Ted Woodworking Program is very well know product on internet.
You are the kind of person who likes DIY's and looks for every possibility to create things by using your hands? It gives you the joy to see the things in your hands after you crafted them?
Then maybe woodworking is one of your special hobbies in which your secret talent lays. As it combines craftmanship with art. If you love it as much as I do, then you love thinking about new projects to improve your skills in working with woods. I like looking through magazines that illustrate different wooden designs like furniture, tables or benches, and other things. Thinking about how I would be able to build them or even improve them with my ideas feels great!
You can see I love working on woodworking projects. And spending my time with that and if you share the passion for garden projects or woodworking. The product we will talk about in the following may be a good fit for you.
What is the Ted Woodworking Program and how is it advertised?
When I have an idea in mind, I usually look online for guides or books that I can easily follow step by step. When I stumbled across the package from Ted woodworking plans (founder: Ted McGareth), I got excited.
The complete package that gets offered seemed like a really good deal. You'll get the 16,000 woodwork plans for $67 instead of $297, which looks like a very good deal for this number of plans. Furthermore, the other aspects that get advertised sound very promising.
- It is truly easy to use and there are additional extras that are helpful to all, beginner to intermediate or pro.
- The price may be a bit higher than other options but still super reasonable for that amount.
- You can easily print the instructions to use directly by hand.
- It’s hard to beat the diligence and features of many plans. To sum that up, it is an enormous quantity of woodworking plans at a rather decent price. Ted states that thanks to the step by step instructions. Prevent frustration and confusion, they allow you to complete your projects successfully the very first time. No matter your experience level, just starting or having years of experience. It's easy to complete many projects, like furniture or workshops. Apart from the 16,000 plans, you can receive new plans every month if you sign up to a membership area. And there you will then find these plans to download. Purchasing it today will get you special time-limited bonuses that will help you succeed in your woodworking projects even faster. And lastly, if you’re not fully amazed by that, you can get a refund within 60 days after your order.
All of that sounds very promising, doesn’t it? However, after I found several reviews, calling out that product and stating it would be a scam, I looked more into it. And found out a lot more than I expected.
Everything a big scam? Experiences from reviewers
” I have personally also reviewed the “16,000 plans” package. And it's a disorganized mess of random plans scraped off the internet. Picking plans at random, I was able to find the source. It's freely accessible, for every one of them with a Google search or two. Being able to download the plans online for free does not, however, make them free of copyright. So reselling them is not legal.”
Reviews like that are not uncommon about “Ted’s Woodworking plans”. Other people shared their stories as well and experienced similar things. It turned out that the woodworking plans also get advertised and sold through aggressive marketing. And sales tactics to sell the product, like spamming people with emails or using affiliate marketing. Those mails in turn were sent from false addresses that had nothing to do with “Ted Woodworking plans”. Additionally, the address on tedswoodworking.com is wrong too. On the website, this is stated as the official address:
Ted “Woody” McGareth 219 Tama Street
Slater, IA 50244
United States
After all of this, there was skepticism coming up towards “Ted”, for clear reasons. Of course, after finding out about the secrets behind “Ted's Woodworking Plans”, people got curious and one user, who lives not far from the address, actually went there to check it out. The address does not exist. So, wherever on this planet “Ted” lives, it seems like he does not want any fan post or visits. … I wonder why?
A significant amount of people already ordered “Ted's Woodworking plans” without even thinking about it. I mean the way how it’s advertised and the cheap price for a large quantity seems like the perfect deal! (Looking at it now, that should have been the point where you get skeptical and definitely should questioning if it really can be that perfect.)
The main reason for the unsatisfied users, outraging about this alleged scam, is however the empty promises that were made.
The whole truth about the fraud
After the people who purchased their packages received the product, they found out that “Ted's Woodworking” is not really about offering qualitative woodworking plans of good value. It's about
making money, using people who fall for aggressive marketing and sales strategies. The plans are just good enough to keep naïve people quiet as they didn't realize that they fell for fraud, so they won't ask for a refund.
Once people received their “16,000” plans as advertised, with a massive collection of detailed woodworking projects and videos, they, unfortunately, must find out that it was far away from that.
