Online Profit Academy

Online Profit Academy (OPA) -- advertising free 90-minute seminars to help peope learn to sell on eBay -- in my opinion, is engaged in some very sleazy sales tactics that target retirees. The seminar I attended this morning was a highly manipulative sales pitch designed to suck in the elderly who are already tight on money.

I attended because Cindy, my wife, has some pretty cool stuff she wants to sell on eBay, and she wanted me to help her figure out how. Her mom saw the OPA ad in a newspaper, so Cindy signed us up. (Stupidly, I failed to Google OPA prior to attending, or I would have seen through their trickery immediately by reading this thread.)

In an article titled Work-At-Home Scams, the AARP reports that: "Con artists pitching work-at-home schemes rake in $427 billion dollars a year. These scams are a favorite way for con artists to exploit people. They use appealing but unrealistic come-ons to lure unwary people into parting with their hard-earned money with the hope of hitting it big financially."

Since about 80 percent of the people who attended the OPA seminar were retirees, and since at least half of them seemed to be parting with money after the program ended, I felt compelled to get the word out as fast as I could.

Do not attend one of OPA's 90-minute, free seminars, because they are hard-sell pitches, not seminars. And contact your parents, grandparents or friends who are of retirement age to warn them not to get suckered into this company's sleazeball sales methods.

In our specific case, instead of a 90-minute seminar, we experienced the following:

A 76-minute sales pitch that included:

• At least 30 references to how there "just isn't enough time to cover everything today."
• A couple dozen carefully worded examples of how everyone is getting rich on eBay and living the good life.
• A 12-minute explanation of the $49, four-hour workshop OPA is selling "only today, and only while you're here."
• At least 20 mentions of the "great tools, great services and great time-saving devices" available for use, with each explanation followed by some version of "We'll cover this when you take the workshop." (For example, "There's a service you can use to find all the legitimate drop-shippers, and it saves you a ton of time ... we'll tell you all about it when you take the workshop.")

At minute 77 of the 90-minute seminar, Brandon Burbage (not sure of the spelling), finally got around to telling us the "Secrets to eBay Success." It took him all of 10 minutes and consisted of the following bullet points:

• Place buzzwords and keywords in titles.
• Pay the $1 to make your title bold.
• Capitalize important keywords you want your shoppers to see.
• Pay the $.35 to use a gallery photo.
• Start and end your auction during prime-time hours (7-9 p.m.).
• End your auction on Sunday or Monday.
• Include shipping costs and use flat-rate shipping.
• Don't forget about the losing bidder -- if you have many of one item to sell, contact the people who lost and offer them a second chance to buy.
• Disclose everything.

After this 10-minute quick-dump, Brandon relaunched his sales pitch, which took another 25 minutes to complete -- running over the 90-minute mark by a full 22 minutes. (Throughout his entire presentation, Brandon put a very strong emphasis on the importance of having your own website, complete with shopping cart and merchant account. Lo and behold, OPA builds websites and supplies merchant accounts -- go figure.)

It's that last bullet point that really burns my butt, because if OPA actually practiced what it preaches -- full disclosure -- its newspaper ad would have to read something like this:

We'll spend 102 minutes of the 90-minute session trying to convince you that, if you don't buy our $49 workshop, you'll miss out on the millions everyone is making on eBay. And in the other 10 minutes, we'll give you a bullet-point list of eBay secrets, all of which (and thousands more) can be found if you simply search Google on "eBay secrets" instead.

Obviously, I haven't attended the $49 workshop myself. But I've seen this type of sleaze before, and I'll bet dollars to gas gallons that it's at least 50 percent sales pitch designed to suck the unsuspecting into parting with thousands of dollars more, and I am certain that few, if any, experience anywhere near the level of success OPA suggests is easy if you follow its program.

I'm all for using free seminars to market your wares. And anyone who does it should, of course, include a sales pitch and an escalating level of next-step services attendees can buy. But any legitimate company can provide a truly great free seminar with true value to offer without resorting to this type of manipulation.

Comments

[Cara Chesser]

I have to admit that I was one of the people that visited a seminar which was held in Louisville, Ky at the Galt House and I'm only 41yrs of age and I fell for it and purchased a website and the package deal for $3200 back in January and my website is still not in operation and they are very slow to helping as promised. I'm having to try and figure out myself how to design my webpage and I have to count this money as "Gone" and a lesson well learned at a very pricey expense. I personally would not advise anyone to purchase from OPA and to find other ways of making money quick & easy. I've learned there are free dropshippers out there that will let you list on E-bay for nothing with free shipping and you dont even have to have a webpage to do so, although may not make a hundred grand a year unless you put alot of hours and effort into E-bay. All I have to say is for people to stay away from Get Rich Seminars and TV info-mercials. these are only people taking from the poor and hard working blue collar workers. My advice Stay away from anyone or any business asking for money to help you make money!!!!!

Cara