Jonathan Davis

To tag on to Ted’s sentiments, Jeffro didn’t provide an opinion about Shopp as a project or product. He simply recounted conversations with Dillick and myself about how hard we do work to develop a quality e-commerce solution for WordPress. And he knows we are proud of it.

To respond to Russell, I have never stopped doing support. I have reduced the porportion of time I spend on support, and as the user base grows the likelihood that I will be the one taking your issues is much smaller. It’s simply a numbers game. I still do support and always, always will.

With all sincerity, I’m glad that you found a solution that works for you. We do the best we can, but we don’t pretend to be everything to all people. Our support policies are realistic to the resources we have available. We did, for a time provide custom code support. That became too overwhelming and was regularly abused. Our support was turned into a free custom consulting team for most of our customers instead of developers doing their homework for their clients. It just wasn’t sustainable and we had to find a support policy that was balanced against our resources. Inevitibly support policies are the crossroads of business goals and customer goals. They never satisfy both sides 100%. We feel ours is more than fair. You didn’t and the market has delivered new choices that you chose to go with. I certainly understand that.

I would love to personally handhold everyone through learning the deep technical capabilities within Shopp. It is awesome to spend time showing someone how to solve problems by writing custom extensions. That simply is not realistic in a one-on-one support channel, nor is it fair to everyone else who wants the same treatment. If you’re getting that from the Woo-team, awesome! Instead, we prefer that code solutions be developed in the community forums where code solutions can be shared with the entire community.

We invested a lot of resources into our documentation and have several other new initiatives to help people learn how to customize Shopp – from simple template customizations to complex extensions. We’re not there completely, but we’re getting there. Woo has a solid orginzation and already had a lot of pieces in place since they’ve been in the game longer than us. I give them all the kudos for what they’ve built. I’m envious, in some respects.

We support our users to the best of our capabilities within our resources and I daresay that long-term we do better than most of our co-petitors. That’s not to say there isn’t room for significant improvement, but that’s the kind of challenge that keeps us coming back to work.

I understand if our changes didn’t happen soon enough for you. I respect your decision to find a solution that works better for your needs more than it appears you respect our team, our efforts or our project. Good luck to you in all your projects from here on out, and perhaps, one day after you’re past being upset at us, you might even try us again and find we’re hitting all the boxes in your checklist just right. Seriously as much as you might hate the thought of Shopp, no hard feelings. It’s business. Best of luck to you.

So here’s to what’s next. Woot Shopp 1.2! Thanks for the mention Jeffro and for the space to engage in conversation. Cheers!

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