We wanted to start an onlne business, and my husband ordered a late-night video from something about making money online. It was an intro piece to Esbex / HB Products Unlimited. He was contacted by a sales rep, and felt the internet would be a good tool for launching a home-based business.
We invested about $10,000 all together. We received two sets of "training" manuals, a bunch of "membership offers" to give to customers to give them a free membership to our discount website, and we were given a generic, cookie-cutter website.
We were promised the products we could purchase at 50-90% off would be sellable on ebay (one of the training programs emphasized this route) and we could list them on our website.
We advertised locally in a valpak type mailer, at an additional cost. We also set up a bank account that charged us $50 a month just to be able to process credit cards. We were also charged a monthly "membership" fee for the program. I don't remember the exact amount, but we were spending about $100 a month just for fees.
We were assigned a business coach. Then another. Then another. Each one gave us different information.
In a nutshell, we barely made any money, and it was only from ebaying items I had around the house to sell at very low prices. None of the HB Products ever sold, because every time I listed them, they were being sold on Ebay for less than I could buy them for from HB Products.
I bought some HB Products for myself to check out and give them as gifts. They were junk. Poorly made, break easily, etc. For example, a knife set we purchased was about as good as a plastic knife with a thin metal serrated edge. We also bought a case lot of laser pointers, I think there were like 10 in the case, and of those, 5 were either broken or broke quickly with use. I was emabarrassed giving them out!
Long story short, we were not confident in the products and chose not to put our names on them, so we stopped using HB products, but still tried to make a go using their "business plan". We never made a dime. We are out the $10k initial investment along with all of our extra charges.
Worse, we put the investment on a credit card, because we were promised by our coaches that we would recoup our money within 3 months. Obviously that never happened. So we paid interest on the $10k until we were able to pay them off.
The program materials are a joke, the coaching is inadequate, by people who don't believe in the plan and quit within a few months, and the products are flea market junk. But that would probably be an insult to flea market junk. I would love to get a class-action suit against them and get our money back.
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