California

From StoresOnlineExposed

Office of the Attorney General

Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr.
1300 I St., Ste. 1740
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: (916) 445-9555
http://ag.ca.gov

Some Comments from Dissatisfied California StoresOnline Customers

Anaheim: My husband & I attended a seminar that seemed to answer our needs for retirement income. It sounded like they would help find products to sell & help set up the websites. After we signed up they sent books & DVD's with information. We were directed to websites that offered product to sell. Everything they offered to do directly had a fee attched except the on-line chat. No toll free numbers are available for assistance. It's been a major disappointment. Not to mention an expensive disappointment. [more]
San Diego: I was led to believe that no matter what product that I would market, the StoresOnline "storefront" would bring in traffic, therefore, more sales. Also, everything about their services were not fully explained, leaving me to believe, that e-commerce entruepreneurship is an easy success. However, to get additional training, or obtain certain marketing tools and stategies, I had to pour money into this add-ons to become successful. [more]
Palm Springs: The websites do not seem to get off the ground. We are not making money. [more]
Rohnert Park: I DO feel like I have been had!!! I was talked into putting out thousands with a promise of this reward in the end. It's been two years and nothing. I am struggling beyond description. I quit my job thinking this would pan out and nothing has become of it. They said in a couple of months the site should be able to pay for itself. Two years later and its still not. All of the fees from storesonline and their credit card processing company are overwhelming me. [more]
Irvine: I was able to get my website programmed myself with final help from Stores Online. During the seminar, Stores Online did not say anything about search engine optimization. They did mention pay per click, but not much was said about it. My web site is selling totebags. I have sold 15 totebags so far, averaging about 1 per week. I have around 40 hits per day. I am paying much more for pay per click and fees I have paid to be listed on other sites than I have made. [more]
Bakersfield: After a brief introductory evening session--in which we were all assured that Stores Online would only tell you the benefits of its services once, without any pressure to go forward--I decided to attend the day-long seminar here in Bakersfield, California. I believed, at the very least, I would learn good strategies for online promotions and sales. The day-long seminar was extremely informative, filled with amazing success stories and multiple website examples. [more]
Santa Clara: We purchased 6 websites. Only 2 are currently up and active, and we are not making any money with either one. Customer support is okay if you have a fairly common question. Anything out of the ordinary - forget it. It's obvious the people on customer support have little or no technical expertise. Also, trying to get them to report a bug to tech support is like pulling teeth. We also experience system downtime on a regular basis where their system is either down completely or it is overloaded. [more]
San Ramon: My son & I attended two seminars to look into the feasiblity of doing business online. Alot of info was given at the second seminar where aggressive selling of licenses took place. We were not interested in buying three licenses. One was for sure and possibly a second license. We were not convinced that more was better. We were surprised that they offered loans to people who did not have the money to make a purchase that day. That was a bit unethical and turned us off some. [more]
San Ramon: My son & I attended two seminars to look into the feasiblity of doing business online. Alot of info was given at the second seminar where aggressive selling of licenses took place. We were not interested in buying three licenses. One was for sure and possibly a second license. We were not convinced that more was better. We were surprised that they offered loans to people who did not have the money to make a purchase that day. That was a bit unethical and turned us off some. [more]
Torrance: I was sold on the idea that it would be extremely simple to put a web site up. They even had a "grandmother" telling her story how easy it was. It is all a "sham!" They also convinced me that their techniques for listing the web site on the search engines would have us showing up on the first page and we would be getting lots of exposure. Again, this was totally misleading. Their advice was completely worthless. [more]
San jose: I believe that Storesonline.com sold us a bill of goods. I have made no money at all with the site. It was difficult to use the site with eBay which they told me it would not be a problem. They call constantly the wrong number for marketing purposes. They also had a third party website company contact me to spend more money marketing my website. I was told that was not needed with the suppose GREAT stores online website. We had bought 6 stores because the sales person gave us many guarantees. [more]
Sacramento : I have been paying for my storesonliine website for almost a year now 264.00 a month and I have not made one sale. I have even had a company send traffic to my website and today I have had over 600 visitors but not one sale. I have complained to storesonline about this and they told me to have one of their representatives review my website and give me some recommendations I did what I was asked to do and all they recommended me to do was more pictures and text to my website. [more]
Sacramento, CA: I purchased six websites to enable my disabled daughter to earn income. We finally got one site online, but there have been no sales (other than my test sale) to date. I have spent thousands of dollars and many, many hours trying to make this work, to no avail. This is definately a scam, in my opinion. [more]
