Every small business owner starts with a dream. For Sarah Chen, it was “The Golden Poppy,” a charming online boutique selling curated California artisan goods from her home in Santa Rosa. She saved, she planned, she invested. Her biggest investment: a “full-service” digital agency in San Francisco, promising a custom e-commerce site that would “scale her visio
Total cost: $75,000. The result? A catastrophe.
“They promised me an interactive map, a custom inventory system, SEO that would make me visible,” Sarah told us, tears in her eyes. “What I got was a template from 2010, broken payment gateways, and a contact form that went straight to spam. They just ghosted me after the final payment.”…