EKM - London

Nigel Gregory

BAD Service and huge price increases!

Despite my two other reviews I feel it time to make people fully aware of the seriously high price increases being introduced now. EKM will tell you that it's down to development costs, to make the platform better and in turn increase sales and revenue to it's members. As we have two businesses on EKM we have seen a sharp decrease in overall sales, huge price rises and more to follow, recent poor service and continued mistakes and issues with our two shops. So after many years being with EKM we are looking for a new e-commerce company to handle our business in the near future. EKM was made by small business and should take care that small business can take them down.

John Daniels

Over the last 14 years using EKM its been a mainly positive experience. That is until 2 days ago when they decide to pull the rug from customers and increase pricing by 500% (for new customers) and existing customers left in limbo as to what the future brings in regards to pricing. They have decided to go from supporting small business (as the company's original ethos was) to slamming that door and only open to medium sized businesses. What start up has £360 a month to gamble on starting an online business. I think EKM have lost there way and this is likely to backfire on them terribly.

Leon Pengilley

Unfortunately we were completely let down by EKM and it almost destroyed our business. In summary, we were promised a working IOSS feature in March 2021 in order to get us to sign up to their platform. Over two years later the feature was still missing, EKM had broken every promise/deadline they'd given us, and we'd lost a sizeable chunk of our income, putting us into serious levels of debt and causing staff to lose their jobs.

Throughout it all we were told that it was 'coming soon', 'we're working on it', 'it'll be here by the end of the year', but nothing ever appeared. And these constant promises kept us hanging on, believing that waiting on the impending feature was worth the damage we were experiencing. After 2 years they finally admitted that they couldn't do it.

The worst bit was that EKM's entire response to our issue wasn't just unprofessional, it was stressful and completely unnecessary. For a company that states "we are small enough to care" in their emails, they did not care one iota about the damage they'd done to us.

At every stage they refused to engage with me proactively to help mitigate the impact being done to our business and our employees. They could have reduced our subscription to help us offset the financial impact, they could have offered free email marketing to help us rebuild our customer base, they could have allowed us API access to integrate a third-party IOSS solution. We even offered to pay their staff to build the feature. But instead they chose to do nothing.

When you combine this with the payment gateway debacle, where they removed most of their gateways and forced customers into the ClearAccept option (who had conveniently just bought out EKM), plus the purging of their Facebook group membership when people were critical of these changes, you get a company that does not care about its customers any more.

There are good people working in EKM, but they are being completely let down by incompetent management. This hasn't been helped by new owners who have clearly taken a short-sighted approach to squeeze as much money out of their customers as possible. You can see this in the prices being charged compared to almost every other e-commerce platform available.

The best indicator of a company's quality is how they react when things don't go to plan, and on this metric alone EKM were a disaster.

We are now with a different platform, with a working IOSS feature, and we can start to rebuild our business again. But it's going to take us years to recover from EKM "helping us on the road to success".

Hannah Bradshaw

I have been with EKM for a couple of years now and I am particularly happy with their support. I like the fact that they are UK based and they help me when I need it. I have over 600 items on the website which isn't easy but I can happily work on all of them and any problems EKM are there.

grace

We've been with EKM for years, but everything started going wrong this year. We haven't been able to use PayPal checkout for over a month, which is detrimental to our online business. Despite our efforts to chase the issue, there have been no updates. Considering the website isn't fully functional, I don't think we should continue paying them over £400 in monthly maintenance costs. My advice is to stay away from them.

Zac Ben

With EKM for 9 years, it was alright at the start but has gone down hill massively since being bought out.

When i closed my account i was promised a refund on the monthly shop subscription as it had just left my account, i have been waiting a month and still no refund. Just shows you what a greedy dishonest company EKM has become! Its the whole reason i left them. Constantly bringing out new rules and charges just to make them more money. The last straw for me was when they announced they were cancelling all payment gateways except their own. There were alot of other rubbish announcements before that though.

My site was super slow and whenever i complained they always said it was alright on their side. I came to realise by reading continuous facebook posts that this is the usual lie they tell. All fb posts on their page are deleted unless you have something good to say about them, i saw countless people banned just for complaining something wasnt right, which is an often occurrence when hosting with them.

I never actually realised how bad it all was until i had a new site made with a different host, its super quick and responsive, so much better than i had with EKM. It took alot of work to switch but im so glad i did!

I highly doubt this company will be in business in the next year or two, things were getting worse by the day. All they care about is lining their own pockets while offering a sub par service.

I will be calling tomorrow to speak to them about my refund, will update here if i actually get it! We'll see

Simon Benjamin

Started off with EKM no problems, then after a year started to notice "ghosts" in the machine so to speak, random issues occurring with zero input from myself or anyone else. In may 2022 I supplied them with products from my business as they decided to capitalise on a tiktok I was a part of, which I happily obliged.

Next time an issue was raised their customer service advisor Richard decided to discriminate against me for making a complaint that it was taking 9 weeks to sort the issue. The issue was never dealt with. They do have some excellent staff but I feel for them as they are working for absolutely the wrong company.

Would give 0 if I could which is a shame as I had high hopes when I signed up.

Also note the condescending nature as to which they reply to complaints on these reviews,people are finally starting to realise what a waste of time, effort and money you are.

Stephen Boyd

I had an EKM store for 15 years. They used to be a small company but always professional and friendly to deal with. Not any more, they just want your money - and if you close your shop like I just did don't expect them to credit any fees, they won't.