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The following is a summary of my observations of the dishonest and fraudulent business practices of the SMC Corporation and eMerchant Club:
Complaint One:
SMC Corporation and eMerchant Club do not have general public contact telephone numbers or email addresses with which to contact them directly.
Complaint Two:
SMC Corporation and eMerchant Club provides no method of Internet website tracking (The number of people that have visited your website, etc.). You have absolutely no idea How many people have visited your website today, in the past week, month or year.
Complaint Three:
Do not pay money to the SMC Corporation or eMerchant Club that you do not honestly owe, or it WILL be gone without a trace. Their process is designed to KEEP YOUR MONEY.
Complaint Four:
SMC will not allow the use of Pay Pal Pro. Pay Pal Pro is for all intents and purposes a gateway (With very reasonable charges). eMerchant Club charges $395.00 to set up your gateway. You may set up your own gateway absolutely FREE (By simply contacting a Gateway company on the internet or by phone).
Complaint Five:
eMerchant Club charges hundreds of dollars for search engine optimization. This simply requires submitting your website to the various search engines. You may submit your website address to all of the search engines absolutely FREE. This will of course be a total waste of time because the SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club website (Provided to you by them) is a replicated website. Search engines despise replicated sites.
Complaint Six:
A typical gateway will cost around $40.00 to $50.00 per month (If you sell absolutely nothing, this will be there minimum charge). The price quickly goes up if actual products are sold.
Complaint Seven:
If you decide to sell SMC items at swap meets or flee markets, you will find 3 or 4 (or more) other people selling the exact same merchandise from SMC (at a greatly reduced price).
Complaint Eight:
It will be very difficult (or impossible) to sell SMC merchandise to businesses at wholesale. Think about it, SMC has flooded the market with their products through their ongoing "mass marketing" campaign of infomercials, emails and ads of every form. If a business wishes to sell SMC products to their customers (For some reason), would they not have the ability to go directly to SMC themselves and pay member cost?
Complaint Nine:
Most, if not all of the SMC products are made in China; I especially love the Harley Davidson coffee mug with "Made in China" stamped on the bottom (that would get you killed at any Harley Davidson Rally!).
Complaint Ten:
When conducting business with the SMC Corporation or eMerchant Club, and you are conveying something of importance, ensure that you have a witness listening on another line (Wife, Friend, Mother, etc), and after the initial call, verify the information by a follow-up phone call.
Complaint Eleven:
SMC tapes all telephone conversations and you will find that tapes that support their position are found with ease, however, tapes that support your position "do not exist".
Complaint Twelve:
Ensure that the battery for your telephone is completely charged prior to a call to SMC support. You will find that a 45-minute to a one-hour telephone wait will be common during the Christmas season (This is of course the time that you will require the most support and you will listen to SMC promotions the entire time you are waiting...NOT music).
Complaint Thirteen:
The shipping costs from SMC are very high and each order will be charged a $3.00 service fee (Hugh cut in any potential profit).
Complaint Fourteen:
You will not have a person to complain to at the SMC Corporation or eMerchant Club if you have a complaint (about anything). You will be relegated to an interface provided by these companies for ALL communications with these companies.
Complaint Fifteen:
The SMC Corporation will assign each person a "Business Coach". This person’s primary function is to "sell" you as much SMC materials as possible (Catalogs, gift cards, SMC products or the new "flavor of the week"). This "coaching" is purely based on the amount of money that you are prepared to spend with SMC. You will find and be subject to “every dirty trick in the book” when dealing with an SMC “Business Coach”.
Complaint Sixteen:
You will find that whenever an SMC Representative has lied to you, it will always be your fault, because you misunderstood or you miss-communicated the situation.
Complaint Seventeen:
The SMC Corporation and eMerchant Club do not have "opt-in", they only have "opt-out" (if you find out in time). You will “automatically” be “opted-in” to pay for upgrades to your website and other hidden charges.
