Shopster is Deceptive

I'm a stay home dad. I recently searched the internet for drop shipping companies to sell products online. I like the idea of using a drop shipping company because this way I don't have to worry about warehousing the products myself.

After searching for a few days, I happened upon a company called Shopster. What drew me towards this company was in their advertising. They claim that by joining their company, I could make "Unlimited profits".
This is how Shopster works: They offer members a website where you could sell items from their warehouse. Shopster deals with suppliers who will ship the item once sold from my website that Shopster provides. Shopster also advertises that they store over 700,000 products. That also sounded appealing to me because I new I should be able to find a product that I'd be able to sell with 700,000 to choose from. My membership cost me $330.00 for the year.

I bought a couple of domain names and opend up a couple of stores online and had Shopster host them. I designed the sites and between the two I was allowed to showcase up to 1000 products. I launched a sports autograph store first. Baseball autographs, football, etc. The site looked very professional and I designed a logo and was very excited about it. I advertised using Google adwords and allowed advertising on my site using Google adsense. I handed out business cards. I had a my space account and did everything I could to draw traffic to my site. In one month over 4000 people visited my online autograph store. No sales.

So I tried a second site selling a variety of different products. Electronics, video games, beauty products, music, etc. I paid an additional $99.00 a year for the second store. Again I advertised using Google. Still nothing. Shopster offered a community forum. I began posting. I made adjustments to my sites. Again, nothing. Then I began reading some of the posts. Some of the other members were posting that the prices that Shopster offers were too high. So, I began to research this myself. I found I could purchase many of the products that Shopster offers for a lower price at retail stores like Wal-mart, Best Buy and Circuit City.

I posted this information on the Shopster forums hoping to get a response. Shopster responded with, "I know our prices are high. It's not always about price. You have to give it a year. We are working on getting lower prices." Then I receive an email from an emplyee of Shopster stating he deleted my post about prices and that if my attitude didn't change, he would permenantly ban me from using the forums. Yes, I was being censored by Shopster. Two days later I was kicked off the forums because of a post I made about liability. To say that I was angry would be an understatement. After all, the forums are supposed to be for helping the members of the community.

A few days later I received an email from a potential customer telling me he was interested in a Mickey Mantle signed baseball but found it for half the price at another website and purchased it there. It turned out that nothing I was selling on my site was competitive. I don't expect to always have the best price but I expected to be in the ball park.

Shopster is basically stealing money. Before joining, I was sucked in because they claim I could make "Unlimited profits". In a recent ad, Shopster also claims to have 700,000 products at "Wholesale prices". When they say "Make unlimited profits" their prices need to be competitive in order for me to make any profits; Otherwise it would be like purchasing products from your local retail store and trying to sell them on the internet. You just don't do that. It doesn't work. Shopster is getting products from their suppliers at a low price, then they jack up the price 300-500% and expect their members to offer the products on their sites and make "Unlimited profits". For this, Shopster is misleading and uses deceptive advertising in order to get customers to sign up. This company is running a scam and I've reported them to the BBB amongst other consumer agencies. I've requested a full refund and their statement about making "Unlimited profits" is going to be challenged.