This is my experience with Goldbar & Marc Goldman back in May 2007.

Marc Goldman has already threatened to sue me if I voice my opinion, & I say I have the right to voice my opinion. You can decide whatever you want & I hope your experience is much more pleasant than mine had been.

Everyone has different experiences, mine was a total mess.

While I wish to be short about the story, it’s kind of hard to be without trying to give out a sense of what happened.

I was with 1shoppingcart (1SC) & had been for almost 2 years, & was very dedicated, but I had started to become increasingly frustrated by all the problems 1shoppingcart was having, & felt there was an option to move anywhere else.

I started a thread on a message board about these problems, & someone started talking about this Goldbar system which I had never heard of before.

Then Marc Goldman (the owner of Goldbar) came onto the thread & started talking about how Goldbar is the same as 1shoppingcart & better.

I guess I was looking for an out, but I wanted to be sure this was going to work because I knew moving over was going to be challenging.

It took a few weeks to decide to make the move. I kept waiting for Marc to contact me, & he didn’t seem to have the time even though he had the time to post on that thread.

I finally talked to him on the phone by calling him (should have been a sign for me) with my list of questions, & then decided to move over to Goldbar.

It took almost 2 weeks just to get an answer to a question about the order page they had sent me.

1 ½ months later I had to quickly move back to 1shoppingcart.

I gave Goldbar all that time trying to work with them to get their system to give me even the bare minimum of what I got from 1SC. I never even got a chance to try out their other features 1SC didn’t have because I was just trying to get simple things implemented.

What that means is that I e-mailed back & forth with his Pakastinian programmers trying to get things changed.

While there was no doubt they were nice, nice just doesn’t cut it when the quality isn’t there, & it was very hard for me to communicate with the guy they gave me. I should have listened to the other people on the message board who mentioned this issue even before I signed up, but it’s my fault I didn’t. I thought I could handle it.

When Marc told me they had the same features as 1SC, I took him literally.

Had he been upfront with me about what they didn’t have that 1SC had, I would have waited until all the changes were made BEFORE I moved over.

One thing a business person should never do is promise something they can’t deliver, OR, if they are going to promise something, make SURE you know your competition & what they offer. In my opinion based on what I experienced, he didn’t know what 1SC offered & I don’t mean the bigger features which now that I look back on it, is probably what he was referring to.

So, in the end I felt he lied.

After I moved over & had been there for a few weeks, I went away for a week thinking everything would be fixed when I came back, but no, I only found more mistakes once I came back.

A quick rundown of what I had to face:

1. Their order e-mails didn’t give me all the same info 1shoppingcart’s did, & it was very hard to read which is a HUGE waste of time when I’m running a business.
2. I couldn’t easily e-mail a customer from that e-mail.
3. They didn’t have reoccurring billing set up & Marc didn’t even ask if I needed it before moving me over. I had to wait for them to develop it all the while not being able to offer it to my clients like I had at 1SC.
4. I had asked him if he had sub user accounts & he said yes; he didn’t & it doesn’t matter to me if he planned to add it in, don’t say you have it if you don’t.
5. I asked him on the phone prior to even signing up, if his system could handle more than one auto responder per client order & he said yes. Did it? No!
6. On one order I even had to pay GST out of my pocket because their system stopped charging CND customers GST & I never got refunded for that mistake his shopping cart made.
7. At one pint the link codes somehow didn’t work on my site, so people who clicked on my links got an error message.

I have documented proof of all the issues I had with his system. I can’t even begin to list them, they are way too long to document, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Money & Business I Lost

First I had to pay my website coder to change all the URLs to Goldbar’s payment URLs, then I had to pay again for him to change them all back to 1SC & we aren’t talking a few URLs here, we are talking a lot.

Do you know how much work that is?

I had paid Marc $350 to move me over & they didn’t even do a good job. I had to keep on top of them to make sure it was all done because they missed things here & there.

After 1 1/2 months & no end in sight, I was pissed & yes it was showing up in my e-mails to his staff, as I had been patient long enough.

No one should have to go through what I went through.

The next thing I know, Marc is telling me off in an e-mail saying I’m treating his staff poorly.

