Potential Distributors: BEWARE! WE LOST $22,000!
In November we purchased a distributorship from Holiday Enterprises, Holiday Ink Half Price that enabled us to buy HP, Cannon, Epson compatible ink cartridges from them for re-sale. We want you to know about the problems we have with Holiday Enterprises.
Poor Quality: Holiday ink cartridges have high, 13%, failure rate versus the company's claim of 1% failure rate. Problems ranged from ink cartridges printing everything in red, printing text with missing lines, missing columns, printing in 'weird' colors, ink leaking out of cartridges, ink smudging, partially-filled cartridges, cartridges that cannot even be installed Although there is a 100% money back guarantee, our customers have lost confidence in the products.
Misleading Sales Projection: Holiday claimed an average sale of 8 ink cartridges per rack per day. Our experience was a dismal 0.65 unit per rack per day. We worked very hard to set up the business and spent numerous hours trying to work it. We made A signs to better attract customers, printed and distributed brochures, provided laminated cross-reference sheets, etc. The initial response to the ink cartridges was good, but because of the poor quality, the business kept sliding despite all our efforts.
High Price of Products: The slogan for Holiday ink business is INK Half Price. (We were even provided advertising posters to that effect.) The slogan misled us into believing that we can buy the Holiday cartridges at a price in which we can re-sell them at half the normal retail price of brand-name cartridges. However the HP compatible cartridges were priced too high for us to sell them at half price' half the retail of brand-name cartridges. Holiday told us to price them higher; in one instant we would have to sell at 80% the price of brand-name cartridge to make a 75 cents profit. Some of our customers complained that the INK Half Price poster was misleading.
Misleading Reference: One of the references provided by Holiday turned out to be an employee!!!
Delayed Delivery: After signing the contract with Holiday, we sent our money and received a welcome letter stating that we would receive the products in 14 28 days. We received the racks for the business after 6 weeks, and we received the ink cartridges after 10 weeks. After the initial delay, on at least 2 occasions, orders and exchanges took more than a month to fill (the contract stated that orders would be filled in no more than 20 days).
The Vice President of the company serviced our account and he provided good service but that couldn't save our business. The poor quality products condemned our business to failure.
We invested $25,000 in the business, and to date have collected $3,000 from the sales of about 300 cartridges. We wanted to terminate the distributorship and return the remaining 75% inventory. We were told we would only get back about $5,400. Ripoff!
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