Complaint Eighteen:
If the SMC Corporation or eMerchant Club takes money from you for any reason that you do not understand, IMMEDIATELY contact your Bank or Charge Card Provider to contest the charges. Attempting to retrieve your money by "going through the system" at SMC or eMerchant Club is a total waste of time! Their entire system is based on KEEPING YOUR MONEY. Let your Bank handle it and this wills FORCE the SMC Corporation and eMerchant Club to be more ethical and responsible in the future.
Complaint Nineteen:
If you decide to try SMC as a business, please do yourself and everyone else concerned a favor and report both of these companies to the FTC, States Attorney General and the BBB afterwards. Something may be done about this if enough complaints are registered with these organizations.
Complaint Twenty:
The eMerchant Club website that you will be given by SMC is a replicated site. Search engines despise replicated websites and pay little or no attention to them. The websites are all identical and are set up so that updating may easily be performed by eMerchant Club. This places you at a Hugh disadvantage from the start.
Complaint Twenty-One:
You MUST be VERY proficient with computer hardware and software as well as the Internet in order to succeed at the "internet marketing" portion.
Complaint Twenty-Two:
You will have to pay for an SMTP server provider to send your email advertising out through, or hire an email distribution company to send them out for you. The SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club will not allow members to use their SMTP severs to send out advertising.
Complaint Twenty-Three:
The SMC Corporation's portrayal of "it's so simple" is of course a total lie (Extreme fraud). SMC should be honest and tell the general public that YOU MAY make SOME money at hosting house parties or selling to friends (Until your friendships end).
Complaint Twenty-Four:
The high tech approach is out of the question unless you wish to hire professional companies to perform this work for every aspect of your "At Home" business (Unless you can do this yourself). This would end up costing in the ten's of thousands of dollars range. The companies that perform many of these services may also be on the fraud alert list themselves, check all companies out completely before using them!
Complaint Twenty-Five:
The SMC/eMerchant Club website that you will be given will have the look of a website from the early 1990's.
Complaint Twenty-Six:
The Site Manager (The utility that you will modify your website with) is a text-based interface that is Reminiscent of the late 1980's.
Complaint Twenty-Seven:
The eMerchant Club Rep will have no idea what you are talking about if your question involves something more complicated than “How do I log on? Where do I find my orders? Etc. You will be on your own.
Complaint Twenty-Eight:
BEWARE of drop-shipping companies that offer “free” websites in general, they are setup to make money for THEMSELVES, not you (This rule does not only apply to SMC/eMerchant Club).
Complaint Twenty-Nine:
SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club had a little over 41, 000 websites under their control some 6 to 8 months ago (On DNS.GIFTWORLDNET.COM in May or June of 2008).
Complaint Thirty:
The total number of domains (websites) on the eMerchant Club server DNS.GIFTWORLDNET.COM has dropped to 28, 389 as of January 10th 2009.
Complaint Thirty-One:
SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club has roughly 13, 000 less websites now on DNS.GIFTWORLDNET.COM server than 6 to 8 months ago.
Complaint Thirty-Two:
This will give you an idea of the tremendous ATTRITION RATE for the SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club member websites. This may also explain the reason that the SMC Infomercials have suddenly reappeared (January of 2009).
Complaint Thirty-Three:
Read the SMC Corporation/eMerchant Club TERMS AND CONDITIONS CAREFULLY from the bottom to the top of the document (they place the important points at the bottom assuming that you will have burned out by then).
Complaint Thirty-Four:
SMC Corporation actually ended up on it's own fraud alert list (They took themselves off immediately after an SMC employee discovered this)!
In conclusion, I have listed several resources that you may wish to utilize if you feel that the SMC Corporation or eMerchant Club has misrepresented any or all of the information that they provided to you in order to entice you to buy their product(s) or service(s).
