Today I received a very interesting phone call about a company that was apparently attempting to collect on hundreds of customers who haven’t paid their bills for a web service that they have signed up for. I was told that the name of the provider was Storesonline. Funny thing was that when I heard the name this sounded like that posting about the Internet Income Training Conference that I blogged about way back. Sure enough, it was.
Just as a quick note, apparently they are a web design/development company of sort that sell people website services. I’m not exactly sure if it is the company that directly sends out these solicitations. From what I gather from my old blog post and all the comments that it received, either them or a company affiliated with them holds these “conferences†where they attract people with free gifts in an effort to then pitch people to buy their services.
I don’t have direct experience with them myself, but it sounds like they charge a ridiculously high price, thousands of dollars, for work that seems rather simple. At the same time, it sounds like people are emotionally pitched to buy into the products such as with the thought of running your own global online business to generate an income.
Because of this, I was told a lot of people are apparently stuck with these incredibly high bills that they did not pay off. So because of that I was asked that since I have a background in this line of work on why I don’t just try the same thing except with a more transparent and reasonable pricing model? Example, do exactly what they do in terms of sending out solicitations except offer services in a transparent and informative way without the hype.
My immediate comment was that this style of selling doesn’t really fit with the “Nice and honest guy†approach. In fact, I would probably say that you would go bankrupt pretty quickly as unfortunately these types of conferences and conventions setup rely heavily on people buying into things emotionally. With that in mind, I can’t see myself going into that kind of direction.
Even when you buy things online about making money for example are you going to buy the product where the guy gives you upfront risk assessment and reasonable analysis on how to be successful or this guy that tells you how easy it is to make thousands in your sleep with a one time effort? Odds are most people will emotionally go with the second choice.
It’s too bad it wasn’t that simple to find say a network of other business people that would be motivated to help others in this scenario as I’m sure it can be a fairly straight forward creation once you round up the right talent and partnerships.
But in general, I guess everyone has their own level of tolerance in terms of hype and emotional selling and what exactly constitutes as an “unethical†business model that would influence you to whether or not to create a business like this.