sacramento: I purchased 3 websites with the worth of $3, 000.00. Then i purchased items to put into business with the worth of $2, 500.00. I registered for credit card processing and got monthly charges. After my websites published i don't have any customer. I became the customer myself and get charges on my account. I decided to close these business. [more]
san jose: i couldn't buy just one website they said i had to buy 6 for best price. they said it would be easy. its not. pmi, a marketing group recommended by storesonline, said they would help me get the website started by guiding me for $10, 000. then they said i would turn my jewelry inventory easily within a month. which is no way happening in a year so far only 12 sales. i have to pay for eci &dynamic (storesonline recommended) for credit card processing/credit card merchant $30 month. storeon line chg 24. [more]
Santa Ana: Did not provide programming support Referred clients to the Tax Club and a bookkeeping service which were useless. [more]
Santa Rosa: Why , I am not satisfied? Because they lied to me right off the bat, by saying the business web site I had could be joined up with my site so I would have total control over it , with the search engines and keywords, well, when the time came to do it , then they told me that is impossible that i have to find a wholesaler and stat selling , what they have. [more]
San Jose: First of all, for the price, I could have saved thousands of dollars if i would have used Yahoo! stores instead....I got talked into storesonline with my girlfriend at one of their meetings in San Jose Ca. I can't believe it now, that I fell for their sales pitches....6 F'ing stores? What the hell were we thinking. They make you feel stupid if you don't buy all 6 stores...Oh well, that was over, I bought them and couldn't turn back(they only give you like 3 days to return?). [more]
San Diego: Well, the first reason that it was such a huge hassle to get the package in the initial meeting (the mass meeting). It also promised a way easier money solution, but after spending hours and hours to get a webste live, I still have not got a single sale. According to the speaker it should take way less time in order to make large sums of money. [more]
Sacramento: We purchased 3 web sites and have spent hundreds of hours working on our web site. They gave us so little info we had no idea what all it involved. Their obvious intentional lack of information should be a crime. They stole for us and many others in the seminar. We are fortunate we didn't finace ours like we saw many others do. They tried to fleece us out of more money by calling and offering to work on our web site for an additional $ 7, 000.00 . What a joke!! [more]
sacramento: presention sounded good and easy, however once we got into it we found it to be very techinical and we still had to spend money with an out side firm just to get on the two most common search engines. this is not the way they presented it at the seminar. They lied by implying that we could get orders with in the first week of submitting our site, however it takes weeks just to get reconized and then only after spending more money.stores on line could not get us on any search engine. [more]
Sacramento: I have purchased six StoreOnline websites thinking that it would be easy to supplement my income. Boy, that was a mistake. When I got starting on the first website, everything went ok, but once I got into it, the experience went sour. It's much time consuming then I previous lead to believe during the seminar. Now, I feel trapped with six websites that I don't have enough time to invest into. [more]
San Bernardino: Had the full smoke and mirror presentation from Stores on Line and unfortunately bought into the vision. Paid a good deal of money for those 6 licenses. We have one store up, it is a money pit as sales do not come close to the way things were described. Trying to get with their credit card processor was impossible asthey wanted a severe deposit to do business with us. We went to Pay Pal and had no hassls setting up an account that works just fine. [more]
Oxnard: Purchased website from private party. Although the site is nice, it is not working very well, nearly impossible to receive payments without a separate invoice. Also, the tech support staff isn't very helpful, unless you want to pay out more money to have them "fix" it. Everytime you try to talk to them, it is well, if you pay this amount, then we can help. [more]
Sacramento: After my seminar & provided dinner, then came the pitch and opening up of the check book. I should have walked away and continue researching more on the cost of acquiring a website to conduct online business. Then came the PMI who too strong armed me in getting their service now or regret in losing out on marketing service. Over all I have spend more then I have anticipated for a virtual store. [more]
Sacramento: The fact that StoresOnLine only give customers three days to cancel the contract, and money back guarantee, made me very skeptical from the very beginning. They recommend that customers take at least 2-3 weeks to think about the items they would like to sell, but with only 3 days money back guarantee. In out particular case, my wife and I called StoresOnLine about three weeks after purchasing the package to try to get our money back, but it was too late by then. [more]
San Jose: It's way harder to build the sites and generate traffic than the seminar leaders who have you belive. [more]
San Diego: The main benefit that I saw with storesOnline was the ability to gain more exposure on the internet. Any benefit in this area that was shown was quickly removed by other entities on the net. The credit card system that is sold at a so called discount is an extremely expensive method of gaining the ability to accept credit card for customer purchases. [more]
