Complaint Review: Universal Banner Network Getestore.com - Los Angeles California

Thank you Sam & Jennifer for your well written, lucid and detailed accounts of your experiences. I purchased their website, for some unkown reason, 4 days ago. It is a pretty ugly looking site to begin with, regardless of the template I chose. Their prices, as you mentioned, do not seem to be competitive enough to make any money. Forgetting this, today, they called me to sign up for their mentoring program. The mentoring program today is over $5,300. Such a smooth sales pitch. They promised: * a 5 page custom designed website * weekly live sessions & unlimited phone support * lots of knowledge and more. Of course, they do not work with everyone, only those that pass muster. Do I have the time to put in to make this a success? Do I want to be a success? Am I teachable? They qualified the heck out of me. Mainly, I guess, they wanted to know if I could handle the $5,300 payment. To easy my trepidation, they guaranteed that they would continue to work with me until I made back my investment (this could take forever) All this sounded great. But wait. Never saw this site. What about the prices. What about this unbelievable "out of stock situation"? What about this instant amnesia once they have your money? What about the broken products? What about the BBB "F" rating and all these consumer complaints? I've been given assurances, promises and secret phone numbers for support, not to mention "our guarantee". Everyone was so nice. Man, what a fool I am. Well at least I am in this 3 day right of recision period. Guess what the first thing I do tomorrow morning is? Thank you RipOffReport and you contributors for providing this forum and these comments. You may have just saved me a lot of grief, aggravation, not to mention the $5,300!. I still want to do this business but I am now so jaded, I do not know what to do or who to trust. There is so much to know about marketing a site, any site that I have my work cut out for me. But almost every one of these companys seem to be a fraud. It's good to know this site is here.

i listed an item on ebay and someone bid on it and whan i went to do the purcase yep out of stock. So now i have to refund the bidder plus now now i owe him for bbay paypal fees and his banking fees lovely eh.Oh yea if you look at some of the products wow no brand name to be found and check the spelling on the descriptions,this is obviosly a mickey mouse rip off operation.I have told my friends to look at my store but not to buy a store,hopefully i can recoup my losses through my friends pretty sad or what. Buy the way if you look at the BBB they have an F rating and a phone nimber for universal banner, but dont expect to be treated like a customer. It is a 1-800 number.

