Michael B.

I had nothing but negative experience with Bonanza, and apparently a lot of people have, too.

It's amazing how Mark Dorsey, VP of Bonanza, likes to tout the almost laughable "A" rating at BBB.

If any person were to visit BBB and look at the actual data, they'd see that out of a whopping total of 14 ratings, 10 of them were negative, 3 were positive, and 1 was neutral. The only thing it proves is that 71.4% of the people who chose to review Bonanza on BBB had a negative experience, and that deserves an A rating?

When was the last time anyone performed with 3 positives out of 14 and scored an A? Especially when 10 of them were negative? What this proves is that the A rating means absolutely nothing, It's the data that really matters.

If a reasonable person were to look at 71.4% negative ratings, they would likely surmise this is not really the right company to do business with. If they only look at Mark's comments about them having an A rating with BBB, it appears good, until you look a little further.

The bottom line is this, BBB is a great resource to resolve problems with a business, but their ratings really don't matter, and have to be looked into by going a little further and actually reading some of the BBB data. Once this is done, no reasonable person could agree that this is a true A rated company, due to how they run their business, for both sellers and buyers.

My recommendation is that BEFORE you do business with ANY online retailer, not just Bonanza, don't just accept their BBB "rating" or statements. Dig a little further. If they have complaints, read some of them to get a feel for how the company operates.

Arguably, some reviews are slanted, and people can usually see through that. However, after reading a few reviews that are either negative or positive, a pattern may start to emerge as to how this particular business operates. From that perspective, a person can then make an educated decision instead of blindly providing their personal and payment information to an unknown entity.

Personally, I'll never do business with Bonanza again. I know better now. I don't trust them for a number of reasons:

1) It doesn't appear Bonanza has vetted their sellers and products very well, because many have marketed and sold what are to be genuine or full versions of something, only to be discovered by the buyer they are actually counterfeit or otherwise cheap "knock-offs", or trial versions of products (see complaints)

2) There don't appear to be the proper checks and balances within the accounting systems employed for both Buyers and Sellers, as you can see from some of the complaints, and it can be difficult to resolve issues as compared to eBay or PayPal

3) As I mentioned in a prior review, Bonanza imports reviews and ratings for their sellers, where many of them can be bogus (as was in my case), where most of the reviews were negative, but the Bonanza "score" was deceivingly and inappropriately very high (in essence, a faked good score)

I've found I cannot believe anything Bonanza says, I needed to go to outside sources, such as the BBB, to see the actual real data. Don't just look at the score. Once reviewed, most reasonable people would likely put their credit card away and migrate to a different online or brick and mortar vendor that's more trustworthy. It's just not worth the hassle and aggravation, for trying to save a small amount of money, only to find the delivered product isn't what it was marketed and sold as.

The amount of time and effort I had to spend to get my money back makes it easy to stay away from Bonanza. I know better now, and hope you can spare yourself the same aggravation and hassles.