Are iweb really that bad?!

suesmith234

masonic said:

suesmith234 said:

Read their Trust Pilot reviews. Shocking.

If you want a balanced view about how good/bad a company is, Trustpilot is about the worst place you could go.

Here's an example of a recent (and frankly ridiculous) one star review left by someone about iWeb:

"I wrote to the Managing Director of iWeb, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez in early March 2021. I had paid the one-off £100 up-front fund-management fee and I was interested to know what would happen in the event that iWeb was sold off or divested. How would, for example, iWeb ensure that I would continue to receive 'a free fund management' service from a new fund manager?
I have neither received a reply nor an acknowledgment. Not good enough, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez "

Don't you just hate it when one of the directors of a major investment platform doesn't give you a personal response to a question that seems to come from a fundamental misunderstanding and false sense of entitlement.

On the other hand, genuinely terrible companies can pay for a good Trustpilot rating, essentially by burying any negative feedback with volumes of invited and incentivised positive reviews. I actually find it reassuring that iWeb doesn't play these games.

Yeh, all meaningless. Total waste of time looking, as it's all lies and stupid people who don't know what they are doing.

And paying a 1% spread on UK FTSE 100 blue chip company is also really great and fine.  

masonic

suesmith234 said:

Yeh, all meaningless. Total waste of time looking, as it's all lies and stupid people who don't know what they are doing.

You can get some value from reviews, providing you know and trust the person giving the review. Someone who you know personally, or someone with a track record of giving fair and honest reviews of other products and services. I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as you have, but there are a lot of people who create problems for themselves through lack of understanding, those who land themselves in difficulties due to their own behaviours, and those with a hidden agenda. An online review is only worth as much as your trust in the person giving it.

suesmith234 said:

And paying a 1% spread on UK FTSE 100 blue chip company is also really great and fine.  

It's better to avoid it if you can. Spread is a property of the market and can widen or narrow under different market conditions, for example spreads are generally higher first thing in the morning, during periods of high volatility, or during periods where an individual company releases price-sensitive information. It's also possible that apparent spread can include a genuine movement in share price if you haven't compared with sell orders made around the same time. Also not forgetting many share price feeds are delayed 15 minutes.

Brokers have a best execution policy, so if you have evidence that your trade was executed at a non-market price then perhaps that's something you should follow up. All market trades are published, so there would be no hiding from the fact you got a substantially different price than others placing similar sized buy orders around the same time.

Presumably this was too large an order to get a live quote, so you did not have the opportunity to decline the price you were offered?

underground99

suesmith234 said:

masonic said:

suesmith234 said:

Read their Trust Pilot reviews. Shocking.

If you want a balanced view about how good/bad a company is, Trustpilot is about the worst place you could go.

Here's an example of a recent (and frankly ridiculous) one star review left by someone about iWeb:

"I wrote to the Managing Director of iWeb, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez in early March 2021. I had paid the one-off £100 up-front fund-management fee and I was interested to know what would happen in the event that iWeb was sold off or divested. How would, for example, iWeb ensure that I would continue to receive 'a free fund management' service from a new fund manager?
I have neither received a reply nor an acknowledgment. Not good enough, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez "

Don't you just hate it when one of the directors of a major investment platform doesn't give you a personal response to a question that seems to come from a fundamental misunderstanding and false sense of entitlement.

On the other hand, genuinely terrible companies can pay for a good Trustpilot rating, essentially by burying any negative feedback with volumes of invited and incentivised positive reviews. I actually find it reassuring that iWeb doesn't play these games.

Yeh, all meaningless. Total waste of time looking, as it's all lies and stupid people who don't know what they are doing.

Trustpilot reviews for financial services and utility companies do tend to attract negative reviews rather than neutral or positive ones.

That's because people who have encountered some issue would sign up to leave a grumble or rant or complaint to vent their frustrations, whereas people who have a normal experience or even a 'better than they expected' experience with a bank or broker or water company or broadband provider are not likely to sign up to trustpilot just to say 'I use this company, it's basically fine'. Unless they have a lot of time on their hands. As some proportion of customers of any financial services company will have issues from time to time, reviews will skew more negative than the average customer actually experiences, just due to human nature.

