BatteryFuel is an Internet company, we sell laptop batteries and adapters online. Our business is 100% online, and to get customers we have to do a lot of online advertising. I personally have been dealing with various forms of Internet advertising for around 5 years, and I am very familiar with the functions and limitations of the various search engines our potential customers use to find us. It is very difficult for any company to be listed high enough on a search engine to be found. For this purpose, we use companies who specialize in search engine optimization, who help us to edit our web pages to rank higher, or who use tricks of the trade to get pages ranked higher for certain keywords.

In March of 2003 we were contacted by Rick Cordova from Traffic-Power. Traffic-Power is a company that specializes in certain search engines, one of which was of particular interest to us.

Since BatteryFuel started business, we have not had a lot of luck getting listed on Google, which is one of the most used search engines in the world. When I told Rick this, he claimed that they could get our pages up on Google. I told Rick that I was skeptical, that I had heard a lot of claims from a lot of companies, and very few of them actually could do what they claimed. I also told Rick that Google was the only search engine I was interested in, if he could get me listed on any other search engines I would consider that a bonus, but I was only really interested in Google. Rick guaranteed that, within 90 days from the start of our campaign, we would be listed on Google. He told me that he could not guarantee that we would be listed at number one, or even in the top ten, but we would be listed.

He then talked to the president of this company and gave the same guarantee. I told Rick several times about problems we had in the past with people who guaranteed things and didn’t deliver, Rick assured me that I had nothing to worry about.

I agreed to start a campaign with Traffic-Power strictly because of the guarantees that Rick had given me. I bought 60 keywords for Traffic-Power to promote for $3000.00, plus I paid $1000.00 to reserve these words, meaning that no other company could use Traffic-Power to promote these words.

Traffic-Power made changes to BatteryFuel’s home page, and created several new pages that I had to upload to our server. Traffic-Power also created two new websites, www.computerbatteries.net and www.computeradapters.net, and created several pages to upload on these sites. Our campaign started, and I received several emails from Rick saying that we would be listed soon. He told me on the phone that we could be listed in as little as 10 days, but he had told us 90 days just to be safe.

July 23rd was the 90th day since the start of our campaign, and not one of our 60 words was listed on Google. I called Rick about this, and the first thing he said was that there were no guarantees on getting our words listed on Google.

I immediately called the owner of the company, Mr. Matt Marlin, who told me he could not help me. I called the president of the company, Mr. Pat May, he told me he could not help me, and that I should talk to Maryann in customer service. I called Maryann, and she told me that Traffic-Power’s policy is that they do not guarantee any results. I explained that although that may be their policy, their salesman was guaranteeing results, and that we wanted to cancel our campaign and get our money back. Maryann told me that there were no refunds, and that I should not believe anything unless it was in writing.

As I was hearing this from her over the phone and not receiving it in writing, I hung up and called for her supervisor, who was not in the office for several days. When I was able to talk to Maryann’s supervisor on 7/24/03, I was involved in a 3-way conference call between Maryann, Lisa, and myself. I explained the problems I had and repeated that I would like to cancel my campaign and receive my money back, as I no longer had any trust in anything their company told me. I was told that there would be no refund.

So, to sum this up, it seems that the Traffic-Power salesmen are allowed to tell prospective customers any lies they can to sign them up, and once the money is collected, they will again lie and claim that they never made any promises or guarantees.

The owner and president of the company are ineffectual; they claim they have no power to help us (if they don’t then who does?). The customer service representative is under the impression that if something is not in writing it doesn’t count (though she has not yet sent me anything in writing, even after repeated requests), and her supervisor refuses to help us in any way, creating a complete cover up so that they can keep our money.

My goal is to tell this story to as many companies as I can so that what happened to my company does not happen to others. Companies like Traffic-Power give good companies that keep their promises a bad name, and there are good companies out there. My partner and I will sign anything requested to back our claims of what was promised to us, we will take polygraph tests, whatever is requested.

David
Absecon, New Jersey
U.S.A.