FountainheadME - Amazon & eCommerce ManagementReviews of fountainheadme.com

Original review as overly harsh so I decided to leave another one. What I liked.: 1) They have a data driven approach - Data driven approach to keyword research - Data driven copy production - approach that relatively unique approche 2) They are really nice to talk to - The interactions were actually quite nice 3) Hourly pricing was transparent - The hourly fees are clear and up front What I didn't like.: a) I feel I got over billed - I don't feel the time logged was fair - I felt: - I would get trapped - If I started I would have to go all in - I couldn't predictable total costs - the provided estimated wasn't realistic and it would creep up - If the task isn't finished I would get little to no value b) Failed to follow up - Requested a price ceiling with an 11% buffer on the provided estimate - No one got back to me as agreed upon c) Additional administration charges - Was charged about 5$ to process my credit card - I really didn't like paying for credit card process fees Important note: I contacted them for a product copy, since I didn't feel that I would be in control of the over all cost I asked to add a ceiling to the contact. Since they never got back to me, we never really went through the transaction... I have to admit I completely blew a gasket when I was going through my accounting and saw I was charged almost 5$ to process my credit card when I payed 160$/hour for the consulting fees... I felt that this was unfair, as it is part of business, and should be covered in the hourly rate. As a new amazon seller it is important for me to plan my expenses, unfortunately their solution does not allow for planning very much. Although the cost structure was well explained up front, I felt the provided cost estimate was very optimistic and I feared things would get out of hand. So with a cool head I can say that for 3 stars is based on the following factors: 1- That they did not get back to me 2- I felt time was rounded up, a little too much 3- Getting charged almost 5$ for the privileged of paying them 4- After the initial invoice I feared that I would get trapped, in the contract

This company is not for everyone, certainly wasn't for me. I worked with them for about 6 weeks and they did solve one problem for me but it cost a fortune for them to do it. The overwhelming experience I had was that Fountainhead's main objective was to charge me as much as they could as fast as they could and to leverage their knowledge to help themselves, not me. There are two of their practices I found very greedy and problematic. When they give a quote, it specifically disclaims any promise of success. It's in the nature of "we'll try, but we promise nothing". And one of the worst is that when they put up a quote, they assume, after 24 hours, that you have accepted it. Not good. OK one final thing....I had a specific problem, but they required that I let them go through (at my expense) an analysis of what I needed. From this evaluation, they then made suggestions for very expensive fixes they would like to do. I felt a little like they were just hunting for way to find work rather than trying to help me. Overall, they are more in it for themselves than they are for the customer and if you don't play it their way, the environment becomes adversarial. I did not get value for what I paid.

Work in progress....

This rating system is flawed as in terms of follow up by the account manager, Spero deserves a 4 or 5 stars Quite disappointed in regards to tasks which are taking too long, do not get followed up with the attention they deserve

No comment. Prefer not to make it publicly visible.

UPDATED: After letting FountainheadME optimize my Amazon business for 60 days, I actually had a lower net profit than before using them (not even calculating their fees). I will say that they seem to know what they're doing when it comes to marketing, however they seem to be lacking when it comes to fine tuning and optimizing an Amazon account. My Amazon PPC campaigns were averaging 20% ACos before hiring them and now I'm left with two campaigns, they created, averaging 126% and 56% ACos. My conversion rate on my product page also dropped after they made changes. I will say that the update they did appeared better than the previous version, however something wasn't performing better and a A/B split test should have been done to find out more. In conclusion, I believe FountainheadME would be a good fit for less optimized Amazon accounts, but not accounts who have already optimized listings and want to fine tune even more. I'm now left with having to go back and redo much of the work I've done just to get back to the same profitable level as before. Note: The reason I used 60 days for analyzing performance, was due to a statement they made on their website saying 100% of their Amazon clients made a profit in 60 days.