At first glance it seems like the perfect home-based business opportunity. A yearly fee of $49.95 and a one-time setup fee of $15 gets you a fully operational online store that practically runs by itself. They give you a small glimpse into what the store looks like, and a teaser explanation of how exactly you're supposed to make money from the endeavor. For those yearning for a stay-at-home income, after wading through one complicated program after another and weighing the pros and cons and costs of all of them, this one, based on first impressions, appears to be golden.
But it isn't as simple as it looks - there are some things that aren't immediately obvious... Things that they don't tell you - and things that you don't find out until you have already paid the money to become a member. These products don't, in fact, sell themselves. For those of you with high hopes thinking about purchasing a membership to this program, here are some need-to-knows that might help you in deciding as to whether or not it's a worthwhile endeavor. For me, it's been anything BUT. It says in the FAQ's that the amount of money you can potentially make depends on how much time and effort your willing to put into it. It takes more than time and effort. Read on!
1. A SPECK ON THE MAP: Once you have this wonderful website, it is YOUR responsibility to direct targeted traffic to it. Just because you have a home on the web doesn't mean traffic is guaranteed. Your site will not be flooded with visitors ready to max out their credit cards and deplete your stock. This costs MONEY. You can go to all the free online classifieds on the web to post ads for your site, but it isn't going to get you anywhere. One option is to buy traffic by purchasing keywords and creating ad campaigns to attract visitors. This is EXTREMELY costly, and doesn't necessarily guarantee that any of your visitors are even going to buy anything. All it does is make them aware that your store exists. I tried this using Google's AdWords program and ended up spending $400 in one day for one day's worth of traffic - and didn't make one dime. Nobody bought anything. And there is a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. You can also submit your site to search engines for inclusion, but that is also very costly. If you are serious about drawing a crowd to your store, be prepared to spend hundreds of dollars doing just that - and be prepared to eat a lot of that cost even before you make a few measly dollars.
2. OTHER SELLING ALTERNATIVES: After losing $400 and feeling foolish, I decided to try unloading some of these items on Ebay and Amazon. After all, I reasoned, you can get plenty of traffic there. When they pitch the store format to you, they show you a few electronic items as an example, and they give you a list price, a wholesale price (the minimum at which you have to sell the item), and they show you how to set your own price, and the difference between the two, which shows you how much money you will make after the sale. For example, say you have a DVD player, and the wholesale price is $50, and the list price is $130. If you price this DVD player at $100 and by some miracle it sells, you make $50. Seems simple, right? If it were really that simple I wouldn't be writing this report. First of all, the list price, or "suggested retail price" that they quote you in your inventory is not accurate.in many cases, (and I have done the research on this, as I have looked up the manufacturer's retail prices on my inventory for comparison) they have it listed higher than the manufacturer's actual retail price. That is misleading to someone who is honestly trying to sell these products in a competitive marketplace. There is a reason why they have to do this. Most likely they figure that you will assume that the research has been done and the list price they quote is accurate... After all, who wants to look up the item specs on over 3000 different items to check the accuracy? Most consumers don't, and they know this - and that is how they get by with it. And even if you do call this discrepency to their attention, what are they going to do about it? It's not like YOU have the power to do anything about it. At first, I didn't do the research on it either. I saw the list prices, thought they seemed about right, and to me, nothing seemed amiss. Some of them may actually be right, and some of them may be only slightly off. It wasn't until I consistently lost money trying to sell these products that the obvious began to present itself. The obvious is, that the wholesale prices are severely inflated. I figured this out by looking at the listings of fellow sellers who were selling the exact same items that I was, and in large volumes. They were offering them at a much lower price. Not just on Ebay, but online in general. How could this be? Where were they able to get their merchandise so cheap so that they could sell it for much less than I was, yet still make a healthy profit?
