FeeFighters Loses BBB Accreditation Over Investigative Blog Post
feefighters.com
feefighters.com
You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out. You barely even need to see one move ahead. What moron at BBB OK'd this? How incompetent is the rest of their organization?
Yeah, it will all blow over in a week or two because Fee Fighters is relatively small. A few more people will find out how sleazy the BBB is, but not enough to actually impact the BBB.
Having been in the room with PR people during (supposed) crises in the past: every single one of them would tell you not to do what BBB just did here.
Where those that are rapidly becoming elderly, grew up in a generation that had to rely on these data aggregation and trust business entities. As those people become less and less of a consumer force via attrition, entities like the BBB in their current form will cease to exist. I think they sense it and are selling that last thing that they had (their credibility) in the death throws. All efforts to adapt their model has thus-far failed.
I think Google is actually the most poised to solve this problem at the moment, and I'm interested/excited to see how the Trusted Stores thing they announced today http://www.google.com/trustedstores/ plays out. Certainly a step in the right direction.
To the extent it allows Google users to interact directly, perhaps. To the extent it demands any (non-development) support from Google staff, "forgetaboutit".
(To clarify, I can sign in and update the listing all I want. It shows correctly on that page. Access the Places listing while not signed in, however, and they are, months later, STILL listed as being at their old address.)
On the other hand, when your business is corrupt to the point that it was investigated for pay-to-play practices by a third party, well, completely expected.
I don't think anyone at the BBB is thinking about the outcome; rather they're protecting their (stupid) business model.
Really incompetent in the last complaint I filed with them. Just basically threw it out without communicating why. When I called to ask why, no call back. Looks like these guys are on the way down - they used to respond competently and quickly to consumer inputs.
Looking at timing and tactics - its possible they are recently taking a page from Yelp - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Criticis... - sad.
We first wrote the BBB, who resolved the matter when the head office of my landlord responded to us that "we had misunderstood the situation". Regardless of their wording, they require a $100 fee to terminate tenancy.
We decided that letting our tenancy lapse and have the extra 30 days to move. We moved out on the 18th, planned to clean on the next friday like the 26th. We found our landlord had entered our property without permission and allowed contractors in (who trashed the carpet by pouring a gallon of solvent out) and told us they intended to charge us for the damages.
We contacted the BBB again, whilst taking the matter past the local office to the companies legal department. The BBB never even registered our second complaint, stating the matter was already resolved. We got the issue resolved by dealing with their legal department and threatening to haul them in front of small claims court and the landlord and tenancy board (and we had not only an admission of illegal entry on their part, but also photographic evidence over a week of illegal entries), and then one of their lawyers apparently drove down to the local office to yell at the staff.
My impression of the BBB is not good. Here in ontario the threat of the BBB is a lot weaker than threatening the consumer protection act.
Consumers are not the customer of the BBB. Businesses are. All else proceeds from that.
Without much coaxing the BBB agents clarified that the ratings could be "reinstated" or "take care of" if the signup process was completed. Once the businesses did that, in every case, the scores were re-adjusted to A or A+ for those companies.
Conversely, companies that didn't re-up would have all their past complaints re-instated on their review page and scores drop to C/D/F levels.
Not unlike the Yelp stuff we saw going on last week or the week before here on HN.
This data is across multiple markets / products and joining the BBB is one of the things that we recommend early on to conversion clients.
Consumers trust the brand immensely which is sad given the BBB's "protection money" business model.
When we do focus groups or usability tests with small businesses, they always look at the BBB ratings of the credit card processors on our site. However, I think with our new product Samurai (for online payments - http://samurai.feefighters.com) we'll have a more savvy crowd who doesn't care too much about the BBB.
For those of you who aren't too familiar with FeeFighters - our original product is comparison shopping for credit card processing. A good chunk of our customers are e-commerce businesses, startups, and other "sophisticated" merchants, but we also have a bunch of mom and pop shops (of every sort) who care about stuff like the BBB.
