enom-truste-fail As most of our customers know, we will go out of our way to get our customers the best possible deals for helping them establish a new brand and internet presence, so that means we do shop around a bit and being we specialize in web development, we’re not after any profit from offering these value-add services; we just hope by offering them, the service is valuable in two ways: 1) It is convenient and 2) it is at cost.

Until recently we were offering TRUSTe through Enom, Inc. TRUSTe touts a 80% marketing rate of trust through the general internet population (which we found to be false) and they claim that having their seal at the bottom of your site will increase sales by increasing trust with your users. We found this again to be false broadly over our own clients.

We had already stopped pushing TRUSTe on our customers, as in we were not telling them that this is a must-have service, though we were offering it. It wasn’t until today that we had an experience of our own that caused us to loose so much trust in both TRUSTe and Enom, INC, that we will no longer be offering services from either company. Here is what happened, and we have recorded correspondence for any whom is interested:

On August 26, 2013, we noticed that the TRUSTe Certification Seal had stopped working for all of our customers and our own website. We promptly contacted Enom, Inc about this issue on August 28, 2013.

On August 29, 2013, Enom, Inc responded that they were not aware of any issues and that they would look into it.

On September 3, 2013, Enom, Inc explained that the reason our certification was not working was because we offered cloud hosting services (though we have never offered it, we would simply send customers to cloud-flare as a once official partner). We stopped offering cloud services back in 2012 and made this clear on our cloud hosting page.

On September 4, 2013, Enom, Inc said they would contact TRUSTe to find out why they had disabled our site and get back with us on it.

On September 4, 2013, we contacted TRUSTe directly, we got a response on September 5, 2013, the representative we spoke with explained the following, “We do not directly turn services off once they are approved unless the site changes, your site has not changed as evidence through the Google Caches. I can see in the logs that we did not turn your site off, instead Enom, Inc requested that the service be disabled and locked for reasons I cannot relay at this time. Please note that you can contact [sales email removed] directly and order a new…”

On September 10, 2013, Enom, Inc finally restored the TRUSTe services to all customers but our own site, and stated that TRUSTe stated that the services cannot be restored so long as our site makes so much as a mention of cloud services (so any descriptive texts stating that CDN services are cloud-like prevent service reactivation).

On September 11, 2013, we have formally requested that Enom, Inc refund the service being it was renewed and billed on August 4, 2013 for an entire year.

We cannot in good faith sell a service we know has this sort of reputation first-hand.  We have also advised all customers currently using TRUSTe to discontinue use at the end of the yearly cycle and use WOT (Web of Trust) instead.  We have also switched registrars, and will not longer be registering SSL or domain names through Enom, Inc.  Instead we are already set with another company to start registering domains on September 22, 2013.   All renewals will currently take place through this new company by transferring the domain, automatically from Enom to this new registrar.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us, likewise if you are a customer and would like to see any of this correspondence for yourself, please do not hesitate to contact our support staff for a copy and transcript. We already have one client who’s seeking legal action against Enom, Inc for this unwarranted disabling (almost an entire month) of their services. While we will remain neutral in any arbitrary litigation, we would recommend that clients seek out the legal contacts for both Enom, Inc and TRUSTe before filing any actions.