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Smart Living Company / E Merchant Club / SMC
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I joined this company because I wanted to be a business owner and make a better life for my family. I have experience with websites and marketing and had full confidence that I could succeed at selling products online.
I was very excited to get started yet I felt a little sick when I saw my website for the first time. It not only looked like a bottom of the barrel website that a child had made but it has only a handful of products and blank spots where out of stock products would be. Nothing about the layout conveyed the message of a professional trustworthy online store. I tried other layouts and they were all just as bad if not worse.
Then also there is my email address. At first it showed up in the address bar with 'myusername@mysite' (i.e. G6318k@MystoreName.com) …that could be a security risk! At first I thought they helped me fix that problem, but now it just shows up as “Sheila” and you don’t know I’m sheila@MyStoreName.com unless you click on the email, that is if it doesn't go straight to your spam folder because it is flagged for being a girls name.
Still, I believed I could make my business work, so I invested money to upgrade my site. I received my “training” from someone who was very nice, but it was clear he was reading a script, in fact everyone that I have spoken with seems to be reading a script and has no actual experience building a website, marketing a website or maintaining a website. None of them have been able to answer any questions outside of their script.
I started branding my site, and my first marketing campaign on all major social media outlets, only to discover my site was down all day on Saturday. Feeling alarmed I tried to call tech support only to discover…they don’t work on weekends! If my site is having trouble I can only expect help Mon.-Fri during business hours??? How am I supposed to run a business when my site can be down for DAYS??? Today is Wednesday and my site has been down Saturday, part of Sunday, all of Monday, Tuesday and now Wednesday.
I called in first thing monday only to be told “You are not the only one experiencing this problem, all of the sites are down…This happens sometimes.” When I inquired how often I could expect this to happen I was again told “It doesn’t happen often. They are just doing updates to all of the sites. It happens sometimes… You might not experience it again for a year but there is no way to know when. It just happens sometimes”… He was very condesending and acted like it was no big deal.
Again I called on Tuesday and was told "Sheila, all of the sites are down, you are not the only one affected" & I said I'm sure your other customers are just as angry & he said "Sheila, you are the only one complaining" (which is either a flat out lie or he has no other customers because nobody would just sit back all calm while they were losing money & customers for days) I told him I don't not like being patted on the head and told everything was ok while I was losing customers, people were already unfollowing my social Media because of this and he said "I am not trying to pat you on the head, I have a dog at home to do that to"! He refused to connect me with a manager, give me a number for a manager or anything.
I have lost an unknown amount of customers as my site has been down over the last four days. I have lost an unknown amount of revenue. All potential customers that have tried to go to my site have lost confidence in me as I appear to be an invalid site. All affiliate programs I have signed up will most likely not except my application. Since I have begun branding my site and started the marketing process already there is no way of knowing how many customers I have so far lost.
The site and the email are unprofessional, they don’t offer editable images to be used for marketing you have to copy & paste images from their store, the videos you can add to your site are old, badly produced and not at all professional, some actualy look like they were shot in a cluttered apartment in the early 90's (i.e. the pizza stone video) and your site can be down for days and you have no way to fix it.
I called my bank today and reported them as a scam, the bank is reversing my funds since emerchantclub refuses to refund me and they are not delivering what I paid for. I had to cancel my bank card so they can't take any more of my money. Do not trust them they are only care about up-selling you "better" websites that are built by people that have no idea what they are doing.
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