As it turns out, in the couple of months since we had to take the BBB logo off, we have seen no difference whatsoever in our conversion stats.
We've tested across general ecommerce, direct sales sites, lead generation, etc, etc - always comes up with the win when you're testing that "trust symbol" real estate . . .
I'm not kidding. Over time I've learned that when I see the BBB logo I need to be really careful, because scuzzy businesses use it as a cloak. A good example is the "Vancouver Rental Guide" ("Edmonton Rental Guide", etc) which literally sells you the information from craigslist. They cite their BBB credentials over and over to get you to fall for their scam.
Suppose someone on here happens to own a business with BBB accreditation, and that person posts a comment to this thread critical of BBB's handling of the FeeFighters situation. Would you consider that a violation of your terms?
For the record, I'm not criticizing or endorsing what happened with FeeFighters, since I don't necessarily know all the facts.
I'd love it if they followed up.
(as a side note, is it the 'scam' word that you find incendiary? or the cussing? If it's the cussing, how old are you? To me, calling someone a scam is dramatic, while cursing doesn't really register.)
It is both the cussing and the use of the word scam. While I don't generally cuss myself, I have no problem with people speaking or writing like that, but I feel that it does frame the post as "I'm angry and have an anti-BBB agenda" rather than "I am a blogger trying to investigate a potential issue."
I dono I find the subject of the cultural acceptability of cussing to be kind of interesting. I'm considering adding appropriate asterisks to my own writing, more as a humerus affectation than anything else, as I personally can't imagine how the asterisks would make it less offensive, but eh, it's interesting to hear what people think about the subject. I sometimes wonder if I'm being way more offensive than I intend.
It just goes to show that FeeFighters are shaking things up in both their technical field along with other business sectors. If you ask me, that is exactly what a start up should be doing!
Congrats FeeFighters for shaking things up.
One of my clients has a competitor who had an F rating due to numerous consumer complaints. They simply did the above and presto they were back to A- again.
http://labusinessjournal.com/news/2011/jul/25/scandal-may-sh...
Scandal May Shut Business Bureau L.A. chapter hurt by pay-for-play revelations. // By ALFRED LEE // Monday, July 25, 2011
Here's a LA Times article: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/08/business/la-fi-bbb-p...
My assumption was that its influence is quite low since the advent of the Internet. If I were looking to see for a plumber or a moving company, I'd check Yelp or Angie's List not BBB.
If you have sponsored listings you'll always be succeptible to this. There's rumors of the same happening on Yelp (reviews being filtered and such).
I can cut and paste a URL, thanks. This 'Like' spam is something I dislike.
Lamer Business Bureau? Sycophantic Business Bureau? I leave the actual name as an exercise for the reader.
(What's that you say? The limit of 0 * x as x goes to infinity is still zero? Hmm...)
I've heard similar stories in other states. I've always been told, as a consumer, to avoid the BBB and go through the state agencies.
Do I smell a Y Combinator success story in the future?
http://feefighters.com/blog/the-bbb-is-a-scam/
Xpay asked the BBB what they could do to fix the problem.
It turned out that all they needed to do was grease the
wheels. The BBB noted that Xpay wasn’t a member
organization, and by becoming a member organization the
BBB would “look into” those 11 complaints to see if they
were worthy of being wiped clean. Xpay paid the BBB a
fee of $760 (see fee schedule). Within a couple of days
the rating had changed from an F to a C. A few days later
and another phonecall, and the rating was changed to an A-.
They also spelled my name incorrectly (2 different ways!). A classy organization all around.
It's depressing how many companies that once were trustworthy have gradually been taken over by scumbags.
BBB is a business and their terms are well known. Fee Fighters knew them and was required to abide by them and chose not to.
I do like that Fee Fighters is bringing this issue to bear. I'm personally not a fan of BBB. Pay to play doesn't seem like the incentives are aligned correctly. That and I can't afford their accreditation process for my business.