PinkSheep - www.pinksheep.co.uk

Mr Schofield,

As always here at Pinksheep we appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, however we do insist that the information is factual.

There are numerous false accusations and inconsistencies in this review alone but i'll do my best to state the exact turn of events, with factual information including various quotes and dates from emails we have received from you:

- We are called Pinksheep Limited, not Pinksheep SEO. Pinksheep SEO would suggest that we offered, and provided you with, a Search Engine Optimisation service which we did not. We are Pay Per Click (PPC) specialists and have been for almost 10 years. These are 2 completely separate advertising mediums, however we assume you must understand this basic differential in order to set your stool out and stake, at the very least, a reasonable claim?

- We received an email from you on 11/03/2012, (our first contact of any kind), requesting a proposal and stating that, "We are a sofa online/retail business. We currently spend £XXX pm on ppc with google. Sales are stagnant if not declining a little (web based)". Bizarre, because the first paragraph of your review states the complete opposite? Never mind, lets move on to the next paragraph...

- Oh, you've referred to us as Pinksheep SEO again. Please see our first point for clarification on this. You have also claimed that we made some "promises" about our service. We'd be very keen to see/hear exactly what these promises are since we do not, will not, and never have offered any kind of promise or guarantee to any of our PPC clients. We are open and transparent wherever possible and accept the fact that with something like PPC it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to guarantee any sort of improved performance. We have lots of experience and knowledge which, combined with proven methods and techniques, can be highly beneficial to PPC Campaigns.

- We are not sure why you thought we were a blue-chip company, we certainly do not sell ourselves as such and can honesty say that in almost 10 years of trading i have never, ever used that phrase to describe us. Maybe you shouldn't have assumed, and just asked. If you had you would have discovered that there are currently 5 of us in the PPC department (2 Sales Consultants and 3 Account Managers) and prior to the recession hitting a few years ago we had double that amount of staff. We also have 4 people in our Pinksheep Print department, 2 more in Pinksheep Clothing and another 2 that look after Pinksheep Web Design. All in all it's a very friendly and lively office, which you are more than welcome to come and visit at any point.

- "...from the initial signing of the contract...". Could you please clarify for us, and anyone else that reads this, exactly what date this was please? We began working for you on 16/03/12 upon receiving an email which stated "I agree to the t&cs sent over by Email. I will foward a signed copy within 72 hours.". We don't normally do this but since you were so keen for us to get started, based largely on your previous email from 14/03/12, "Your proposal is by far the most professional and thorough. I will be happy to undertake a 3 month trial subject to agreeing a spend and fee for this period.", we believed a good business relationship had started. How wrong we were.

After failing to return the signed hard copy within 72 hours we sent numerous emails reminding you to do so. These emails date all the way through to early/mid April 2012 and we finally received the signed documents on 26/04/12, just the 5 weeks late.

With regards to time-frames and launch dates, these vary case on case, client by client. Naturally we look to implement our work, which also included restructuring your entire account in this instance, as soon as possible. Again however, we do not "guarantee" it'll be done within a specific time-frame. We prefer to ensure that the work is done properly, if it takes a few days then so be it, and we'd assume our clients would appreciate this and request this level of accuracy too? Once again, we have email threads detailing our progress, updating you every step of the way until the campaigns went live.

- Upon your initial concern over the use of "italian leather sofas", and various related search terms, as a keyword we confirmed in our email dated 23/03/12 that ,"They were keywords that had previously been running related to Italian leather sofas. I can do one of two things, pause the keywords all together or keep them running, but alter the advert?". So just to clarify; you are unhappy that we continued to manage an existing keyword which had been implemented by yourself (we can only assume, since you have disabled our access and breached the Terms and Conditions, which i'll come to later) and given you various options on how to resolve the issue? We'd love to know what else we could have done for you, please enlighten us.

With regards to apparently, "...forcing the majority of my monthly spend...", i'd urge you to provide one single piece of evidence on this immediately. Our work ethic and approach to client budgets has been, and always will be, reactive. If you're happy with our work and the results then it is entirely up to the client to increase/decrease the spend. Yes, we may put suggestions and estimates together but only on request from the client, absolutely never forced. This is something we take very seriously and again, i'd encourage you to back up such an outrageous claim instead of throwing false accusations around.

