Credit: Kaptain Kobold
Last year I wrote a 3 part series on assessing PPC Competition. Today I received a comment on one of the posts about a customers experience. I have never personally used Keyword Spy so I do not know their customer service one way or the other. I feel the best thing I can do is pass on the experience of my reader. Please if you have any information that may enlighten future users of Keyword Spy please leave a comment.
Apparently Keyword Spy does not allow people to cancel their accounts over the Internet, instead you have to fax the information and wait 2-5 business days for the account to close. They do, however, engage in automated billing. This means that they may bill you while your cancellation is in process. On the Internet there is a certain expectation that you will provide online support for cancellation and billing of your online services.
The buyer really needs to be aware of how these companies handle billing. If a company does not accept cancellation in the same manner they handle billing you should be wary of entering into a recurring bill with them.
Keywordspy Scam Alert!
Firstly I do believe the concept to use such a service is great. Finding out what my competitors are doing is really a good idea. Unfortunately the way KeywordSpy go about it just doesn’t cut it for me.
Firstly what made me signup was the fact that I could see all the keywords my competitors were using. This is great in theory, but after I signed up I found that most of the keywords many of my competitors were using were rubbish. It seems that all my competitors were using keywords that were not working for them. After I signed up I found that over 2/3 of the keywords I received from my competitors were useless.
Secondly I decided to signup was to find the keywords with little competition.
Sure they supply these but out of the few that were actually related to my industry, the analysis was way out of date. All the keywords that Keywordspy said only had 1 competitor really had at least four.
And the final reason for never touching Keywordspy, is they recurring charges. As a merchant I feel it is the customer’s choice weather to stay, this does not apply for Keywordspy. I only wanted to test it for the first month, so three weeks later I logged on to cancel my account. THERE IS NOT AUTOMATED WAY TO DO THIS!
Here is the email I received..
Dear xxxxxx,
We regret to hear that you want to cancel your account with us.
To cancel your subscription, please click the link below and follow the KeywordSpy Subscription Cancellation procedures:
We will process your cancellation upon receipt of the Subscription Cancellation Form. Please note that cancellation request cycle normally takes 3-5 working days to complete.
We wish to join you again in the near future as we continue to include and integrate more features in our system.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
KeywordSpy Support
I have to fax them a copy of a form which is available on their website. The issue with this, it has to be faxed and can take 2-5 working days. Even if I was to fax my application across I would run out of time and be billed for next month. I am unsure of the law on this but shouldn’t the consumer have the right to email KeywordSpy and ask to have their billing authority revoked?
After all this I declined to fax the form and contacted my bank. They told me to send an email to KeywordSpy stating that they no longer have any authority to bill my card. If they bill me again my bank will create an investigation causing a chargeback to Keywordspy,
I am very disappointed with this and believe that the consumer has the right to choose, not to be forced into a silly scheme intended to cost even more
photo credit: Cappellmeister
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