Of course we always have the right to make exceptions internally, which is what we often do for reasonable folks who are a few days late in canceling. is a BS. I asked you at least 5 times to honor the refund. You have no such policy, and it is unfortunate that instead of admitting you have a problem, you come out on defensive and look like an idiot.

The reason
why I remain anonymous because I dont need a letter from your attorney on defamation for speaking the truth, and fighting this over in court. If you are serious about helping your customers, change your policy as a good will. I will then call you to get my refund, and I will post a response on all the boards that this has been resolved.

Otherwise,
you can try to sweet talk your way all you want. The fact that you lied on this board, but claiming you have a 5 day policy while not disclosing it, and now coming back that its internal on case by case basis makes you look like a scammer. In fact, your internal 5 day extension refund policy seems to work only if you have a ton of bad reviews on all the different boards. Then you will take a proactive measure to refund the customer.

Also I
suggest you read VISA/MASTERCARD guidelines. It clearly says you are not allowed to charge for service in advance, and if the service is cancelled it must be prorated unless you have a physical signature of me agreeing to the terms.

If you are
ready to resolve, please update your policies.

Report Attachments

Brendan

California,
United States of America

Refund Period

#5UPDATE Employee

Mon, October 01, 2012

Dear Sir,

We have offered several times to work with you and look at your account history, but you insist on staying anonymous and slandering our award-winning company which provides an industry-leading service to thousands of businesses around this world.

Despite your own admission that we have followed our extraordinarily generous refund policy which you knew you agreed to, you insist on anonymously posting your meritless complaint to every message board on the internet that you can find. This speaks to the obvious fact that you have no intention to resolve anything here, so this will be our last response.

To reply to your demands specifically, we will not change our refund policy from 90 to 95 days. Of course we always have the right to make exceptions internally, which is what we often do for reasonable folks who are a few days late in canceling. However, our refund policy - the longest in the industry by far - is 90 days.

We will not revise our policy about charging for service in advance. It's not illegal, in fact it's standard practice in the SaaS industry.

We will not change our sign up form for you either. Our refund policy is written in large text right on the sign up form, as well as many places on our website. It is not "buried in the terms" as you suggest. A 90 day money-back guarantee obviously implies that AFTER 90 days, there will be no money-back. That's what a 90-day money-back guarantee is, so there's no need to clarify this further.

I'm sorry we were unable to work this out to your satisfaction.

alonzowooten

Dayton,
Ohio,
United States of America

office autopilot is fraud

#6Author of original report

Fri, September 28, 2012

CONVERSATION FROM THE REP VIA EMAIL

REP

I was able to check with Billing Regarding a 90 day refund request.

The terms of this agreement entail that the account is closed within 90 days of when the account had been activated in order to qualify for the 90 day money back guarantee.

Your account was created on X-1-2012 and the account was closed on X-5-2012.

This means that the account was open for longer than 90 days disqualifying this account from the 90 day money back guarantee.

We will not be able to process any refunds for this account.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

CLIENT

I pleaded to refund again, and I got this reply

REP

We provide OAP clients a 90 day refund period to see if the software meets their needs. Within that window you can claim can of course claim a full refund.

That is not the case here. These terms are listed and can be referred to here:http://officeautopilot.com/terms-of-use/

When your account was open you could always reference the "My Account" button: http://screencast.com/t/ARvKEiYUCpPA in case you forgot when you signed up or next charge would occur.

I can not process the refund as it is not within the 90 days grace period we allow for all our OAP clients.

CLIENT

Then I asked to refund me for the 4th month that I didn't even use since we are only 5 days in

REP

The Service is billed in advance on a monthly basis and is non-refundable.

There will be no refunds or credits for partial months of service or refunds for months unused with an open account. In order to treat everyone equally, no exceptions will be made.

If your account is open on your billing date the account is charged. Please reference http://officeautopilot.com/terms-of-use/ if you are unclear.

So now all of a sudden you have a 5 day grace period, which btw is still not in your terms and conditions. I will be willing to come forward and consider this claim resolved under the conditions:

1) Confirm that if the cancellation was on the 5th day, you will process a refund for all 4 charges, 3 months of service and the 4th month that you charged in advance.

2) Revise your non-sense policy about charging upfront and having that as unrefundable. This is illegal, if anything it should be pro-rated.

3) Change the policy on your website to indicate the grace period.