- If you had left our work running in the Account for a solid month, after committing to 3 months, then maybe it would of had time to take effect. Yet again however you have provided incorrect details with dates and time-frames that are way, way off. We actually received an email from you just 10 days after the campaigns went live, claiming that, "enquiries, swatch orders and revenue is down, even though the CPC has increased greatly.". Aside from the fact that we worked on an Account owned by you, which you had complete access to at any point in order to view/edit/approve our work, we'd assume only someone sabotaging your PPC Account could have such a detrimental effect on your business in just 10 days. At this stage it's probably worth highlighting your first paragraph, and our second point, where you emphatically contradict yourself when summarising the importance, dependancy and/or performance of previous PPC campaigns.

- We can only assume that you read the Terms and Conditions which you signed, there's only 19 points covering one side of A4 so we certainly hope so, i know i don't sign anything without reading it first. On this basis you'd be more than aware of our cancellation process, and that at no point are you "tied in to a contract". Our clients have the ability to cancel at any point, at which stage there is a cancellation fee to pay, naturally, which is pro-rartered. Upon your initial request to cancel, (your email dated 23/04/12, one month into the contract), we informed you that, "we would need payment for one months management fee plus the cancellation charge.This would amount to £300 + VAT.". Your response to us roughly 8 minutes later, via email - "I am happy to pay £150 but not £300 - I think you have an absolute cheek asking for £150!".

I personally responded approx 1 hour later to clarify the situation and outline that, "the additional £150 (plus VAT) is the Cancellation Fee amount...Naturally we'd rather work with you for the initial 3 month period which you agreed to, however should you wish to cancel early this additional fee will apply.". Later that afternoon you confirmed that, "I will stick with it for 3 months then - can you please call me tomorrow at 14.00 to discuss.". If we are missing some information, such as a completely separate conversation in which we insist you have to honour the contract, cannot cancel unless you pay us a ludicrous amount of money and that expresses your adamant "reluctancy" to continue the service, please inform us.

- One month after expressing your initial desire to cancel and subsequent change of heart, the exact same day, we received another request to cancel via email, "We are cancelling our campaign with immediate effect due to the poor results that have materialized in lieu of the results promised. A payment will be raised by accounts within 10 working days to cover work undertaken.". I fear i'll be repeating myself once again but just to be certain; as i have previously stated, NO results were "promised". Ever.

You'll also note that at this stage you're happy to pay the 2 management fee invoices, despite us apparently being "...useless and putting me out of business.".

To date we have not received a penny from you, hence the legal action and subsequent Court Claim that is still in progress.

- I am 30 years old and, of the PPC department, i am the oldest by 2 years. I am not sure how old you are and to be honest it has zero influence and/or relevance in this, or any, instance when conducting business.

I'm not entirely sure what our location has to do with anything either. From my basic understanding of a map there are plenty of places South of you, (Nottingham), and had we known this would be such an issue we could have recommended a local PPC Agency for you, or perhaps one North/East/West of you if that's more appropriate?

- I genuinely do not believe that we, or anyone who reads this review, will ever witness a more obvious case of "sour grapes", contrary to your comments.

Oh and look, you've called us Pinksheep SEO again just 1 line and 2 words after referring to our PPC service. We clearly have no idea.

To summarise; you approached us, we worked for you but unfortunately our various process didn't have a great effect, you cancelled the service and disabled our access (breaching the T&C's) and since then have refused to pay us a single penny, despite confirming i writing that you would.

As you know this has all led to us having no option but to instruct the Courts, where we're simply seeking payment of invoices due - no interest percentages, no charges for the endless hours of chasing you and composing what should be unnecessary, yet impressively long, responses such as this etc.

if you can reinforce any of your claims with a single shred of proof then, please, send it over to us and we'll rethink our position and outlook. Since you have been unable to provide such information over the past 9 months and throughout the recent Mediation meeting however, we looking forward to presenting all of our email and contractual evidence in Court shortly to resolve this needlessly lengthy, drawn out situation.

Regards,

Tom Pinkerton

Director

Pinksheep Limited

To whom it may concern,

As always here at Pinksheep we appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, however we do insist that the information is factual.

