Warning To The Wise… Stay Away From Sunshine Phot Cart At All Cost!!!

  • Resolved codedaddy

    (@codedaddy)


    7 years, 4 months ago

    Hi WordPress Community & Derek (Sunshine Photo Cart Developer)!

    First off, I would like to mention that I am an extremely patient person who has been developing custom websites for the past 12 years. I’ve dealt with thousands of plugins and scripts that have been implemented in anything from basic websites to large-scale eCommerce environments. Hundreds of both good and bad developers. I typically don’t post on support forms.

    That being said, here is my Sunshine Photo Cart horror story…

    I was approached by a Photography customer many months back who was then using ShootProof for their proofing and sales gallery. Her goal was to break ties with ShootProof and develop her own customized environment basically cutting out the middleman. I went to work looking at a number of solutions to accommodate her request. I came across Sunshine Photo Cart, visited their website (which touts support and customer service), and decided that it looked like a perfect vertical integration with my clients business.

    I went on to download the free version of the plugin and test the setup on Twenty Seventeen theme. Being this is the first time using the plugin, I was unaware of the micro and was more concerned with the macro. My thought process was… “Hey, they convincingly talk about support, any issues that may arise I should be able to contact them and get answers on how to address possible compatibility issues with themes or other plugins”. That’s where I was wrong!

    I went on to purchase a Pro license with all the bells and whistles and started integration with one of the most popular premium WordPress themes on the market (I’ve developed over 100 websites using this theme without issue). After a month of development I ran into my first problem which was with large uploads (my client is on a vps configured to handle large file uploads along with wordpress admin and root php.ini’s tweaked). It is worth mentioning that this was happening through both the Client Gallery and FTP from Lightroom. I immediately reached out to Sunshine Phot Cart through their websites support system looking for answers. A number of days later, I received a response blaming the issue on the template and plugins rather than offering support on how to resolve the issue.

    Outside of Sunshine, there are only a few additional plugins that I’m utilizing which were deactivated to only produce the same result. I then contacted Derek again, this time I didn’t receive a response back. Since we are in the summer months and many people go on vacation, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I continued to work on my clients project and ran into a second issue which was light box related. My images were getting cut off and displaying in a fixed dimension rather than the image constraints (could be a .js tweak that I wanted confirmed). Believing that this could be a theme conflict, I emailed Derek again for a possible fix. By this time, my project was 80% complete on my end, I was waiting for some direction on how to get this working properly.

    At this point my client was getting extremely impatient. I attempted to reach out again with no response. One month went by and still no feedback… WOW!!!… Being this was a dead lined project, I took it upon myself to upload the entire Sunsine Photo Cart suite on the stripped down version of WP Twenty Seventeen. Immediately I received 3 errors… 1 Warning: unlink, and 2 Warning: Cannot modify header information. At this point I started doubting the coding and the way the plugin was written. I went back to my clients website, re-skinned it with another theme which seemed to address the lightbox issue. Being that my client was furious, I went with my emotions (not my gut) and completely rebuilt her website from the ground up. To be honest, I had no choice after initially providing a professional opinion touting the Sunshine platform as the next best thing since sliced bread (Wrong Again!)

    So here we are today… I wanted to confirm if others were having support delinquency and plugin issues. I see some of you share identical frustrations I’m dealing with. It’s one thing if free plugin support is slow, but when you pay for support that’s a completely different animal.

    Needless to say… this project should have taken no longer than 6-8 weeks, not 6 months!!! It wound up costing me thousands of additional dollars in time not to mention ruin my relationship with my client before it started. This was my FIRST UNSATISIFED CUSTOMER in 12 years. Thank you Sunshine Photo Cart for taking away my planned vacation, pissing off my client and costing me thousands of dollars due to your negligence and unprofessionalism.

    On a side note… Here’s what you’ll see when you first install this garbage plugin.

    I hope Sunshine is working well for you so far! If you do run into any issues using Sunshine or integrating it into your theme, please check out our support area to look at our help articles or the support forums to ask a specific question. I want to make sure Sunshine is working well for you. In almost all cases Sunshine works great out of the box, but with the infinite number of plugin and theme combinations in WordPress a few tweaks might be necessary and I am here to help.

    Derek, Sunshine Developer

    DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT THIS CON ARTIST IS SELLING!!… bottom line free or pro, you’re on your own! I’ve dealt with many bad developers in my life, unfortunately none like this.

    I DEMAND A RESPONSE TO THIS THREAD AND SUPPORT TO ALL OTHERS THAT HAVE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS!!

    DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR PURCHASE ANYTHING FROM THIS COMPANY… PERIOD!!

