A few years ago I was taking an entrepreneur lecture series class at BYU. The class was held once a week. Local guests from successful (and sometimes "potentially" successful) companies were invited to come teach the eager young minds of Brigham Young University about achieving success in the secular world. On one particular day, we were blessed with the privilege of a condescension from Brandt Anderson, the founder of uSight and uSight.com. Brandt started his discussion by explaining how he'd risen to such great heights since his first entrepreneurial venture, which involved stenciling basketball court markings on the driveways of people in his neighborhood for something like $20 a piece. He mentioned that back in his stenciling days, he drove a beater Volkswagen Rabbit. At the conclusion of the lecture, a student (obviously impressed at Brandt Anderson's business success) asked him, "What kind of car do you drive now?" Brandt's answer, "Which day?" Wow! If there was a contest for business owners whose ego's kept pace with their earnings, I would have definitely entered this guy.
At least Brandt was a decent lecturer (smooth talking is a gift a lot of entrepreneurs have), and it seemed like he had some good ideas. At the time, I was just building my first online store, OuterSports.com. I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask Brandt some questions, so I got in line after the lecture. He told me to stop by his office where he'd metaphorically toss me some crumbs.
When I went down to the uSight office in Orem, Utah, I came in and introduced myself to Brandt, who sent me to see someone else in the office. At that time, OuterSports.com was hosted on a shared BizHosting.com server, and I was interested in finding out if I could build my own shopping cart setup using JSP and Servlets, and host it with uSight.com. A marketing guy at the company jumped the gun and told me they'd host it for free for me since I was one of Brandt's fellow "Zoobies" (BYU student). I was pretty excited about the prospect of using one of their servers and being given preferential treatment.
In the end, access to my own personal web server at uSight.com never became a reality. Either they never intended to make good on the favor they'd offered, or their tech guys decided it was an unreasonable request. During this process of trying to get my account set up on a uSight server, I was asked to do a testimonial for them. They took me to a photographer and asked me to make some favorable statements about them. The end result was my picture on the uSight.com customer testimonials page. I've since asked them to remove it, but apparently testimonials are hard to come by for uSight.com. They still have my picture and testimonial up there. I'm the goofy bald guy wearing the OuterSports.com shirt. The funny thing about it is that the testimonial is on a page entitled "Real Stories".
Here is what's real about uSight.com's story. They promise a lot, and they deliver next to nothing. From what I've observed of companies like uSight.com (see my Simplx.com article), they are intentionally set up that way. I don't know if Brandt Anderson ever intended to sell a legitimate product, but ultimately he persisted in peddling a product that was definitely not what he said it was, right up until the time he sold the company to an organization called National Marketing Resources.
Shortly after I gave my "Real Story" testimonial about uSight.com, the deal they promised me ended up being nothing more than hype. Over the next few months, I found out that I wasn't unique in experiencing a letdown after getting involved with uSight. At least mine didn't cost me any money.
At least a few times each week I got calls from uSight.com customers who either claimed that they were afraid they had been scammed by uSight, they were considering using uSight's services and were nervous that the deal was too good to be true, or they were frustrated about not getting what uSight promised them. Many of uSight.com's customers who were still in the denial stage about what they had just purchased contacted me to find out how I managed to have such a different experience (judging from my testimonial) than they had had. These people had seen my company listed on uSight's "Real Stories" page, and they called the OuterSports.com customer service line to get some answers on how to get uSight to live up to the promises that had been sold. There were a few times I tried to use uSight's toll free number and their direct line to contact one of the guys I'd worked with while doing the testimonial. I never once was able to get a person to answer the phone. Instead, I was routed to a few different departments until I was tired of waiting for someone to answer. For me it wasn't a big deal, because I had the guy's cell phone number available. However, for someone who paid thousands of dollars to have access to a "coach" supposedly available at the other end of the line, the lack of availability much have been frustrating to say the least. I apologize to anyone who based any part of their decision to get tangled up with uSight.om on my goofy picture and concocted praise of the company.
Among the calls I received because my testimonial appeared on uSight's website was one from the Utah Division of Consumer Protection, who'd received so many complaints about the company that they were doing an investigation. The person who called asked me whether I knew that my picture was on uSight's website as part of a testimonial. I explained how that happened, telling them that after I did the testimonial, I never even got to the point where I used their service because they had backed out of what they originally offered.
My advice to anyone else who may be considering using uSight.com is to find a different source for your drop-shipping needs, your shopping cart and hosting, and whatever coaching you will need to help you market your site. There are sources available that are much more cost efficient, including manufacturers who'd be glad to have you help them turn over their inventory, free shopping carts like Zen Cart and Magento, decent hosting plans for as little as $5.00 per month, and a world of free information about promoting your site using search engine optimization and other marketing strategies.
One last interesting note about uSight.com: It looks like they do know a little something about manipulating search results. While I was writing this article, I googled 'usight', and I came up with some pages they've put out on the web to try to squeeze the negative search results off the first page of the search engines. For instance, here is an About Us page that showed up #16 on my Google search: http://usight-hosting.com/about-usight.html . You'll notice that this page includes the terms scams, frauds, fakes, and rip-offs. Those links point right back to the page they appear on. This technique is a well-know search optimization strategy to make that page show up high in the search engines for those keyword terms. The hope by uSight is that if someone does a search for "usight scam" or "usight fraud", uSight's "About Us" page and other planted pages will show up at the top of the search results, making is so that people who attend their seminars don't see the negative commentaries about them. Here is a list of pages uSight has created specifically to push negative reviews down the list of search results.
usight-hosting.com/usight-fraud-rip-off-scam-fake.html
www.usight-design-templates.com/usight-fraud-rip-off-scam-fake.html
www.usight-ecommerce.com/about-usight.html
ubuilder-design.com/about-usight.html
usight-merchant-account.com/usight-fraud-rip-off-scam-fake.html
www.usight-marketing.com/privacy-policy.html
www.usight-business-solutions.com/10reasons.html
ubuilder-software.com/about-usight.html
If you'd rather have this post show up at the top of a Google search for any of those search terms, feel free to add a link from your website to this post, and include something like this for the HTML code to create the link: <a href="http://ecommercesuccessstory.blogspot.com/2009/09/usightcom-scam.html">usight scam</a>. As I discuss in my posts on search engine optimization, linking to this post using those keywords as the anchor text will cause this post to rise to the top of Google when someone does a search for that term.