Catch P.

I had been an advertiser with Wedding Wire for four years. At first I really felt like Wedding Wire was a partner with me. My rep was awesome and the leads I received from Wedding Wire were top notch. The CEO would also reach out to the Wedding Pro's and ask for our feedback and input as decisions were being made.

A little over two years ago a big shift took place and it felt like there was a major push away from advertising and toward providing vendors with tools they didn't ask for or need. Ironically it was just after Wedding Wire received 25 million capital from Spectrum Equity and Spectrum equity personnel joined the Wedding Wire team in managing positions.

The first major change that effected our business was when Wedding Wire changed their listing format to a "Lazy Load" format that put many more vendors on a page and reduced the amount of information listed about each vendor. We saw the number of clicks from WW go up but the number of leads went down dramatically. Through this format change, they were able to double the number of Spotlight and featured listings. Wedding Wire gained while their advertisers lost.

I quit my membership after this change. But I renewed again after Wedding Wire employees talked to me about a change in culture that was going to make vendors feel like partners again. One of the things that they instituted at that time was a "ask the pro" live chat on their brides forum. I participated in this and it was very good. However, they discontinued that practice. About this time I started receiving fake leads from Wedding Wire. I would call the number and respond to the emails to find that the leads were completely fake. In the last year I would say that less than 30% of the leads from Wedding Wire were actual couples looking to book services.

Earlier this year, Wedding Wire introduced "Quick Leads". It is a program where they change the phone number that appears on your store front. Basically they want all vendor calls routed through WW for tracking purposes. They automatically opted all vendors in to this service and required that vendors opt out if they did not want their phone number changed. The problem is that we were opted back in without notification. Some vendors have been opted back in 3 or 4 times.

They also changed the review policy so a bride can review a vendor before they perform the actual service or before they deliver the product on the wedding day. For most vendors, the wedding day is where we do the majority of our work and the client can get an accurate example of our work to review us on.

Then they recently started the Wedding Wire Rewards program where a bride can win 5,000 toward their wedding for performing certain tasks on the Wedding Wire website. One task was to review vendors. The brides participating in the contest have not had their weddings yet so they were giving vendors premature reviews just to be entered in the contest. That is not fair for the vendors or the potential brides reading the review. Another task is make vendor contacts through Wedding Wire. This lead to brides making contact with me just to be entered into a contest. Again, this is totally unfair to vendors.

As vendors we have submitted emails and calls to reps asking hard questions about these practices. My rep kept saying that he could not answer and that decisions were being made above him. I should have stayed away two years ago. This company does not view vendors as partners. Most of their efforts are geared toward getting brides to contact and review to inflate their numbers. Wedding Wire reviews no longer have integrity. Brides and vendors alike need to be aware of the practices of this website.