I'll miss the DishStore net. Bought two of my three current receivers, a now retired/traded-in receiver and a few accessories including two SW64s for my mom's legacy system from DishStore.net. I love shopping on line and really hate calling for anything. Not sure what I'll do for my next purchase. Time will tell. Thanks for the great service while the net store was operating!
I would recommend DishDepot.COM or SolidSignal.COM. Both want to be sponsors here, but I am not sure if I want additional sponsors going forward. (not a knock on either company, although SolidSignal has Stuart Sweet from the other site working for them, and whenever he has news he seems to post it over there and never posts it here, so I count that as a strike against them.
Just kididing I have purchased a few things from them over the past few months!)
The reason for this is that honestly the Syndicated ads pay a lot more plus there are a lot of headaches (at times) with Dedicated sponsorships. Not many people know this but over the years I have REMOVED 5 sponsors from the site (they wanted to stay) and the reason I removed them were due to a number of reasons...
1) Not servicing the customer the way I would like. If someone is listed here as a SatelliteGuys gold sponsor its our name along with the sponsor. If I get complaints and they are not handled well then I gave them the boot.
2) The quality of the products was crap! We had a few sponsors start off by selling good quality stuff, but then later on was getting a lot of complaints about them selling bootless knockoffs of the real products they were selling. Infact in some cases there were lawsuits involved about their knockoffs by the OEM who made the real equipment. I dont want to sell my members JUNK.
3) We got rid of a few companies because when a customer needed support for a product the sponsor would send them here for support (which we don't mind that's what we do.) But a majority of the support for these companies was "help me steal DISH Network service." which we would reply we don't do that here and then I would get an email back with lots of swears saying that I ripped them off, when I didn't sell them a thing.
4) We have had a few sponsors here that I gave the boot because they thought that because they were buying ad space that they could spam in any thread on the forums. While we work with our sponsors (such as SatelliteAV with their new microHD receiver) to promote their product where appropriate being a sponsor here is NOT a license to spam. We even have one try mass spamming our members via PM's. We don't like spam and we know you guys don't like spam so guess what happened those sponsors got the boot.
Whats funny about almost all of these sponsors is they wanted to pay more to be able to stay. And once I actually let one sponsor back and within a few weeks he was spamming users again. I quickly gave him the boot and refunded him the rest of the money he paid.
We have been offered a LOT of money over the years for sponsorship here (including 1 time only email mailing which would have netted me in the mid 6 figures) and I said NO our members and their email addresses are not for sale.
Every week I get many companies looking to advertise, most of them start ups or mom and pops, these folks are here today and gone tomorrow. If I ran this site to really make a profit I would be taking all their money left and right, but I don't because I want only THE BEST for our members. I want you to buy from a company you can trust and who will be here for you when you need them!
DISHSTORE the online store may be gone, but Claude is still here and is always willing to help a DISHSTORE customer out any way he can. And thats something I love and respect about Claude and the way he ran DISHSTORE the past 9 years! I can safely say that almost up until the end when he started having issues DISHSTORE was the Gold Standard of Satellite stores. And when he started having issues no one was more upset about the problems then Claude because he knew this was not the way he wanted to run things. And again thats why he closed the online store. Claude is a man who really cared about his customers!
Thank you Claude for 9 great years!!
