Let me first preface that I would not be writing this if they had just honored our agreement and not sold our products in any way. They failed to honor that and this is why I write this so you all know how it works and to be aware of the possible theft and fraud that"indirectly" occurs with this company.
As a business owner I was approached some time ago by this company. They asked us to see the value in their Barter and told us how much savings we would get if we joined them. We have a "Very Popular" venue and our trade started to sell like gangbusters...so much so they had to raise our credit limit to over 30,000.00 dollars. At first it seemed lucrative. But it didnt take long to see the erro we made as a business owner with this company. This is how it works.....
They give you an amount to barter with and you can use any servoces you currently pay cash for with your new found barter. The agreement states that they MUST honor the same cost. This does not happen. We started to negociate with approved vendors a price PRIOR to telling them we were members so they couldnt rip us off. They would either honor it the one time and say the price has increased for no apperant reason thereafter. (we have proof of this which we supplied again and again to them and it fell on deaf ears) So the costs for us was we lost full price at our door and the other vendors were getting an inflated value or 50% cash (which was closer to 90% of the cash they charged) and we lost out on the savings.
It gets better. Say you are a member. You have a dry cleaner and they gave you 3000.00 in trade as your credit. Times are tuff and so you go to IMS and find a fbig fish like Best Buy or Dave & BUsters (both dont have membership for this very reason) and take 3000.00 dollars worth of gift cards and then sell them for half the value in cash on Craigs list/Ebay/Amazon and you score up to 3000.00 in cash while we have to eat the discount. And if the vendors we deal with inflate the value to cover their cash loss......you get losses from both sides.
These things REALLY happend! And after months of making it abondantly clear by showing them Ebay sites, showing them vendor usages, all they could say is there is nothing they can do. I informed them we will complete our finacial obligation loosing thousands of dollars and then I wanted none of our products to be sold or represented by IMS. They assured this would be the case. I have attached a real email I recieved today for you to read from one of my vendors years later after we left this program. He justsent this to me today.I have removed the names as to not expose anyone to unwanted attention.
uick question for you? IMS approached me and said they would buy my stonefire Cards at a premium. I wasn't interested. I could do it thru my account if you like so you wouldn't have to deal with them. You could sell $100 in cars for $130 or something trade. Just an offer for you! xxxxxxxx (xxx) xxx-xxxx S2 Computer Support Is your AntiVirus up to date? Do you know if you have your data backed up? They approched him for trade we "directly" gave him! They offer to buy it so THEY could sell it! Just how long that has been going on is unclear to me but it still means we loose. They sell if for a discount and we eat half. It is a very concerning way of doing business and if you are concidering them pay careful head to these words.....beware of empty promises. As a very intelegent person said once. "If it seems to be too good to be true......It probably is!
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