Always read the contract

Near the end of last year I went to an eBay marketing seminar given by a self-described eBay guru. At the end of the first day he spent a little time using neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and other persuasion techniques to make a couple of upsells.

For those who don't know upsells are selling a more expensive product once someone is in your sales funnel (bought at least one product from you). An example of the upsell is in the fast food industry when the sales person will ask, "Shall I supersize that for you?" or, "Do you want fries with that?"

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing upsells. It is proven that people who have bought from you are much, much more likely to buy  from you again.

In this case the seminar leader had two upsell products. One a dropship program which cost a thousand dollars (he was against drop ship programs before hand and I was not interested in the least in that program.

The second upsell program was a rapid website development program which was web based. He implied that you would be on page one of Google in a short time and got a niche from someone and that night said he would develop the site and market it through his people in India and show us the results the next day.

That night I told my wife, "This guy is talking about a program that if it is true, it would be worth at least a hundred thousand dollars."

The next day in the afternoon he searched for the keyword and a digg to his website was sure enough on page one of Google.

Wow! Pure magic....

He did more sales job on the two products and said he would sell the product next day (last day of the seminar). I asked how much it was and he referred me to one of his assistants who said, "Twenty five hundred dollars."

That night I spent a huge amount of time negotiating with my wife. I bet you, like me, have been burnt by people over promising and under delivering.. So my wife was not really sure I should waste more money chasing dreams especially when my own projects were at last becoming profitable.

Eventually I persuaded her to allow me to buy the product since I would be spending some of my Internet marketing profits.

On the last day of the seminar the leader said the product I was interested in cost $4,000 not the $2,500 but unfortunately I was already committed to getting it so I bought it. I signed the contract without reading it (it was late in the day and after three days of intense hype I was in cloudkookooland).

The reason I call it bait and switch is because (an I don't think this was done on purpose) the assistant gave me a lower price. If I had been given the four thousand dollars price at first I may have said no, but there's a point in selling and persuasion that once people decide to buy the product is there's (that's when the upsell comes in - note what happens when you buy a car).

Actually my wife is extremely kind and forgiving but the above is a homage to "Rumple of The Bailey," and it in itself comes from "She" by H. Rider Haggard....

Back to the story - I did have to explain to my wife that I had spent more that we had agreed. So eagerly I waited for the password which came two and a half days later (in fact by the time I opened the email and started using the software three days had gone by -- more of this later because it is of paramount importance)...

The product was OK (not great ot fantastic - but I was trying to give it a good chance given the hype in the seminar. I was spending at least sixty hours a week developing these instant sites. Some took a few hours to do when I actually put in my own content, to an hour or so when I just used it to have affiliate links (eBay and Amazon) plus automatic content (from Yahoo answers and videos from youtube).

The problem was that the built-in FTP had no error checking and if there was any issues with it it would upload the files into the wrong directories bringing my blogs (already earning money) down. I would often have the .htaccess file messed up and get 500 server error messages.

I had bough the program to save me time as I was already doing everything the program was doing on my Wordpress blogs. Unfortunately the program often failed. They were making changed to the program on the live site (instead of a test site and then changing the code on the live site). About once every two days I was sending support request with lots of MySQL and PHP errors.

I used to be a software engineer for more than twenty five years and the last fifteen I was a cont actor (hired gun typically bought in when the project was way late and full of bugs) but I have never seen anything so bad.

Eventually a month later I wrote an email asking for the product to work without constant downtime or a refund. I gave them a week to get rid of the constant errors with the software.

OK I'm cutting to the chase. Within an hour and a half I got an email back. I expected them to say we'll look at your issues and make sure the program works (that's basically my first choice - I had asked for a refund as a last resort).

But they used all uppercase (shouting) to tell me the product was much better than I had paid for and no way would they provide me with any refund.

So I immediately started a dispute with my credit company.

After four months of back and forth my credit card company said, "You singed the contract and that's that!"

For now I want to write two of the points in the contract:

1. The product was warranted to do nothing useful.
2. By singing this contract you give up all your legal rights.

I believe in forgiving as part of moving on. So that's the end of the journey for me. I did my best to stand up for my rights. I was assertive. Now is the time to move on.

I write this Hub as a warning.

Please be carefful:

1. Go online looking for the reputation of the person you are seeing in a seminar. In this case the person had his eBay account closed in 2004, and has left a slew of dissatisfied customers like me.
2. Read every word of every contract you sign. Do not assume that just because you buy something with a credit card you have any rights. Some companies support the consumer, some do not.
3. Before you buy anything, ask yourself, "Do I realy need it."