Review: Joomla Shop Builder - avoid this company like the plague

Well, I didn't want it to have to come to this.  I really didn't.  What follows is a story explaining why you should never, ever buy Joomla ShopBuilder.  To cut a long story short, the terms and conditions are inaccurate and they stole my money.

Back in January a friend and I opted to buy JoomlaShopBuilder - a plugin for Joomla that can essentially generate affiliate sites based on feeds from affiliate networks - i.e give it a computing feed from Clickbank or something similar and it'll create you pages based around those products.  It wasn't quite what we needed but it was a great starting point.  The terms and conditions (which appear to have been revised since) stated that:

So we bought the plugin for $100 or so.  However, the plugin was encrypted - not what we were expecting.  So I emailed JoomlaShopBuilder requesting the unencrypted plugin.

The response
I actually did get a response back.  It was a long, personally written response explaining that the encyption had only been done recently and the various reasons behind it.  "Mack" explained that people were making modifications to the source and then complaining when updates didn't work, or when affiliate networks changed their web-services.  He explained that supporting all these modifications was impossible.

My solution
I'm a web developer, hell, I'll happily waive the support contract for an unencrypted version if that's the problem.  I explained that I needed to make bespoke modifications and should be entitled to do so based on the terms and conditions. 

I never heard from JoomlaShopBuilder again.

Dates and emails
I received Mack's response in January 26th 2009.  Since then I have sent 5-6 emails through their official technical support and 1 to Mack's personal email account.  I have received no replies.

So the bottom line
I paid $100 for a plugin that specified in the terms and conditions that you can make modifications to the source code.  This wasn't the case so I requested a refund (trades description act being in breach for one thing).  He has not responded and considering he's based in the US and I'm based in the UK there's nothing I can do. 

So 6 months later I've decided enough is enough and I'm going telling people.  Never buy anything from JoomlaShopBuilder.   Found this interesting?  Maybe you should email roadmack@gmail.com to let him know.

Mack, if you read this - it's not nice to ignore emails.

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