Before words like stupid are thrown about - consider the following: Firstly the scam USES dropshipping - dropshipping itself is not illegal - dropshipping is NOT a scam, it is a way for start up distributors to sell smaller quanities of goods (usually 1-50 items per lot) at a mark up price on to ebay sellers - that is below retail price but above the wholesale price. It is a way for eBay sellers & other small retail on-line outlets to beable to sell a wide range of products - without initial outlay, holding stock etc. So,dropshipping in itself as a method of delivery, is not the issue here. The issue is a group of scam distributors, that are using the trade names of Sony, Microsoft, Apple and other highstreet retail brands - to sell a dropshipping service to new, potential & established On-line retailers, that is not providing the service retailers are paying for, or proving such a sub standard service that it can't be used. I class my self an an Internet retailer, not a sucker, I know what money schemes are about, I know the diference between a dodgy MLM program seling "pixie dust" & a legitimate networking program - like Cognigen. I make use of traffic exchanges, paided e-mail services, affiliate schemes & affiliate networks with no complaint - they are not all corrupt, just as not all dropshipping corrupt. The question that need to be asked is - why are the scam distributor Companies still allowed to show products from World of products (SMC) - if this is the work of con artists - why aren't Speciality Corporation Merchandise suing a butt off these fake sites or their ISP's that host these fake site ? - SMC they have a fraud alert list - why aren't Dropship Design & getestore on that list ? The real Wholesalers & Genuine Distributor's need to stand up, take some responsibility for who they supply their goods to. Vague suggestions, that there are some scams & "bad guys" out there are not enough - dropshipping is a growing industry, but it will die a very quick death if the genuine USA companies carry on ignoring this problem, keeping quiet & hoping it will go away, is really lame & I can't believe for one minute that American Consumers - the people that are untimatley placing their trust in the on-line retail system - will standby & let this happen Just as not all wholesalers are corrupt neither are all on-line shop owners & webmasters - on-line shopkeepers are getting scammed, they might be considered 'the next rung up' on the consumer ladder being classed as business consumers rather than "the public" doesn't mean they deserve to be ripped off any more than Joe Pulic either - they aren't asking to be ripped off - they are asking for products that customers want to buy so they can earn an honest living. Small on-line retail businesses are being hit twice - the scam distributors are clearly hiding behind Companies like netdropshipper, SMC, Doba & using brands like Xbox & Playstation to get the retailer interested. I still want those brands in my store - Universal Banner Network are unable to do the job, I still need a Company who can! Fake distributor companies have 1000's of these replica stores on-line which means they are making Millions of Dollars for a sub standard service, if it exists at all. Just like Affiliate Programs needed to clearly seperate themsevles from the scams to get credibility in the business world, I think it's high time real dropshipping agencies got together & booted out the corrupt distributors. Genuine dropshipping outlets are losing thousand of dollars daily to these scam companies - that could have been spend on your products - why is that not bothering you ? it should, retailers like myself are willing to pay for a genuine service, so why not name names, clear up the mess? - people like me would pay for you to clear up the mess, so what's wrong with my money, that it is only fit for scam artists ? Customers are not happy, I'm not happy, my Dollars are being spent in the wrong place, just because I prefer eBay/iOffer etc. doesn't make me a scam artist - you are the guys with the power to oust these bad distributors, I don't want fake merchandise in my stores. Dropshipping needs a natonwide (USA) legal body, that can mediate between - on-line retailers, wholesalers & distributors, this way a code of conduct can be drawn up to protect sellers & buyers from fraudulent behavior - anything along these line's would be better than the current unregulated set up - dropshipping networks need to be created, just like Affiliate Networks were created, to regulate, Protect & turn a profit! Real Companies like World Wide Web Brands have an on-line radio station, they should be telling people like me, excatly who the fakers are, you can't be afraid of being sued by a scam artist, so use your good reputation to blast these scum off the planet!

Sam, After reading your very intelligent report and informative experience with GetEStore.com, I decided not to sign up with them. Thank you. You saved me a bundle, which I don't have in the first place. Not to mention the friction this would have caused on the homefront as my husband is leary of the internet as it is. And while there have been some very positive experiences we have had, such as finding ripoffreport.com, there are also some negative ones, which, due to this, he has expressed his opinion that everything on the internet is, probably, a scam and not to be trusted. I have to admit, at this point, I'm beginning to wonder if there really is a way to make money on the internet as of, to date, I haven't found any. But, I digress. I, like others, saw GetEStore.com's offer and thought it would be a great deal. I didn't do any research on the prices like normal. So reading your report helped me make the right decision. As I said, previously, I will not be signing up for this scam. Once again, ripoffreport has saved me money and my dignity.

My wife and I were actually sitting here this morning considering whether this was a legitimate opportunity or not. Afterall, they had a special ending today for $29.95 per year. Not to be one to jump into something that sounded so appealing with very little upfront investment, we thought we had better do some research on the company behind the offer. Thankfully, we happened to come across this site in our search. We are truly grateful to Sam/Jennifer, or whoever they are!

I decided not to buy into the GetEstore after reading your well written tabulation of how these guys operate. Thank you Sam for taking the time to put together something that must have taken hours to compose. Your efforts are not wasted here.

