I listed my business on a free page of city grid media as one of many business owners looking to grow their online advertising, days later i was contacted by fernando sumaya (sales rep) talking me on to try their paid service, that in his opinion would generate tons of customers being listed on the 300 network sites of city grid, a few days later fernando zumaya did a online presentation, explaining how the company and operations work saying that my website was not SEO optimizedand he would take care of that, I said how would he do that, in response he said, oh I'm going to give you a SEO optimized article to put in your website, just put it in every page that way when people search for your particular type of business yours will show up, by the way he never did any of that, I was going to be charged. 75 cents per call and they would monitor the phone number i was going to be assigned to be able to determine my bill per month. This is not like a pay per click google ads he goes you only pay for every call when a customer contacts you and my projected spending was 600.00 a month because he thought I wasn't going to be able to handle too many phone calls in one month, it looked to good to be true but I decided to try it out for one month, next day he call me saying that he made a mistake and instead of. 75 cents the charge per phone call was going to be $1.45, I thought ok this is an honest mistake still a good deal and no monthly fee, no activation fee.
They assigned me a weird area code that honestly I myself would never call if I was a customer I thought days later (i was not happy with it) when I asked if they could change it they just said it doesn't matter people don't pay attention to area codes.
They assigned a video man to produce a 2 minute video on my company, supposedly free with the ad campaign they were about to start running for my business, a month later I get charged 613.00 Dlls, and no a single customer contacted me, another month goes by and I get charged again when this was a one month trial, I call fernando and he acts very surprised as he wouldn't believe what's going on, I will do an investigation he goes and disappears and never talked to him again, I called asking for a supervisor and all I would get was a customer service rep on the line trying to explain the shady charges that showed i was being charged for every click happening on their site and not per phone call, finally days later I get a supervisor on the phone, I explained the problem and he gets the attitude of we're right you are wrong, take it up with fernando if you want he goes, I was furious and call my bank to back charge this ripoff crooks and now I get issak garcia and lorenzo frenandez harrasing me for 900.00 when they can even proof to my bank that the charges they did were legit.
I certainly did learn my lesson, want online marketing?
Learn and do it your self which by the way is not that complicated, but companies like city grid media take advantange of small businesses that are struggling with their online presence and hard earned money.
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