Unfortunately, about 3 months ago, after 6 years in business, VW/Audi came after us for copyright infringement and, while short of filing a lawsuit, threatened us with enough monetary damages to require us to comply and give them our (4) domain names and remove any potentially infringing material from our sites.
At that point and at the advice of our lawyer, we complied, but with all our products being of a drop ship nature, we had no means to replace the images that we had to remove from the site. Since then, business has been dismal.
To prepare for transferring the domain names to VW we consolidated and forwarded the sites to Parts and Accessories for Touareg Jetta Passat Cayenne Q7 : Carmata (currently in operation), which we planned to operate going forward in compliance with VW's demands. The domain transfers for our old stores were finalized yesterday and we are no longer owners of them. Even with Carmata up and running for almost 8 weeks and the old sites forwarding to them, nobody is buying since they can't see the images of what we are selling. Lots of traffic... no sales.
So, on Nov 15th we will take our last order and shut down Carmata, which was formerly TregCentral, JetaCentral and EuroDriveGear.
I know we haven't been an active part of the community for some time, but back in 2003/20044 Heidi and I were very active on VWVortex and also CT when it came into being. We met quite a few of you and sold many of you products at the best prices we could get. Hardly ever the cheapest, but you couldn't beat Heidi's friendly voice on the line.
TC started on a whim... I am a web developer and when we bought a Touareg in August 2003 I got involved in the community online. Since there were no places to get accessories at that time, I opened a store and it became the go to place online for Touareg parts. In fact, other than eBay and Spock's unique offerings, we were the only game in town for a while. Which was part of the plan ;-)
Heidi quit her day job on 2004 to run the store full time, and we got a business phone line and I wrote some extenstions for the shopping cart to help her do her job faster and more efficiently. In 2005 we opened JetaCentral and EuroDriveGear. In 2006 we did almost $500K in sales and I quit my job to run my web agency full time. Things were going really well. TC was always the champ - over 3/4 of our sales every year.
When the economy turned, so did our sales, expectedly. We rolled with it, and my web business has been growing steadily, offsetting the declining sales of TC. With 2 kids now, Heidi is more than happy to let go of the store and spend more time with them, but really, TC was our first baby. We built it from scratch and took pride in providing great service and doing everything we could to be fair to our customers.
So, thanks to the hand that we fed, we are bowing out. Its not worth it at this point, for the income we get from it. We really really REALLY want to thank everyone who purchased from us over the years and helped us grow. It was a great run, and I met some really great people along the way.
We sold the Touareg to my sister in 2007 and she still has it. Heidi drives an Odyssey now and I have an LR3. We're going to concentrate on my web biz as it will go from a sole proprietorship to a Corp on 1/1/10... big things ahead.
For the record, we don't dispute that we were using VW/Audi images and descriptions, and that our domain names were knock offs of their trademarks, so no need to rub it in our faces. They've known about us since at least 2005. For some reason it bugs them now.
So, that's the story... good luck to everyone in the community!
Chad Crowell
Owner
At that point and at the advice of our lawyer, we complied, but with all our products being of a drop ship nature, we had no means to replace the images that we had to remove from the site. Since then, business has been dismal.
To prepare for transferring the domain names to VW we consolidated and forwarded the sites to Parts and Accessories for Touareg Jetta Passat Cayenne Q7 : Carmata (currently in operation), which we planned to operate going forward in compliance with VW's demands. The domain transfers for our old stores were finalized yesterday and we are no longer owners of them. Even with Carmata up and running for almost 8 weeks and the old sites forwarding to them, nobody is buying since they can't see the images of what we are selling. Lots of traffic... no sales.
So, on Nov 15th we will take our last order and shut down Carmata, which was formerly TregCentral, JetaCentral and EuroDriveGear.
I know we haven't been an active part of the community for some time, but back in 2003/20044 Heidi and I were very active on VWVortex and also CT when it came into being. We met quite a few of you and sold many of you products at the best prices we could get. Hardly ever the cheapest, but you couldn't beat Heidi's friendly voice on the line.
TC started on a whim... I am a web developer and when we bought a Touareg in August 2003 I got involved in the community online. Since there were no places to get accessories at that time, I opened a store and it became the go to place online for Touareg parts. In fact, other than eBay and Spock's unique offerings, we were the only game in town for a while. Which was part of the plan ;-)
Heidi quit her day job on 2004 to run the store full time, and we got a business phone line and I wrote some extenstions for the shopping cart to help her do her job faster and more efficiently. In 2005 we opened JetaCentral and EuroDriveGear. In 2006 we did almost $500K in sales and I quit my job to run my web agency full time. Things were going really well. TC was always the champ - over 3/4 of our sales every year.
When the economy turned, so did our sales, expectedly. We rolled with it, and my web business has been growing steadily, offsetting the declining sales of TC. With 2 kids now, Heidi is more than happy to let go of the store and spend more time with them, but really, TC was our first baby. We built it from scratch and took pride in providing great service and doing everything we could to be fair to our customers.
So, thanks to the hand that we fed, we are bowing out. Its not worth it at this point, for the income we get from it. We really really REALLY want to thank everyone who purchased from us over the years and helped us grow. It was a great run, and I met some really great people along the way.
We sold the Touareg to my sister in 2007 and she still has it. Heidi drives an Odyssey now and I have an LR3. We're going to concentrate on my web biz as it will go from a sole proprietorship to a Corp on 1/1/10... big things ahead.
For the record, we don't dispute that we were using VW/Audi images and descriptions, and that our domain names were knock offs of their trademarks, so no need to rub it in our faces. They've known about us since at least 2005. For some reason it bugs them now.
So, that's the story... good luck to everyone in the community!
Chad Crowell
Owner