4) Add a clear warning message on your CHECK MARK next to the terms and conditions that after 95 days you will not be refunded (and not hide it in your terms and conditions)

Report Attachments

alonzowooten

Dayton,
Ohio,
United States of America

OfficeAutoPilot aka MoonRay LLC aka SendPepper A Scam, Scam, Scam

#7Author of original report

Fri, September 28, 2012

CONVERSATION FROM THE REP VIA EMAIL

REP

I was able to check with Billing Regarding a 90 day refund request.

The terms of this agreement entail that the account is closed within 90 days of when the account had been activated in order to qualify for the 90 day money back guarantee.

Your account was created on X-1-2012 and the account was closed on X-5-2012.

This means that the account was open for longer than 90 days disqualifying this account from the 90 day money back guarantee.

We will not be able to process any refunds for this account.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

CLIENT

I pleaded to refund again, and I got this reply

REP

We provide OAP clients a 90 day refund period to see if the software meets their needs. Within that window you can claim can of course claim a full refund.

That is not the case here. These terms are listed and can be referred to
here:http://officeautopilot.com/terms-of-use/

When your account was open you could always reference the "My Account" button: http://screencast.com/t/ARvKEiYUCpPA in case you forgot when you signed up or next charge would occur.

I can not process the refund as it is not within the 90 days grace period we allow for all our OAP clients.

CLIENT

Then I asked to refund me for the 4th month that I didn't even use since we are only 5 days in

REP

The Service is billed in advance on a monthly basis and is non-refundable.

There will be no refunds or credits for partial months of service or refunds for months unused with an open account. In order to treat everyone equally, no exceptions will be made.

If your account is open on your billing date the account is charged. Please reference http://officeautopilot.com/terms-of-use/ if you are unclear.

So now all of a sudden you have a 5 day grace period, which btw is still not inyour terms and conditions. I will be willing to come forward and consider this claim resolved under the conditions:

1) Confirm that if the cancellation was on the 5th day, you will process a refund for all 4 charges, 3 months of service and the 4th month that you charged in advance.

2) Revise your non-sense policy about charging upfront and having that as unrefundable. This is illegal, if anything it should be pro-rated.

3) Change the policy on your website to indicate the grace period.

4) Add a clear warning message on your CHECK MARK next to the terms and conditions that after 95 days you will not be refunded (and not hide it in your terms and conditions)

Report Attachments

officeautopilot aka moonray llc aka sendpepper scam fraud

Brendan

California,
United States of America

Contact

#8UPDATE Employee

Wed, September 26, 2012

Dear anonymous client,

I won't waste any more of anyone's time responding to your posts point by point. We clearly disagree on the facts here.

Despite your strong opinion to the contrary, we remain a committed, generous, and good bunch of people doing good work and who who make a big, positive difference for thousands of businesses around the world. As I mentioned, our business is one of the fastest growing in the nation and that growth is based 100% on word-of-mouth referrals. Your experience is dramatically out of the ordinary, and I'm sorry for it and that our services aren't a match for your needs.

The reason I suggested that you identify yourself or get in touch is because our actual policy is to give clients 5 business days grace period after the refund period is over in order to ensure that we're being fair and to avoid situations like the one you're describing.

If, in fact, you canceled a day after your refund period was over as you said, and you requested a refund, you should have gotten it.
Again, I'll extend the offer to get in touch so we can ensure you were treated fairly. As I said, our commitment is to make a positive difference for our clients.

We are not interested in charging you for services we don't provide.

alonzowooten

Dayton,
Ohio,
United States of America

Office Auto Pilot AKA MoonRay LLC AKA SendPepper Yes A Scam and Fraud

#9Author of original report

Tue, September 25, 2012

It is amazing how companies cant monitor their own customer support internally and only volunteer to take action once a bad review is posted. Posted on 9/17 and already a reply on 9/18 from an Office Auto Pilot staff member? How about implementing an alert system on your own emails.

The first solution to a problem is admitting that you have a problem. Based on your reply you dont think you have one. If you really cared about your customers, you would put the customer first, not your policy. You want to play hardline with your policy, I will play hardline as a pissed of consumer.

So let me address your UI in detail:

1. Your 9 movies video can be made into a 2 minute video if you wipe out all the stupid sarcasm from it. In fact your software features are so simple, they shouldnt even need a video. We are talking about adding and importing contacts here. How about rolling out a 5 page PDF that I can read in 3 minutes instead of me wasting my time listening to your corny jokes for an hour.

2. In order to map new fields, add a contact, tag a contact and add an auto responder group and tag them all. Takes 5 tabs with 15 clicks. In fact it takes that many plus 2 hours with waiting on your customer support to reply on how you go about doing it.

