Reseller ratings has 10x's their merchant member fees since getting into Google review syndication
We have been notified that merchant member fee effective January 2011 increased from $129 per month to $1,499 per month. With no material changes to the features and services offered. And suspiciously tied to the fact that Google has included resellerratings.com reviews in their new merchant ratings system.
Anyone else angry about this too?
One retailer complains: "Our site traffic (according to Google Analytics) has trended down for the past three months, but reseller rating claims it has gone up, according to their second order gathering sites, so they increased our rate by 698%! What is extra special irritating about this is that there is no published pricing tier structure, or even any indication (when we signed up) that there was a tiered structure, or anything other then the base rate. Plus, they formed the price increase notification to look like a marketing email with a very vague title and the price increase info stuck quietly near the bottom of the message. We almost missed it. "
Another story:
We just cancelled with ResellerRatings because our pricing increased 566% in 6 months since we signed up. We had just started to accumulate ratings, we got to about 60 of them when we received an e-mail from ResellerRatings disguised as a marketing e-mail with the price increase on the last paragraph almost as an afterthought. After we caught the sneaky price increase, I exchanged a few emails with the CEO but did not get anywhere.
We immediately removed the reviews pop up from the website and replaced with the BizRate pop up. My biggest concern was what would happen once we got to the level of 400-500 reviews, then they would really have us by the nuts and they could charge anything they wanted, or we would have to start over from scratch collecting reviews with another provider.
The decision was easy, it is better to switch now with 60 reviews than a year from now with 400 reviews...we bailed as soon as we understood that as soon as you have a ton of reviews you are exposed to more pricing increases and become less flexible to move. I have no doubt they would have jacked up the price until our last tear drop, but we will not hang around to find out. We would much rather build our reputation and collect reviews with a more predictable and professional partner. To our surprise, Bizrate response rate is higher than ResellerRatings, so we are already well on our way to getting back to the point were with ResellerRatings.
Globalmediapro is another kind of such online retailers, who selected a different way. Read positive reviews from their customers.