In April of this year I contracted Visible.net net of Redmond, WA to develop a web site with specific required features that they are not able to provide as promised. After giving them five months to come up with a solution, they told me that they will not perform any custom programming to implement the required functionality and they have provided what they were contracted to do. I told them that what they have provided is unacceptable and I asked for a partial refund which they are refusing.
My business sells custom apparel and before contracting them to perform the work, I showed them a specific web site to use as a model for specific features and functionality. They verbally agreed that they could implement the required features after reviewing the example web site. They told me how their "Warhead" e-commerce software is the most technologically advanced, cutting-edge, e-commerce platform available today.
Then after taking a $7,300.00 deposit and charging me $149.99/mo. For "web hosting" for the past six months, they are refusing to perform any custom programming necessary to implement the features that they agreed to, but rather are trying to force my feature requirements into their standard Warhead "template" which will not accomplish the required functionality without programming modification. Of course they knew this from the beginning when their "programmers" supposedly looked at the example site I showed them for use as a model for feature requirements.
They are trying to say that they have "provided the services which were contracted" which they have not.
The most important and very basic feature of the web site is the ability for the customer to enter multiple quantities of varying sizes of a garment. This is because we only sell team orders, and there is a minimum order requirement. This minimum order must consist of various sizes as you would order for a team. They are not able to implement a shopping cart system that allows the user to enter multiple quantities of various sizes and add the total quantity to the shopping cart. They have offered some very weak, lame, tedious work-arounds instead. Their first shot at this resulted in forcing the minimum order requirement to be all of one size... Duh? Their second attempt resulted in accomplishing the minimum of various sizes, but then not allowing the customer to order more than the minimum quantity! What??? Are you serious? So if someone wants to order more than twelve garments they can't. What kind of idiot would have this as their business model? This seemed like perfectly sound logic to them.
The contract I signed does not itemize the specific features they agreed to build (stupid me). But before I awarded this company with the contract, I spent at least 12- 15 hours of phone communication with their marketing people who assured me that the required features could be implemented. Every time I asked about a specific feature that I pointed out on the example web site, they told me that they checked with their "programmers" and the features could be implemented. If they had told me otherwise I would not have awarded them the contract.
They have told me that all of their phone conversations are recorded, so there should be a record of what they told me.
I am not asking them for a full refund, but of the $9,199.00 that I have already paid them I am asking for 7,199.99 to be refunded, and they can keep $2,000.00 for work performed to date. I believe this is fair. They are refusing to offer any refund whatsoever.
So at the moment I have a partially built web site that is totally useless that has cost almost $10,000.00. Nice.
Don't do business with these scam artists.
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