There are numerous false accusations and inconsistencies in this review alone but i'll do my best to state the exact turn of events, with factual information including various quotes and dates from emails we have received from you:

- We are called Pinksheep Limited, not Pinksheep SEO. Pinksheep SEO would suggest that we offered, and provided you with, a Search Engine Optimisation service which we did not. We are Pay Per Click (PPC) specialists and have been for almost 10 years. These are 2 completely separate advertising mediums, however we assume you must understand this basic differential in order to set your stool out and stake, at the very least, a reasonable claim?

- We received an email from you on 11/03/2012, (our first contact of any kind), requesting a proposal and stating that, "We are a sofa online/retail business. We currently spend ￡XXX pm on ppc with google. Sales are stagnant if not declining a little (web based)". Bizarre, because the first paragraph of your review states the complete opposite? Never mind, lets move on to the next paragraph...

- Oh, you've referred to us as Pinksheep SEO again. Please see our first point for clarification on this. You have also claimed that we made some "promises" about our service. We'd be very keen to see/hear exactly what these promises are since we do not, will not, and never have offered any kind of promise or guarantee to any of our PPC clients. We are open and transparent wherever possible and accept the fact that with something like PPC it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to guarantee any sort of improved performance. We have lots of experience and knowledge which, combined with proven methods and techniques, can be highly beneficial to PPC Campaigns.

- We are not sure why you thought we were a blue-chip company, we certainly do not sell ourselves as such and can honesty say that in almost 10 years of trading i have never, ever used that phrase to describe us. Maybe you shouldn't have assumed, and just asked. If you had you would have discovered that there are currently 5 of us in the PPC department (2 Sales Consultants and 3 Account Managers) and prior to the recession hitting a few years ago we had double that amount of staff. We also have 4 people in our Pinksheep Print department, 2 more in Pinksheep Clothing and another 2 that look after Pinksheep Web Design. All in all it's a very friendly and lively office, which you are more than welcome to come and visit at any point.

- "...from the initial signing of the contract...". Could you please clarify for us, and anyone else that reads this, exactly what date this was please? We began working for you on 16/03/12 upon receiving an email which stated "I agree to the t&cs sent over by Email. I will foward a signed copy within 72 hours.". We don't normally do this but since you were so keen for us to get started, based largely on your previous email from 14/03/12, "Your proposal is by far the most professional and thorough. I will be happy to undertake a 3 month trial subject to agreeing a spend and fee for this period.", we believed a good business relationship had started. How wrong we were.

After failing to return the signed hard copy within 72 hours we sent numerous emails reminding you to do so. These emails date all the way through to early/mid April 2012 and we finally received the signed documents on 26/04/12, just the 5 weeks late.

With regards to time-frames and launch dates, these vary case on case, client by client. Naturally we look to implement our work, which also included restructuring your entire account in this instance, as soon as possible. Again however, we do not "guarantee" it'll be done within a specific time-frame. We prefer to ensure that the work is done properly, if it takes a few days then so be it, and we'd assume our clients would appreciate this and request this level of accuracy too? Once again, we have email threads detailing our progress, updating you every step of the way until the campaigns went live.

- Upon your initial concern over the use of "italian leather sofas", and various related search terms, as a keyword we confirmed in our email dated 23/03/12 that ,"They were keywords that had previously been running related to Italian leather sofas. I can do one of two things, pause the keywords all together or keep them running, but alter the advert?". So just to clarify; you are unhappy that we continued to manage an existing keyword which had been implemented by yourself (we can only assume, since you have disabled our access and breached the Terms and Conditions, which i'll come to later) and given you various options on how to resolve the issue? We'd love to know what else we could have done for you, please enlighten us.

With regards to apparently, "...forcing the majority of my monthly spend...", i'd urge you to provide one single piece of evidence on this immediately. Our work ethic and approach to client budgets has been, and always will be, reactive. If you're happy with our work and the results then it is entirely up to the client to increase/decrease the spend. Yes, we may put suggestions and estimates together but only on request from the client, absolutely never forced. This is something we take very seriously and again, i'd encourage you to back up such an outrageous claim instead of throwing false accusations around.

