One of the advertising channels considered for a recent campaign for a local business client was yellowpages.com. I wrote about this campaign in a previous post.
This was the first time I've done any paid advertising with yellowpages.com and I'd like to describe the hell they've been putting me through.
Before I go on, I just want to make a point of saying that I'm not a noobie when it comes to working with paid online services. It's what I do for a living. I work with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and have subscriptions with 2 web hosts, Skype, Carbonite and Flickr. I have never had a problem with a vendor's terms and conditions until now.
I had decided on doing a $50/month premium listing with them that basically gives you more visibility on the business listings pages. The process for creating an account and then your listing is awkward and very unstreamlined. I glossed over the terms and conditions (because when you use a lot of online services the way that I do, you just assume that the larger service providers like yellowpages.com have reasonable T&Cs so it's not worth your time to read through them - an assumption that I figured out to be wrong later), entered in my credit card info and clicked submit. When done, I had no idea of what the payment schedule was or what the next steps would be.
Okay, I thought. Maybe they'll send me an e-mail telling me what the next steps are or when the listing would go live. I received no e-mail, so I called their customer support two days later. I asked for clarity on the payment schedule, and they said that it was $50/month with a 12 month minimum. "Okay," I said, "let me cancel this listing then." This 12 month minimum was news to me and I wasn't interested in having the paid listing run for that long (after all, this was part of a 2 - 3 month campaign). Their response was basically, "It's too late. You agreed to our T&Cs and clicked submit. We have to charge you." Flabbergasted, I told them that this payment schedule wasn't clear at all, to which they told me that had I read the T&Cs, it would've been clear.
I don't have statistics on what percentage of people read the T&Cs before signing up for an online service, but I would bet it's way below 50%. You generally assume that they're reasonable and that if there's an issue, customer support will help you make it right. Which brings me to my next point - locking someone into a 12 month contract for something like a premium listing are not reasonable terms and conditions. I can understand for services like a cell phone where there are significant upfront costs that they would want a term contract. However, with a premium listing, there is no cost to them associated with setting it up. Yellowpages.com tricked me into this 12 month contract by not being clear about it, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, they wouldn't let me out.
Appalled by their attitude towards customer service, I logged in and changed the credit card number so that they wouldn't be able to charge me. They then started sending me e-mails of threats that they're going to send this to a collections agency, so I logged back in and changed my e-mail address. Hopefully this will be the last I'll hear from these pathetic buggers.