Review Title: Too Bad You Can't Report the BBB to themselves [ View All Reviews ]

If you're running a small business and you thought about shelling out the money that the Silicon Valley chapter of the Better Business Bureau wants to make you a proud member, save the cash unless you only want to the membership for the positive aura that the general public associates with any place hanging the BBB member plaque. If you're one of these people, I hate to tell you, the BBB aura as the consumer's guardian is not deserved.

I got fleeced around $400 total for a basic membership and a special "online reliability" graphic that I could stick on my website. It was a complete waste of money. I wouldn't have minded as much if I had felt that my money somehow ended up protecting my rights as a consumer, but I've had very serious run ins with companies that had no business with a "satisifactory" BBB rating. That's the same rating I and just about everyone else had. "Satisfactory" is not how I would describe a company that ripped me off of over $2000 and has miles of bad reviews online.

The Silicon Valley chapter of the BBB is a Skunk. Here are six signs of a Skunky Organization.

SIGN #1: You don't meet their very lenient membership requirement of having been in business for a full year and the sales person changes gears and explores "other ways" your business is at least a year old.

In my case, it wasn't an unethical thing to do. My business license was only 6 months old at the time, but I've been doing web development work on the side for years. I offered to show my filing for a business name that was made well in advance of me actually declaring my web development work as a business.
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SIGN #2: You tell them to lookup your alternate proof of qualification (fictitious business license filing) and they have no idea what you're talking about.

They wanted me to fax a copy of my fictitious business license filing, but I couldn't find it. I told them to go look it up in public records online. They didn't know how to do that so I sent them a link to a website run by the county with all sorts of public records on it. They still couldn't find it so I had to tell them where to move the mouse and what to click.
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SIGN #3: You get your membership application packet and it's a photocopy of a photocopy made too many years ago.

The membership form was hard to read. It was grainy and crooked and there was a date on it that betrayed the advanced age of the original document.
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SIGN #4: The $240 special service that you purchased that allows you to post a special graphic on your website to invite people to lookup your BBB records ends up not having the BBB name anywhere on it.

I'm a web developer and I sell web hosting. If I pay for a BBB membership, I want to show it on my website. They inform me that I didn't pay enough to display the BBB logo on my site. The "reliability report" graphic was a cheaper privilege because it didn't have the BBB logo on it. This would have been less of a problem had that graphic not looked as if it was pulled straight out of Microsoft Office clip art from the 1990's. I wasn't going to deface my website with that piece of crap! The privilege to show the BBB logo would cost like another $400-$600. No thanks.
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SIGN #5: Half a year into your membership and you feel like you've been had. They lose track of you and call you up again and start to give you the same sales pitch on why you should join the Better Business Bureau.

I was astonished for two reasons. First it just showed me just how disorganized they were. Second, they gave me the same sales pitch, which made me realize that some of the things they said to convince me into joining was nothing more than sweet talking garbage.
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SIGN #6: After your membership expires, they call you again with a very similar sales pitch as they did the first time. By this time, you realize the "reason" they have for calling you is a false front.

A few months after my membership expires, the same sales person calls me and thanks me for being a member in the past. She tells me that I've been receiving hits on the BBB website and that usually means that people are checking up on me so they can do business with me. She goes on to explain that they have a high rate of successful referrals from their website from people looking for BBB members to do business with. The story is plausible, but I just find it hard to believe that an organization that needed me to talk them through a public records website has the ability to mine their web traffic reports for the business intelligence to make this kind of claim to me.
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I'm sure not every Better Business Bureau is this bad, but with the advent of direct consumer reviews online, it just goes to show how dated and flawed the BBB reporting can be.