- If you had left our work running in the Account for a solid month, after committing to 3 months, then maybe it would of had time to take effect. Yet again however you have provided incorrect details with dates and time-frames that are way, way off. We actually received an email from you just 10 days after the campaigns went live, claiming that, "enquiries, swatch orders and revenue is down, even though the CPC has increased greatly.". Aside from the fact that we worked on an Account owned by you, which you had complete access to at any point in order to view/edit/approve our work, we'd assume only someone sabotaging your PPC Account could have such a detrimental effect on your business in just 10 days. At this stage it's probably worth highlighting your first paragraph, and our second point, where you emphatically contradict yourself when summarising the importance, dependancy and/or performance of previous PPC campaigns.

- We can only assume that you read the Terms and Conditions which you signed, there's only 19 points covering one side of A4 so we certainly hope so, i know i don't sign anything without reading it first. On this basis you'd be more than aware of our cancellation process, and that at no point are you "tied in to a contract". Our clients have the ability to cancel at any point, at which stage there is a cancellation fee to pay, naturally, which is pro-rartered. Upon your initial request to cancel, (your email dated 23/04/12, one month into the contract), we informed you that, "we would need payment for one months management fee plus the cancellation charge.This would amount to ￡300 + VAT.". Your response to us roughly 8 minutes later, via email - "I am happy to pay ￡150 but not ￡300 - I think you have an absolute cheek asking for ￡150!".

I personally responded approx 1 hour later to clarify the situation and outline that, "the additional ￡150 (plus VAT) is the Cancellation Fee amount...Naturally we?'d rather work with you for the initial 3 month period which you agreed to, however should you wish to cancel early this additional fee will apply.". Later that afternoon you confirmed that, "I will stick with it for 3 months then - can you please call me tomorrow at 14.00 to discuss.". If we are missing some information, such as a completely separate conversation in which we insist you have to honour the contract, cannot cancel unless you pay us a ludicrous amount of money and that expresses your adamant "reluctancy" to continue the service, please inform us.

- One month after expressing your initial desire to cancel and subsequent change of heart, the exact same day, we received another request to cancel via email, "We are cancelling our campaign with immediate effect due to the poor results that have materialized in lieu of the results promised. A payment will be raised by accounts within 10 working days to cover work undertaken.". I fear i'll be repeating myself once again but just to be certain; as i have previously stated, NO results were "promised". Ever.

You'll also note that at this stage you're happy to pay the 2 management fee invoices, despite us apparently being "...useless and putting me out of business.".

To date we have not received a penny from you, hence the legal action and subsequent Court Claim that is still in progress.

- I am 30 years old and, of the PPC department, i am the oldest by 2 years. I am not sure how old you are and if this equates to us being classed as "young kids" or not, but to be honest it has zero influence and/or relevance in this, or any, instance when conducting business.

I'm not entirely sure what our location has to do with anything either. From my basic understanding of a map there are plenty of places South of you, (Nottingham), and had we known this would be such an issue we could have recommended a local PPC Agency for you, or perhaps one North/East/West of you if that's more appropriate?

- I genuinely do not believe that we, or anyone who reads this review, will ever witness a more obvious case of "sour grapes", contrary to your comments.

Oh and look, you've called us Pinksheep SEO again just 1 line and 2 words after referring to our PPC service. We clearly have no idea.

To summarise; you approached us, we worked for you but unfortunately our various processes didn't have a great effect, you cancelled the service and disabled our access (breaching the T&C's) and since then have refused to pay us a single penny, despite confirming in writing that you would.

As you know this has all led to us having no option but to instruct the Courts, where we're simply seeking payment of invoices due - no interest percentages, no charges for the endless hours of chasing you and composing what should be unnecessary, yet impressively long, responses such as this etc.

if you can reinforce any of your claims with a single shred of proof then, please, send it over to us and we'll rethink our position and outlook. Since you have been unable to provide such information over the past 9 months and throughout the recent Mediation meeting however, we looking forward to presenting all of our email and contractual evidence in Court shortly to resolve this needlessly lengthy, drawn out situation.

Regards,

Tom Pinkerton

Director

Pinksheep Limited