Warning OpenCart Developers: mixmatchmakeup.com Undeserved 1* Review

Fellow OpenCart developers!

I just want to warn you all about a client we've had recently who turned very nasty for (as far as I can tell) very little reason other than us asking to be paid fairly for our work.

I'm not saying in over 10 years in business we've never made any mistakes and every single piece of work we've done has been absolutely perfect first time in every way, but we've always done our best and where we have made mistakes we've always made things right and acted ethically, as others here who know our reputation will confirm, I'm sure.

So with the quality of our work and service generally being extremely good, we were very proud of our perfect 5* rating on Google from 14 very happy clients!

Unfortunately this perfect score was recently broken by Andy Taylor from MixMatchMakeup (mixmatchmakeup.com) because he didn't like the tone of some of our emails, that were (in my view) fair and reasonable.

Bear in mind that we had worked with Andy in the past, and he had been difficult to work with then but generally happy. We hadn't heard from him for a few years and he got back in touch. He was asking for a quote and we were asking for more information but very quickly the tone of his emails became incredibly rude ...

Amongst other smaller pieces of work he had asked for an integration with "Amazon buy shipping" but became angry when we started to ask for more information about how this would work, so he linked to the API docs and said "im afraid that pretty much sums it up buy shipping labels on Amazon !?!?!?" Which as any developer knows obviously isn't enough information as the API can do many things.

He then tried to beat us down on price and give him a "bulk discount" on 2 small jobs saying "Could you do the following jobs for £120 Including VAT?" Bear in mind here we'd already spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards in emails and he had been emailing lots of other developers, playing us all off against each other to get the lowest price.

Overall his tone was becoming ruder and ruder despite our questions being reasonable and necessary to do the work properly.

Next his site that's based on Journal and has loads of extensions seemed to have an issue with a small tweak we applied previously. After a quick look we saw the site had been put in Maintenance Mode and as he'd told us he was working with several other developers it seemed to us that someone else had changed our code so we replied:
"Should we wait until current website amends are done so we don;t overlap, before we can investigate and quote to fix?"

To which he said:
"A quote to fix the work that is less than a month old?
Il pass an go to another developer, as opencart experts you have admin details etc you know can see the site through admin"

And after another email from us:
"Dont worry will not be contacting you for any of the attitude which your company has recently adopted"

And then at this point he left the following 1* review on Google, ruining our perfect 5* which we had worked so hard to get:
"Was an existing customer, asked for them to resolve an issue, which would be paid to be met by an email from cristina, whom is abrupt and not very helpful, ignores questions, used to be fantastic but now very poor wouldn't give any work to this company"

It may be true that we could have handled the interaction better - but to be fair to us, he was repeatedly questioning our prices, telling us other developers were quoting fair lower, saying he fell off his chair laughing when he got our estimates etc. etc. and generally being sarcastic and rude - he should have just gone elsewhere at that point and in hindsight we should have asked him to.

Of course we offered to put things right, apologized profusely and asked if he would consider removing the review, to which he said "only if we reviewed how we worked with him" (or similar) to which we said we were happy to, and he should just let us know what we can do. Unfortunately we didn't receive another reply even after following-up.

As a business owner himself, Andy knows that star ratings are very important as you can see from his Trustpilot here although the MixMatch facebook page has plenty of unhappy customers on who may not have submitted reviews.

Why he thought it was acceptable to lash out at us as a small business and leave a 1* review over something so small, I do not know.

TL;DR
So anyway this post is already too long. I would just urge other OpenCart developers to use extreme caution if dealing with Andy or MixMatch because they'll play you off against other developers on price, ask for complex quotes that never go ahead, and then if he doesn't like the fact you need to charge to investigate issues on his site, he may well give you a 1* review. Avoid!

Oh, come on, Paul! You of all people should know that there're plenty ignorant and erratic customers. Have seen them a lot, so your story seems quite trivial to me :-)

Im sorry but I do take offence to that my emails were becoming ruder and ruder, I have never have and never will be rude to an opencart developer.

The reason I have left a 1 star review was nothing to do with the quotations and you have indeed taken it out of context almost slander, the reason was I asked Cristina if she could assist with an issue which yes you just completed around a month ago, got an email back Word for word, stating that you cannot expect us to fix again and again.. and accused us of having work done on the site when we just simply put this site on maintenance mode for some time off.

I have all the emails, so if any one wants a copy please do contact me. Will be steering clear of Antropy.

mixmatchmakeup.com - 502 error
your work? ))

paulfeakins wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 16, 2020 6:53 pm

Fellow OpenCart developers!

I just want to warn you all about a client we've had recently who turned very nasty for (as far as I can tell) very little reason other than us asking to be paid fairly for our work.

And so on ..

andyt248gb wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:41 am

Im sorry but I do take offence to that my emails were becoming ruder and ruder, I have never have and never will be rude to an opencart developer.

And so on ..

You both may have an dispute - or not.
But, don't bore the public here with further details.
thx.

andyt248gb wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:41 am

Im sorry but I do take offence to that my emails were becoming ruder and ruder, I have never have and never will be rude to an opencart developer.

They were clearly very rude, I can paste more of them if you like.

andyt248gb wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:41 am

The reason I have left a 1 star review was ... stating that you cannot expect us to fix again and again.. and accused us of having work done on the site when we just simply put this site on maintenance mode for some time off.

Not an unreasonable assumption considering you kept telling us about how many other quotes you had and not really deserving of a 1* review with all the negative impact on a small business that has, especially as we offered to do whatever was necessary to make it right and would obviously have been happy to fix any issues once you explained no other developer had broken it.

andyt248gb wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:41 am

I have all the emails, so if any one wants a copy please do contact me.

Post them here if you like, nothing we said was unreasonable, whereas yours are pretty horrible.

thekrotek wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 2:22 am

Oh, come on, Paul! You of all people should know that there're plenty ignorant and erratic customers. Have seen them a lot, so your story seems quite trivial to me :-)

Of course, but they don't often leave 1* reviews, usually you would just go your separate ways. We had an unbroken 14 five star reviews before Andy thought he'd leave a 1* because we dared suggest another developer may have broken our code!

netruxa wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 5:48 am

mixmatchmakeup.com - 502 error
your work? ))

No, we certainly wouldn't interfere with a site because of something like this.

OSWorX wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 12:24 pm

But, don't bore the public here with further details.

It's a warning to other OpenCart developers.

I'd also rather not have to air these grievances so publicly but seeing as Andy's already done that in a Google review ...

If they work with this client and suggest they need to charge to look at a bug because it seems another developer has touched the code, he may destroy their online reviews (and SEO) with a 1* on Google out of pure spite.

I am fully with you and understand the frustration, etc.
But going deeper into details and writing more and more, leads to nothing.
We got the point - but as always: every medal has 2 sides.

And having 1 not so good Google Review - the world can live very good with that.
Better you offer quality work and I am confident that everyone here know how you are working.

OSWorX wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 6:23 pm

I am fully with you and understand the frustration, etc.
But going deeper into details and writing more and more, leads to nothing.

Yes you're right of course, I did not want to have to write this - we tried very hard to make it right, we offered to do whatever was required, but Andy would not listen.

OSWorX wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 6:23 pm

We got the point - but as always: every medal has 2 sides.

It's true, our emails could have been nicer of course, but did we deserve 1*? No we did not.

OSWorX wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 6:23 pm

And having 1 not so good Google Review - the world can live very good with that.
Better you offer quality work and I am confident that everyone here know how you are working.

Good advice, but slating a developer in their Google Reviews because they suggested another developer may have broken their code is absolutely out of order.