Worst scam in living memory

Hello @peter491,

Thanks for taking the time to share feedback. But there is a huge misunderstanding and confusion on your end.

1. “but what they don’t tell you is you must also pay pro for elementor, which is another $49USD,”
– There’s no “must” in this story. We do not sell third-party licenses, including that one for Elementor Pro. Unless you have Elementor Pro license, you will always see their upgrade notice.

Whatever theme you choose and whatever pro option you choose, unless you purchase Elementor Pro license specifically, this will always be the case.

– Elementor Pro is absolutely not required to run, use or edit, any of our Pro extensions and/or website demo templates:
https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/714-is-elementor-pro-required-to-use-oceanwp-theme-ocean-extensions
https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/623-ocean-elementor-widgets-elementor-pro

2. “then you have to pay for the woocommerce package in it, then you get hit with $199.50/year for their pro forms to work with it”
– I assume you are talking about some additional package in Elementor Pro, in combination with WPforms? This is absolutely unrelated to OceanWP and our products/services.

Summary of points 1 & 2:
All these options are well, optional. If you want to use these packages, then you need to purchase them. But you are not in any way required neither obligated.

We do not sell, neither use third-party pro extensions in any of our products or website demos.

3. “And don’t think you can go back, because once you remove the add-ons and change the theme, you are still stuck with corrupted data that ruins your entire site.”
– That’s not corrupted data, it’s how WordPress and WordPress content functions.
If you import or create a content on your own, it will not simply go away just because you’ve switched themes.

When it comes to Ocean full website demo templates, we have a full guidance to explain this because we are aware people new to WordPress usually don’t understand how specific things function: https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/728-how-to-switch-different-demo

All in all, these are WordPress basics, unrelated to any theme, including OceanWP.

Imagine simply switching themes, and your pages, posts, images and all other content disappear. Now that would be a problem.

4. “And when you contact him for support, the first thing he asks for is your admin password – alarm bells ringing in my ear!!!”
– We ask for login details depending on the description of your problem, but you are definitely not under any obligation to provide that and we’re perfectly fine when you refuse support:
https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/762-how-can-i-get-support
https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/685-support-policy

OceanWP has been present in the WordPress community since 2016 and is run on almost 800K websites, and the trust of our users and clients means the world to us, so we would not misuse their trust. But, again, you are not obligated to accept our help or the way we provide help unless you want to.

EDIT: I just found your ticket and it was related to issues of importing demo content. So asking for login details where we import the content for you so you don’t have to waste time or check whether are problems with your configuration is a standard practice.

All in all, I understand you are new to WordPress, unfamiliar with basics and got confused by everything. I also understand it’s sometimes a hassle to go over all the documentation or even ask questions if you’re uncertain of something.

Hope this clarifies things out enough.

To sum up, it’s not a scam, not in whole, not in little-by-little, it’s simply a misunderstanding.

By WordPress rules, we’re not allowed to provide you with support here. If you have any other questions or require some other clarification, you can always open a ticket with us.

Have a great day

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Marko OceanWP. Reason: additional info

I am an experienced WordPress user of around 5 years, yet I could not get this system to work, so I called on help from experts, and they could not either, without payment of premium products to make this theme work. This is my honest opinion of the theme. I changed to another theme and set it all up myself in a few hours. I posted this review so that others did not spend a week to find their entire site was corrupted and they had to start afresh. I don’t give out my admin password to anyone I don’t know, hence the reason the expert came to me. I firmly beleive it is a con, with paywalls at every step. The representations about the theme was one fee of to unlock everything, which is false and misleading, because it relying on numerous third party that doesn’t work properly without them. And for the record, it took you several days to reply, so what support is that? Totally useless when someone has a website down…Hence the reason I sought expert help elsewhere.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by peter491.

Hello @peter491,

We perfectly understand how self-hosted WordPress beginners can be overwhelmed by plethora of “new” things. You finally have the option to use plugins or themes you want, among all other new features and possibilities.

Not knowing how to edit widgets (Appearance > Widgets), not knowing that plugins that offer pro versions will advertise to purchase their pro instance unless you purchase a license directly from them (which is completely unrelated to any theme, including OceanWP), not knowing that WordPress content will “not go away” if you switch themes, being new to Elementor or WPforms, and everything else in between tells a different story.

In case of a confusion, it’s my job to present you with the facts – not my personal opinion – to clear up that confusion. Users may try to bend/twist the facts to fit the agenda or personal belief, but that does not change the facts, and everything afterwards is not a confusion anymore – it’s deliberate. However, that’s outside of our scope.

Additional facts I would like to add:
1. There is no such representation to unlock any third-party pro plugin features or services, as we do not use, neither sell third-party pro plugin or services in combination with our products. Stated on multiple places on the website.

2. Our website demo templates use only free third-party plugins. Whether users want to purchase those licenses in addition to the original one (OceanWP) is entirely up to users, and their personal needs.

In addition to it, free plugins we use (in our demo templates) but offer the pro version on their own, are not “temporary” or usage-limited free plugins. Meaning, you don’t have to purchase their pro versions in order to continue to use the features you did. All their pro versions bring new features in addition to the existing features.

3. Users can adjust the content entirely per need and don’t have to use the same plugins as we did. If users want to import the template as is – those (plugins we used) are necessary to begin with, but not obligated to continue.

4. You purchased the license on August 10th and submitted a ticket on the same day (today is August 12th – so not a week).

5. You received a reply in 4 (four) hours and 2 (two) minutes (not several days). You left this review immediately after receiving the initial reply (again, not several days, not a week).

Your ticket did not contain any mentions of a “website down”, neither did you mention that afterwards. You were experiencing problems with the demo content import, which, in your own words you were able to get resolved.

6. Even though we tend to reply to all tickets within 24h, the usual response time is 48h, as stated in our Support Policy https://docs.oceanwp.org/article/685-support-policy

7. Calling our services a scam because your experts told you they could not fulfill your design ideas or website needs without the use of additional third-party plugins is utterly incorrect, but also extremely unfair.

8. We provide support services we believe are in accordance with the problems our users are experiencing. And, like previously mentioned, you do not have to agree to the services, neither use our support services, as it’s not mandatory.

Everything mentioned above can be verified, even though 99% of the WordPress community already knows this.

As this is a review section, I will no longer reply here even if the thread continues with false information or misrepresentation of our products and/or services and those of companies whose products we use, as it’s against WordPress rules.

If you require our help and agree with our Policies, you can submit a support ticket.

Have a great day.

PS. To any of the users reading these reviews and have questions about our products/services, you can always check our documentation or submit a prepurchase question:
https://docs.oceanwp.org/
https://oceanwp.org/pre-purchase-question/

Hello @lztheman @peter491 @logologics @wpfleek
I’m closing this thread and have also archived several replies.

The original review is there. We’ve got a couple of replies with some facts from the theme developer and some clarification from the original reviewer. That’s enough.

No need to go into various disputes here. And no need for other parties to jump in and start proving things one way or the other.

Peter, if you want to discuss refund, right/wrong, etc., please do that directly with the developer and not in this thread. I’ve flagged your account for moderation until further notice. You can still post and reply, but your posts will be checked by someone in the moderator team before getting published. When we see stable good behavior that flag will be removed by the moderators (after all, the moderators value their time, too, and won’t keep anyone flagged just for fun).
If you need to discuss the moderation part of things, please join the global Slack team for WordPress contributors via https://make.www.ads-software.com/chat/ and then ask there in the channel “forums”.