Interestingly enough, not ONCE did Marc check on me personally to see what was going on & he had to have known there were problems because I even posted about it on that thread I mentioned.

I had drummed up more business for him because of the thread I had started complaining about 1shoppingcart in the first place. He had people going over to him, & did I even get one thank you?

Nope

So, because nothing was being dealt with even though his poor staff were trying, I figured I’d post back to that original thread.

While I think Marc attempted to push to get things fixed, after another 1-2 weeks went by, I couldn’t go on like this any more. This entire thing was disrupting my business & taking me away from my other duties.

I felt like I was running his team of programmers & yet I wasn’t getting any discount for consultation, help with User Interface suggestions, etc.

I had wasted countless hours of my precious time & money & while I did it for me because I needed it, in the end it only benefited his product, not me & my business.

So, another day I started detailing the problems I was having in the thread because hey, it’s my duty to warn others if I’m the one who started the thread in the first place.

Marc starts making me out to be the bad guy telling me my expectations were unreasonable that I just want everything to be exactly like 1SC. He didn’t like the fact that I had outed him to the entire world & I thought long & hard about whether I should do that, but I just felt very overwhelmed.

I short time later I finally had to fess up that this couldn’t continue, & I asked for my money back if they couldn’t get the things fixed within 3 days.

At first Marc didn’t want to give me the $350 back & the one month I was charged.

In fact he didn’t even know I had already been charged a month, & I was told I would get a 30 day trial which of course I never got because nothing had been working properly from the day I moved over.

Marc Goldman received my e-mail stating how I felt he lied & me detailing all the problems I had had.

He then called me at 9 pm EST during my dinner, & proceeded to raise his voice to me on the phone & then he swore at me.

I don’t care how you want to fluff things up.

I’ll say it again, when you compare yourself to an existing platform, you better make sure you are just as good or better.

So instead of just e-mailing me back in response to my e-mail, he had to phone me up & lose his temper with me. I’m sure he wasn’t happy with my e-mail, but come on people, this had been going on for almost 2 months now.

Then he later on e-mails me on top of that having the nerve to tell me I’m unethical because my business doesn’t live up to his moral code, yet he had no problem with me signing up for his software after I asked him point blank if this was going to be a problem. He said, “no”, & now he turns around & tries to use this against me.

When someone can’t accept responsibility for their actions, the easiest thing to do is try to find fault with the other person. Not ONCE did he ever apologize to me during this entire time.

It doesn’t matter what business I’m in so long as I am NOT hurting anyone.

It matters what type of a person I am inside.

No matter what business I’m in, I’m an extremely ethical person.

I don’t lie, I don’t play games, & lastly, I don’t lie about my products or services.

One thing has NOTHING to do with the other, & anyone who automatically thinks that just because someone is in the adult business therefore they lie is very very ignorant not just about the adult business, but about human behaviour in general.

The average person lies 15 times per day, & the average person isn’t in the adult industry.

I don’t lie 15 times per day, I don’t even lie once per day, that’s how ethical I am.

I also don’t defend my staff if they don’t know what they are doing, & I would certainly have to get the FULL picture before even opening my mouth one way or another.

While the customer is not always right, & I’m the first one to admit this, a customer shouldn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars just to move over to a system that isn’t up to par, & be stressed to the gills & do all this work, especially when I paid his company $350 to move me over in the first place.

If I had never been with 1SC to begin with, I wouldn’t have been able to compare, & in that regard he is right, I was comparing his system with 1SC, but that was to be expected, right?

Why would you want to switch to a system that doesn’t work as well, is harder to manage/navigate, & doesn’t give you what you’ve become accustomed to?

You wouldn’t.

LOL, I just got the refund & look what this mature person put in the comment field… Fired Customer.

He didn’t fire me, I fired him, but if it makes him feel good to say that & try & flaunt that in my face, by all means, I just ignored him.

Also, he cut me off the system soooo fast, that he gave me absolutely NO time to move my system back over to www.1shoppingcart.com, so my next 2 orders declined.

In the end, I helped this company for free because quite a few upgrades & features were added & the layout was improved because of me.

I feel like I was treated like crap & all in all, I lost close to $1,000 or more, BUT, it was all a learning experience for me, that is for sure.

Thank you for listening

Michelle