Site Sell It Site Build It, instead of refunding all our money they spam us. Did not resolve Better Business Bureau complaint. Internet

Site Sell It – instead of refunding all our money they spam us

Site Sell It, www.sitesell.com, Site Build It, SBI! and SBI etc. are part of Ken Evoy’s internet business. The websites, content etc. as well as all copyright, trademark, and other rights are owned by its respective owners. I claim no right to these names. I am just identifying the business.

Site Sell It is an expensive program advertised as a “10 day” program that “removes EVERY barrier” and “reduces the hard work by 90%”, has an “internal company motto: ‘no unhappy customers’”, and is “in good standing with the Better Business Bureau”. A business partner and I discovered a different reality. Read on to find out our experience plus a few facts SiteSell does not share with you.

We made the mistake of trusting SBI to help us build our web business. We found SBI!’s money-back-guarantee worthless, their company motto meaningless, their customer service careless, their claims useless, and the whole experience hopeless. As of November 2009 we have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau that they did not even bother to reply to properly.

I truly regret believing Sitesell’s claim “E-business success. Simple. Real.” Like others, we got confused and stuck. After SBI messed up one time too often we decided to take them up on their money-back guarantee. That’s when our experience turned from highly frustrating to downright ugly.

Here is just one example of SBI’s confusing program: after wasting hours with SBI tools that give you demand and supply numbers to decide which niche to pick we found Ken’s little nugget of ‘wisdom’ “Don’t take numbers too seriously”. Where did Ken learn how to speak and write in a way that normal people can’t understand it?

Next, we signed up for SBI’s training. After paying SBI hundreds of dollars and going through quite some effort to have the time to attend the class we received an email:
“Two days before your first "live" orientation session...

Tue … 10 PM EST (Wed 10 PM local)

... you will get an e-mail outlining additional information
about SBI! eLearning.

***************************************************************
Important Note:

Should your first session start earlier...

Tue … 2009 10 PM EST (Wed 10 PM local) or later

Tue … 2009 10 PM EST (Wed 10 PM local)

... due to student registration numbers, I will contact you to confirm that the new course date fits into your schedule.”

CONFUSING!!! I am in the EST time zone, but I cannot tell which DAY or even the date!!!

The confirmation email never came. I asked SBI “When is our class going to start?” The time of the class had passed but still there was no email. Not in the inbox, not in the spam folder. But the next morning there was an email which surprisingly had a time stamp of the previous evening just in time for the class. Strange!

SBI treated this as business as usual and told us to just take another class. All arrangements for the class were at our expense even though SBI wasted it!

By now, we were VERY UNHAPPY! Ken never bothered to respond to our email. Customer service did not care much either. Basically, their attitude was “Sign up for another program. And no, we don’t reimburse you for any inconvenience we have caused.”

We decided to cut our losses. SiteSell wanted to refund less that we felt was fair. So we contacted Christian Erwig, the head of SiteSell’s support. In normal companies, a head of support tends to have the right, the power, and the will to make a customer happy. Not Christian. He did not show much empathy, and decided not to give us what we felt we deserved.

Looks like SBI is willing to risk its reputation in order to keep a few dollars from us. To make things worse, despite EXPLICIT instructions to keep the account active UNTIL we had saved our work and received the free domains we were cut off immediately and thus lost over one hundred hours of work!

In a truly annoying act SBI now conscripted us as affiliate – we NEVER signed up! Unsolicited Commercial Email! In my opinion, that is !! And I explicitly asked SBI Support to not send us any unsolicited commercial email.



What SBI does not tell you about money

SBI states that SBI sites make it into the top 1% of web sites and claims to “build a successful e-business”.  A successful e-business makes money. During the heyday of the financial crisis in 2008 over 6.7 million US households –one in sixteen – had a net worth over one million dollar.

Does one in sixteen SBI sites make you a millionaire? How about one in twenty? One in thirty? One in fifty? If SBI were able to achieve just the US average during the worst year, one in sixteen SBI users should become a millionaire as a result of using SBI and building their e-business. Which one do you prefer – a website in the top 1% in a niche, or a business that makes you a millionaire?