Obviously these other sellers are truly buying wholesale somewhere. And if there's always at least one other person offering the same item as you are at a lower price, you're not going to make a sale. This has been the case with nearly every item I've tried to sell. Here is why selling this company's products on Ebay (or anywhere) is a waste of time. I am going to use their electronics items as an example because they are the only items worth even trying to sell - the rest are outdated perfumes, home decor knick-knacks, and a bunch of other useless junk that nobody wants, and isn't going to sell no matter how cheap you price it.
One of the things they don't tell you about the products BEFORE you pay to become a member is that most of the electronic items they offer for you to sell are REFURBISHED. They are not new! It's been my experience that most people would prefer to buy big ticket electronic items fresh out of the box, never having been owned or operated by anyone else. I have learned this through the research I have done on buying and selling trends over the last four months or so, and by watching hundreds of different auctions on Ebay and recording selling prices in conjuction with item conditions, and reading hundreds of product reviews - and also through my own selling experiences and customer feedback. Even someone who is looking to buy NEW is looking for the best bargain they can find. If by some chance a person is willing to settle for a refurbished item, they are going to expect the pricing to be considerably lower than a new product, due to the refurbished item's propensity for potential malfunction due to previous use or misuse. Here is an honest example of a product they offer for sale, along with the prices they offer them for, so you can see how trying to sell this on Ebay is a moot point:
The item is the Garmin Rino 120 GPS communication device. The list price that they specify is $279.95. The actual retail price specified by Garmin's website is $267.84. Deceptive. The wholesale price that they offer it to us subscribers for is $211.99. Now keep in mind that this is a refurbished item. The first thing one needs to do to figure out a competitive way to price this item for sale is to do a price comparison, and figure out what other retailers are asking for it. I went to Pricescan.com for starters and looked this particular item up. For a BRAND NEW unit, the prices of various retailers range from $184-$250. How am I going to sell a refurbished unit for more than $211 when a buyer can purchase a brand new one for less somewhere else? It's going to be nearly impossible to sell this item anywhere online, and absolutely impossible to make any money off of it on Ebay, and here's why.
If you look this product up on Ebay, you'll find that NO ONE has one of these priced over $211- not even for a brand new unit. Let's say you're still overly optimistic and decide to list one of these anyway. Maybe you'll get lucky and sell one. Let's say you'd be satisfied to make a $20 profit off of it. Given the circumstances, you'd be lucky to get even that. Even if it sells, and you make that $20, listing fees and final value fees are going to eat up most of the small profit you make, assuming you can even sell it for the price you're forced to ask for it. Remember that Ebay bases the final value fee on the total final sale price of the item, not the measly little profit you made off of it. If you sell the item for $250, they take the final value percentage off of that. But with everybody else selling it for so much less, it's not going to sell anyway, leaving you short the $2-$10 you spent to list the item, depending on which method you used to list it. It doesn't seem to matter what product you try to sell, if you do the research, you will find every one of them sold online elsewhere cheaper. The wholesale prices they offer the subscriber are just too high to be competitive. I've tried every method of listing these items that there is, trying to figure out if one method works better than any other, but the end result has been the same every time, whether the starting bid was $1.00 with a reserve price, or a $349 buy-it-now listing, or a regular auction with the starting bid being my wholesale price. All products went unsold, and I was out all those costly listing fees.infuriating, after wasting so much time and money, and getting nothing in return.