3. Same as above

4. Well that is very sad than, developers in India have more skills in UI and development than world-class developers in NA. If its not that, then you are just a bunch of shitty developers, who are pretending to be designers as well. I understand that you dont have enough customers to rip off so you cant hire a graphic designer just yet. I am sure your conference in a month will bring you a lot more people that you can wallet F****, which will finally allow you to hire a graphic designer to finish the one month UI job after 18 months.

5. Leading ESPs? And that makes it not shitty? Your HTML editor is good for text not HTML. Its impossible to use it. Show me a nice HTML layout from one of your customers to prove me wrong. I am sure there is none. I think only your own developers can figure out how to use it.

6. Your word against mine, but if you are a trial client go and test it out yourself. Take five random emails and email them to your Gmail account, they will all land in spam folder.

7. Of course you disagree; you just disagreed on my whole claim. The first solution to a problem is admitting that you have a problem. AND BELIEVE ME YOUR COMPANY HAS A PROBLEM. Considering it takes you 18 months to change UI screen that should take no more than a few weeks, I would just say get out of business now. You are not going to make it.

You are not sorry, youre a thief with a big tongue who is representing a crap company and defending their policies instead of the customer.

I love how you said contact me again and I will ensure our policies were followed, instead of contact me to see what we can do for you. Yes your policies were followed alright, except your policies are flawed and your product is even worse.

Report Attachments

Office Auto Pilot aka MoonRay LLC aka SendPepper Fraud and Scam

Brendan

California,
United States of America

Poor Experience?

#10UPDATE Employee

Tue, September 18, 2012

Hi Alonzo,

I'm sorry to hear about your poor experience! This is not typical for us at all, and we hate to hear that we've let you down.

Let me answer a few of your specific concerns.

First, the refund issue. I certainly understand your frustration, however as a company we do have to draw the line somewhere... and we have drawn that line at 90 days. No other company in our industry offers anything like a 90-day refund policy. I'm not aware that any offers any refund policy at all, and most clients feel that this is an extremely generous time period in which to ensure that our services are a good match.

During that time (and forever after) we invest a lot of resources into getting clients up and running, answering questions, creating implementation roadmaps and so on. At some point, it's fair that we should no longer assume the risk of refunds and we believe that 90 days is more than fair. Second, regarding the product. It's unfortunate that our product wasn't a good fit for you, however your suggestion that our software is unusable clashes dramatically with the feedback we constantly get from the marketplace. We've got thousands of happy customers, a stellar support team that's available seven days a week, and a very useful support forum and knowledge base located at support.officeautopilot.com/forums.

Our business has grown dramatically - even earned us spot #102 on the Inc500 - based 100% on word-of-mouth referrals. This simply doesn't happen with products that aren't great.  To answer your specific complaints:
1. Our initial client training program is not 5 hours, but 70 minutes. You can see it here: http://www.the9moves.com
2. You don't have to open 5 tabs to add a contact. In fact, you don't have to open any additional tabs at all.
3. In fact it doesn't take 15 clicks to add a tag to a contact, it takes 3.
4. No outsourced coders have ever touched our system. It is 100% created in-house by a team of world-class developers.
5. Our HTML editor is not open-source, not abandoned, and is in fact in use by many of the leading ESPs on the market today.
6. As for the blacklist issue, this isn't true. We have an email delivery team working daily to ensure that our email reputation is maintained and that we are delivering messages to the inbox at the highest rate possible. This is accomplished by a series of reviews, message content filters, and our partnership with the industry leader in email deliverability monitoring - Return Path. We successfully deliver millions of emails every day while maintaining Sender Scores and inbox delivery rates among the highest in the industry, and are proactive in helping our clients succeed with email marketing. That said, poorly managed email lists and promotions are not going to get delivered into inboxes by us or anyone else.
7. Regarding the 'hidden' cancellation feature, based on the fact that people cancel successfully and without assistance or complaint regularly (as can be expected for a SaaS company with thousands of clients around the world) we'll have to disagree on this one.

I will acknowledge that the interface design was done several years ago and is badly due for an update. Fortunately, we've been working on that update for 18 months and plan to unveil it next month at our user conference. Despite the clunky looking graphic design, though, we've worked hard to  ensure that our system is easy to use and well supported. Again, the consistent feedback we get from the marketplace is that our system is far simpler to understand and use than our competitor's tools.

To sum up, I am sincerely sorry that you've had such a bad experience. Our mission is to support entrepreneurs success, not to hinder it!

However, your review here is radically inaccurate and your experience is extremely atypical. In any case, I'll gladly review your specific case again to ensure that our policies have been followed.

Please contact me or support at your convenience with your old account info and I'll see what we can do.