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Very frustrated...

Very frustrated with technical support here...

11/3/2009 5:10:00 PM

SCI-DFE5BA4B0C584B1DB44EC5CB4065790E

1 posts

Very frustrated with technical support here...

I could not get a good answer from technical support and my client cannot wait entire days between asking a question and getting an answer. We are trying to get a particularly thorny tax issue resolved so that a site can go live. It has a DROP DEAD DEADLINE of TOMORROW, and all the data is in the system and working except for tax calculations. In frustration I ordered the full source version to see if we can fix this ourselves, only to find out that the zip file is passworded and we have no password for unencrypting it, so we are again dead in the water. Technical support has been unhelpful - offering only an $80/hour assistance with configuration, and no guarantee of a fix. No responses to our enquiries here on the forum, and entire day passes between question and answer responses from technical support. This is unacceptable. I see many reviews raving on snowcovered about how great this product and it's support are. That has not been my experience to date. So far I am tempted to just dump this for another store, ask for our money back and/or give it a poor rating in snowcovered. My customer wants all the consulting time we've poured into this project back because we can't answer simple questions about how to do tax calculations and the software doesn't perform as advertised. Please make the effort to get back to us ASAP. We've been more than patient, and have now poured over $400US into purchasing your product on multiple sites, and even multiple times for one site. See the thread by prichards on taxes for more information.

11/5/2009 2:58:46 PM

host

1815 posts

Re: Very frustrated with technical support here...

I had conversation by email with your developer. Maybe you have not seen it. Please find a summary below:

file is passworded and we have no password for unencrypting it
-> Email below has been sent to your developer one hour after I got the request:

Hi Pat,

Please find the ZIP passwords on the download page at: http://www.dnnsoft.com/MybrAccount/MyDownloads/tabid/174/Default.aspx

The box with the ZIP passwords is located below the box with the source code pack links.

Please let me know if you can't find it.

Thanks,

Technical support has been unhelpful - offering only an $80/hour assistance with configuration

-> I have replied to the initial request of your developer regarding this issue and sent him this solution by email:
The same location can only have only one Zone name. To assign the zone names to products with different tax use CATALooK.netStore -> Products -> Taxes.

After that I got another email from your developer, copy below:
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, this still doesn't solve our problem. Is it possible to do a Skype voice chat with you? It may be easier to discuss our specific issue with you by voice instead of email.

Our Skype ID is oscubed.

We are available for chat now, if you are.

This was my reply:
Pat,
I have a developer who offers Skype support but he takes $80 per hour. Please let me know if this is an option for you.
If not, please send me your scripts by email or send me screen shots of the CAT_Zones setting pages and the product tax settings from the ‘Taxes’ page of module CAT_Products.
Thanks,

We offer free email support or support by Snowcovered HelpDesk. The forum is not the right place to get instant support. If you don't provide us with the requested information that we need to help you, it's not possible for us to check what causes any problems. I have offered you the option to fix your problem by email see email above. For Skype or telefon support I have to pay a developer. I can not offer this for free otherwise I would have to charge much more for the software.

All of your email requests (6 requests) in the past have been answered within 24 hours after you have sent it.

and no guarantee of a fix
-> I never told you something like this. Also I have sent a solution by email to your developer.

and entire day passes between question and answer responses from technical support
-> You got all replies between 1 and 24 hours after we got the requests. If you need faster support, you have the option to hire a developer.

4/7/2010 5:31:49 PM

Coops

12 posts

Re: Very frustrated with technical support here...

Hi SCI-DFE5BA4B0C584B1DB44EC5CB4065790E

How is upport now? Has it improved at all?

I want to buy this product but am not keen as I feel there is no support and the documentation appears to not cover many of the Admin options.

I have emailed DNNSoft twice with pre-sales questions and been ignored. First email ovet two weeks ago and still nothing. There are many comments on this forum that go unanswered even though they've been viewed 30, 40, 50 times so must be of interest to other users but nothing from DNNSoft.

Have things improved or worsened in your opinion since you posted this?

Thanks

Paul

4/7/2010 5:54:54 PM

SCI-44C201F5BE2D4A66BB2B783F632D8AB7

5 posts

Re: Very frustrated with technical support here...

Coops wrote
Hi SCI-DFE5BA4B0C584B1DB44EC5CB4065790E

How is upport now? Has it improved at all?

I want to buy this product but am not keen as I feel there is no support and the documentation appears to not cover many of the Admin options.

I have emailed DNNSoft twice with pre-sales questions and been ignored. First email ovet two weeks ago and still nothing. There are many comments on this forum that go unanswered even though they've been viewed 30, 40, 50 times so must be of interest to other users but nothing from DNNSoft.

Have things improved or worsened in your opinion since you posted this?

Thanks

Paul

It's a very complex product. That means there are lots of options, but it's frequently unclear how to solve specific tasks. Tech support seems a bit combatative - you ask them questions of a specific nature and they send you back clips from the Admin manual. Well I READ the admin manual before asking the question and it didn't answer my original question. The manual is over 250 pages - it's huge - and MANY of the more common things you want to do are covered there. For our Tax issue we ended up subscribing to a tax rate service and modifying the standard tax handling code to handle the byzantine NYS tax laws regarding clothes. CataLook is a worldwide entity so I guess I can understand that it's tough to support directly all the local tax issues out there in the world.

All in all - if you put time into it - the product can create a wonderful store. We usually recommend people budget approximately 100 hours to configuration, setup and customization of their store's design and layout to get what they want. That's a non-trivial investment and one that you should be sure you are up for before jumping into it.

4/7/2010 6:24:32 PM

Coops

12 posts

Re: Very frustrated with technical support here...

Hi SCI

Thank you for that.

Time is the problem, isn't it always? :-), customer wants this yesterday and I can't get any response out of DNNSoft despite the fact I want to give them money for their product. Strange business model they have and does nothing to the way I look to my customer. This isn't just not helping but is causing problems and more work, I'm not sure I want to pay them $129 for that.

I'm currently playing with the trial version but can't work out if the problem I have is due to it being the trial version or not, no mention of this configuartion in the manual at all (that's not a surprise either, seen many comments that the manual is more like a "Getting Started Guide". Have emailed DNNsoft and left a message on the forum but no answer from them.

Don't expect you have any experience with download products do you? It's a simple issue which could be answered quite simply but nothing but silence from DNNSoft.

It looks like I'm going to have to buy it to see if my problem is trial version related or not, I wish I could go elsewhere and buy something else instead, doesn't seem like these people deserve my money, but it does seem to be a good product even without support, just hope it doesn't break completely sometime. Guess I can always go back to PayPal and get a reverse, they seem to always take the purchaser's side.

Cheers

Paul

4/14/2010 2:38:51 PM

steve123

69 posts

stefporter.com

Re: Very frustrated with technical support here...

Hi,

without any doubt CATALooK is very complex and hard to configure ...

Do you tried to buy e.g. Excel from MS and ask their support to solve your problem with their product ???

Regards, Stefan.

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