MUST READ: Bemunchie – Thousands Spent, Will Our Small Family Business Survive This?
Looking At Toys already had a working e-commerce website and an established eBay presence when we approached Bemunchie. We wanted to take our small family business to the next level, and Bemunchie reviewed what we had and told us they could build something much better that would help increase traffic and sales.
Sadly, what followed did the opposite. Thousands of pounds and countless hours later, we have no completed replacement website and now face paying someone else to start again. For our small, low-profit business, the financial impact has been significant and I genuinely worry whether Looking At Toys will recover from it.
From the outset we explained that our customers were mainly serious adult collectors and we wanted a more premium/luxury website, NOT a children's toy site. Despite this, the first design was very child-focused and had to be reworked.
Later, a homepage appeared that we had not approved, full of auction features — live auctions, bidding, countdown timers and priority bidding. We are NOT an auction business. It also prominently displayed "50% OFF", completely at odds with the premium positioning we had requested. We asked who authorised these changes and requested an audit/creator trail, but Bemunchie could not provide one.
There were COUNTLESS BASIC PROBLEMS too: products displayed in Indian rupees, payment-on-delivery options we don't offer and multiple 404 errors on a website we were being told was advanced and launch ready.
The backend regularly crashed. We repeatedly raised this with our manager and the company owner. Hours of our time were wasted and product work we uploaded was repeatedly lost.
Most importantly, we repeatedly asked what this new website actually offered that was fundamentally better than our existing one. We were told this had been discussed internally with the company owner, yet nobody could give us an answer. In our view, what had been created was actually worse in many respects than the site we already had.
We repeatedly offered to speak to or work directly with their developer, even offering to visit their offices and work through the problems together. Bemunchie declined.
The project passed through several managers, with assurances things would improve, but our experience remained much the same: delays, missed timescales, promises of updates "next week", repeated chasing and considerable amounts of our own time spent identifying problems and explaining corrections.
Eventually we asked for communications to be in writing because we felt matters discussed on calls were not subsequently being properly addressed.
Bemunchie ultimately terminated the project while many of our questions remained unanswered and without delivering the completed replacement website. Despite the problems above, their position remains that the site was launch ready and no refund is due.
We have spent many months trying to resolve this, including directly with the company owner. Unfortunately, nothing changed even with the owner's involvement — timescales and promised response times were missed, as was a meeting time offered by the owner himself. We still have no resolution. We are now considering legal action and formal complaints, including to Trading Standards and the ICO regarding our concerns.
The financial impact is what hurts most. Money that should have gone into stock, marketing and growing Looking At Toys has instead gone into a website that was never completed or delivered to us.
Rather than helping our business grow, this experience has put us significantly backwards. For a larger company, thousands of pounds might be manageable. For a small, family-run, low-profit business like ours, it is not.
We now have to see if we can even find the money to rebuild elsewhere. I genuinely don't know whether Looking At Toys will recover or ultimately survive the financial impact Bemunchie has had on our business.
It may be too late for our small family business to recover. We would NOT recommend Bemunchie. If this helped, please mark it helpful for other small businesses to see.