Pros and Cons -   Adriatic Services (www.youradultstore.net) offers an adult based webstore (toys/dvds). Their ad reads ""Own your very own adult webstore"". Now reading that, who do you think is the majority of people who are jumping on that chance? You're right, newbies, people who are unfamiliar with the online marketing world and how it really works. I am one of those, or well, working on not being a newbie. The pros of this offer is that you get a website that is allready stocked for you, no need to make changes unless you want to (so you have that option to), they take care of all technical issues with the website, they take care of all customer service, you have the power to set your markup margins and you get the commisions from all sales. All you need to worry about is promoting your website, easy right? WRONG!

This is where the cons come in, even though you can customize your website to be a little more original you HAVE to know HOW. Did I know how? No! Did about 20 of other store members I've gotten in contact with know how?? No! So, now there's who knows how many of us out there with the same website, same products and all trying to do the same thing, SELL! Now there's also the support from Adriatic Services that is also an issue. Getting in contact with someone from customer services is litterally almost impossible, getting a phone call back is equally impossible. So really, there is no support. They claim they are in the midst of expanding their customer service department, but are they really? Now, the other part is the cost of all of this.

This part can come across a little confusing. When initially signing up for this, I was quoted $29.00/month for hosting fees and $329 for the store. This was a ""deal"" I was told. However, the $29.00/month was based on a 1 year contract. To not do contract it was $10 more a month. The $329 store was 2500 products. Before commiting to this, I had requested a quote again for pricing. The representative emailed me a price list that ranged from $29/month to $89/month for hosting fees depending on the amount of products you have ($29 for 2500 product store and $89 for the 30,000 products store) and the price for the store itself ranged from $329 - $1600.

But this wasn't the end. There's always an upsell! The marketing department convinced me to dish out another $500 (although this guy was trying really hard to get me to hand over $1000 - $1500). This $500 was for them to build me a Google Site Map to help my placings in google and they were supposidly suppose to give me some ""marketing secrets"" also. First off, I found out a person could do their own google site map for free and secondly I NEVER EVER received those ""marketing secrets"". Although, I did get my website upgraded included in that $500.

But what I got and what I was told were two different things (to my benefit though). Which leads me to think they are either overloaded with work and can't remember what they've told their customers or they are just really unorganized and are only in it to get the sale and not to build a relationship with their customers. The last thing I want to mention is that with talking with the other website owners is that the sales department was really inconsistant with their sales tactics. In talking with these other owners, I was the ONLY one who was even offered the additional marketing tips at $500. Everyone else I spoke with spent $1000 or more.

Recommended?   No! I've recently heard from other ""store owners"" that even the ones who dished out $3000 to the marketing department have not had 1 sale...almost a year later! 

Author Info: Jennifer, SK, Canada