WARNING ALL OPENCART DEVELOPERS

All opencart developers please think twice about developing for svenno79 as he has had a lot of work done for him and will not pay...

Also... make sure you recieve a deposit on work unless you know the person well as a lot of people on this site are now crooks... as sad as it is... it would be great to be able to trust every one

I think we should put together a database of users that owe money or the likes so that others don't get caught out by the same person...

Because i used to believe in people paying once they could see the work... but i can't trust people to pay anymore...

Cheers

I think that it will never pass. Contractual development work between Open Cart Dev's and customers has always been a private matter separate from Open Cart where Open Cart is not responsible for what goes on. This post however I believe spreads knowledge to people about the risks involved in contractual work. Me personally, I never do any type of work for Open Cart without securing a retainer up front and it has been that way for years. Again, thanks for the heads up about this particular individual. I have a few other comments for which I will send to your private message.

I'd have to agree with Jeremy 100%.

An example of my own, I had a person here on the forum ask me for help on their website. Some stuff having to do with modifying the template a bit. The person said they would send me some money for it. As the work wasn't too terribly complicated I decided to just tell them to send whatever they felt was fair for the work.

I did the work and the person asked me to do a bit more. They reassured me they would send me a nice payment after I was finished. I really wasn't worried about it. As I said the work wasn't too terribly complicated and I didn't have anything else going on at the time.

Long story short, never got any payment from them after the work was finished, even though they promised me twice that I would. I totally don't blame them for it. It's my own fault because I was kind of indifferent to the whole thing and didn't really specify terms. I just figured they would honor their promise and send me something. I would have even been happy with $10 or something, as long as they kept their word.

Just goes to show you, if you want to get paid for work, set specific terms, collect upfront (at least half) and don't rely on promises.

bigchili wrote:I'd have to agree with Jeremy 100%.

An example of my own, I had a person here on the forum ask me for help on their website. Some stuff having to do with modifying the template a bit. The person said they would send me some money for it. As the work wasn't too terribly complicated I decided to just tell them to send whatever they felt was fair for the work.

I did the work and the person asked me to do a bit more. They reassured me they would send me a nice payment after I was finished. I really wasn't worried about it. As I said the work wasn't too terribly complicated and I didn't have anything else going on at the time.

Long story short, never got any payment from them after the work was finished, even though they promised me twice that I would. I totally don't blame them for it. It's my own fault because I was kind of indifferent to the whole thing and didn't really specify terms. I just figured they would honor their promise and send me something. I would have even been happy with $10 or something, as long as they kept their word.

Just goes to show you, if you want to get paid for work, set specific terms, collect upfront (at least half) and don't rely on promises.

Fully agree...

What was the username of the person that you had the problem with, as i will make sure i think about them before doing any complicated coding for them...

I have another example that one customer asks for something real small and i would normally do it for free, but he offered $10USD for it and i was ok with that, so i did the work, and then he ask me to do something else and another $10USD and then more work etc... getting more complicated.. and i just trusted this guy because i believe in trust, however i ended up doing some major modifications and now he has not only not paid me for what i have done but he scrapped it all and left opencart and started using magneto (he has since come back to opencart as it looks but not using the mods that i developed) www.pcextreme.net.nz

It really sucks when these sort of people wreck a great community....

Cheers

Jem

No doubt, we all have our stories We all have been burned at one point or another but there HAS to be some responsibility placed on the DEV as well for protecting his/her assets. I agree, people like that make it hard for honest hard working dev's that come to this forum but for every bad one, there are countless good ones. Open Cart will never get involved in the workings of client/contractor relationship of development work that is being done behind closed doors on the forum. It would be foolish because of liability reasons and then you get into the HE SAID SHE SAID BS which will inevitably cause even more issues. I think the best approach is just to make people aware if it is legitimate and go from there.

avvici wrote:No doubt, we all have our stories We all have been burned at one point or another but there HAS to be some responsibility placed on the DEV as well for protecting his/her assets. I agree, people like that make it hard for honest hard working dev's that come to this forum but for every bad one, there are countless good ones. Open Cart will never get involved in the workings of client/contractor relationship of development work that is being done behind closed doors on the forum. It would be foolish because of liability reasons and then you get into the HE SAID SHE SAID BS which will inevitably cause even more issues. I think the best approach is just to make people aware if it is legitimate and go from there.

Good point... There are a lot of great users out there... and the few bad ones just seem to make you forget about them... lol... my bad... Im just a little bit annoyed (more with myself than anything for being taking in by the crook)... lol

Maybe someone could make a Private Forum that only OpenCart devs and others that make a profit from offering OpenCart services could access. It wouldn't really be like OpenCart getting involved in it, more like a Forum where we could check to make sure whoever we are doing business with doesn't have any prior negative history with any other dev.

I've seen some of the VBulletin Forums that have a Private Members Forum that only certain people can access. Not sure if phpBB3 can do that or not...

Trust me, there is such a thing already.

It is also the other way around.

I asked someone to build me a module and he said he would.

I got a price and he wanted me to pay 50% upfront, so I did.

I got the module but it was not working OK so I even helped him on how to develop it further.
He asked me to pay me more but I only paid another 25%, it just needed a small tweak.

He never replied to me again.

Lucky for me I paid with PayPal......

i2Paq wrote:It is also the other way around.

I asked someone to build me a module and he said he would.

I got a price and he wanted me to pay 50% upfront, so I did.

I got the module but it was not working OK so I even helped him on how to develop it further.
He asked me to pay me more but I only paid another 25%, it just needed a small tweak.

He never replied to me again.

Lucky for me I paid with PayPal......

Absolutely! Works both ways. Like you said you paid with Pay Pal. These methods whatever they may be should be more of a tactical way to protect company assets in my opinion