Anaheim: When my wife and i signed up, we were told of several websites that had "thousands" of suppliers that would provide dropshipping for their products. We contacted hundreds of them, but most of them didn't even respond and those that did, didn't do dropshipping. Most of the sellers listed were cheap Chinese products with high minimum purchases or high shipping costs. [more]
Sacramento: I am on disability and so I was looking for something that I could do at home to make a living and not depend on disability totally. My wife and I attended a Stores Online seminar in Sacramento and decided that having my own stores on the internet was my ticket to finanical independence. It has become a big black hole sucking the life out of my finances and I may be in danger of losing everything I own. I was able to get one store site up and running but it took coaching from PMI which added to my expenses. [more]
San Diego,: We started a process with StoresOnLine in April of 2006. That was to put us more prominently on the map of severe anxiety treatment program providers. What we offer are programs for adults in english, a spanish version also, and an excellent proram for anxious children 5 to 15 years. From April we gave them a total of $10, 583. We were looking for was expertise in fine tuning the 3 sites we had already developed. StoresOnLine's persuasive presentations clearly stated that they were experts. [more]
Riverside: The number of complaints we have about our experience with Stores Online are too numerous to write in one session. Everything from lack of consistent information, misinformation at the seminars and elsewhere, problems with Merchant accounts and failure to refund money spent for Merchant account when requested. Misinformation about positioning in first page of major search engines. [more]
Ventura, : When I went to the seminar in 2004 they had someone there that made it sound that stores on line would build the site and help in every way. I thought that was great especially based on the numbers being shown at the conference. I signed up for 6 sites, the links, the on line promotions, etc. I paid for licenses, training, and I never got anywhere. I lost money on the first site I put up and the second did nothing. Never got a call to help me or see how I was doing. [more]
Victorville: We bought into the whole thing. We purchased 6 stores, and we have 2 that are live. One, www.scrapbooksrfun.com and two, www.realdowncomfort.com. I have had 2 sales on the first one and it went live in November 2006. The second went live around March 2006 and has had no sales. And why aren't there any sales?? Because we are beyond page number 30, and no one goes that far down in the search engines. We were told at the seminar that any one can do this. [more]
Pasadena: Four years ago I signed up for storesonline, and to be honest, I still have my website up through them. Mostly because I thought I might as well since I paid a fortune for it.
I now have another business with godaddy.com with the same benefits I received from storesonline, but it costs me $24.00 per month.
They did build my site for me initially, claiming I could design it any way I wanted and that I would be able to keep the site updated for myself. [more]
Moreno Valley: They made it so easy to set up the website. After I was convinced that I should buy six (6) licenses, it too me forever to get the first one started. I finally got started. I received a high pressured telephone call from someone with PMI who said that I had been selected to participate in a special training program. All it would cost me was $10, 000. I fell for it because I was so frustrated at trying to get my site up, I was willing to do whatever it takes. [more]
San Francisco: deception. They promised much morte than they offer. They said that the program is allyou would need to get started and that they would walk you through everything and then a few weeks after the purchase they call you up with all sorts of other people telling you to truly take advantage of what you bought it will cost another 3-14, 000. One of my biggest frustrations is that in the initial lecture I asked if they were set up for apple computers and they said the absolutely were, which was not the case. [more]
Redding: I recieved an invitation to attend a breakfast seminar and it included a guest that I could invite. I invited my daughter to go with me. After our breakfast, We sat through a 90 minute high pressure seminar that said over and over that you did not need computer experience to use there program and launch a web site that would start making money to pay the expenses of opening future sites as well as provide us with an income. [more]
San Jose: I want to express my apinion about the tool and service Stores Online is selling. They sell out the space on their server plus some "software" which helps to maintain the site. I would complain that the software is not easy to use and customize to owner needs. There are a lot of limitations which prevent of using different ways of attractings clients. [more]
No. Hollywood/Burbank: I purchased 6 websites, and have had one up and running for over a year. I spent a large amount of time, and a lot of effort, expertise and did not make any money. The last three months for example, I made about 25.00 per month and spent 24.95 per month plus other incidental charges. The reason for my dissatisfaction is that the promises are not true, and the company does not deliver what it has promised. [more]
Palm Springs: As a retired railroad employee, I was aware that my pension was going to be reduced by $800.00 monthly on my 65th birthday. I was also aware that I would have to supplement my income to overcome this loss. In September, 2006, two months before that birthday, I attended a StoresOnLine seminar in my hometown of Palm Springs, California. [more]