So, a review score you find 'shocking' will often not be the average experience. It is like Amazon reviews, unless you know and trust the reviewer to be fair and even handed from checking all they other reviews they write, they may just be a crackpot or have an agenda.

If some reviews are particularly glowing, they may be written by the company themselves or a shill or a motivated/ incentivised customer. If some are particularly negative they may be written by a rival or an aggrieved employee who's annoyed they didn't get a pay rise or got fired. In DIY investing, reviews may be written by people who misunderstand some aspect of the service. So there are all kinds of reasons why individual reviews won't be representative of the experience someone would get.

And paying a 1% spread on UK FTSE 100 blue chip company is also really great and fine.  

A ) why did you accept the offered price if it was 1% higher than you were expecting to pay;

B ) what did they say in response to your complaint that they had failed in their duty of best execution of your trade, as evidenced by the published transaction prices from the stock exchange at the time of day that your order was dealt?

jimjames

underground99 said:

suesmith234 said:

masonic said:

suesmith234 said:

Read their Trust Pilot reviews. Shocking.

If you want a balanced view about how good/bad a company is, Trustpilot is about the worst place you could go.

Here's an example of a recent (and frankly ridiculous) one star review left by someone about iWeb:

"I wrote to the Managing Director of iWeb, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez in early March 2021. I had paid the one-off £100 up-front fund-management fee and I was interested to know what would happen in the event that iWeb was sold off or divested. How would, for example, iWeb ensure that I would continue to receive 'a free fund management' service from a new fund manager?
I have neither received a reply nor an acknowledgment. Not good enough, Mr Pardavila-Gonzalez "

Don't you just hate it when one of the directors of a major investment platform doesn't give you a personal response to a question that seems to come from a fundamental misunderstanding and false sense of entitlement.

On the other hand, genuinely terrible companies can pay for a good Trustpilot rating, essentially by burying any negative feedback with volumes of invited and incentivised positive reviews. I actually find it reassuring that iWeb doesn't play these games.

Yeh, all meaningless. Total waste of time looking, as it's all lies and stupid people who don't know what they are doing.

Trustpilot reviews for financial services and utility companies do tend to attract negative reviews rather than neutral or positive ones. 

Except London Capital and Finance which had all 5* reviews from people who had no idea what they were buying. Until it collapsed and they found out, the reviews then dropped like a stone.

So essentially Trustpilot is meaningless for these sorts of services.

I bought it FTSE100 stock last week. The spread was 0.08% with iWeb so I guess it depends which one you buy and probably when as well.

xylophone

I am quite satisfied with iweb.

lirr

havingaball74 said:

Hi all,
After much research and discussion, I'd pretty much decided to invest with iweb. I have £85,000 in a cash ISA to invest. I'm a total beginner when it comes to investing. Then, I read quite negative reviews on Boring Money and other sites and so now I'm having second thoughts. They quite like Vanguard and Money Box. Any thoughts would very much be appreciated.

The  review on Boring Money is pretty accurate. It is ugly, it is cheap, and it does the  job fine if you  know what you're doing and don't trade much.

I've used it for about 2 years for those reasons. Now I'm moving to Freetrade and really enjoying the change to a decent interface and chat-based customer suppoort - though I moved mostly because I wanted to start trading more.
Changing providers, I've now found my only actual 'problem' with iWeb so far - I'm unable to sell some euro-based shares that I bought through iWeb a couple of years ago. Apparently  they  no longer have  a broker that trades in these, and no promises that they ever will have - it was the case   2 months ago when I started closing; and they confirmed today still no solution in sight. The only option they offer is to either keep the account open forever on iWeb with those shares, or open an account with a broker who does trade in this  particular share. And it sounds like quite a lot of shares and customers might be affected. Seems to me like pretty bad service in this specific area.

Also worth mentioning that it's pretty hard to get through to customer support - I was over an hour on hold with them today

xylophone

I've been with i web for a few years now.

I don't trade often and don't choose anything exotic so no problems there.

Dividends can be late and when paid out take at least three days to  arrive in the bank account but that is no great matter.

I needed to phone them last week - I got through to a human within around twenty minutes so not too bad.

I notice that the web chat function has become very hit and miss.

However, it is cheap and suits my limited needs.