Paul I was going to say something similar to what you said but after reading what you had to say I don't think I could have done any better. Bulls Eye by Paul. Folks real wholesale come from companies that actually buy huge amounts and stock it every year and what ever didn't sell goes to the liquidation companies. Now, I'm not saying buy from liquidation companies because middle men and crooks also exploit those networks. It all comes down to research. True distributors and I'm talking over 90% of the time will not ask for a membership fee. Why? because all they want is to move inventory in their warehouse, therefore no membership fees. They will ask for a resellers tax ID number over 90% of the time. When they don't ask for a tax ID yet they want a member's fee up front most likely it is a SCAM or FRAUD. Most of these distributors have been in business for 10-50 years and I never had to pay anything to join since all they want is for you to resell. If you have good credit they will even extend a 30 day credit line so you can sell, than have them ship and 30 days later they bill you for it. These distributors 90% of the time will display an actual number for quantity available of a certain product in the warehouse. For instance, you buy one of 90 they may have in stock than go back to their website and look at the same product and you will see 89 instead of 90. Why? It's real live inventory and these are the distributors you want to get involve with. Why don't I sell? I do sell products but my main business has been selling hosting/domain and web developing. I also would like to help folks get their own hosting/domain for the lowest price around along with the direct sources information so you can actually profit from selling. You can build your own website with all these different distributors at your fingertips and choose your own products to sell. You can sell on Ebay like I did for a long time. I no longer do since I opened another Ebay & PayPal account with my wife's name which got both accounts suspended. I tried to re-instate but since they have incompetent customer service I never did get a chance to raise my case or some one there to respond to my many emails. I've made money from all my ventures but now I will be concentrating on selling a shopping cart software. The software is so simple to use that if you can fill out an application than you can build a professional ecommerce website in no time. I'm also going to be web designing turnkey websites with hosting/domain along with the name of the source so you can go direct instead of having a middle man to deal with. I have built a few sites for myself and if you are interested in checking them out all you have to do is add the .com to the word since they do not allow web addresses on here. First, steadydomain, esellersbay, landoceanair, and scooteride. I'm currently selling on Ioffer under nsc_wholesale, and on Yahoo under esellersbay_com. I'm also a member at Overstock under smceracom but I'm about to give it up since they really lack traffic and sales percentage ratio is not that good. My esellersbay website is a distributor that I would have not chosen first but at this time since my traffic for reselling products isn't as heavy as I would like I had no choice but to go with them. Reason being is because some of these really good distributors expect that your account with them be some what active since they do have your information on their system taking up space. The accounts with these distributors are FREE but they want activity out of you which means sell. Also I do not agreed with Overstock advertising their website to sellers and buyers by email. To me the whole Overstock thing is a conflict of interest and I believe all they are doing is raising advertising money for their Overstock website and not the auction part of it. It kills me to see them on TV advertising overstock.com and not the auction site, yet the money is coming from the sellers on overstock auctions. I have been selling with hardly any competition since lots of the sellers on all these auction websites are lacking the direct source. Check out my auctions on ioffer, or my esellersbay website. I'm still working on that website but I will have nearly 10,000 products added by the end of the summer so that I can make a killing by next Christmas. I will simply provide this information FREE when you buy a years worth of hosting with a domain name at steadydomain. 15000 MB Data Storage 300 GB Data Transfer 1 Domain Hosted SiteStudio - website builder 33 FREE pre-configured scripts Anti-Virus & Spam protection 12 Subdomains PHP, Perl, MySQL 5 FTP Accounts Multi-Language CP 30 Days Money Back All of this and more for less than $70 for the whole year. I will mention a few distributors here, for example, SMC, B & F System, D&H, Ingram Micro, Evertek, Eastern Distributing, Net Dropshipper, Mega Goods Inc, Azerty, Tech Data, 21st Century Distributing, Safety Technology, Margolin Shoes & Apparel, Sunl Group, Homier Products, Plum Island Silver Company, Richard Cannon Jewelry (10K-18K Gold), CompAmerica Inc, Simba Electronics Corp, Electronic max Toys Importers, plus more of FREE information of real distributors looking for resellers to sell their products and not trying to scam you with memberships. Due to the 30 days money back we can only supply you with the FREE information after 30 days.

