Trent Studios LLC We Paid For A Modern And Automated Website And Got Outdated Product And Arguments Fort Collins Colorado

We hired them first to work on our woo commerce site and keep it running. After a while they recommended that we build a new site to take what we had then and move it forward. With that we hired them for a special project to upgrade our ecommerce site at that time into the new and advanced level. The goal was to create a site that would be advanced, automated and have the ability to work with tools that would bring us more traffic, customers and deals. We expected a highly professional service and product that we would use for many years to come and be able to upgrade when needed with current generation marketing and commerce tools.However, they created a website that instead of being a major step forward, became a leap backward.

Firstly, we lost many programs and tools that helped bring new customers for very low or almost free, like in the refer a friend program which we had previously. This allowed us to offer customers a discount if they had their friend make their first purchase from us. We lost the ability to get leads from customers who were interested in our services, but were not yet ready to buy. This we lost because they could not properly set up a system that would allow customers to sign up for our newsletters prior to purchasing. We lost the ability to create dynamic prices for our products. We now can no longer offer more than one unit of goods for a small discount to our customers, which previously allowed us to increase the amount of units we sold per transaction. We lost the ability to sell goods directly on Google because you were not able to connect the integration system. We lost the ability to see detailed information on google analytics, like how many sales and how much we sold from each source, because you could not correctly connect Google Analytics. We lost the ability to automatically bill periship, so we ended up having a less automated logistics system than before, costing our employees much precious time to manually compile data in order to get reimbursed by periship. We lost these programs because either they stated that you do not have the ability to create such a tool, or because Miva itself does not support such programs. The miva platform in itself came with many blunders that handicapped us and kept us from doing business properly. When we started discussing this project they recommended Miva and shot down any ideas of other platforms. Being highly recommended to us we trusted them on that matter.

Yet Miva in itself has shown to be greatly inferior to what we had before. The inventory manager keeps us from being able to automatically control the count of any product. With a system that counts products in our inventory as “sold” when it is added to a cart instead of actually being paid for, it took us much more time to sell off lots of inventory than it ever should. In order to bring products back that were actually unsold we would have to go into the system ourselves and clear the carts. We would have to hope that a product wouldn’t be marked as “sold out”, even though it wasn’t because it had been stuck in an abandoned cart and that a customer who was looking to actually buy it, didn’t come by our site and see that what he wanted was sold out. We literally lost sales because of this. The editing of products and texts was a massive failure in itself. What made them think that when we told them that we have no experience in coding or html, that we would work well with a system that only edits product text or any other text on the site, only in html? This has made us waste too much time and added too much effort to something that should have been as simple as writing a letter. They created a system that completely crippled our SEO potential and ability. With the WooCommerce site we had the blogs connected directly and they registered perfectly with analytics and with google SEO. The way they set it up now, makes it that google reads it as a completely different website. This does nothing for our SEO, when previously it acted as a major booster for our organic traffic. Worst of all they recommended a platform that has absolutely no potential to progress into the future.

Miva is so behind on current ecommerce practices, that nearly no one creates high quality add ons and tools for it. That means that as the world of ecommerce evolves, any Miva platform will stay stagnant and irrelevant. It does not even have the ability to take on applications such as a customer reward program, which every other platform already has and is now vital to the success of the business. Even with all of the issues that the site has given us, they do not add up to the issues that working with them has created. The first and possibly the biggest issue is their inability to communicate with speed and efficiency. There were far too many times where I would ask them a question, and they would either ignore it completely or state they don’t know and never attempted to find an answer. In the end they completely disregarded our dissatisfaction with certain applications, like how they created a completely redundant system with Infusionsoft, which was meant to be a lead catcher like we had before. It would have allowed us to automatically and efficiently communicate with potential customers who show interest and lead them to a sale. We invested over $4000 into this program, and when they did not deliver as asked, they decided that we should pay you more to do as needed and would not hear any more of it.

They blatantly disregarded any investments on our part for these 3rd party platforms and completely ignored our needs as your customer over a payday. When we started talking more recently about the late completion of the site, they disregarded our claim and blamed our needs for edits. Yet on the contrary, when we launched in October, many functions were absolutely unacceptable. Vital functions had errors, did not work, were confusing to customers and to our employees and leaving them in that fashion would have spelled the utter demise of our business, because when launched, the site was unusable. They have shown that we cannot take them for their word, as they are grossly dishonest.

In 2015, shortly after launch we had a conversation about hosting fees they assured us that they will never increase our hosting fees because we are on their server. Recently they have increased our hosting fees nearly 10 fold. They built us a system that is not common and not too many developers know and use. They built a system where if we were not happy, then we had no choice but to stay with them or use miva’s own developers which are extremely expensive to use. When we started speaking about dis-satisfaction and how we believed that the site was incomplete, then they stopped all conversation and took a stance of power and threatened our business if we did not pay. They forced us to pay for something that we are completely unsatisfied with. They took hostage the vital customer information that is required to run a successful operation. In current web development and ecommerce standards this site is in incomplete and in shambles. It is not the high standard of quality that we paid for and should not have to spend our money on this disaster. Such was the disaster with this project that we were left no choice but to have built and launched a different site on a new platform. We will no longer be using Miva for our business needs.

In the end we switched to a completely new site and with new developers. We asked him for a refund, and not only did he state that he sees no reason to refund us, but he believes we still owe him money. When we fired him, he completely dismantled the site he built and we consider that as taking a "return of product"