Indeed, there are thousands of videos included in the package, but it’s not even close to 2,500. And the 150 woodworking premium videos? People started to notice that they’ve seen some videos on other sources already where they are publicly available and free to use. So, they found out that most of the plans can be looked up for free on public websites like YouTube or Vimeo.com. And not only that, you can watch much better woodworking videos, free of charge!
From the images used on the website, you could expect that you'll receive a box with a CD/DVD. But instead you will receive a digital product and if you want to have the CD/DVD you need to pay extra.
There are several more aspects why many feel cheated on:
- Some of the links to videos do not exist longer. That proofs that the list hasn’t been updated in a while.
- Added to that, the quality of many videos are not even of good value and up to date. The latest video is from 10 years ago, in 2010. You can tell that the videos haven't been properly produced for “Ted's Woodworking”.
- The original product advertises 16,000 step by step plans. Not all of them are step by step.
- The experience level didn't matter but apparently, there are videos here that are not suitable for beginners.
- Further research exposed that of the so-called “original woodworking plans”, the majority was stolen from websites like www.furnitureplans.com and www.beesource.com and other publications including books, magazines, and other video platforms.
- It’s not too easy to use at it may take a while to find what you’re looking for. As mentioned above, the videos that are included in the package did not meet the expectations. You can divide them into two different categories.
- ➔ Simple: Detailed plans but not as user friendly like others. These include a material list, an extra that not all the plans in “Ted's Woodworking” have.
- ➔ Detailed: These plans are suited for beginners too. They are easy to read, thoroughly understandable due to detailed instructions, elevations, 3-D drawing, close up shots, many side notes, and comes in color. Nowadays more companies use people or characters that are not always realistic to represent and advertise a specific product. That doesn't mean that the product is bad in any way, for instance, have a
look at “Tony the Tiger”, used by “Kellogg’s”. In this case, it indeed leads to a negative reputation, as “Ted” makes lots of promises on his website that aren’t 100% true.
How Ted Woodworking Program could it become such a big scam?
Affiliate Marketing is probably a big reason why “Ted's Woodworking” gained so much popularity. Lots of websites have links that link back to “Ted's Woodworking”-Website. This boosts the website in the Google rankings and makes tedswoodworking.com the second search result after the ads on Google. It doesn't matter if all these affiliate links will ever sell a single copy. Even links to Ted's Website will never sell anything to support his website on Google.
The reason why many bloggers or website-owner used affiliate links to “Ted's Woodworking” may be the high commission they could get from using it as an affiliate.
As a consequence, even though many people already put up public complaints, still loads of people promote their website a lot. Maybe so many that he still generates sales, even after all those reports and complaints.
How much is the fraud worth?
In 2012, the website had traffic from approximately 200,000 to 300,000 visitors per month.
If you assume that only 1% of those people buy the plans, with 100,000 visitors per month means 1,000 sales per month at $67 per sale. Which leads to $67,000 (67k) per month or $804,000 (804k) per year. Generally, such a percentage is referred to as the “conversion rate”.
When we assume that all those sales were affiliate sales, he would only keep around $200,000 (200k) per year. But is expected that at least a third, or more, of Ted’s sales are NOT affiliate sales. As we learned previously, affiliate links boost his page on Google. So if that one third comes not from affiliate links but through search engines, he would keep $22,000 (22k) for those. Putting 70% commission on the remaining $44,000 (44k) would leave him with a total of $33,000 (33k) monthly, or $396,000 (396k) per year.
Even when you calculate low, it is a lucrative scam.
Is it even legal?
Some of the websites, where content got stolen from, like www.woodgears.ca, www.woodworkweb.com, www.formeremotals.com, and www.beesource.com are calling “Ted’s Woodworking” out as a scam saying that it is illegal what he is offering.
He sells instructions and plans that do not belong to him. People tried to contact him directly to find out if it's legal or not but they never got a response.
And, at the same time, all the latest updates are dated around 2012 and it does not seem like he had issues with the legality since then. Even though his plans are so popular. If nothing happened until now, I actually can’t see anything happen in the future too.
Why do people care so much about that issue?
Every dollar that has been spent on “Ted Woodworking” could've been spent in another, legitimate way. Something like purchasing a trustworthy, high-quality woodworking content, which then, in turn, would encourage the creation of more quality content. Apart from hurting other producers, it also hinders the buyer from finding better woodworking plans, for free.
