Zibbet Review: Owners Jonathan Peacock & Andrew Gray Should Personally Invest to Provide What They Sold Customers

Why should Zibbet customers bear the financial hit for owners Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray's delay in the rebuild?  They owe their customers all of what we paid for and should personally invest in the site to provide those services or refund every single customer for the fees paid, if requested  Their "oh gee, we sold you this, but you aren't getting it" is not acceptable.  

We were sold these things:

1.  That the site would be rebuilt early 2014, with date of relaunch to be announced in January.  (Not happening, and no solid date will be given).
2.  That Zibbet was automatically submitting our items to 20 million buyers at The Find.com.  (Not happening,  blamed on Zibbet site issues that will be fixed in the rebuild but not disclosed AND STILL USED TO LURE NEW CUSTOMERS until "outed" a few weeks ago on the forums. The "false expectations" referenced by Peacock and quoted below.

When cornered on the Zibbet forums in January about the silence on the rebuild, CEO Jonathan Peacock admitted:
Essentially we have over-promised and significantly under-delivered, which is NEVER good in business.
No, it is not.  And wouldn't be acceptable to 99% of the experienced Etsy sellers who invested in Zibbet shops in whole or in part on the promises given in their forums and on their sales page.

MANY of us with businesses scramble at times to ensure we deliver as promised to OUR customers.  Sometimes it means pulling all-nighters, sometimes it means spending our family money to hire help or resources. 

I have done it.  I've accepted portrait commissions with a Christmas deadline that I find I underestimated.  The ethical thing for me to do is to do all I can, personally, to fulfill my promise.  That means investing my family money into doing whatever I MUST DO to make it happen.  I pay out of pocket for expedited shipping, I get take out, I stay up all night until my eyeballs literally burn to honor my contract with my customer.

I don't just wait until I'm past deadline and cornered,  to tell the customer:   I have over-promised and significantly under-delivered, which is NEVER good in business and leave it at that, as Zibbet has done!  Precious few of us would ever do that.  If I were ever in the position that I could not deliver, I would offer a refund.  Zibbet refuses to do that.  WE pay for their mistakes, not them.  The owners, Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray, should dig into their own pockets to live up to their promises, like most of us do when we err.

WHY THE REBUILD TIMING MATTERS

Why does the rebuild date matter so much that it affects our bottom lines?  Because the current Zibbet site does not entice buyers or promote sales.  And time is money.  Knowing you're blowing a couple of months fees til the site relaunches is a loss many of us were willing to take BASED ON THE PROMISES of the owners.  Losing half a year?  Not acceptable.  Not even knowing if the whole year's worth of fees are blown because they have no idea when they'll launch after taking our money?  Unacceptable.  They should refund us since they can't deliver what they sold us.   Personally, if necessary.

 Many of us were willing to invest in shops last fall based on representations Zibbet made regarding the rebuild timing.  Some were planning "Shop Grand Openings" this winter, to coincide with the promised relaunch, this month or next. The time wasted on listing at Zibbet in anticipation of the promised relaunch is a financial hit few of us sellers will ever recover from.  It is so much more than just the Premium Account fees, and I want that back, too!

WHY THE REBUILD MATTERS

The "rebuild" or "relaunch" of the site was mentioned frequently as the panacea for all the other issues on the site.  The horrible, blurry photos of our items, the wait of nearly an hour for newly listed items to appear, the downtime, the tacky and dated-looking front page, the lack of credible site stats, issues with checkout and paypal interfacing, the inability to bulk edit, the dinosaur-age message system between buyers and sellers, the site slowness, the site stability, the awful jerry-rigged internal search, to name just a few issues that make Zibbet shops less competitive than selling on up to date ones.

All of which affects the "sellers" (Zibbet paying customers) bottom line because buyers aren't attracted to buy, or even brought to the site at all as promised. 

WHY THE FIND.COM MATTERS

Zibbet's stability issues is the excuse for why 20 million buyers are not being shown our items via The Find.com.  Since we knew Zibbet has little internal traffic, being found via the internet is essential.  Yet Zibbet chose to stop providing that service and didn't tell us, again until forced to when confronted on the forums.

Yes, we paying customers all assumed our items were being promoted via The Find.  Zibbet said so, had it as a major feature on the page to invest in a shop on Zibbet WHEN WE BOUGHT.  How could we have possibly known that was NOT TRUE?  Knowing that our items were being submitted to 20 million buyers on The Find.com was a selling point for many of us.  It is why I invested in 3 paying Zibbet shops, in addition to the promised relaunch.  It was used by the owners as a major selling point up to the day they were forced to admit on the forums that they were not providing that service!  See cut and paste (J and A, I also have screen shots).

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Peacock (Zibbet's CEO) on January 26, 2014 at 3:20pm

Hi Deb,

We've had some issues that we haven't been able to resolve with our feed to The Find. Some sellers will find a few of their items on The Find, others will not. 

The main reason we've had trouble getting it to work, is because of the bad architecture of our current site. 

We have decided that we're going to hold off on sumbitting to The Find until the relaunch of the new site. The Find doesn't send a huge amount of traffic to Zibbet for the items that are indexed there, so we deemed it low priority.

You should definitely get to listing those items though. The organic traffic that you'll get from your items being indexed on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, will far outweigh the traffic that The Find would send you.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Peacock (Zibbet's CEO) on January 26, 2014 at 3:24pm

Btw, I will organize for The Find reference to be removed from the seller sign-up page. Hopefully this will avoid confusion in between now and relaunch.

THE BO

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Peacock (Zibbet's CEO) on January 30, 2014 at 2:11pm

Hi everyone,

As mentioned, The Find feed submission hasn't been working for a while. It is now removed from our pricing page. We apologize to anyone that felt mislead by this. It was not our intention. 

Whilst TheFind has the potential to send traffic to Zibbet, it is a very small amount. If it were significant, we would be straight onto fixing it right away. You will get more traffic by simply listing 10 more items in your shop, which will get picked up by Google and other search engines, then you would from The Find. 

I'm going to close this thread up and if anyone has further questions, you are welcome to email me directly: 

Again the relaunch used as an excuse not to provide this service (which many of us find very helpful productive elsewhere where we can actually track where our views come from).  Also note that his opinion on getting more traffic by listing more is in dispute, being that my research and others' is showing that Google isn't providing ANY results for Zibbet within 10 pages for buyers searching for common items like "steampunk earrings", see previous posts in this blog on this issue.

THE BOTTOM LINE
So the relaunch we were promised by the owners AND the outside promotion sold to us by the owners are not happening, we customers are left holding the bag.  What are owners Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray doing to uphold the contract they made with us? 

Are they refunding when requested?  Nope.  We pay, they don't. 

Are they investing their own money?  Haven't heard it.  In fact, they say the rebuild all hinges on Zibbet Premium Account money.  My money. Your money.  Not their money.

There are sellers like me who depend on their online sales to pay their bills.  Their mortgages, electric, food, water, children's schools, health insurance, supplies.  Sellers who do whatever it takes to live up to the promises they made to their customers.  Sellers who invested their hard earned money in a site where owners make promises, then kinda shrug their shoulders, and say "gosh, gee, this is LOT harder than I thought, heh, heh, well, maybe someday you'll get what you paid for, but I ain't making any more promises!"  Tee hee.

They NOW say (I cut and paste, have screen shot):
We would encourage those that are considering a Premium membership only on the basis of the rebuild, to wait until launch to upgrade. We don't want to create any false expectations."
--------
And I say What about those who already PAID for a (or many) PREMIUM MEMBERSHIPS ON THE BASIS OF THE EXPECTATIONS THAT YOU CREATED THAT WERE FALSE?

What is the ethical thing to do?  What is the moral thing to do?  What is a good business thing to do?

Refund those of us who have requested it.  And stop chasing even more sellers away with your whack-a-mole mutings of customers who ask you hard questions in the Zibbet forums.  We just want what we paid for.  From whatever source you have to get the money, Zibbet owners Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray, whatever it takes, just do it.

The momentum Zibbet HAD in the fall began to crumble when Andrew Gray put all of our shops at risk by tweeting controversial political opinions and religious views along with tweets about Zibbet.  And their subsequent actions on the forums hurt, too.  But refusing to refund those of us who have requested them because of promises not kept and services not rendered, is the biggest blow.  It's gone from primary site or second selling site to not worth it at all.  Based on owner actions and inactions.  We all deserve better.  Give us our money back.  It's only right.