"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Truer words where never spoken especially when they pertain to Shop America Network. I still cannot believe that the same people that established this company when it was known as Shop America are still in business today even if their name has changed the cons behind it are still the same and prospering.
In the spring of 2002 they found our product on our website and from there on out we were lured into their web of great TV promotion and astronomical sales as "we had the product they were just looking for". Yeah, I am sure it was us and tens, maybe hundreds of thousand other clueless and gullible small business entrepeneurs.
After receiving the initial email that we responded to, we were quickly contacted by Joe Perez by phone. He is slick. And so believeable. Beware. He said how we were "going to be so rich" after our infomercial aired. He made it clear that the business the TV infomerical would generate necessitated our stocking up on our product. Believing this to be the truth, we did just as he said and not one item was sold via the TV infomercial.
We were assigned a young sales rep that worked under Joe Perez and after we got impatient seeing that our airings were yielding nothing, we asked him to check into this further. We got the strangest feeling in later contact with him that he truly didn't know what scumbags he was working for and shortly thereafter, he was history.
The really sad part about this is that they destroy dreams. Small businesses, for the most part, do not have access to funds that they can throw out the window. Our business was hurt so bad, we never recovered.
And what is even sadder, is that the Florida State Attorney General did not seem interested enough to stop these crooks in their tracks. When we did her back from him it was in the most discouraging terms as in you will probably not be compensated, if compensation is possible, for more than pennies on the dollar. My question is "who is minding the shop"? Does the State Attorney General's office have a vested interest in seeing that Shop America stays alive and thrives? Appears that way to us.
Be careful with dealing with any operation in Florida. They have a reputation for attracting all the shifty-type businesses there as it is apparent they have no legal "teeth" or refuse to use them, if they do.
Stefan
El Paso, Texas