On the other side, I would say it's almost a waste of time. Why? Let's compare it to McDonald's or Walmart coming to a small town. People in the town never like the idea but the majority can't afford to say no to the price, convenience, and range of offers.
Ted is going to continue selling his plans, despite other woodworking bloggers who are not happy about that. Because people can't say no to his cheap and therefore acceptable offer.
What can you do about Ted Woodworking Program?
To prevent falling for scams like this in the future, look up reviews from other people who already had experience or issues with a product.
So, if you do a little research you will find out that www.tedswoodworking.com, after getting over 30 complaints to which they failed to respond, received an “F” from BBB Review, which is the worst grade.
However, if you already purchased those plans, you could just keep them, once you have them anyway. Maybe the next time you create something, it comes handy and useful as you perhaps can look up some information. Also being able to print them seems appealing to me. If you're a teacher, you can use them for your students for example.
Of course, I understand, that with those circumstances not everyone would accept falling for a scam like that, so…
Can you get your money back?
When you used clickbank.com for your purchase, I would recommend to contact them and report the issue. There is a good chance to get your money back. Steve Ramsey bought the plans, basically only for research purposes, and after reporting the fraud he got his money refunded. Clickbank.com is pretty known for being used to sell scams and frauds, so they should be used to deal with reports like that.
If you paid with PayPal, report an “Item, not as described” file with PayPal.
If you purchased the product within the last 90 days, chances to receive a refund are pretty high.
Forget about trying to contact “Ted” or the customer support of his website because they most likely won’t respond to your request. That will be only disappointing and frustrating for you.
How to stop scams like that
The main action that could be done is that those people who hold the copyright of the stolen content. That they sue “Ted” to stop him selling these plans. However, that would mean that the copyright holders need to spend money on lawyers and investigations to find out who is the real face behind “Ted”. And that is difficult as the address does not exist and the image of “Ted” on the website is just a stock photo. Even if he would be successfully sued, he could just remove the plans that are against the copyright. And of course keep selling the other plans that are not affected.
If you know what can be found on the internet nowadays and how to use it appropriately… it is unlikely to fall for such scams. The main victims are people who just started to look for woodworking information online.
So, it’s important to inform those people who could potentially fall for such frauds. We need to inform them so that they realize, that products like “Ted Woodworking program” is a scam. Before they buy the product. It would be very effective that they find legitimate sources after looking for “Woodworking plans” online before they find Ted's. So ideally, after using search engines for that, other pages show up.
That's the step where YOU can help! Pages get higher ranks on Google when there are many links to them. The ideal solution is to link better sources for plans. On the opposite side, when pages and articles like mine, that are talking about the scam, get ranked higher on Google, more people can find out about it and can be made aware of the fraud.
Probably none of those measures will stop “Ted Woodworking program”. Because legal action to stop scams and frauds, in general, haven't been successful yet. What we can is making scams like this less profitable. Even if Ted's website would be shut down. He would most likely just relaunch it under a different name and domain.
Concluding and are there any trustworthy alternatives?
After this extensive information about “Ted Woodworking program” and other scams, you probably have an idea why you should avoid buying products like that. But now an important question. As your expectations and needs clearly couldn’t be met by “Ted’s Woodworking”: Are there any legitimate alternatives?
I was sourcing through different sources and yes, I found a product that looks trustworthy, “Woodworker's Treasure Chest”. Normally the price is $97, but you can purchase it for only $27, and no monthly fees! Other than “Ted Woodworking program”, it contains a lot of information and will improve your knowledge and experience.
If you will look for other alternatives for woodworking plans after leaving this side, I have to mention that other variants of the scam can be found on woodworking4home.com and woodprix.com. The layout is similar and when you look at the list of folders it’s identical. Don’t fall for those!
In the end, it's up to you though. Perhaps you're okay with buying and using a mixed-up copyrighted woodworking plan package. That's fine.
But if you want to avoid falling for scams like here, learn a lesson and always read people's reviews before purchasing a product and learn more about the business to find out how legit it is.
But Ted woodworking program is not reported as scam from all users
If you had the intention to buy “Ted Woodworking plans” before you read all of those reviews and still thinking about buying it, then sleep over it to see if you still want it tomorrow as it will still be there. Maybe you fell for the hype. But if you want it after you slept over it, then it wasn't the hype that made you buy it. If you want to buy it, you can do it here:
