Stay far far away. This plugin is horrific, especially at the price.

  • We paid $500 for the package of plugins from GiveWP, and immediately regretted it. The only good thing I can say is that they refunded the payment without much fuss. There are so many problems with GiveWP it is shameful, and if I pay $500 for a plugin – I am not about to spend much time and effort troubleshooting what they should have caught in QA.

    On top of all the problems outlined below, I just got an email notification that they’ve allowed my account information on their website to be comprimised by a user who should not have had administrator access. “On July 11th, we became aware that an unauthorized administrator account gained access to our customers’ data on givewp.com” – this is a very typical basic violation that you can expect from this developer. A company that makes a billing platform should not have made this mistake. (Or any of the ones below.)

    Apparently untested on mobile – donations often fail with just a white screen. Reported by over 12 donors.
    Donations often fail on firefox, with just a white screen. (More than 4 donors experienced this)
    About 1 in 20 transactions result in a double charge of the amount donated to the donor’s payment method. Several times there was 6-8 duplicate charges to the donor. This is either because the pay button is not disabled while the transaction is processing as is industry standard to prevent this problem, or some other issue with the plugin.
    Entire plugin designed outside of WP Standards. (Not paged based, does not obey css, does not use templates.)
    – Not page based, no shortcodes, no endpoints.
    – Cannot edit pages
    – Custom CSS ignored – must edit plugin code to adjust styles
    – Stock styles are horrendously bad – most text is unreadable size, thus requiring CSS editing.
    Missing basic minimum of features
    – Reporting is awful and often useless data. Cannot be exported. For example – a donation record does not indicate why the donation was made (ie:Regular, or P2P, etc.) or who referred it (if P2P donation.)
    P2P Fundraising is half baked at best.
    – Can’t create team after signing up as individual.
    – There is no function for registration fees
    – Donation reporting is useless.
    – Participant export does not include anyone who has fundraised $0
    – Donation email notifications do not include the participant receiving donation
    – Toggling approval of teams participants off does not automatically approve pending participants.
    – There’s no way to link to a particular participant’s profile. (No unique links to a profile)
    – There’s no way to log in or out in the plugin. Once you’ve signed up, you’re logged in forever and cannot start over.
    – Unable to edit fundraisers or teams in the back end. Just “View” and “Delete”.
    – When visiting a team page without logging in (or having an account) you can only create a new individual fundraiser profile, not join the team.

    We ended up immediately abandoning GiveWP because it has so many issues – the whole duplicate transaction problem alone was bad enough – we spent a lot of time monitoring and refunding transactions and hoping our donor base does not revolt against our charity.

    And again, I should not have to spend so much time trying to interact with support staff for a plugin I paid $500/yr for. It should work almost flawlessly.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Matt Cromwell

    (@webdevmattcrom)

    Hi @kingdingbat

    I’m one of the co-authors and co-founders of GiveWP. I oversee our marketing and customer support departments. All the people that worked hard to support you are my team, and your experience saddens us deeply.

    I appreciate the level of detail you put into this review, and regret that your experience of our product was so sour.

    I’d like to add important context to some of the allegations you’ve made from our perspective.

    The most urgent of the issues you raised is the double-charging issue. We reviewed our support ticket history with you and unfortunately you did not alert us to this issue at all. It is our policy to treat any support issue that is negatively impacting payments as extremely urgent. We would have welcomed the opportunity to make that problem right for you if given the chance.

    Regarding some of your other items, here’s our perspective.

    First: GiveWP is tough to style. You’re right, but that is a bit intentional. GiveWP styles are coded defensively. We made the decision to make the styles of our forms more difficult to interfere with in order for them to be more stable and prevent breakage from other themes or plugins. Based on feedback like yours and other users, we are also in the process of creating a new way to build donation forms which will both have this defensive style approach as well as a built-in way for users to add their own styles directly.

    Regarding our Peer-to-Peer add-on. We have received feedback around this important add-on and are making continual improvements. But we also have many organizations already funding large campaigns with Peer to Peer with success and satisfaction. We are confident that there is no Peer to Peer solution as affordable that offers the features we do, and we will continue improving it for all our customers.

    Finally, what appears to have been the final straw that prompted you to write this review: our recent data breach. As we mentioned in that message, there’s no indication that any data has been misused anywhere, or disseminated, and we worked swiftly to contain any potential fallout of the data breach. Unfortunately we live in a world where nefarious actors will make these types of attempts continually and no website is 100% safe, these things happen. What matters is how we respond, which we did with transparency and action and additional preventative measures.

    As you can see from the hundreds of other reviews all over the web, by far and away our users and customers are very satisfied with our product and how passionately we support all our users.

    We wish you success in all your future fundraising efforts.

    Thread Starter KingDingbat

    (@kingdingbat)

    “I’d like to add important context to some of the allegations you’ve made from our perspective.” Nope – not necessary and responses like this, that largely deny issues, state that others are happy, and blame the client for not wanting to help resolve clear and serious issues with your software, are inappropriate and only highlight the problems in the mentality of your company.

    And it’s completely false that I did not contact you. I opened multiple support tickets and received nothing but “help us troubleshoot” – Your software needs to work out of the box – almost no customer who is embarking on a large-scale fundraiser will have the time or responsibility of helping you resolve issues with your software while there is a campaign supposed to be happening. Further, it is impossible for you to review my support history as you have no idea who I am. My information here should not give you any indication of which customer I am.

    My point still stands: It is not appropriate to expect customers who pay hundreds of dollars for your software to be your QA team. The price you charge, your software should not be riddled with serious problems like it is and should work almost perfectly out of the box. Your tone-deaf, “its not us, it’s you.” response only reveals how you think about your customers and highlights how you treat the relationship with people who pay you. Do better.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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