Our dealings with Rand Internet Marketing, http://www.randinternetmarketing.com
rand internet marketing
We first met Seth and his protégé in Miami a few months back at a Magento developers get together. At this time we were getting our newly developed site up and running and needed to find a reliable 3rd party to assist in search engine optimization & more important paid search.
This was our first introduction to Seth Rand the owner and founder of www.randseo.com “Rand Internet Marketing”, which is also http://southfloridawebsitedesigner.com/, and his partner Jason. We had a brief discussion about what we were looking for in a partner to support our advertising initiative. This introduction truly was just that, a brief intro about what he does for his clients and potentially what he could do for us, pretty standard stuff.
It was not till about a week later we spoke again where at this time Seth Rand offered to meet us at his office, he wanted to introduce us to his team and further discuss the possibilities of what Rand Internet Marketing could do for our business.
We accepted the offer to meet and a few days later we had our first initial meeting, we sat down in their conference room, pulled up our site on their screen and they had said they done a review of our site design, code and performance to see how this could potentially effect the ability for them to properly be able to manage the proposed work and our project.
We were told the site was very good, clean design, clean code and fast load times, Seth explained that with our site he felt there would be no need to change any structural portions of the site and that they could do a number of different marketing strategies to help us grow the business, at this time he also discussed with us a number of various payment models ranging from “x” number of months up front, to month-to-month payment models, etc.
During this discussion there was a fair amount of talk regarding scenarios where their company had done a fair amount of work to get a campaign such as ours going and to find they had been cut out down the road from the rewards, this was a little bit odd seeing as this was an initial meeting to come to a term of agreement, but this may be their normal procedure so we just listened.
A few days later we received a proposal from Seth at Rand Internet Marketing with a few different structures and payment methods, we emailed back and chose a plan that focused primarily on PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising only.
Rand Internet Marketing requested at that time we “pay them in full” for three months of their service before they would start the project and that we would sign with them for a term of no less than 6 months. We accepted the terms and that is when we found out what we were really getting our selves into.
After sending Rand Internet Marketing http://www.southfloridawebsitedesigner.com the money they had requested, we received a very short email that read – “ Please give us a week to review the account, get things set up and come up with a strategy, they also explained they would be contacting their Google rep for any additional information pertaining to our account”. They requested we would have a meeting to kick things off properly once they had this information and set the meeting for a Tuesday at 10:00 am.
We then granted access to Jason from Rand Internet Marketing to both our Google AdWords account as well as our Google Analytics account so they may be able to look at our search history, conversion reporting and account structure thus far.
We thought at this time, great, this sounds good, they are local, seem to have knowledge so we were told, explained they were Magento partners etc.
A week later we gathered in our offer waiting for this call, which never happened. We thought maybe they just missed it so we emailed them asking if they had forgot, and to our surprise we did not get a response.
We figured maybe it was just a fluke and emailed them again asking if they would like to reschedule, again no response. So we just waited to hear from them for maybe another week.
After this time frame we were quite disappointed that we were unable to get a response so we emailed them explaining our disappointment in the way this has been handled so far and asked if this is what we could expect in the future.
Again, no response…
A few days later we get a response from Jason, to be fair though we finally got a response, the length of this email was nothing short of an insult.
The entire email read – “ We are researching and will get back to you once we have more info “…
That was it, nothing more, nothing less..
We were completely taken back by this level of disregard to how they are handling this project and felt a compete lack of professionalism and respect as the paying client.
At this point we already had a good sense of what we were dealing with and what we could expect from Seth Rand – Rand Internet Marketing, and his team. After another week or two we pretty much got fed up with the situation and wrote Seth a letter saying, we were very displeased with their lack of professionalism and wanted to know what was going.
A few days later we got an email from Seth Rand who wrote another extremely short email saying much of the same of Jason aside from one fundamental difference, this one read – “We agreed to take on this project at the price quoted before getting full access to your account. After reviewing we have some ideas and suggestions, and we have reached out to our team at Google to review your account and give us some additional ideas and suggestions. After we complete this process, we may consider refunding your payment. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding. “.
This was the last we heard from, his email was sent month after our last inquiry to them with our distaste for their level of service.
It has since been a month, we have not had any communication with them and they have made no attempt to contact us. We paid in full for three months of service and got nothing but lip service from Seth and team. They did no work to any of our accounts, they did not communicate with us at all and once they got paid they vanished.
In the end we learned a valuable lesson and wanted to share our dealings with Rand Internet Marketing – www.southfloridawebsitedesigner.com. Our advice to you is to steer far away from this company; we got burned and wasted months of time going nowhere right before our busiest time of year, black friday and the upcoming holidays. Its bad enough they stole our money, did zero work, did not return our inquiries and kept us in the dark while they moved on to the next poor company that they can pull this scam on, now we need to first get started during our season and have to apply resources to the project instead of focusing on other tasks.
Find a more reputable Internet marketing company, you will thank yourself down the road when you saved for self the headaches, aspirin and lost money.
We welcome you to join in the conversation and post a review of your experience both good or bad!
Thank you for your time,
Annoyed Customer
Well this just keeps getting better and better,