Please follow this link (Or copy/paste it into your browser’s URL window) to view the Federal Trade Commissions Guidelines on Truth in Advertising FAQ:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/adv/bus35.shtm
Please send an email to: --> [protected]@gmail.com
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
check this site out http;//plrwholesaler.com/download/clk.php?pid=2&a=52261
I recently was " talked " into purchasing a website in April from emerchant regarding my membership with smc. That website was a gift card redemption site--which you would have to have a gift card to enter the site. I called and complained then, on May 2/09 I was offered many "free" items if I up-graded to a more costly one . Which I did. I paid $1295. U.S . There was a sense of urgency -- buy today or you will lose these specials. With stars in my eyes I agreed to up-grade. I tried to get a refund today with no success. What can I do now? I also want nothing to do with my membership which cost me $399. starting in 2004, and paying $49.95 per year since then. I was approached by a company wanting me to pay $299. and they would "get" my money back. I don't know who I can trust any more.
I do not know what these representatives are doing. I had some difficult time. My membership was cancelled way back in December 2008. I made calls saying I want to cancel the website. About the website, I cancelled it the day I purchased it! It took me 2 months for my refund and it seemed like they did not want to return the money. I had different feedback on how to get the gift card website refund and none of them made sense. I remember getting a call from a man saying "Hi. Would you like to upgrade your website?" My website was cancelled for a month before the call came. He told me it was up and running. So I had to call BACK AGAIN to cancel it. That tells me they did not cancel the website when I told them to. I got the refund of the monthly payment I had been paying for the website but not the gift card website. Yes I know you cannot get a refund for the gift card website but how about cancelling the day I purchased it?
I too bought the website, up to about $750.00 about now, and no refund for my out of date site as well. Never got any orders, no traffic, no HELP from coach, just asking me if I needed more Catalogs, they are in my book USELESS! Dont fall into this. This is a scam if you ask me. SMC has good product, but they are all in it together. I did the life chat on line, with SMC and was actually talking to ecommerce. BEWARE. I have gotten probably 50 calls from people wanting to talk to the owner of the site I purchased. I tried to cancel my site as well, that was back in July, it is now November and YES it is STILL up and running. Like previous people have stated, you will NOT get a refund. They will tell you they did their part, you need to invest in ADVERTISING NOW! I have had another website with HOMESTEAD for over 5 years now, and they did all the advertizing for me with my $10.99 monthly member fee. DO NOT GET THE ECOMMERCE website, it is a RIPOFF! If someone can tell me how to get a refund please post it. Thanks. Frusterated in Abq.
Been a member for years with an emerchantclub website, I have a feeling these people complaining have no clue what it takes to run an online business. Just because you get online does not mean people are just going to find your store. I have been very pleased with their work, I have tried to do other companies that offer to do things for less, in the ended up costing me more and I had to do the website build myself with other companies and I had to maintain the product line including adding products, it was painful! With my website through emerchantclub they build it, its easy to update and I can focus on my business. I have had my site for years and can tell you with the new features that come out each year and their technical support I have been overly satisfied
E-MERCHANT CLUB IS A SCAM! I used E-Merchant Club several years ago and cancelled my service after making no sales and losing money. On November 29, 2019, I received a call from Hope Harmon (E-Merchant Club) with a sales pitch that sounded enticing. I accepted the plan again after much persuasion from Ms. Harmon. After not using the web site and not ordering any items from SMC/E-Merchant Club, once again I decided to cancel. I called Ms. Harmon in February 2020 and she told me that cancellation was a two-step process. I needed to alert the cancellation department by e-mail or letter and I also had to call them. I sent an e-mail on February 4, 2020 and made the required phone call. The lady I spoke with said the account was paid through June and I should keep it until then. In June, I called on several occasions to make sure they cancelled my account. No one answered the phones, possibly due to the COVID pandemic. I left at least four messages with my phone number asking them to cancel the account and call me with confirmation. No one returned any phone calls. Around the first of July, another $199 was held from my bank account. On July 5, I sent another e-mail with the original February 4 e-mail attached. Still no response. I called again around July 7 and this time I got a live person. After much debate, I was refused a refund because, according to her, I did not contact them until July 5, after the June deadline. I tried numerous times to reach them in June and I do not feel I was treated fairly. They do not return phone calls and they do not issue refunds. IT IS A SCAM!