This was originally posted 10/3/09 at my 1shoppingcartsucks.wordpress.com blog

In later emails I was told that they were upset about the blog when they found it was ranking in the top 10 for “1shoppingcart.com“. And that was after just three posts and only one or two links from my main site. It wasn’t like I did a lot of promotion or even wrote very much.

As I pointed out recently I’m going to continue to write but the posts are all password protected. And I honestly hope that nobody has to read them. Because that means that things have gotten better and we’re till using them. I hope the issues slack off over time and I don’t have anything to write here. In this case no news is definitely good news.

Oh and if I really tried to, I know I could probably rank 3 or 4 for their name, without too much effort. I hope it doesn’t come down to that, but I’m not getting rid of this because it may be the only thing keeping them from retaliating somehow worse.

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The following post was published 10/3/2008 on wordpress.com which was closed with a password shortly afterwards as we agreed in order to get our service reactivated. 70 days later, after this blog had been closed for months and was clearly no longer a violation, they suspended us anyway not for saying anything publicly, but for being “unprofessional and rude” which is another way of saying we were “complaining”, only to them in private, about their over charging one of our customers by 400%. Apparently if you piss them off enough they’ll also shut you down and even hold your customer data hostage too. But since they shut us down, we can now repost our experience with them. And to their lawyers, the last time I looked, accurately expressing our honest experiences with an organization still falls under free speech.

I received the following email from the founder this morning:

Mr. Bill Quimby,

I am writing today to advise you that we have temporarily suspended your account due to a violation of our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. In order for the suspension of your account to be removed you are asked to take the following action(s):

1. By 5PM Est. today, October 2^nd you are asked to take down/delete a blog belonging to you which is published at 1shoppingcartsucks.wordpress.com.

2. The content contained within this blog shall not be republished in any form at any time.

Should your blog not be taken down by the above time, we will move forward with permanently closing your account immediately as per section 7 of our Terms of Service (http://www.1shoppingcart.com/shopping-cart-terms-service.asp) which allows 1ShoppingCart.com to terminate the agreement at any time without notice.

Please contact me directly via email or telephone upon taking the required action(s) described above. Should the action be taken as per our directions, your account will be fully re-instated without delay.

After asking what specifically we violated, it wasn’t in the terms of service but under the acceptable use policy, which states (bold added):

xiii. Utilize the Services in any manner that might subject 1ShoppingCart.com Corp to unfavorable regulatory action, subject 1ShoppingCart.com Corp to any liability for any reason, or adversely affect 1ShoppingCart.com Corp’s public image, reputation or goodwill, including, without limitation, sending or distributing sexually explicit, hateful, vulgar, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable materials as determined by 1ShoppingCart.com Corp in its sole discretion;

I explained that what I write in a personal blog which has no connection to my business does NOT affect my use of their service. And to use this as an excuse to shut off any customer that says anything negative about their organization is clearly abusive and wrong at best. I have not said anything that they even disputed. They aren’t disputing the things I’ve written about. They claim their service is better than I have experienced but this is my experience.

Anyway, to make a long story short, my compromise was to agree to password protect the posts. They have the password so they can see what issues we’re having. And unless they do actually suspend me or force me to leave, I won’t make the posts public. But I am going to continue to write them because this should insure that we get better response and assistance when we really need it, because if they do suspend us or we ultimately have to leave we can open it back up.

Again I’m not doing this to be vindictive or hurt 1shoppingcart. I’m simply so frustrated with the lack of support from their support and the problems that they have created for us, that I had to vent and try to get someone’s attention. I think it’s done that and hope that nobody outside, ever has to read this.

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This was originally posted Sep 16, 2008 @ 16:45 at 1shoppingcartsucks.wordpress.com

I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrating it is to have so many customers calling you all day long saying that they can’t use your order form that you have to go and write up instructions to tell people to fax or email you the form with the order information because the shopping cart won’t work for them. That’s not the worst part, the worst and most frustrating thing is how the technical support people simply deny that anyone else is having any problem as if I’m just making it all up!

