I would like to add my horrible experiences with this company to Richard Baldwin. Many of the dates will be estimates because this process has carried on so long that I do not recall exact dates, and so long that I can no longer retrieve my credit-card statement online for the months in question.
In early February I received the same sort of phone call $99 to list your car for sale, and if it doesn't sell within 90 days you can get your money back. What sold me on the transaction was the money-back guarantee I figured I had nothing to lose. I was sadly mistaken.
Initially I had problems with my listing in that I couldn't upload pictures. I was told I could have three pictures uploaded, but I could only seem to upload one. I called and emailed a few times with no response, finally got through to someone and was told that if I send them three pictures, they will crop them and arrange them into one image. This is not three pictures this is a cut and paste exercise, and really just amounts to one picture with three images, all of which are now ridiculously small and low resolution.
After 90 days the vehicle was not sold (even at a very low asking price), so I called them and told them I wanted my money back. They directed me to their website and a form I had to print out and mail to them. Something they didn't mention at the time of the initial sale was that I had to post-mark the application within 7 days of the 90 day time period expiring if I wasn't paying attention I could very easily have missed that day and not been eligible for a refund.
In addition to the form and a few documents, they needed me to get the package of material notarized. I mailed everything on time, and about two weeks later I got the whole package back it was sent back return to sender.
At this point I was worried that the company had up and moved at worst, or that the 7 day window had expired at best. I called and was told they had a problem with the mail (whatever that means) and to re-send the package including the original letter that shows that I had originally sent the material within the 7 day window, and I would still qualify for the refund.
After sending in the package and waiting for a while (again, I have no idea how long) I began to wonder what was going on with this process. I tried called a few times and always got an answering machine.
Nobody every returned my calls, but my repeated attempts to contact them eventually resulted in someone answering the phone. I told them what was going on and they replied that it could take up to 6 weeks to get my refund. It only took them a few minutes to charge my credit card, and it should only take a few minutes more than that to go over my paperwork and make sure everything is there but alas, I had to wait.
After waited quite some time with still no refund I contacted them again. I was given the email address of the person that handles the refunds and sent her a message describing my frustration and asker her what the status of my refund was.
The response I received was typical of all responses I receive from this company a generic reply informing me that my message had been forwarded to someone, who will forward it to someone else, who will contact me. Not one time have I been contacted by anyone in this company.
Any time I talk to someone it is because I called again and got a hold of them. After many weeks of promises to contact me going un-fulfilled, I called and asked for the manager (who I had spoken with about a month or two earlier when this process was only mildly frustrating).
He told me that the person that does this work does so from home, and is only in the office about 1 day a week. He suggested I re-send an email to her and wait for her to contact me. You can imagine my reluctance to do so considering the history of this problem, and I explained this to him. He would not budge so I re-sent the email and also sent it to him. No reply.
I called back a few days later he told me to wait until she called me. I again expressed my frustration explained to him that I had been waiting months for someone to contact me and nobody had, and he was still unable or unwilling to do anything but tell me to wait longer and he would leave a message for her to call me. He said she would be in the next day and he would have her call me. Guess what no call.
I called back today (October 5th, 2005 9 months after initially placing the ad) and got the same rhetoric. In addition to repeating that he does not have the paperwork, she works from home, is only in the office once a week, he also offered up these choice nuggets of information that will make all of you wonder how they possibly stay in business.
He is her boss but
1.He doesn't know when she will be in the office next.
2.He doesn't have her home phone number so the HE (not I) can call her to stress a level of priority to my claim (even though she works from home).
3.He can't even guarantee me a phone call by her by a specific date.
Basically in his position as her boss, he has no power and she does whatever she wants. Man I want her job! As of today he again told me I had to continue to wait, and even when as far as to imply that I had only given him a couple of days to deal with this. I guess that's all I can do for now.
In a few months I hope to be moving back to Calgary, where this company is based, and at that time I will be in a better position to put a face to the disgust I have with this company. I intend to find out where they do business and pay them a visit. I am so disgusted that I am also trying to come up with ways to make their lives miserable and/or put them out of business.
That's all for now, and I'll update if anything changes. In the mean time, if anyone has any questions for me about this ordeal, or has any ideas for ways I can put them out of business, please contact me at [email protected]... I would love to talk about this.
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