Monkey business

On one end it is lovely how literally anybody can build something and start earning a little bit on Marketplace. On the other hand, the (lack of) supervision offers literally any self-claimed developer a chance to upload and sell anything. Even if their work is simply copied from developers who actually do time. I can only imagine OpenCart officials spending countless hours refunding purchases and seeing a significant amount of revenue vaporize into thin air.

Obviously the buyer is responsible for looking at reputation signals, such as reviews. Whether or not somebody is signed as an official partner makes incredible difference. I'd like to mention Clear Thinking here, simply because I never even had a single error message show up while using their extensions, EVER. The extensions simply worked on the first attempt, just by installing, which is quite impressive. By far most of the other extensions I've purchased were subject to malfunctioning, poor support or even no support at all. I hate to bother OpenCart again with another request for a refund.

Looking at reviews alone just isn't enough to know whether or not the developer is genuine. Somebody has to be the first to try something new. Somebody out there will always fall victim at some point. This is why I think it's about time we start at least setting SOME boundaries of what is acceptable and what isn't. The people who choose OpenCart and therefore participate in generating revenue for this -in my honest opinion- amazing shopping cart system, those people deserve to know what's up. No more monkey business, please!

EMGX wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 14, 2021 11:40 pm

Whether or not somebody is signed as an official partner makes incredible difference.

Yeah, no it doesn't, at least not for some. I've had to fix several extensions from said types. The issue is not that I had to fix them, errors and mistakes happen and that's fine, more that they weren't interested on one occasion I remember or flatly refused to believe/acknowledge an issue even when it's in black and white in front of them on another occasion.

And I don't do that much work, so statistically, given other issues I've had to deal with also, it's quite a poor showing for "offical partners".

So no, "offical partner" guarantees nothing.

grgr wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 15, 2021 9:33 am

Yeah, no it doesn't, at least not for some. I've had to fix several extensions from said types. The issue is not that I had to fix them, errors and mistakes happen and that's fine, more that they weren't interested on one occasion I remember or flatly refused to believe/acknowledge an issue even when it's in black and white in front of them on another occasion.

And I don't do that much work, so statistically, given other issues I've had to deal with also, it's quite a poor showing for "offical partners".

So no, "offical partner" guarantees nothing.

Well, I haven't tried all official partners so I could be wrong. We shouldn't expect completely error-free development ofcourse, this is only possible for some very highly experienced developers (and yes they are out there too). A lot of non-official developers do have a very bad rating for communication. Some advertise their work for version 3.x and it turns out to be a 2.x extension. And yes some refuse to acknowledge the issue too.

Why don't we remove extensions from Marketplace when they reach 3/5 stars or below after an X amount of time or an X amount of ratings? And why don't we find ways to make people rate their downloads more? Too many people download something and forget to rate their download. This is because the rate option is hidden in your account. It does not show up at the extension download page or somewhere else in plain sight.