<<< but I am really leery of all the broken promises and shady dealings of this company>>>>
JP, so am I, to the disdain of all. I am not sure what the "good things" are that I am supposed to say about this company, since it seems to have barely kept in business for 9+ years.
The broken promises and shady dealings continue to overshadow anything else I see. Forgive me for not trusting a company that can't calculate profits and losses. As I mentioned earlier, they lied about turning a profit, saying in a PR they had made $100,000 in advertising "income" which, it turned out, couldn't even be counted as revenue.
I see by their latest filing (the S-8 filing on 2/17) that they still haven't learned how to calculate profits and losses. The shady dealings continue.
First, some background, a selection from the SB2-A regarding ShopGoOnline: "For the period from inception of our web site until November 9, 1999, we have had 128 orders with total gross sales of $9,483.01."
Now from the S-8: "For the period from inception of our web site until November 30, 1999, we have had total gross sales of $10,059.68 on total expenses associated with ShopGoOnline of $184,851.64... a loss of $174,791.96."
As well... "We make arrangements with each individual vendor to package, ship and notify us of sale and delivery. We obtain payment from our customers and pay the vendors directly for these products."
So GONT doesn't buy the products, just acts as a place to sell them.
Why is it claiming revenue in the S-8 for selling things it doesn't even own?
Obviously, GONT is not receiving all the money from gross sales (most goes to vendors), so how can they treat it as revenue? Of course, by counting it as revenue, they make the numbers look better than they actually are. It's a good thing the auditors didn't sign off on this statement.
Furthermore... by subtraction, we can see how well SGOL did in the last three weeks of November, including the busy post-Thanksgiving weekend, comparing gross vendor sales up to Nov. 9 to the total up to Nov. 30.
$10,059.68 - $9,483.01 = $576.67
If GONT's commission was 10% on vendor sales, then the SGOL site had $57 in revenues over that period, or about $20 per week. Hard to make money bringing in $20 per week.
I hope that the kiosks can make up the hundreds of thousands in losses on SGOL and Auctionomics. As far as ever seeing numbers broken down from the kiosks alone, I doubt we will ever see that. |