Now, I could see if a dumb f sent in money for this scam. These are the idiots that send for all kinds of things that absolutely nobody in their right mind falls for. But, here's the part that always gets me. Sharp, analytical people fall for this crap. Are Sam and Jennifer the same person? They both write the same. And, they both reference the same garmin product. Whatever. Clearly, they are obviously intelligent people. So, why can't they see the con here? Here it is. The scam is $50 plus $15 times 1,000,000 suckers, or at least as many as they can get. What does it mean when the junk they supply is priced higher than retail? It means they don't want you to sell it. That way, they don't have to fool around shipping any of it or stocking any of it in the first place. The idea was to take your $65 and send you packing. Not to have you sell trash. That's why the prices are too high. You were never supposed to sell anything in the first place. It was all a con. Please, please, please do yourself a favor. Forget internet retailing. Advertising is sky-high. Then, froogle steals away all your customers. Hell, you could do $5,000 a month is gross sales and maybe end up with a 10% net profit from it. That would be $500 a month. For shipping and packing tons of trash. You'd be better off at McDonalds working minimum wage. Trust me, the only things on the internet that consistently make money and enough of it to be worth the time, are scams and frauds. Which leads me right back to my original point. Don't listen to the company shills, people. This is nothing but a scam. I can't believe you people actually did this for months. Google Adwords? Search engine submission? Lord help me! Babes in the woods! Do me a favor. I read this s**t most everyday. Come here and ask before you venture out on your next can't-fail internet goldmine deal-of-a-lifetime business opportunity. Either I or somebody else will explain the con BEFORE you sink $2,000 into it.

First, let me make it clear, I am an getestore site owner, having started the program a few weeks ago. What I find amazing is people actually think you can get a home business that isn't going to cost anything to operate or that isn't going to require any effort. And what on earth does anyone think there going to get for $49.00 a year, an online Walmart?! Let's get real here, any business whether it is virtual or brick & mortor is going to require a lot of effort and one must expect capital outlay, especially for promotion. To enter into any business expecting less is purely naive. If someone were to open a brick & mortor, do they think the inventory is going to magically stock itself on the shelves, price itself, and rotate itself to meet shoppers preferences or holiday marketing? Plus, just because you hang a sign out front, are customers expected to appear in mass to buy everything, and make you wealthy?. A virtual store requires no less. But, the overhead is next to nothing and you can manage it in your PJs at home. Plus, there are no real time constraints to being profitable since you don't have the pressure of a lease, utilities, payroll, etc. The author of this complaint fretts about the products offered. There's 3000 items available, so this things a bust because she can't sell 150 items, or less than 5% of the available inventory, on ebay. No claims were made this was a wholesale business for ebay. Experienced or not, if you can only sell 2 out of 150 items, you got to be doing something wrong. Furthermore, the site offers you a way to sell your own products if your that disatisified with those available. I found hundreds of drop-shippers to work with, free. Took a little work, but I'll give you a hint try wholesale411.com. You want something for nothing, and success? Buy a proven franchise, like McDonalds, oh, you do need $1.5 million just for the franchise fee. One last thing, just because you're not successful doesn't mean others can't be . I congradulate the getestore owner who made $700.00 in a couple weeks. And to the guy who sent in the rebuttal already to give up after only a few days, don't.

Well, I found this rip off site maybe a little too late. I bought into the idea of having my own online store and once paid am seriously thinking I got ripped off. Prices are way too high and shipping is questionable. The product mix is limited in some areas and I was very disappointed to see many of the items as refurbished. I'm disappointed that the ability to make changes to the menu structure is extreemly complex. I'm worried that it is so difficult to pick products to highlight (you must view the products picture in one section to varify a product number) and switch over to another section to select the product. All I can say is that if I'd seen this warning first I wouldn't have signed up. For the rebuttles who say "you just need to know how to use it correctly" - please share cause I'm headed for disappointment.