I think someone should explain to “Tom” that even though he is in technical support he needs to understand a little bit about customer service and that he should really try to empathize with their customers, not act like there’s nothing wrong. I have the faxes and emails from customers to prove that there’s an error. I don’t believe that I’m the only customer that’s hearing people have problems with their shopping cart any more than I believe that they just shut their whole business down yesterday for 7 hours for “maintenance.”

Someone needs to tell them that this isn’t the 80s any more when you could just send out a spokesperson or a memo and pretend that nothing is wrong. And you can’t treat customers this way or they will post things about you that will be hard to hide. Your customers can communicate and acting like your customers are the problem and pretending that problems don’t exist are both very bad for business.

I’ll put in a trouble ticket and show their response here as well.

This was originally posted to 1shoppingcartsucks.wordpress.com on 9/15/08

I registered this blog about the problems at 1shoppingcart because they don’t seem to care at all and I wanted to show the world and especially the people at 1sc. Their customer support department has repeatedly been essentially helpless. I will try to write a few things about the problems specifically but their current failure is the straw that broke my back and made me bite the bullet and do this.

I know there will likely be repercussions because any time someone tries to point out that the king is wearing no clothes the king’s first reaction is often to throw that guy in the dungeon. And that is very scary because we rely on our shopping cart quite a lot. Without that we’d have no business. Which is why it’s so frustrating when they just go down with no warning or explanation during the day.

See the actual screen shots of what everyone saw when they tried to order or go to their website.

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If you’ve ordered toll free numbers from us in the past you may notice how different our new toll free order process is now. When you click on any 800 number you want in the Live Toll Free Search Results, most bring you straight to the new order form and even fill in the number in the Desired Toll Free Number field for you. This may seem like a little thing, but just making it easier to order new 800 numbers makes after just the first day, is making a significant difference in the number of people finding and ordering toll free numbers successfully.

If you say anything bad or apparently even threaten to say anything bad about 1shoppingcart they feel they have the right in their contract to shut you down with no notice at all, no recourse and no access to our customer data.

The problems we had with 1shoppingcart were so bad I started a blog about all of the problems but I had closed it with a password two or three months earlier, per our discussion. So there was nothing at all said in public at the time they shut us down for supposedly violating their terms of service in an unspecified way and for not being professional and polite (about their over charging our customers).

All I did was complain to them about how they charged a customer several times what they were supposed to and didn’t even show that in the cart. We’ve lost customers and had the whole shopping cart go down on multiple occassions but when they made us essentially steal from our customer I had to complain. Their response was to SHUT US DOWN with no notice at all, and no access to our data on a Friday night. Is this the way you want your shopping cart to respond to anyone that’s not professional or polite?

Read the final notice we got from Justin Bell, via email at 4:30pm on Friday 1/9/09

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If you’ve purchased anything in the last two or three days you’ll notice that we have a new (and improved) shopping cart. I started with 1ShoppingCart almost 4 years ago when I started my own resporg and changed the focus of my business from a toll free consulting service to a more mainstream Toll Free Search Engine. 30,000 customers later, they allowed us to grow from $2,000 a month in 2004 to a million dollar a year business in 2008, so this isn’t easy to write, but someone has to tell the world about how many problems there is with their system and how they’ve literally attacked their own customers to try and keep people silent.

During the past year or so, they simply had way too many major outages, issues over charging customers and simply lost too many orders to stay with them. But even worse than the technical problems was the way they blamed everyone else, from the customers, to their browsers to us for things that were obviously their fault. They simply didn’t care, unless you wrote something about it, in which case they attack you full force. It’s important to mention that we’re not selling or promoting anything at all. We’re simply sharing our own experience with 1shoppingcart.com with the rest of the web at large. I say that because I’m going to be putting up several posts about our experience in a section specifically for our 1shoppingcart.com story.

There’s a saying that goes: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing‿ and if honest people don’t say something about companies that really mess up, how would anyone ever find a good service or why would companies even care about doing a good job? Not only am I not doing this to sell anything, but I’ll probably have significant negative fall out from just sharing my honest experience. That’s because unfortunately companies that hurt their own customers, are often more than willing to hurt anyone that speaks out.

But they don’t realize that I’ve built my business sharing my honest experience and I’m going to do that no matter how many lawyers they threaten me with or what they do. The world (or at least anyone considering their service) needs to know what they’ve done!

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