I bought a store from Your Own Store in lured in by very slick sales patter and the fact I had been made redundant from my job. I spent my redundancy money on this website. I was assured I would receive an income of around $40,000 a year from the site and that it would only take a few hours a week to maintain. I followed the training provided and my store was virtually completely optimised, but absolutely no sales, when their servers crashed spectacularly in the Xmas period and lost the owners any holiday traffic they may have received. It took a long time to sort out and when the sites came back online, Google updates started emerging which smashed and destroyed the Your Own Store concepts about SEO. They were very slow to react to the changes in Google and as a result many of the stores were sandboxed or plumetted in rankings and have never recovered. The owner has been evasive, patronising and arrogant in the extreme and has refused to talk to anyone except by way of a condescending email here and there. There are massive problems with the CMS and product feeds of the sites and most of the products are not valid, or out of stock and do not track on the Affiliate Window software so commissions are lost frequently. The company operates in a dark way if criticised and have engaged cyber thugs to threaten and intimidate people perceived to be leading complaints about them, so much so the police had to become involved recently. There is no doubt the stores were misrepresented and missold and no store owner is likely to get their money back as it has long been spent on the lavish lifestyle of the owner. Owners are no longer getting responses to their requests for assistance and they are just being ignored. The owner is now focussing on setting up similar schemes all overthe web, similar to this one, instead of trying to keep existing customers stores going and assisting with the massive changes in Google and the changes that would need to take place in the stores to try to earn an income. I think my $10,000 is gone, long gone, although I could ill afford to lose it. Please beware and do not buy a website with crazy claims of projected income from this awful bunch.
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