Thursday, 27 August 2015
Sitebuilder.Con?
Today I was tempted to switch my blog provider to Sitebuilder.Com
I wasn't actually unhappy with blogger, but I was looking around for something unconnected and saw the rave reviews that sitebuilder got. I mean *really* rave reviews and such great features for a free site.
It did look good indeed so I had a tinker with it and the templates are spiffy and clean and very nicely done which appealed to me. But the basic package turned out to cost about £9.00 per month which I wasn't really happy to pay so I shut the page down...
and a pop up window offered me a discount down to £4.99. Still not interested so I shut down again..
and a pop up window offered me a discount down to £2.99 per month.
You know, I thought, I could go for that, so I signed up and paid by PayPal. Hurrah and huzzah I was now the proud possessor of a new blog site with some spiffy features.
I was also a few minutes later the proud possessor of an email from PayPal advising me that which I had indeed just paid for a year's subscription at £2.99 per month a recurring payment had been set up for £11.00 per month starting automatically when the first 12 months were up... That's £2.00 per month MORE than the original starting price of the undiscounted offer.
Presumably this was some administrative error. It would surely not be the case that a company just created an overinflated charge to run automatically without notifying the customer and only kick in after a year when presumably the blog would have lots of content and emotional investment. That would be the action of a shady disreputable organisation full of shysters and sharp dealers and Sitebuilder.Com isn't like that.
I cancelled the recurring payment at once (good old PayPal) and have given Sitebuilder the news that some dreadful mistake has occurred. I bet they'll be glad to find that out and put things right, eh?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That is quite manipulative, but I am not surprised. There's gold in the web and it is mined from us all. I have often wondered how Blogger made money offering free blog space.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I would accept that the next year's price would probably not include the discount... but to set up a recurring payment without informing me AND to do so at a price higher than the originally advertised price seems beyond a joke. No doubt there was some small print somewhere, I'm sure they'd cover themselves like that, but I'm neither Internet-ignorant nor inattentive and certainly nothing was ever presented to me in a way I could have been expected to notice that warned of what was about to happen.
Delete