Well you guessed it, it has finally come down to this.. We have been talking with some of our current clients and of course prospective ones, and I have even sat in on a couple of these companies' sales pitches to our clients. Customer opinions and ours is these are some hard pushy sales people. As I sat in listening to his sales pitch (let me remind you I just rebuilt one woman's website, completely responsive and mobile) he tore the site apart claiming we didn't have the technology.. really? Steve aside, I have been in this industry for almost 20 years and I keep up on every new trend. Secondly, the salesman really pushed her paid advertising online, I mean huge budgets! Most of the companies we deal with are small business and I do my best to do their online marketing at a fair price.
Let me tell you about a local company that contacted me for help to get her out of her hibu contract. These people firstly never finished her website but had been billing her for 4 months. They also asked for a decent size down payment, and monthly payments of $99. So after I called hibu from her office for her they told me "sure they can cancel her contract" (which she then did), come to find out they still kept billing this poor woman, and did not refund the deposit. She had to contact her bank and spent weeks fighting their collections department. I wish there was more I could have done.
Another local client could not stop them from taking auto-withdraws from his bank account, even after many calls to cancel, the web was finally removed - but they owned his own company's website address name (URL) and he lost it.
Just one more: One area client bought a restaurant that had a hibu yellow-book site with the former owner's name and other incorrect information, even menu prices. The new owner called and canceled renewal of the old site and the yellow-book ad. After many subsequent calls the web is still live online and they will neither make corrections or remove the website. These businesses are all in the Danville area.
The best thing you can do if you work with big international companies like hibu, dex or whatever they will change their name to next... read and reread your contract. Make sure you can get out of it if you need to. watch out for their up-sells, it doesn't matter to me if you decide to work with BEAMSCO or another local design company. My suggestion, shop around, don't fall for their high pressure, buzzword ridden sales pitches. If you want to shoot me an email I'd be more then happy to see if there is anything we could do to help you TRY and get out of the contracts. Small business is what built this economy, and big business like them are running it into the ground
Don't believe our clients or us? Look for yourself. Click the links below and see how some of these companies are taking others for every dime they can, initially and by the month for years.
BEAMSCO Staff
admin@beamsco.com
Hibu:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/specific_search/hibu
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/misc/yellow_book.html
http://hibu.pissedconsumer.com/
DEX:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/business/dex_yellow_pages.html