I can tell you that I have been through it and everything that is said about this company is true. I will never recommend these people to anyone. Not even my worst enemy.

This could be why when you researched the BBB concerning Heritage Web Solutions you thought it would be Okay to go with these people; But read this warning below and BEWARE!

BBB- THE FOX GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE

It has been reported to the 'badbusinessbureau.com' that,
the BBB encourages and solicits money from the very businesses they monitor! How could this be beneficial to the consumer?

Consumers have reported, the BBB DOES NOT report consumer complaints which are under investigation, even when they know the business is under criminal investigation and is about to be shut down. (see victim's story down below)

What the BBB does, is give the business that is being reported the opportunity to respond. If the business responds many times this is enough to give the business a satisfactory rating, no matter what their response is!

Most BBB offices do not report any past history of a business, even when that business continuously victimizes different consumers. Even when the business just continuously satisfies each costumer complaint, you will never know of this information in the future. All you might know is, ... 'they have satisfied their complaints.' ..GIVING THEM A SATISFACTORY RATING.

Even when a business does have complaints that are unsatisfied, they still might get a satisfactory rating. The BBB Better Business Bureau will not tell you what the complaints were even when they tell you, they satisfied all complaints. The BBB must realize what a consumer must have gone through before resorting to filing a complaint! And for every consumer that did file a Complaint, there are 20 others that did not complain. And you can be next!

When consumers see that Better Business Bureau plaque, this gives the consumer a false sense of security. Consumers need to be made aware of this rip-off & misconception nationwide.

Remember, all you need to do to become a BBB member and get that very impressive, overrated BBB plaque, is to call the BBB and tell them you want to be a member. You can tell the BBB any lie you want about yourself, ...they will never check it out. That's correct! They never check it out. All that BBB plaque means is, they paid their dues. (Period)

Services they provide? Services is an over statement! If they ever try to resolve your dispute by having mediation, the BBB decision means nothing in a court of law.

The BBB does provide a mediation service, but the BBB cannot force the business to do anything for you to resolve your consumer rip-off. They can only make suggestions. And if the business does not comply, this will not insure an unsatisfactory rating for the business that ripped you off.

Not too good for the consumer who has been victimized and not to good for future consumers who will call the BBB to see if the business has a good rating before they do business..

Even when many complaints are satisfied by a business, they can still get a satisfactory rating. Many times, all a business needs to do to satisfy the victim's complaint is just simply answer the BBB alleged complaint.

Consumers put too much faith and respect into the BBB. The BBB is in the business of collecting fees from the very businesses they monitor. That's like the fox guarding the hen house.

And we wonder why the courts are so jam packed?

And we wonder why the Attorney General's office cannot give the consumer any attention. The AG's office only has time for the high profile cases. They are way-under-staffed. (Another subject for another time)

The above information about the BBB may vary form state to state, where some BBB offices may be more scrutinizing in their efforts to check on business when becoming a member and some BBB offices might be more thorough and revealing in reporting than the BBB offices we have investigated around the United States.

Badbusinessbureau.com does recommend the BBB to consumers, because it is so hard for a business to get a bad report with the BBB, we always recommend for a consumer, when filing a report with the badbusinessbureau.com or before doing business, to check with the Better Business Bureau first. You know a business is really BAD if it has an unsatisfactory rating with the BBB!

ALL the statements are all alleged allegations. We are not recommending you not patronize the BBB.

Heritage Web Solutions:

I am at a loss for words to describe the horrible experience of finding out that your server crashed and that you did not have a back up more recent than July 8.

When the server went back online, our site AFFPS.COM had some old files, some missing files, a disabled shopping cart, a subsite (Decatur Market) that was completely lost.

I cannot access the shopping cart from AFFPS.COM/CART/ADMIN.

Our merchant account with Authorize.net has received scrambled data and some orders (with multiple names assigned to the same invoice) that never went through the shopping cart. Authorize.net is also holding some unprocessed orders that were sent from our shopping cart which cannot be processed. I have repeatedly asked for this problem to be fixed, but NO ONE has responded.

Our business is crippled due to the complete disregard for customer service by Heritage Web Solutions. I have called many times today, but never get a call back.

The only person who has demonstrated interest in the success of our site is Kristina Roberts, and she has been reassigned to other areas within your company. I know that she would be very sad to know that the site she helped design has been treated with little or no regard by others.

