I attended the free Stores Online seminar in Valencia CA a couple of weeks ago, and was intrigued enough by what they said to decide to attend the day long session, which was promised to be filled with a bounty of strategies to help you better market your website for FREE, and which would be hosted by 10 or so experienced internet marketers.
Of course, I knew that they would be selling their own product at the full seminar, but figured I could filter that out of it (if their deal was not attractive) and learn something from the workshop leaders that I could apply to my own websites. What I didn't expect was how much of a hardsell act they would put on to promote their product and make it seem like panacea for selling online.
A very high portion of the day is spent getting everyone enthused about improving their quality of life, having financial freedom, getting everyone into a "you're so foolish if you do not follow-the-horde" mentality, etc. Of course, with the caveat that your own results may vary. They are more focused on stirring emotions than sharing a specific business or technical advice. You are promised that they will teach you at least 8 key strategies at the workshop that you can use right away, but they then only superficially touch on a couple of them explaining the workshop would have to be several days in length if they went into detail and they did not want people to go into info overload.
Very little info / strategies of any "meat" to them was shared.in the early morning, one speaker promised to share something he had just learned in the past few weeks that was AWESOME that he guaranteed would move your site to the top of the search engines for free. I anxiously awaited this revelation. At the end of the day, when I heard no such wow-like tip that fit the promise, I asked him about it and he said it was the fact that you could pay money to search engine companies to have your listing ranked higher. First off, that isn't free. Secondly, this guy has been a successful internet marketing consultant for 5 years and he just learned about "pay-per-click"?
There were really only two speakers. One was from Stores Online, and one was supposedly an independent seller (who said he used to work for Worperfect Corp and who coincidentally lives in the same city in Utah as Stores Online). A local seller stopped by and gave a talk about her own experience for a few minutes, but she was supposedly not a part of the scheduled curriculum.
First thing in the morning, they sent around forms for everyone to fill out so they can run a credit report on you by noontime. Later in the morning, they ask you to commit to how many websites you want to buy and which add-on pieces you want, and how you plan to pay for it (you can use their —yikes! — 18% financial if you like).. And all this before they have really shared much in the way of concrete info of what you are getting for your money.
Just before lunch, they reveal their "great" one day workshop offer of $2500 to sign-up for 3 sites or $4700 to sign-up for 6 sites, plus $399 - $499 for 400 links, plus $999 for set up of a credit card merchant account. They also let you know the hosting fee will be $150 for the first year and $24.95/month thereafter per site which they say is discounted from their normal price of $2500/yr per site. Of course, if you don't buy right now—TODAY—the price more than triples!
The promised one-on-one business consultation? Never happened.instead, the Stores Online rep simply wanted to confirm how many sites I wanted to buy and which options I wanted so he could put the package of materials together for me by the end of the day. When I balked and questioned him about the value of the base arrangement and the options, he was defensive and told me he would let me think about it because he was busy with someone else and would come back later. He never did return.
A couple of times, they showed a feature in their system that lets you know how many times in the prior month a specific set of words was used in an internet search, and emphasize how valuable this is in tweaking your website to maximize hits. What they don't tell you is that there are MANY free sites on the internet that do exactly the same thing. Actually, the other free sites do it better because the Stores Online feature doesn't fully count the searches, and they tell you that you need to multiple their results by 5.
They overprice their offering from top to bottom Let's take a look at what else they offer in their package.
They talk about the Overture system and how you can use it to figure out how to budget your Pay-per-clicks, and they make it seem like it is an integrated part of their system.in fact, Overture is owned by Yahoo, and you can go to Overture's website directly and do whatever you want. There is no need to be a member of Stores Online to access any of its features.
Links4Trade - 400 links for $399 for 3 sites or $499 for 6 sites, plus $7/month per site after the first year. You can go to Links4Trade directly and pay a $39.95 registration fee, plus $7.95/month, plus a fee based on the # of links you want. Other companies offer many more links at lower prices (e.G., 25,000 links for $19.95/month) than the option offered by Stores Online.
Merchant Services Support - $999 for an interface to be able to accept credit cards (plus monthly fees and transaction fees, of course). If you already have a merchant account, Stores Online will charge you $1500 to add the interface from their shopping basket. Generally, merchant service operations charge $300 or so for the software interface to accept credit cards online, so the Stores Online "discounted" deal is way-overpriced. Their monthly and transaction fees are high, too.
$2500, plus $150 per site, is the price for them to set up three boilerplate websites for you for the first year. They don't tell you this directly, but you need to plug the products and the pictures in yourself if you have more than 25, or you can pay them extra to do this, too. (Of course, they really push for you to buy 6 websites right away for an additional $2200, and emphasize that they won't let you get more than that to start.)
Is this good value? Well, there are numerous hosting services which provide free shopping basket software, no set-up charges, and monthly fees of $17.95 and up per month to do basically the same thing you get with Stores Online. I still have not quite figured out what the value is you are supposed to be getting for the $2500. It's all smoke and mirrors, if you ask me.
I feel sad for the hundred or so people who stood in the long line of lemmings to pay for the package. My guess is that Stores Online probably took in close $400,000 at the session yesterday. Are those people going to get $400,000 worth of value? Unlikely. Could those people have spent 1/10 of the amount and gotten the same value? Yep. Of course, as Stores Online likes to say, your own results may vary.
In doing some research on the company last night and today and after reading through their service disclosures in more detail, I have to laugh when I think of one of the points they mentioned at the workshop as it relates to their business model, that they strive for multiple residuals streams of passive income. What this means is that they nickel and dime you to death for eternity for doing nothing. Is this something you really want to sign-up for?
G
Canyon Country, California
U.S.A.
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