warning about TEMPLATIC themes

BTW I am not insensitive, I do understand that managing plugins and themes is hard especially with people who don’t read the READ ME files are take the time to read the forums first. I have seen many decent plugin and theme developers be run off by cheap, rude people who wont donate for support.

But This is a premium theme, and shouldn’t charge premium fees for something that isn’t up to par. They are making money on broken themes when the guys doing the free work are struggling to get a $1 donation for hours of work.

I don’t expect a lot ,just a forum or support area that allows the customers to share ideas and work out issues and if not, responses to what I consider serious issues with the themes integrity.

And it maybe wouldn’t be such an issue except they do brag “Get top-notch theme support whenever you need.”

False advertising for sure.

If you paid with PayPal you could file a complaint. Or file something with the credit card you charged it for.

@all

I will address the issues here first and explain things later.

ISSUE 1: Never got a response to 6 tickets and then never got a refund when I requested it.

When you are saying it, I agree you might not have received a response. But don’t you really think this could be some email alert issue? Such as helpdesk email response going to SPAM folder or something like that? can you mention any of the ticket number that you have created which is not answered?

An alternative method to check ticket is to log into your account at https://templatic.com/helpdesk and you can see the ticket history and responses provided by us at that time.

Anyone else wish to check the accuracy of our claim can add a ticket as guest and check the response.

As for refunds, when purchasing the theme we do mention membership terms which mentions that because this is a digital product, we do not process refunds. Yes, if the theme does not work as advertised, are are always there to help you.

——————-

Issue 2: Forums unavailablity

Consider this scenario for a moment: “You are working on a website which you wish to keep private and need some help. We need to check your website before providing you help. Sometime, we even login to customer site and do the setting for them which they are not able to understand somehow (we do have step by step install guides).”

– Do we ask for your wp-admin logins in open forum?
– If the issue you are having needs to be assigned to a specific person in our team, how do we do that?
– While helping you, some other member posts their problem in your thread, mixing all the issues which does not let us provide help on your particular problem
– Our themes are updated regularly, old threads referring to earlier version misguided people as they were dealing with new codes.

And there are endless other issues. We finally decided that helpdesk is an ultimate solution for any software company. And we switched to helpdesk.

Having said that, the forums are for community that helps each other. But because we do sell themes, members were somehow not providing help to each other (thinking that its only our responcibility?). Thus, the purpose of forum did not work for the benefit of them and helpdesk provided us better efficiency. So we switched to helpdesk

CONCLUSION
As I have mentioned in other threads today, I am going sit back again and rethink the overall support at templatic and resolve to improve Documentation, New help articles, Support desk and in any other way possible.

Instead of big promises, we’d chose to prove it by actually improving it.

One of the issues I forgot to address is:
They are making money on broken themes when the guys doing the free work are struggling to get a $1 donation for hours of work.

Answer: It really suprises me when you consistently say “broken themes”. I am not claiming our themes are always 100% bug free. But we are here since last 2+ years and have provided theme upgrades consistenly. You can check our blog archive to see the proof.
Also anyone who want to check this claim of us, can test drive the theme before they make purchase at https://test.templatic.com

We appreciate that you are considering changing this support function. And the fact that you are responding says something too. However I don’t agree with your points about the forum. Let me give you a user perspective because I can see how developers may lose that from time to time.

From those of us who who work with plugin developers and theme developers on a regular basis, we are familiar with the standard of having a forum. And I can tell you how they work in response to your points:

If you need to ask for a users account access, developers simply ask for them to PM it or at that time, submit a ticket.

Developers work in shifts monitoring their forums. They even have trusted users volunteer for this who are familiar with their themes. So you ask how can you track responses and assign people to the problem? There are several ways. Work in shifts, so if a forum question comes in on your shift you answer it. OR, forward the email notification to whoever you want to handle it. SIMPLE.

Regarding users giving wrong information. Well us users know that developers moderate their forums and are usually pretty quick to jump on incorrect information. We know better than to try something on a forum post that is new or hasn’t been marked as CLOSED which some do as well which is nice.

One key point you are not considering is that for Users, we see it as major red flag when there is no public forum or area for people to comment or talk. Why? Because this is very consistent with abandoned plugins, themes or anything where they are tired of getting complaints or are afraid for others to see how many issues people are having. That is what concerned me. When I saw the complaints, I assumed you got rid of the forum because if that was up, we would see how many people are posting issues and want refunds.