Palm Springs: As a retired railroad employee, I was aware that my pension was going to be reduced by $800.00 monthly on my 65th birthday. I was also aware that I would have to supplement my income to overcome this loss. In September, 2006, two months before that birthday, I attended a StoresOnLine seminar in my hometown of Palm Springs, California. [more]
Oxnard: HORRIBLE! I did everything that Stores on Line said to do to be successful. I had four times more hits off of my Network Soltions site than SOL.
I would ask them questions and they would tell me to look in the manual. One girl tried to help.
They made us pay $900 up front and then they said that Duvera had accepted our credit -- now we owe them $5500. They specifically told us that this software would be good for a NONPROFIT corporation. [more]
Long Beach: I went to a seminar and they really sold that it would be easy and there would be a complete support staff to help me and I found out you pretty much have to do everything on your own and half the time I was unable to get help because the people on the phone could not help me because they did not know what I was talking about. [more]
Universal City: My husband and I went attended the luncheon seminar where Storesonline proceeded to make it seem that anyone could and should make money if they followed their plan. The speakers and video clips were very motivating. We thought, "we can do this, they make it so easy". Not so. Even after attending the intense workshop I had difficulty putting my website together. They were helpful online. It was never adjusted or set up as I wanted it to be though. [more]
Irvine: I signed up for the service based on the tremendous sales pressure from the "team". The results stated by the lectures were nothing short of phenominal. They made it seem that anyone could do this.
I'm dissatisfied because after following their coaching in building a site, using all the key words, meta tags etc. I still have basically no ranking. It was a huge waste of money for nothing.
Weve decided to cancel our web site publishing and simply write the $6, 000.00 off to a bad investment. [more]
lawndale: In the summer of 2004 I bought a package of 3 SOL stores for $3299 in San Diego.
two weeks later I succumbed to two high level SOL salesmen who sold me a monitoring package for $3494, a package with an implied warranty to help build my store to showcase my success to the public at a future SOL seminar.
I followed all SOL's advice and directions and instructions and made every effort to succeed.I dedicated every minute of a whole year to the business. [more]
San Bernardino: We wanted to start a home business. We received a letter in the mail from StoresOnline for a free seminar, we decided to check it out. When we attended the StoresOnline seminar the presentation was slick and well polished. During the seminar, we were excited about the prospect of an income derived from a home-based, web-based business. The logic and details described during the presentation made a great deal of sense. [more]
Sacramento: I bought into the great story at the Sacramento seminar over a year ago. I was convinced that 6 stores would the best deal. It would be easy to set up, the program includes everything needed even search engine optimization! They told us how easy it is and how to figure pay per click budget which is the way to go. I would be up and running soon. I have a great product. It took months of late nights after work to set up the website. I got pay per clicks going right away. I got about 40 hits to my site a day. [more]
Oxnard: I have followed the instructions and directions given to me by Storesonline, after 6 months of diligent effort and reviewing their DVD's I still had not a web site worth viewing. The program is more difficult than they make it seems and very limited. I tried to get my money back but I was told I could sell them but no refund would be issued. I tried to sell them, but to no avail, no one wanted them. [more]
San Diego: Pressured and intimidated into buying something I did not want, told them I was unemployed and could not afford...I was separated from my girlfriend when she objected to the cost, and the employees used cultlike behavior to denegrate her as a negative thinker who would hold me back from the success the program would guarantee me. [more]
San Jose: I got involved in a seminar here in San Jose, California. Before I knew it I was signing up for 6 sites. Yes, not good. I have tried my hardest since then. I have done nothing but pour more money into them. I have closed them down now. Sadder and wiser. [more]
Whittier: Traffic did not live up to expectations, despite spending $3000 for 6 months of extra tutoring with a so-called expert who soon passed me off to an underling who had different ideas than the original guy. [more]
Los Angeles area: attended seminar and bought 3 licenses from storesonline. I found their tools to be difficult to use, the keywords and meta tags were not as easy as shown in seminar. If I wanted to pay for their service I could have them write my keywords and "help" me get higher in relavancy searches. [more]
Monterey: Site and Builder make it impossible to optimize for seach engines as it puts in redundent html language. Gateway and merchant services are rigged to cost you double and some times triple the going rate. of 6 sites purchaced I have 1 live and only 2 sales in 13 months. with over $14, 000 invested. I have leaned I could have bought software and hsting for less than $300.00. [more]

[edit] Lawsuit

The lawsuit against California is active. If you would like to be considered for a refund in this lawsuit, contact

Mark Volpei
District Attorney Investigator III
646 County Square Drive #200
Ventura CA. 93003
Office: (805) 662-1757
Fax:    (805) 662-1770

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Category: Lawsuits

California

From StoresOnlineExposed

Office of the Attorney General

Some Comments from Dissatisfied California StoresOnline Customers

[edit] Lawsuit

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