We promoted Labor Day reservations (purchases on our site) by spending a lot of money. Now we are losing thousands of dollars each hour since we cannot receive or access customer orders.

Our phones are ringing off the hook and I'm handling them as best I can, working late hours. I cannot imagine that your company would just LEAVE work for the day without any interest in helping your clients, but that is what happened. I finally got a hold of one tech person by phone at 5:30 p.m. who told me he was aware of the problems but that no one was working on it. He said he would try to reach his manager, but again that yielded no response.

What will you do to rebuild our site's missing files? Will you take any preventative measures? How can you operate in this manner?

I have learned a hard lesson with Heritage Web Solutions. IF our site becomes operational again, I will only use it until I have established a new contract with a new provider.

AFFPS
Atlanta, Georgia
U.S.A.

You contact Heritage Web Solutions and the sales department is really nice and let you know that you will have a web design in about 4-6 weeks BUT this is how they really get away with MURDER!

After you are told about the price agreement and hosting fees that they want you to pay at least for one year before you can even transfer to another hosting site. But hey, of course they try to give you a little courtesy by telling you that in order to do that transfer you must pay them ONE YEAR HOSTING FEES!

Everything will seem fine at the beginning and they tell you that your account manager will be contacting you soon and they do but hold up. this is what gets better.

Your account manager is trained to encourage you to go ahead and submit your information/content to them. You start submitting your content and you get some information where you must choose your design colors etc. but of course before that information can be submitted, you must electronically sign the TOS (Terms of Service Agreement).

Get this in their terms of Agreement, it states that once content have been submitted, you have already been bind as far as agreeing that they will be working on your website as your web designers so, you are already backed up against the wall.

They 1. Get you to submit content

2. Tell you to pick out your color scheme for your web etc.

3. Have you sign their Terms of Agreement (Sorry theirs nothing that protects YOU as their client)!

4. Whether you like it or not you already submitted content to your account manager and was therefore bind to their agreement in their TOS statement.

5. As their client they state that you have no rights to complain about them.

6. They make you not get to worried about charging you for hosting fees because they place a little temporary website their just in case you ask too many questions.

7. They have no guarantee that their website will work once completed.

8. They state that you hire them AT YOUR OWN RISK!

9. They expect YOU as a client to test your own technical part of the web before go live. MMMMMMMM. wonder how you do that as a client?!

10. Their sales person may say 4-6 weeks but they will be VERY quick to promise you, HEY did you read or TOS we make NO guarantees. That was only a time frame.

11- 100. CAN YOU SAY RIP OFF!! They GOTCHA!!

Oh PS You really didn't expect to keep YOUR domain name if you only register it but not purchase it right, because if they purchased it, go ahead and FORGET it because they do have rights to that name for an ENTIRE year.

Your reading this right? Which means it happened to you too! Go ahead and tell your story! Hey, Don't forget the BBB.org (Better Business Bureau)

Unknown
Adamstown, Maryland
U.S.A.

This company advertises that optimization is a very important part of your website, however, after you purchase you then find out as I did that unless you pay thousands more they only do a minimum optimization - not what they claim as advertised or lead you to believe when speaking to them. You can not access this area to do this yourself.

All the instructions for updating/editing your site are incomplete and after I bought this program I was informed that I had asked for too much to be done and they only provide so many hours of free work so I will have to pay them $60 an hour to do anything beyond that. The gimmick here is they never tell you how many hours it will take them to do anything. The bill could run into hundreds of dollars.

It is true I did not buy the biggest package from them, however, I would think I should be able to edit my entire site within reason. They have set it up so that adding an outside link to your page is often impossible or it comes out looking weird.

Often when they did the initial set up I would have to have them go back to do what they should have done to begin with - their incomplete work.

You never know who is working on what part of your site when you do the set up and it took a very long time to complete it. Phone contact with the techs is impossible at times so one has to wait for e mail communication - that was not really made clear at the onset.

I now have a site that I cannot finish without paying more for them to do the correct optimization needed for search engines like google. I also have very little support time each month.

I would not recommend this company even though they brag that they are in the 1% of the top designers now. I suppose that is for the large corporations that can pay thousands of dollars.

Margaret
Cottonwood, Arizona
U.S.A.