We have unfortunately written about Eventective.com’s questionable business practices before.
1 If you try to use their services to contact a specific company listed on their website by clicking their “contact” button, your message will at some point be sent to the vendor but before that happens your contact information will be sold to other similar vendors to contact you and sell you their services. It is far better to go to the company’s website and use their contract system.
2 Many of the companies listed on their website in their early days were mined from the internet and listed without the company being aware of the fact they were being listed. The benefit to Eventective was that it looked like they had more vendors than they actually had and there are benefits in doing this to gain SEO ranking. This early practice of theirs has led to many “dead” companies still being listed on their website. In the South Bend DJs listing we found 3 defunct companies. You can see our other Michiana Weddings articles here and here.

Here at Michiana Weddings we believe that an informed consumer is a smart consumer who won’t fall for more questionable practices of some wedding vendors. Eventective is full of questionable practices and their latest is pictured below:

Yes they are now issuing honors! The question here is what is the criteria for winning the Planner’s Choice? Is it like Wedding Wire that bases giving vendors website icons because the majority of reviews score a 5? NO! From Eventective’s own announcement: were selected for the award based on many factors, including the number of times their Eventective listings were viewed by planners.

Yes you read that right, the Planner’s Choice is based on “many” factors but the only factor that Eventective is willing to tell you about is the one based on how many people clicked one of the listings on their website!

Remember those companies in the old yellow pages that used to be called “A DJ” or “AAA DJ”? People chose to call their companies such inance names because decades ago marketers realized that most people would go to the category they were searching for and mostly call the first 3 vendors listed under that category. So if you were in the yellowpages, from a marketing standpoint you wanted to be listed first and the yellowpages based everything on alphabetical order so it ended up full of companies that had strange names starting with “A”.

The internet is no different, people go to google and call the first 3 vendors they see listed under a specific search. So many companies are battling it out with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to be listed in the top 3.

Eventective knows this and not just any company can get listed at the top of their city listings, you have to some way purchase that spot. From what we can tell they don’t just “sell” the top spot our bet is that they give that to the companies that buy the most contacts from them.

So what does this award mean to you as a bride or groom or wedding planner? It means don’t take a vendor who is promoting the fact that they are an “Eventective Planner’s Choice” very seriously. The only criteria that Eventective.com will acknowledge that is required to receive this honor is that the vendor listing was clicked on within their site many times. The ones that will be clicked on the most are the listings at the top and to get to the top it appears that the vendor needs to buy lots of leads and that is how they get to the top of their city searches. From there normal consumer behavior will make you an honor recipient because the average person only clicks on the first three vendors listed usually, according to marketing studies.

And if as a bride and groom you decide to use the Eventective search services, please be aware. Take for instance the South Bend DJ listings. Out of the top three companies that rotate to the top of the listings not one of them is based in Indiana! Two of them say they are from South Bend on the listing but two are from Michigan and one is from Florida, yes you read that right Florida! There are many fine, locally based wedding vendors in the Michiana Area including South Bend, Notre Dame, Mishawaka, Elkhart, LaPorte, Plymouth, Michigan City etc. If the vendor doesn’t have an office in your state or isn’t close by we would recommend skipping down the list until you find one that is. An out of state vendor, especially one several states away can be difficult to deal with, has no idea about local restrictions or traditions and in our experience have been very unreliable. If you are seeking relief from a vendor either not showing up to your wedding or sending in someone that did not live up to what you were sold, getting relief from an out of state vendor is very difficult. It is very expensive and very difficult to take legal action against an out of state vendor.

It says two of these companies are from South Bend, IN. But if you go to their websites you will find they are from out of state and don’t even have offices anywhere in Indiana.

Services besides Eventective to look out for such things on are Gigmasters, WeDJ.com and even Wedding Wire.