YourOwnStore.co.uk (Bright Light Media Ltd.)
Complaint 182543 Details

I was made redundant in Oct 2011 and thought it would be a good opportunity to do what I always wanted and work from home so that I can look after my 5 and 2 year old, after being a management consultant and having to work away from home for months at a time. I came across YOS stores and thought this would be a great opportunity to finally fulfil my dreams. Little did I know that it would be a financial disaster! I brought a site from this company in Dec 2011 for approx £6,800 with the following information. You will only need a few hours a day, part time and will start to see a considerable income by 9 months to the tune of £123K per year. It is a proven site and in their webinar they showed income results so it looked authentic. I looked at my site and the sites of the cheaper ones and there is no difference between them. A single template is used and a few categories are set up. No further consideration is given, they only charge more because they think you will make more. I have since spent a lot of time and money learning seo and what works and what doesn't. Here are some of the reasons these sites have not worked and as the failure of the sites to work is a YOS issue refunds should be given to those who request it.
1. No proven site that YOS can demonstrate, either a tried and tested site of their own or a single owner who has even met the minimum earnings on 50 visits a day.
2. The architecture so far has been set up to be very google unfriendly.
3. IP address are all the same
4. All sites linked by franchise opportunity in the footer, so if 1 site undertakes bad linking all are affected in addition to looking like a content farm. Google Penguin make this very dodgy practice. When I requested YOS to change points 3 and 4 my site started to get an increase in visits almost immediately.
5. 2 recent changes that have caused massive duplication issues, not great move considering Panda is targeted at duplication. Not only do we have product duplication as we have affiliate stores but we also have original content duplication courtesy of YOS software.
6. EPC are vastly exaggerated from what is real, a highly unreliable figure that is the cornerstone of their sales process
7. Conversation rates are suggested to be 85% which is again vastly overrated. 1 in 4 visitors will not buy from your YOS store. I have proved this when I was getting 60 visits a day I had about 1 sale a week!
8. Customer service for unhappy customers is not appropriate verging on offensive, with ignored emails, no ability to phone and suspension of accounts even though they fall within the 1 year of support.
9. SEO training provided is not google friendly, having 5 links on the page linking back to the same page is not user friendly, when was the last time you clicked onto a link with 5 different keywords and came back to the same page?
10. There should only be about 100 links in a page but this is neither explained nor compensated for again YOS should already know this but they don’t.
11. My site was ranked at less than 400K on alexa and I had only 60 visits, due to daily content addition, tweeting and backlinking with niche sites and was being indexed daily by google and this was moving in the right direction slowly but surely, however YOS changes stopped this dead in its tracks over 1 weekend.
12. Support only exists 9-5 Mon-Fri so if they are claiming that you can make anywhere between 30K and 175K per annum should the support not been 24/7 after all this is a passive online 24hr a day business opportunity.
13. Backlinking using article spinning is no longer accepted however this is still the package that is offering.
14. My email addresses have been changed twice to go to info email inbox at YOS, once via my cpanel and once via WHOIS data.
My site was getting 60 organic searches a day and i was getting regular sales, nothing like they suggested but it was going in the right direction so i would have kept at it despite the extremely low ROI. However YOS keep updating with things that have taken visitor numbers down to less than 8 a day. All sites are on the same IP and are linked via the footer when I realised through research that this could be detrimental to sites I asked it to be changed on my site. They have introduced a system to make the url's look better which resulted in almost 4000 duplicate content pages for me, as my site was indexed daily, this meant that the Panda updates made my site nose-dive. This took almost 2 months for them to reverse, despite my constant requests. I have tried to suggest ways in which things can be improved and as a software implementation manager am surprised that no obvious testing or engagement prior to making changes with store owners takes place. There is no person that I have come across in this year that has made more than £250 in a year. I have made considerably less than this at this rate it will take me 68 years to recoup my initial costs forget getting any profit. In addition we were told that out of 250 visitors 200 will buy, as I believed that YOS had a proven site I did not question it, but that is an 85% conversion rate highly unrealistic. In order to make the £123K per annum as I was told my site would make, I would need to sell millions of £'s of products. Finally whilst I appreciate the help that some of the team have provided when I have asked them to look closely at their system, the fact remains that my site has failed due to YOS changes and I had to recover from their changes 2 times and a 3rd time with no income is in this economic climate not possible. I was made redundant and used my pay for this and now will have to look for a job or worse go onto benefits as this is definitely not a way to make a passive online income.
My site is not 100% optimised but as this is only 30% of the factors that go towards a site ranking it is a valueless stat to consider. Others have had fully optimised sites for months for no results and that is proven.
I was asked to resell my site twice or to hosted elsewhere for which I would have to pay a programmer to make any changes for me. I refused to sell as I had worked very hard on my site and as my seo and niche backlinks were bringing in visits and sales plus my investment , why should I sell after all this was due to support me and my family. None of us are afraid of hard work but when hard work yields no results due to the YOS software limitations then frankly YOS are in selling a defective product and should be giving full refunds and compensation for any additional costs and time that store owners have spent on their sites. Note not all store owners are upset as they tend to be new store owners and have not put in months of full time work as opposed to 2 hours a day.
On the 3rd attempt of YOS asking me to get a refund I accepted and they then refused saying that the refund is only valid for 7 days So why suggest I get a refund???? Since then I have had not had any contact from Jason West who was supposed to deal with this and I have mailed a few times to follow up. Frankly any response YOS make on this site is for PR purposes only they do not have the integrity to refund customers who have put their earnings into a product that does not work and at the same time made a number of suggestions that would help YOS store owners which YOS have now implemented. I should not have had to force these improvements, some of which have taken me 2 months, if YOS knew what they were doing. For that reason alone I should be given a full refund. The only reason my site has failed is because YOS have made changes that created massive duplication and speed issues and because their architecture is not google friendly enough to enable ranking and visits.
I want a full refund and to be compensated for my time and additional costs which include migrating my site which will cost me a further £500. So £7500 in total includes cost of additional article writing, courses and time, and this is a very low figure we should also be compensated for the no income produced over the last 11 months, in this economy YOS should be more conscious of what they are producing instead of creating more sales sites for innocent people wanting to move from redundancy to independent incomes to support their young families. Their other sites for yourowntravel and a job related store are set up in the same fashion and will rake in 1000’s for the owner but nothing for the honest new business entrepreneur unless they drastically overhaul their entire software in line with google requirements.