IXXO Cart Component for Joomla

Author:

I started out very excited about this product. It looked to be a great ecommerce solution for Joomla. I wanted to use a demo, but as no demo was provided I had to purchase it, and evaluate it within the 30 day refund period. I used the product for about a week. It started out well, but I could not get some of the features to work like URL rewriting. I opened the files to see what was causing a problem, and the entire product is encoded.... including some of the templating files.... certainly not a good thing. Some amount of encoding is ok, but to encode 95% of the files is very bad. The licensing engine also makes a call on every page display back to their server, so if their server ever goes down, then so will any one's site which uses IXXO cart. This is not acceptable. Their server has gone down several times in May alone.... if you wanting to have a professional store which you rely on to make money, avoid IXXO cart. The final and possibly worse part of this is after 10 days of evaluating the software and deciding it would not work for me, I requested a refund. I followed the refund process on their site, and sent an email to accounts@ixxocart.com explaining that I had evaluated the software and decided it would not work for me. I got a reply from David Stanley saying "your refund has been rejected". I asked why, and David responded saying that I had several unresolved support tickets, and that they would not provide a refund. This is true, I did submit several tickets for support to fix some of the bugs in the software before giving up completely after discovering that the software could not be fixed in a reasonable timeframe. There support ticket system would not process any of my replys and would not allow me to submit any follow up messages to my tickets, so after requesting support, I could not view the ticket, or respond... which does not really work. After several messages with David, it seems that the company has no intention of ever refunding the software. They do not seem to care about the interests of their customers, and are very defensive about anything with their software. Although their software seems to be good for Joomla ecommerce, and many features do work, I would warn you to be very careful before basing your business or your website on a completely encrypted joomla component which you will have no ability to edit or debug. Also even if the software was not completely encypted, you cant make a good deal with bad people. Proceed with caution.