Help Desks are usually used after you can’t get your issue answered in the forum. Even WordPress does that. Why? Because it dramatically decreases your SUPPORT LOAD! Think about that. All those people with those really simple stupid questions that never read your tutorials can find answers quickly on the forum from reading posts from other people who asked those same stupid questions. And of course the common issues people have will be up and answered already. I find most of my answers by searching forums, I rarely submit tickets are ask questions anymore.

Submitting a ticket sucks when we have simple questions. It seems like I am wasting someones time submitting a ticket to ask something that you probably get all the time and could have been answered in a community. TO me, submitting tickets is a last resort for bugs or requesting to pay for customization.

You have been around 2+ years because you are well placed in the search engines and your themes are very nice looking I admit that. But I had a lot of issues with them and had to hire another theme developer to fix them. And I am fairly savvy when it comes to customizing others themes.

And maybe BROKEN themes was a little harsh. I should say BUGGY themes. In comparison to many your sre visually superior, but not in functionality. Sorry but if you want to excel among everyone? Get a community up, encourage feedback and fix the issues. Your themes would be awesome.

I hope you listen to your users and re-consider using forums for support.

Hi,
I’ve been researching Templatics themes for a little while trying to decide if I want to go with them. I have to agree with some of dstolfi’s points about the forum. My first thought was that the forum may have been removed because of complaints or it was removed because users may have been sharing/providing customization info that the developers saw as a loss of potential revenue. I have recently been working with another WP classified theme that has a lively forum. The open exchange of ideas has undoubtedly helped everyone involved. The theme upgrades have come faster and the developers don’t have to respond to “Does anyone know how you change the background color?” type of questions. Any personal info is simply sent in a PM. The developers have moderators that patrol the forum answering questions, directing people to the correct forum, etc.. As dstolfi mentioned the themes look great! I am just a little worried that after paying for a couple of themes it will cost me more money to get some simple mods implemented.

I actually found this thread searching for an unofficial templatic forum. Kinda wish there was one.

@dstolfi

Hands down, I see your point and understand the things from your perspective. Especially Submitting a ticket at the point when needed is a way to go.

One of our support person is from US and we are located in India. That sort of makes things same like working on shifts. Also we are hiring more persons including technical support templatic.com/jobs and once we have a person dedicated specially for forums, we will launch the forums back. Maximum within 1 month ( I know its too much time but wouldn’t want to start something that we cant handle properly)

Thanks for taking time to explain the things. You’d definitely see us improved in coming weeks

@rtibbs4 thanks for writing :). As I wrote in last reply, we will come up with a forum in a month’s time at max. With a dedicated moderator and provide a platform for the users to interact with each other.

Great, looking forward to it!

Hi,

I am in the process of reviewing several vendors for a new site that I am putting up. I was impressed by the functionality, design, and business mode of Templatic. I have more trust in vendors who have a recurring revenue stream model, since it means they can support a staff.

However, I am concerned that there is no official forum support. Forums are a big time saver especially if a problem (unrelated to the theme) has already been resolved by another member. I strongly encourage Thematic to put a new forum into place that will greatly assist users and further enhance their product and business.

Thanks for lending an ear to my recommendation,

Rich

“Also anyone who want to check this claim of us, can test drive the theme before they make purchase at https://test.templatic.com”

Unfortunately, the theme I paid for and downloaded does not function as the demo did. After several trouble tickets, excuses that staff was not at work at “9:30am” (???) – that I needed a programmer to look at my theme and someone would get back to me (4 days ago), I have had it. Have filed a complaint at Paypal. Want my money back.

Hi prosediva,

I am troubled by any product that has either no forum or a closed forum. I never know what is going on behind the scenes. I hope that Templatic implements an open forum so that these kinds of issues are quickly resolved.

Rich

I did notice one thing, that there were responses in my account that I was never notified of even though I asked to me notified. When I logged in I was surprised to see responses in there and it wasn’t in an area I noticed right away. Even though the didn’t respond quickly and it took a few requests they did respond. I recommend checking your account to see if they did respond to the tickets in there.

No – it never notifies you when they respond. You just have to keep the Helpdesk page up in your browser and refresh it every so often.

In fact, it does notifies the user on every response. You have not received alert because

– maybe under your profile, the box is unchecked where it says “get email alert”
– or, the email from helpdesk goes to spam box?

@all – I have mentioned earlier as well and mentioning again – forum is on its way. Maximum one week I think