Stay away from TrackItBack!

Two days ago I went shopping at Béloeil, Quebec. When I saw that Zellers were closing and selling everything at 60-90% discount (even all their furniture, like racks, billboards, chairs, etc.!), I was surprised and hurried up to get the feet inside to see what inventory left for sale, especially about electronics. Since this was their very last day before official closing, all the most interesting stuff has already been sold.



I noticed some strange cards with serial numbers on them, from a company named TrackItBack. It was descripted on the verso that TrackItBack is a company that specializes in restoring lost items (especially mobile electronics like cellphones, laptops and cameras) to their owner internationally at no charges of any kind (shipping fees, custom fees, etc.) when the person finding it calls back TrackItBack's phone number (which is printed on the sticker that you have to stick on the object itself). TrackItBack are also supposed to offer about 100$ in rewards to the person who declares the lost item, plus your own extra reward -that you are free to set yourself, depending on its importance and/or value-. Furthermore, they claim having a high success rate (of not charging extra fees) of up to 85% on reported lost items, which is quite interesting.

Each licence was actually selling for 9.99$ at Zellers, but at 90% discount, I was able to grab 12 of them at 0.99$ each. I saw the opportunity to resale them at my friend's computer store, making interesting % markup on each one I would be able to resell. I could have made around 107,88$ profits with an original investment of only 12$. Not too bad! And not too risky neither; such a service is great and can easily be sold by a convincing vendor (or given away for free as a valuable extra by the vendor when the customer buys a laptop) in a local computer store where exists no other competing service.

The problem is, today I finally decided to stick one on my 17-inches laptop, so I visited their website in order to know more about the service and to activate a first licence for my own utility. But wait... their website is not working! Uhm... After some research on Google, I found that many other persons bought the very same product at Zellers and that TrackItBack is in fact out of business until May 2012! Very deceptive. Stay away from all TrackItBack services and products, whatever their selling price are. To their leitmotiv "What do you have to lose?" I would answer "My money!".

On a final thought, I would say that if this is how Zellers managed their inventory and were protecting their customers' interest, I now better understand why they are closing in Canada (some will be replaced by Target, the biggest american competitor to WalMart). When something's garbage, it needs to get out.