You are unlikely to succeed in 10 days

I got the impression that I could build an e-business in 10 days using SBI. Only got AFTER SBI took my $$$ did they disclose “DAY 2 will take longer. It may take hours, days, or even weeks.” Let’s put things in perspective: it took 7 days to create the world. SBI takes 10 days (“just a metaphor”), and one single SBI day may take weeks!

You probably can learn to fly an aircraft in less time than it takes to complete SBI day 2! We were not the only ones who did not make it in 10 days. Other customers in the forums also took much longer than 10 days to even reach day 3.

But wait. SBI has the slow tortoise as a mascot. While it may be many 10 day periods before you earn even a single dollar, somebody makes money. You? No, you pay. SBI gets paid. If you are still around after a year, you pay again, and SBI gets paid again. You can only stop paying after you cancel the SBI program.

In addition to paying around $400 for SBI one needs BAM – brains and motivation. If you don’t build a successful e-business in 10 days do you lack brains and motivation? Maybe the brain part in my case refers to the fact that I paid SBI in the first place.


But why do we need motivation? SBI! claims to remove EVERY BARRIER and cut your work by 90%

Sounds like magic- “SBI! does remove every barrier, empowering you to take charge and ‘go out and get it.’" EVERY barrier! Does that mean all SBI subscribers who have BAMs – brains and motivation – are out there in happy land without any barriers? Does that also mean that anybody, for example myself, most millionaires, probably all billionaires, who do not build a successful e-business with SBI lacks brain and motivation?

SBI! claims you only need 10% of the work to build your business. Most businesses require the largest amount of time for marketing and creating a business model. Does SBI technology magically eliminate most of that work? Do successful e-Businesses outside SBI’s program spend less than 10% of their time on sales, marketing, promotions, affiliates, product development, … etc. combined?

SBI! claims “Building a REAL business takes some work. SBI! reduces that by 90% because it handles all the tedious, difficult and technical barriers.” At the time we subscribed to SBI there were enough barriers left. One of the main barriers was that the whole material was not very well organized. We felt it was easy to get lost, to overlook something, to spend hours looking for the answer in the forums.

How is the 90% calculated? Is that a lie, a damn lie, a statistic, or something else? Or does the “Don’t be numbers bound” caveat apply here as well?


With friends like this, who needs competitors or opponents?

SBI! claims “There is a friend in the forums ready to answer your question.” Really? Where were these elusive friends of mine? When I needed them, I felt like a hermit. I asked two questions in the forum, and the one that was crucial for picking my niche did not get answered in a way that solved my problem. Basically, if you don’t find the answer in the forums assume you are on your own.

In our case the forum administrators were in exactly the same niches we were researching. I am sure they are really excited to help competitors build a website using the tool that makes “E-business Success. Simple. Real.”

SBI did not refund all the money we asked for despite SBI!s Money-back success guarantee

SiteSell claims that “Some customers do occasionally ask for refunds. When they do...  We always immediately honor these requests.”

Dream on. In our case SBI used multiple tactics to refund as little as possible in a way that - for us - was as time-consuming and costly as possible.  SBI seems to have a special (uncommon) definition what “immediately” and “honor these requests” mean.

By the time we asked for a refund we had closed the credit card account since the card-issuing bank was affected by the financial meltdown.  SBI, instead of sending a check or using Paypal insisted to refund only to the original card, and in the original currency. Getting money back from a bank with whom we had cut our banking relationship took hours. Fortunately, the bank was much more pleasant to deal with than SBI.

Now for the way SBI calculated the refund, they simply used every little factor that would cut out dollar amounts big and small. Here is what they refused to include – makes me wonder what kind of company is willing to extremely upset a customer for a few dollars:
-    Exchange rates were used in way that cost us more money and reduced SBI’s refund
-    Reimbursements for costs caused by a previous SBI mistake were considered as a part of the refund, even though these were in consideration for unnecessary costs SBI’s misinformation had caused us
-    The “free” domains which I paid for and explicitly requested was denied, and they refused to refund a domain fee in lieu of the domain
-    The 2nd package got billed right away

SBI did not refund all the money we asked for and feel that we are entitled to. Since we did use the package for some time we have asked for significantly less money than a single annual subscription. SBI refused. I don’t know whether this is because SBI has a bad attitude towards us or because SBI cannot afford the money.

