If you are reading this article, you probably are trying to find out more information about Visible.net, I assure you that everything Im about to tell you about this company is true. I originally got a call from one of their sales guys offering to go over my site and give me some suggestions on things I could do to get more traffic. If you own a website, you probably already know that these calls come all the time. But the sales guy was persistent so I listened to what he had to say. After talking with him for a while he passed me on to a project manager who was more experienced. After talking with them I found the conversation informative and I told them I need a few days to make a decision.
During this time I did some homework on the company and found out that they have a D in the BBB and had a civil lawsuit for fraud in 2008 with WA state attorney general. The lawsuit said that they settled for $250,000 for damages and was ordered to compensate to consumers as well as follow a number of conditions. After looking at the negative I felt inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt to explain their side of the story. When I spoke to them again they told me that the BBB was a scam and told me that the BBB had given good ratings to terrorist and skinhead organizations for money. They even showed me a video. Then they told me that the attorney general sued them because they didnt have a telemarketers solicitor license, and because the sales reps at the time werent telling customers that they had no affiliation with their website provider. After talking with them for about an hour I decided to move forward and give them a shot.
After working with them for about 60 days I got a call from the guys who sold me. They told me that my website was outdated and they could continue marketing it, but I would be better off in one of their websites. They showed me the Pro and Expert as well as a few sites that were doing well using their software. I told them I needed some time to digest everything and after I got off the phone, I didnt know what to think. After spending $5650.00 to get started and $159.99 a month why was I not told this to begin with? And why did it take over 60 days to figure out that I needed a new website? They did say that they could credit me my original investment towards the new site which would be so much better than what I had but it still seemed odd.
The first thing I did after talking with my wife is looked at how other companies compared to their ecommerce websites. I ran a search for ecommerce providers, companies etc., and found that almost every provider out there was substantially cheaper. With an additional $3000 and my initial investment, these guys at Visible.net where offering me a state of the art website for over $8,000 total. What I found with some research was companies like Volusion were only charging a monthly fee, no set up fee and only as much as $149.99. After looking at the market I still wasnt sure if it was an apples to apples comparison and maybe Visible.nets website had better features so I took some of the websites that Visible had shown me and compared it to some of the other companies I had found. When looking at the sites side by side, I noticed that Visibles sites had a few key features that were missing such as - customers being able to make reviews on pages and shop by price. I called Volusion and talked to one of their sales reps and the guy showed me that Visibles shopping cart was outdated because of a number of features but one of the most important flaws that I found was being able to create pages and add content. The other thing that stood out is every ecommerce company I spoke with was willing to give me a free trial.
So when I spoke to my wife about everything I had discovered I felt like I had been taken, lied too, cheated. I felt ashamed to admit that I had spent over 5k of our money with a company that didnt even have enough integrity to tell me I needed another site to begin with. The truth is I was an idiot for not taking the BBB in to account, honestly a company that sells a service and has a poor BBB rating usually is a major red flag, unlike businesses that sell a tangible product such as a knife set or something tangible. What company gets sued by the state for nothing? And why do they charge so much upfront for their services when the rest of the industry is charging monthly?
The truth is that if a company is going to charge you that much money for a website you should definitely compare it to a few companies such as Volusion or Shopify, youll find that a lot of major brands use them and they have 24-7 support, free marketing tutorials and will only cost you as much as $149.99 a month no set up fee to get started. I asked about design, and it ranges from $1,500 to $3,000.00. Still convinced that your missing something, yeah they offered a number of marketing providers that will actually do all of the seo, social media work for a reasonable monthly charge instead of a ridiculous upfront fee a monthly.
Ive been with Visible.net for 4 months now and all I get is appointments with their techs to show me what to do on my site and tutorial videos. If you are a customer of Visible.net, has anyone else noticed how outdated their videos are? Ive spoken with several other seo companies since and what theyve all told me was that Visibles marketing and ecommerce services are a joke. One of the biggest flaws with Visible.net marketing is the fact that they dont do on-going seo. No wonder they want a lot of money upfront, they do work within the first 60 days and then if you cancel afterward they only loose a much smaller monthly charge.
The more I looked into their seo practices, the more I learned how little I really was getting. Even their top program the Enterprise only does as much as 7 pages of optimization for over $8,000 as listed on their site, oh unless of course you get a special promotion. And the optimization youll get for that investment - my teenager can probably do better competitive research than their low educated technicians.
I wrote this article not because Visible.net is a scam or rip-off necessarily; they will do a service and will do what they say on the site. They're a great company to go with if youre the type of person that is persuaded by fast talkers, high set up fees, 9-5 support Monday thru Friday and only wants 7 or less pages optimized, no quality on-going link building, a website that you cant write content on, cant have customers write reviews on, borderline spammy, limited shipping options, and will take forever to get off the ground.
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