I've been using Ebay for various sales for four years now... I know very well how to use the service. No matter how you slice it, or no matter what technique you attempt to use to sell, you have to price the merchandise high enough above wholesale to make any kind of profit... and when many of the same items on Ebay are selling at a lower cost than what we pay WHOLESALE, it is impossible to make any money. I have attempted to list over a hundred different items, using every technique available and nothing has worked- even pricing items at $2 over my wholesale cost (which makes me NO profit, and if sold, would have COST me money) didn't work- I was still undersold by other sellers. I have an exemplary record with Ebay, with 100% positive feedback, and I am a well established seller. But these things do not matter to some buyers; if someone else has the same item that I have at a cheaper price, they will get the sale before I will. I have a hard time believing anybody could make that much profit in just a few short weeks. Obviously we are selling the same products, so unless you are getting them at a much lower wholesale price than I am, it seems improbable one could have so much more success than another. Maybe you have listed hundreds of products in the last few weeks and got lucky... I don't know. I didn't just list a few products that didn't sell, get discouraged, and give up. My conclusions are based on the fact that out of over a hundred products I listed on Ebay (nearly 150 I believe), only THREE sold. And as I mentioned before, I tried many different listing methods to find which worked best, and nothing I tried made any difference because the one thing that WOULD make the difference is out of my hands- the wholesale cost of the items- which after contacting other wholesalers for price comparisons, I've found to be horrendousely inflated. I've read all the "insider secrets" to profitable selling on Ebay, and I'm sure they work wonders for those who have competitive prices to offer in the first place, but again, after all the research I've done, and time and money I've wasted, my conclusion is still the same. There is nothing I could do differently that is going to affect the outcome now or ever. I still would not recommend this program to anyone. Unless you are sitting on thousands of dollars to pay for advertising costs, it isn't going to work out well for anyone. Most people eagerly jump into these things BECAUSE they aren't satisfied with their current income, and they don't realize that it takes a LOT of money to even begin to make a LITTLE money. You may have made $700 but how much did it cost you? These are things that people need to know. If you really truly are a customer and not an employee of getestore, and you really are by some miracle making a healthy profit, then my hat's off to you. You are probably one in a million. I have serious doubts that anyone else has been so lucky. I was not a newbie when I started this. I knew there would be some costs incurred, and it would require a lot of work and patience, and I knew that it would not be an immediate or even a guaranteed success. But there are many people out there who are unfamiliar with this territory- and they expect the business to run itself, and they think the products will sell like hotcakes just because they are name brand and in demand. The market for what we sell is oversaturated with the types of products we're trying to sell (especially on Ebay), making it fiercely competitive. Unless you've done lots of web surfing and price comparisons, you wouldn't know this, and many newbies to the business don't. It's advertised as a ready-to-go online store, and they whet your appetite just enough to make the $49.95 risk justifiable. You don't find out just how difficult the process is until you become a member. I'm sure it is with any business venture. But I can't deny the facts in black and white, specifically the example I noted above with the Garmin handheld GPS device. Anyone who does the appropriate research will come to the same equation as listed above. That particular product will be nearly impossible to profit off of. It wouldn't be so bad if it was only a few products out of the inventory that faced this issue, but I have found that most of the high end, sought after items we sell have this same problem. There is no "right or wrong way" you can list this that is going to make the outcome any more or less favorable for anyone, experienced or not. I am in the process of compiling a list of the products' wholesale prices and and their manufacturer's suggested retail prices, along with the current prices the products are selling for on popular sites and price comparison search engines. I feel this information would be useful to those considering becoming a member of this company, so that they can do some research of their own and verify what I've stated in my posts. $50 is a fairly small risk to take financially to try it out for a year, but it saddens me to think of how many people will potentially be disappointed in the results- it is disheartening to spend so much time and money on something that is doomed to fail for the majority of people who take it on. I personally worked very hard at promoting my business, using every affordable (and not so affordable) means that I could find. I don't have a nest egg or various credit accounts to fund the continuous money pit that this endeavor inevitably becomes, so for me, YES... it has been very disappointing. I know I'm not the only one out there who has come to this conclusion, but I'm one of the few who cares to share my experience and let others know that failure is a possibility. I don't know what magic method you use that has made you uber successful, but I'll wager whatever it is, it's probably not an option for me, as it won't be for many others contemplating the home-based business opportunity either. My experience is just one of many. My posts are just my opinion, but my opinion is based on verifiable FACTS. That is why I made it a point to list the example that I did. If anybody truly is having any luck at this, (and isn't a getestore employee posing as a customer to sway the opinions of readers), the rest of us would love to know how you do it. Those of us with mortgages and kids to put through college are dying to know ;-)

Like anything, you just have to know how to use this service! I have had my e-store for a couple of weeks and I have already made a profit of $700 using Ebay. If you do it right, you CAN make money.