Similar to the experience of John in Wyoming, I decided to try the so-called "Test Drive" offered by Yahoo! Stores. I had tried a store for a 30-day period more than a year before that and didn't like it at all. I hoped their software had improved and thought I would check it out.
This time, I made sure I did NOT open a store. I played with the store software for an hour and found it still the same: confusing, hard to manage and unable to meet what my needs would be. I did NOT open a store... And logged out. If you OPEN a store, you must CLOSE it. I did not open the Yahoo Store and Yahoo will admit that.
For one year after that, Yahoo! Inc debited my account every month $49.95, totaling $599.40. I never would have known it if I had not begun banking online, where I actually saw the Yahoo Stores notation. It had not been noted on the typical paper statement. It just showed up as an automatic deduction, and I didn't pay attention to it because I had REAL payments of that amount. I realize fully that this was stupid, stupid, stupid. As the smart-aleck person at Yahoo said, "Most people notice it before you did." Isn't that amusing?
Did Yahoo agree I had not opened a Yahoo! Store? Yes, they agreed. Had Yahoo ever contacted me to say I was the proud owner of a Yahoo Store? No, they did not. "We don't have to, and Ma'am we have thousands of participants, we don't have time to contact every one." Did Yahoo EVER contact me in any way to tell me they were debiting my account $49.95 every month? NO, they did not.
Their justification for feeling free to charge me $599.40 was that I used a tiny image I own during my one-hour Test Drive time, a miniscule image of a pin. It was the image I used to test the Yahoo software to see if I liked using it. They said after my Test Drive, the useless image was left on their server, so they had the right to charge me $49.95 for it being there. They said they did not have to provide me an active Store for this charge and that if I had wanted a Store, I could have just opened one. They say they did not have to say anything about this tiny image being there. They said they would have continued to charge me for years to come, with no regret or legal exposure.
I wrote, I telephoned, I faxed, I sent hard-copy letters to the top 6 or 8 people at Yahoo! Their stone-walling method of doing business is simply not to respond.
When Yahoo! And its leader Terry Semelman were recently the subject of a laudatory Business Week feature story, telling how the company is raking in gazillions of dollars, I had to say how happy I was that my much-needed $600 could be part of the company's fortunes. I wonder HOW MANY $600 chunks Yahoo has stolen from people to build its vast supplies of money?
I posted my story to a newsgroup I am part of and was surprised at the response: The posts came back saying "Stay away from every facet of Yahoo's business, whether Stores or ISP or email or anything." Seems they routinely rip off people in every area, once they get your credit card or debit card number.
0 comments