We paid but SiteSell did not give us the domain

SBI promised “keep the domain name that you register (at our expense since it’s included in the price)”

My cancellation email made it crystal clear that the cancellation is effective only AFTER receiving my domains and AFTER saving my work. Instead, I was blocked within hours and lost all my work. When I asked for the domains by email the requests were just brushed aside.

Going for the double package was another costly mistake. SBI frequently run a promotion along the line of pay full retail on subscription and $ 100 to get a second package. SBI promoted it as “no rush … you have 9 months to start … the one year subscription starts at that time” (If you really need 2 packages, every so often you can pay one and get the second package for free.)

Two disappointing facts about the second subscription SBI only told me AFTER they had our money:
1)    activate the second package within 9 months or “it will be lost” (not just activated)
2)    If I cancel before activating the second package the partial refund is only for whatever time is left on the first package. For example, if you cancel after 9 months you only get is a quarter of the price for the second package even though YOU NEVER USED it!

SBI claims “No ifs, ands or buts. There is no ‘fine print.’” So what do you call all these caveats SBI applied to the refund – going as far as trying to force us to keep a banking relationship! I feel this is worse than “ifs, ands or buts” and “fine prints”. I felt mislead.

And how about the fact that your affiliates explicitly told us that SBI bills in US$, thus unnecessarily costing us foreign exchange fees because – surprise, surprise – the order page actually charges in local currency?

Or maybe the fine print refers to their billing. If you actually need a proper invoice with the tax number etc. you don’t get one automatically. Believe it or not, you actually have to EXPLICITLY REQUEST a proper invoice! The world’s biggest companies and dollar stores alike print you a receipt with ALL the information without you having to ask.



SiteSell has our complaint filed with the Better Business Bureau


SBI claims “We are members in good standing of the Montreal chapter of the BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU ("BBB") -- you'll see that our record is spotless.” As of November 2009 SBI’s record should not be spotless anymore. I did submit a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, a volunteer organization that helps customers obtain their rights. SBI never replied to BBB’s email.  The BBB had to follow up and replied months after we filed the BBB complaint. But SiteBuildIt did not give us what we wanted.

Instead, SBI asked about the order details. Next, SBI asked about the relationship between me and the person on the order (SBI order form only has place for one name so we put in one name, not both) and declared that they normally don’t discuss these issues with other people.

After telling SBI how we are related SBI never even bothered to reply about the complaint. Not to me. Not to the BBB. Not to the person on the order.

Instead of refunding or at least replying, SBI tried to conscript us as affiliate! We explicitly requested a full and fair refund and asked not to be spammed! After we canceled SBI we have received multiple emails “pre-selling” SBI. Not only was the affiliate email unsolicited, it is really obnoxious to even suggest we would recommend SBI for a few dollars after the crappy service they gave us.

SBI claims that its guarantee has teeth because of the BBB. Unfortunately, when you call the BBB you will probably end up listening to an automatic message instead of talking to a real person. If you are willing to spend the time and wait, paper mail seems to be your best bet.

If SBI does not reply, employs delay tactics, or refuses to reimburse the full amount we may only have the legal option left. I probably would get a small claims court judgment. But I found out that there is a difference between obtaining a judgment, especially outside SBI’s home province Quebec, and actually getting my money from SBI because Quebec legislation differs from other jurisdictions.

I wish I had known all this before trusting SiteSell.


PS: Here is my SBI experience in an nutshell: “We were very disappointed. We found SBI’s product confusing, SBI’s claims questionable, SBI’s money-back success guarantee useless, and the overall SBI experience annoying.

In other words: SBI – no thank you!