amycooper86
Junior Member
Hi, I have a long story for you. I am a business owner and sell on marketplaces. So I was doing well on this particular site and my sales were good . Most merchants advertise their products and I was not any different so with great conversions, the marketplace called me and said we see you are doing well and perhaps we can help you advertise more to make more. At that time, commissions for them were 15% on the merchants. So they offered to advertise more with a guaranteed 2:1 rate ,t hat is for every 1000 invested, 2000 would be earned, that sort of thing. And because they knew I couldn't afford that kind of money, they offered to be taking the advertising dollars from my payments. On top of that, they came to me and said they have a pilot program which helps merchants buy goods from alibaba.com with a minimum of $15,000. Now I did tell them that I couldn't afford 15,000 because they said that the invoice was to be paid within 30 days. They said we could work out something now this was over the phone. Mind you I wasn't making even $10,000 and they knew that. So they continued promoting for me and I was shipping the items as bought by the customers. 30 days after receiving of the 12,000 merchandise, they called me about paying the invoice. This is when the nightmare began. I went back and forth with them and asked them how I was going to pay such a huge amount when I dint even make half of that( mind you they were taking so much money for advertising and I didn't even have any proof of what was being spent) leaving me with almost 2,000. In the month of October, the marketplace went on to promote me big time and I sold merchandise worth 14,000. But they refused to pay me. We went back and forth and still they ignored my emails and refused to pay. In fact they said I owed them money so I thought they were referring to their invoice. You can imagine my shock when I saw a letter from a lawyer about the invoice for the merchandise. I was appalled because I thought they would reduce what was owed to me to pay the invoice. None of that happened so I am frustrated with these people , I answered a court summons and are willing to go to court so the judge can hear this story. Now I go to court on July 14th and I wanted to state that the plaintiffs lawyer send me interrogatories and that they be certified. AS a defendant, should I answer them and is there any penalty if I dont answer them? Please help me
