Great Theme – Really Poor Support!!!!

  • WordpressUser1

    (@betterlifereviews)


    5 years, 4 months ago

    I have been using Ocean WP for about 2 years now. I picked it very carefully due to suggestions from experts on YouTube. I chose it over Astra (the other most recommended theme) due to the various extensions (core extensions bundle).

    Unfortunately, I am pretty disgusted with the support. I have placed a ticket with support twice, and never received a response. I see notes in the support forum that the team is small, and that they struggle to answer all questions for free users. That is somewhat fair, although this will impact customer happiness of course. However, as a paid customer, I would expect my questions to be answered in the support forum. Maybe something is broken, and they are not getting my tickets; I don’t know. I do see someone by the name of Amit Singh replying to some of the comments in the forum, but the responses are somewhat lackluster, and I don’t know why they would reply there, and not for paying customers.

    Here are my problems with Ocean WP

    1. They don’t reply to my tickets in the support area of their website. I placed 2 of them 9/1/19 (about 2.5 months ago), and still have not received a response.

    2. I don’t see any area to view my tickets in their website, so I don’t even know how they would respond; by email I guess.

    3. I am constantly have issues with the “Ocean Extra” plugin. I’m not extremely technical (I’m learning), but it seems pretty important. I am getting regular issues related to this plugin via the “Query Monitor” plugin in WordPress. Sometimes it’s not even obvious that the issue is due to Ocean Extra. This relates to the support issue. One of my issues was about the Cron not working. This means that my product information, price, etc. which I obtain through API, as well as any other scheduled posts, etc. were not working. This is a critical issue to my site functionality, and it absolutely unacceptable that they never replied to a paying customer about a site critical issue. Thankfully Siteground hosting is amazing, and with their help I was able to identify the issue, updated Ocean Extra, and the problem was fixed. At least they found and fixed this issue, but it shouldn’t really exist in the first place, and they should certainly reply to my tickets.

    4. The other issue with “Ocean Extra” is that does not show when it needs updated. What I mean is that an update is available, but this does not show as having an update available in my plugin list. I only know that an update may be available when I start having issues, such as with the Cron issue. I also have other issues, such as mem cache, or something like that, “declaration of quiet skin”, etc. that seems to be better after I search for the plugin, see there is an update available, and then update.

    5. I like the “Ocean Product Sharing” extension, but it is very basic, and doesn’t always work. I thought I remembered a more robust sharing platform, including pictures, prices, etc., but now it just lists the product name and link. This is another issue I wrote a ticket about, but was never replied to.

    6. You can purchase “priority user” support for $29 for 3 months, or $99 for 1 year. This seems crazy to me. When you purchase the “core extensions bundle” it already says that you are paying for support, and about $10/month is a lot of money for support. Maybe they should just increase the core extensions from $39/year to $59/year or something if they really need the extra money.

    That’s all I can think of for now, but the point is that there are a fair amount of bugs with Ocean WP, support is poor, premium support is expensive (if it would even work), there are issues with the Ocean Extra plugin, and with some of the features in general. This is all a shame, since my site is how heavily built around Ocean WP, and I really don’t want to change it. It is a generally well respected, and popular theme. I am considering Astra, but I would lose some important features. Ocean WP does offer an excellent amount of customization, reasonable speed, and has a great extensions bundle. I just think they really need to do some restructuring to make improvements, be more transparent, and offer better support. Until then, you might want to look at other options.

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  • I think the incredible success of the theme brought him into the wall. It is difficult to keep technical support on free, it’s time-consuming and it does not pay anything.

    This is so for all themes, even Premium. I have several theme licenses that have experienced the same curve that has led to a chaotic evolution and ultimately compromised for users.

    That said I do not have many problems with OWP that I use on nearly 70 customer sites. E-commerce or not it works well overall.

    It’s true that for a small-staffed theme company, trying to deal with updating the theme and responding to free customer support can become overwhelming. However, I would think that paid customers would get a higher priority and not have to wait days, weeks, or months for a reply. If the theme is growing that fast, it may be worth investing into more staff to provide support. The return on that investment could be quite significant if done well.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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