To all the small/medium sized business that have already or are thinking about signing up with salesforce.com - BEWARE! You may think you have signed up for a 12 month term - but be careful, they will once your 12 month term is finished, without notice or authorization, automatically charge your credit card for another 12 month term. They do not disclose this on the order form that you sign to start the service, nor on the credit card authorization form. They say you have 60 days to cancel, but if you happen to notice the charge on day 61, you are stuck paying for another 12 months - even if you haven't been using the service much and didn't want to renew.
If the credit card you signed up with is no longer valid, they will send you e-mail notices that they could not charge the card. If you thought you had signed up for a 12 month term anyway and were too busy too dig into why they were sending you these strange e-mails about trying to charge your card, they will have a collections company in New Jersey start harrassing and threatening you with legal action.
If you tell them that you did not know there was automatic renewal and did not authorize it, they will say - it's in the MSA. When the aggressive sales guy sold you the service, he would have never mentioned an MSA, he never e-mailed you an attachment with an MSA nor did he provide a link to an MSA. Oh - the MSA is "Master Service Agreement". If you look very carefully, at the bottm of the Order Form, in very small print it says "subscriptions ordered above shall be governed in all cases by salesforce.com's Master Subscription Agreement...".in very small print. Again, there is no link to this MSA. I still haven't seen it. It is a very sneaky, dishonest and fraudulent way to try and milk small to medium sized business for renewals. They desperately need renewals to keep their stock price up - it's a key metric for stock valuation.
Oh - and let's say you pay for 10 licences but half way through the year realize you haven't used half of them - they will not allow you under any circumstance to reduce your liscenses. Why? Because they already recognized it as revenue and they don't want the needs of their customers to come before their own needs. They do NOT practice customer relationship management. You are not a relationship to them. You are a transaction - you will never hear from their sales people again - unless their trying to ram additional features or higher level subscriptions down your throat. Just be warned, you are dealing with a predatory, dishonest company. Customer service is also terrible. Try asking for assistance - either you pay for it or it takes about 3 weeks for them to return an e-mail. There are a lot of technical flaws as well - but that's not what this is about.
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