One of the wineries I work with was recently approached by Vang Online which looks aligned with Buy2Sell Vietnam about exporting into the Asian market. Just seeing if anyone here has done business with them before and if so, curious to learn about experienced. Thank you in advance for any feedback!
Hey there, they reached out to me. They are asking for money upfront for marketing before they place an order. Sounds strange. Have you continued to work with them?
We rejected the proposal based on that. $25k up front was not happening.
Yeah agree, they had tiers in my proposal the starting option was $6k. Seems pretty shady. Also on their site they have a shopping option, there’s even a cart icon, but you can’t actually add any products to your cart. There’s no button on any product. Lots of red flags.
Sounds scammy, I wouldn’t expect to have to front the cash, good odds they’d just walk and that’s it.
Hey there. We have been contacted by the same company and the proposal seems similar to yours. Can I ask whom from the company has contacted you? Thank you
Is the contract a scam? This I can reply, the company is too large to be a scammer, I saw their buildings and wine shops, foreign employees in the offices, they have large shoulders and I suppose a government eye on them. I saw a contract draft, in case of legal disputes they choose the Singapore Court to rule.
Would the resulting price be artificially inflated? And so the wine will not sell as opposed to the competitors? (if the winery can’t afford the investment, it could easily add 2$ into the unit selling price to cover it up)
Too many boring theories, but actually these are part of our daily challenges, isn’t it? What would you suggest, take the risk, make the investment, or instead take a more traditional and safer way? Don’t forget: this is Asia, and it moves fast, GDP still grows over 6% here, and if keep waiting could reach too late.
I would avoid them.
We contracted with them well over a year ago and they have done absolutely nothing. They have a beautiful convincing website, promise the world, contract to make guaranteed purchases and do nothing. They even turned down our offer to hold a product training and Q&A session for their sales team.
The kicker is today we received an email that was sent to dozens of suppliers by an individual claiming to being one of their sales representatives warning myself and around 40 others that we had all been scammed. Many of those contacted responded to the group affirming this claim. Thus far nobody has shared a positive experience only stories of loss.
So do your due diligence and proceed as you see fit.
We have been approached too, the initial requested fee was € 15.000 - we kindly said “no, thanks”.