What Will You Sell?

During infomercial company mentioned that you would have thousands of products to choose from. However, what I found was that there were only 50 or 60. When I questioned this, I was told they either fired their supplier or contract with supplier expired and new negotiations were underway. As for quality of items… it was sorely lacking. Rather cheep trinkets that had no real value.

How Will Your Customers Pay?

In order for customers to pay online, you will need a shopping cart system. However, I'm afraid I found that this application was another add on. It was not included in $59.95 price.

In addition to shopping cart, you'll also need a merchant account to receive credit card payments. Most merchant accounts require a 2 year contract. However, to receive a merchant account from this company, a 5 year contract was required. I found set up fees very high and monthly fees just as disturbing. Not to mention, with a new Internet business, I can't imagine being tied into a 5 year agreement. If company fails, you would still be liable to pay monthly fees for remaining time on contract.

Bringing Traffic To Your Site

During infomercial, you are told that company will submit your new Web site to top 1,000 search engines with automated software. However, what most people don't understand is that 90% of your search engine traffic will come from top 20 engines. In addition, most of major engines require manual submissions, not automated. In order to get your site positioned properly, you'll either need to buy additional software, pay a search engine professional to do task or learn to handle it yourself. Needless-to-say, that costs even more money.

I am not going to add up all individual cost of my investigation but I will give you total cost that was on contract they wanted me to sign. Not counting $59.95 I had already paid for my Internet business in a box, they asked for another $2695.00.

This article is not meant to discourage you from starting your own Internet business. My business is to educate people about sharks that will try to take your money.

Can you start your own Internet business, make money, lie out by pool sipping Margaritas and only work 20 minutes a day? You bet! And it can be done for a lot less than $2,695.00. Will it happen first week you're in business? No. Before you jump into an online business, I urge you to educate yourself, learn how Internet works, decide what you can or are willing to do yourself and what you will have to pay someone else to do. Calculate entire cost. You will not get rich over night. It will take time to build your business and automate it. Then, with a little luck and a lot of hard work in beginning, you can lie out by pool sipping Margaritas.

Network Solutions Whois Site http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois and enter URL. You should in most cases be able to determine who registered domain name, where they are located, a telephone number and/or email address. This will be under Administrative contact section. You can also determine who hosts site.

If URL ends in one of new domain types i.e., .tv, .ta, or .de for example I generally use register.com site since it has info on these type domains: Register.com http://www.register.com

There are a couple of discussion boards that may have information that may help you. They are:

Victims Against Scams http://pub31.ezboard.com/bvictimsagainstscams

Friends In Business (Scams 101) http://friendsinbusiness.com/board/index.cgi?

iCop! Discussion Forum (International Council of Online Professionals) http://pluto.beseen.com/boardroom/h/50220/

The Home Business & Marketing Discussion Board http://www.homebizlink.com/wwwboard

A couple of sites that you may want to also check are:

The Consumer Sentinel http://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/

Internet ScamBusters http://www.scambusters.org

The Federal Trade Commission http://www.ftc.gov

One other resource is good old online telephone books. If you have an address or telephone number go to www.yellowpages.com or www.whitepages.com and check them out. You can use telephone number and do a "reverse directory check" which checks telephone number and gives you a name and address. You can also check out address that you have and sometimes may be able to tell if address is a valid business office or a mail drop by making a couple of telephone calls.

If you are getting ready to spend some of your hard earned money by joining a money making opportunity whether it is a one time cost or a monthly cost, make sure that you check it out. First you want to reassure yourself that it is legit and secondly if you are going to promote it, you want to make sure you have confidence in it since you are going to risk your reputation by recommending it to others.