Hello,
I just wanted to warn others about Magic Kids. This Company is a rip-off in every sense of the word.
First, a little background: A couple of years ago, I became a member of their Close-Out Club. For a fee of "only" $600, I could become a Close-Out Club member and could have this "good-faith deposit of $600" returned to me after selling a "mere" $10,000 in merchandise. I was promised access to a website to sell the clothing. (That was a lie and it was a YEAR LATER before they even HAD a website.) Anyway, I received the package, and for my $600 all I got was a handful of business cards and a few samples. Not a single *&*& thing in that package that even gave you any ideas on how/where to market the clothes.
Shortly after I became a Close-Out Club member, I received from them another sales pitch TRYING TO GET ME TO BECOME A CLOSE-OUT CLUB MEMBER EVEN THOUGH I ALREADY WAS ONE!!! A few weeks later I received ANOTHER mailing from them trying to get me to sign up to become a Close-Out Club member. (It's pretty *&*& sad when they don't even know who their own members are!)
Ok, so a few months go by, and they AGAIN mail to me trying to get me to become a Close-Out Club member. (With each mailing, they said that they were looking for a "few distributors nation-wide" and that I was one of the lucky few to be chosen to become their distributor.) This time, however, they were offering the membership for a FRACTION of what I originally paid to become a member.
This time, for $149, you could get business cards, a few samples, training material, and the website that was promised a year before. Needless to say, I was highly pissed when I saw what they were offering for so much less than what I paid for originally. I called them up and called them out on it. To their credit, they did send me the new membership kit for the cost of shipping.
While they were mailing out to people on "opportunity seekers" lists, they were also running full-page ads in "Small Business Opportunity Magazine" claiming they were looking for about 75 distributors nation-wide. They absurdly claimed they would "only" take 75 distributors to start with and if you sent your application in to become a member too late, that they would return your money to you. This is ridiculous on it's face.
First, NO company is going to turn away money! Second, it cost MANY thousands of dollars to run a full-page ad in a magazine with the readership that "Small Business Opportunity Magazine" has. They would have to accept HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of memberships just to cover their cost of running the full-page ad.
Anyway, the new kit came with sales material that you could use to sell the clothing. One of those methods was placing ads in your local (or any national newspaper if you can cough up several thousand dollars). The cost of doing business this way is ASTRONOMICAL. If the newspaper your are placing your ad in has ANY kind of size to it at all you will lose your shirt trying to sell your merchandise this way.
First of all, people pay VERY little attention to online businesses being marketed off-line. Second, there is basically no profit margin with these clothing. You have to SPLIT the PROFIT, not sales, PROFITS with Magic Kids 50/50. Sounds fair, right? Not really. You are basically doing all of their advertising for them with no profit margin to cover your costs.
About the "distributor code" they assign to you: Magic Kids assigns a code to you that you are supposed to give to your customers so they-meaning the customer-can enter that code in the online order form when they place an order with you. This code is used so you can get credit for the sales you make.
First, it IS NOT MANDATORY FOR THE CUSTOMER TO ENTER YOUR CODE!!! They can skip right over this section if they want to. I called Magic Kids out on this, and their answer was that they call customers back to get the code. I HIGHLY doubt that they are gonna sit there and make long-distance phone calls all day long just so you can get credit for your order. Second, I ordered something from them and tried using my code and my order never showed up in the commission report.
I got someone else to order from me using my code and once again, my code never showed up as making a sale. It is SOO EASY to rip off their members this way. I may have made DOZENS of sales through all those ads I placed and flyers that I placed around town and through the word-of-mouth advertising I did.
Third, orders that are placed off-line, i.E., through the phone, or mail order are NOT recorded into your commission report. ONLY ORDERS THAT COME FROM the INTERNET are recorded into your commission report!!! Know what that means? You are relying on the HONOR SYSTEM and relying on them to be HONEST about the orders that they receive with your code that come from any place other than online.
About their "Wholesalers/Retailers" Directories: Magic Kids offers two options for purchasing their directories: 1. You can become a lifetime member for a "good-faith" deposit of "only" $500. (You supposedly can get that "deposit" back if you can manage to sell $4000 worth of clothes.) 2. Purchase ONE directory of 500 names for $139 plus S&H.
DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT purchase their wholesalers/retailers directories from them! In their sales material, they say that their names are "BIG-TIME buyers", are "RED-HOT" and that their list is SO GOOD that, and I quote, "A DOZEN people could work out of ONE directory and STILL have more business than you can handle!" I went through one directory and mailed out to the names that were actually relevant buyers. A fairly large percentage of the names in the directory were COMPLETELY irrelevant.
Please allow me to treat you to some examples of the names in their "red hot directory": Walmart, (DUH, they don't buy these name brands to start with!), Kmart, Casual Male Retail Group (they only sell MEN'S clothing, not boys), finance companies, sporting good stores, bait and tackle shops, bookstores, boat canvas stores, beach-wear stores, various dollar stores, Target, sports collectibles stores, upholstering stores, consignment shops (obviously consignment stores don't BUY merchandise-they rely on people to bring in things they want to sell and split the profits with them), wedding accessories stores, firearms stores, and on and on. The list was a #$%& joke! I was SO angry when I got the directory and found all that garbage in it. I LITERALLY could have pulled a better list of names out of my *&*&!
I wrote to Magic Kids concerning their directories and told them about the problems I was having. They wrote back and said they were "sorry" I was having problems with the directories and offered to ship me another one for free. They did ship me another one (free of charge), but it wasn't 500 names like I orginally paid for. The second directory was no better.
After I mailed out to the relevant names, I allowed a reasonable amount of time to get orders. When I never received a check for any orders, I wrote to them asking them to check my code and see if I had any orders. I told them that I had started mailing out on December 12 and had mailed out 450 letters by January 14th. I waited til February 28th to contact them (which was PLENTY of time to see orders coming in) and that I had used THEIR directory of names, THEIR sales letter they provided, and had mailed out using THEIR letterheads and envelopes.
When they FINALLY wrote back, they claimed that they had been "busy" and that's why that hadn't wrote back sooner, and said I did not have any orders. When they wrote back and said I didn't have any orders, they had checked the WRONG code. So I wrote back again, and told them they had checked the wrong code, and again, NO reply. After hounding them and threatening them, I FINALLY got a reply and again they insisted I had not received any orders.
I finally threatened to report them to the FBI for running a scam organization. That changed their tune. They put someone named Keneret in contact with me to talk to me about my complaints. All of a sudden I DID have an order, for $500. This "big-time buyer" bought $500 worth of merchandise and my grand total profit on that order? $92. That didn't even cover the cost of that lousy directory I had purchased.
Keneret talked to me and informed me that Magic Kids was not a scam organization, and they really did want their distributors to be happy. I told her I wanted all the money that I had sunk into this endeavor and she, of course, informed me that I couldn't be refunded for anything. What they DID do, was send me some free samples, some letterheads and envelopes, order forms, and some business cards. She said I should try selling at the flea markets. The stuff is priced MUCH too high to attempt selling at a flea-market-ESPECIALLY in a small town like mine! (Forget throwing house parties too... To throw a house-party you'd have to spend quite a bit of money to throw one. With such low-profit margins, you'd be lucky to break even, let alone turn a profit!)
About them competing against their distributors: Magic Kids is paying for organic search engine listings for relevant keywords. This means that anyone searching around on the net for those keywords can place orders and thus this enables Magic Kids to go around their distributors and keep 100% of the profits. This is HIGHLY unethical and there are PLENTY of members out there right now spending money they probably can't afford to spend trying to get orders while Magic Kids is working to go around them.
And they CANNOT say that it is necessary for them to pay for organic listings as that would be complete BULLSHIT! They don't need to list keywords for anything, because the distributors give the URL to customers so they can directly access the Magic Kids website. As anyone knows, as long as you know the URL to a website, keywords are NOT necessary.
It would ALSO be complete baloney for them to say that they just magically appeared in the number one (or at least to 5) positions for relevant keywords. That simply does NOT happen. First, there are gazillions of other discount children's clothing websites fighting for the number one position (both for Pay-Per-Click listing and organic listing), and second, simply submitting your site to the various search engines will not yield number one positions. It can (and does) take MANY MONTHS for the search engines to even just pick up a site that has been submitted.
Sorry, this has been so lengthy, but I'm begging anyone who reads this to SAVE THEIR MONEY! You'll likely end up sinking a ton of money into this and getting zilch in return.
0 comments