So far, all this has done is COST me more money. I've been at this for over six months and have not seen a change in the trend, no matter what options I've used to try and be successful. They say that you have to spend money to make money, and most people know this to be true, but with the obvious lack of marketability of these products, it appears that one could continue to spend themselves into bankruptcy and never sell any of these products. They make it look easy and appealing to the novice seller looking for financial freedom and their own home-based business. They omit all the information (the reality I've listed above) that might persuade you to look for a different online business venture to invest in. The things I've informed you about in this report are things that you can't possibly become aware of until you've already become a member - and by then you may as well cut your losses because they are not keen on giving refunds. Besides what I mentioned above, there are a few other things about the whole experience that have raised the red flag for me. On your store administration page, just because it says the item is in stock, doesn't necessarily mean it is. They need to implement an email notification system to alert you to a product's depletion as soon as it happens. It is mortifying to sell an item to someone, receive their payment, and then enter the order for shipment only to find out that the item is out of stock. This happene to me once, and it wasn't until five days after I placed the order that I received notification that it was out of stock. The day I placed the order, and even for a few days after that, the item showed in my inventory as being "in stock". The money was then refunded to me. Because my feedback on Ebay is extremely important to me, I searched the web and located the exact same item on Amazon and purchased it there and had it shipped to the customer, which ended up costing me $5 more. I didn't make any money off of that sale - I ended up in the hole. I shudder to think of what I would have done had I not been able to find that exact item anywhere else. This was just one of the few items I WAS able to sell on Ebay. And that is one of the risks with drop-shipping items - if you can't see it, you can't guarantee it. Another item I managed to sell was glass and arrived at the buyer's residence broken. I lost money on that deal, too. It made me afraid to try and sell anything else, because I didn't want my reputation as an online retailer damaged.
Customer service has improved some, and they have become faster at responding to subscribers emails about products and addressing their concerns. When I first became a member, it took forever to get responses to emails, if you even got one at all. Apparently this issue has been addressed (after many complaints to consumer protection agencies I'd bet) and admittedly, it has been improved some. But one thing they can't do is lower the excessive wholesale prices that make the merchandise so difficult to sell. I can only surmise that THEY are the ones truly paying wholesale prices for the merchandise, and profiting hugely when an unsuspecting subscriber spends hundreds of dollars promoting their site only to make a fraction of the profit that they should for the time and money they've spent.
In conclusion, I wouldn't recommend sinking any money into this company to anyone. Overall it's been a disappointing and highly unsatisfying experience. After reading others' complaints, it appears to do no good to complain, because all it gets you is locked out of your store, and no refund for the inconvenience. I will probably not be renewing my subscription later this year, and I will probably be looking for a more reputable wholesaler to sell for with true wholesale prices. If there are others out there who have come to the same conclusion that I have, I would like to know. Don't let fear of being locked out of your store stop you from voicing your dismay. It doesn't sit well with me that there is so much information out there that this company doesn't disclose to potential subscribers - information that, as a reputable company, they should feel obligated to provide so that their subscribers can feel confident that they've made a wise business decision BEFORE they waste hundreds of dollars and precious time promoting products that are not fit pricewise or qualitywise for a competitive market. Gee... I wonder WHY they don't tell you any of this stuff?
Anybody with a brain stem can quickly put two and two together and deduce that they don't have anything close to a bargain to offer anybody - it's commonly known that the majority of consumers comparison shop before purchasing merchandise-especially big-ticket items. The internet has made this quicker and easier than ever. If any getestore.com employees are reading this, I'd love for you to offer up proof of what YOU are paying wholesale for the merchandise, just so the rest of us can see how badly we are being ripped off. We know it's happening; I'm just curious to know just how hard we unsuspecting consumers are being LAUGHED at. It saddens me to think of how many more hopeful, unsuspecting people will lose so much time and money in search of the American dream, only to end up let down and in worse financial shape than when they started. It's not just about TIME or EFFORT... You can have all the time and effort in the world, but if you don't have MONEY to back it up, it's never going to work. That's why the starting fee to get in on this wonderful venture is so low. They must feel a little guilty charging too much for something they know is going to cost MORE to make it work out like it reads in the description. Heaven forbid someone have a inkling of conscience here.
I pray that many people will read this and opt not to learn the hard way. I'm glad I could share this information with others that the company itself will not because they know for a fact what a rip-off the whole system is for the people who buy into it. The truth, after all, does HURT.
Consumers... Save your money and keep surfing!!! Tell getestore to get-e-lost!!!
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