    Stay tuned for more… my clients site is still not up. I’ll keep you all posted.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)

  • This plugin is a disaster. The reason I bought it in the first place was because it was recommended by the guys at ProPhoto who are discontinuing their proofing which used to work perfectly.

    Support has been less than helpful and has taken weeks to get any response.

    I have unloaded the crap plug in.. had my hosting company clean out any references to it and thought that I could reinstall the ProPhoto 6 proofing plugin. NOPE — it is now broken as well.

    This thing is a nightmare and it is not a cheap option. I purchased the Pro version and was expecting to have reasonable support… certainly no more than a 48 hour wait. It goes on for weeks.

    I am moving to another option because I can no longer wait for this thing to work… clients are waiting for their galleries and I am starting again from scratch.

    Thread Starter codedaddy

    (@codedaddy)

    Hi glk!…

    I feel your pain my friend. Personally I think it is pathetic that developers entrust core plugins like this to basically get the middle finger in the end. We have commitments to customers that are already uptight because of industry stigma. Losers like Derek / Sunshine Photo Cart add even more doubt and give hardworking web developers a bad name. Funny part is that there isn’t even a phone number on their website to get in touch with these scammers. I should have known better right out of gate.

    Anyway, Quick question?… I checked out ProPhoto6. Correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like it’s a straight proofing gallery with no sales options. Do you or anyone else have additional WP photo proofing galleries with sales options or any other comprehensive php platforms/scripts that can achieve this?

    Thanks!

    I already had the Proofing option with shopping cart before it was discontinued. It worked fine until I tried this crap Sunshine Photo Cart plugin. I wanted to self-host with Sunshine which is what they said.

    Now ProPhoto’s proofing option won’t work either since I uninstalled Sunshine and reinstalled it. The guys over at ProPhoto are looking at it because they insist that Sunshine will work with ProPhoto but it doesn’t. I am moving over to ShootProof and will pay the fee.. at least it works.

    Thread Starter codedaddy

    (@codedaddy)

    Thanks for the response glk!…

    My client was using ShootProof and was unhappy with them. Too many pieces to put together rather than a one-stop-shop website / photo proof / sales, the reason why I chose this abomination.

    Any other suggestions guys & gals?

    To everyone reading this, this reviewer is accurate. Except for the con artist part. This is not a con. I have been developing and providing support for Sunshine for 5+ years with 99% 5 star ratings. That doesn’t happen by accident.

    For the reality of the situation for the past couple months… I have been going through a divorce. It has crushed me and I am working through it. I’m slowly getting back to how things were before.

    I am fully aware of the issues this caused for many customers in trying to get help and I am working through the back log of support tickets. It’s taking a while.

    Right after I did the partnership with ProPhoto (wonderful people) all the personal stuff hit. So not only was there a surge in users I was heading in the opposite direction to handle it all.

    To anyone who has been adversely affected, please feel free to reach out and ask for a refund – regardless of when you purchased. OR, if you have any patience left please know I am working to get back to normal as soon as possible and proving a great product with quality support.

    Great response and one that I feel was not necessarily needed, I understand people’s frustration but perhaps a little sensitivity should have been adopted rather than ranting on here. I’ve never come across any problems with the plugins and it’s actually brought me sales etc.

    Please don’t take this as a critism to the original post, it’s a mere look into the fact that people do have lives outside of their jobs, I just hope people think before they speak.

    Keep up the work sunshine, one happy customer here!

    Well, turns out my problem was the WP 3 Caching program… it HATES Sunshine Photo Cart. The guys at ProPhoto figured that out this afternoon. There are still some issues with it like categories don’t show under the individual products but they do on the bulk one.

    Derek, sorry to hear of your personal issues. I am going to wait until you get a chance to fix the only issue that I have left — the categories. Everything else is working well now that the caching program is disabled.

    Sunshine used to work fine with W3 Cache, not sure what changed yet. All cache plugins are supposed to recognize the DONOTCACHEPAGE declaration but suddenly W3 Cache doesn’t appear to be – I need to look into it further still. They also removed the Advanced options to set which pages to not cache (The Sunshine cannot be cached, it updates pages as the user adds things to cart).

    Been there done that, have the T shirt. It sucks. Thank you for sharing such personal information.

    I am one of the dissatisfied ones with customer support. However, this information helps me understand on a personal note, however, it doesn’t help on a business level as I still have Business issues I am having to deal with in regards to my new cart.

    Thank you for the offer of a refund, However, for now, I for one have the ability to wait it out and hope you are able to “get back on the horse” soon.

    Sincerely,
    Carol

    P.S. You might consider a template email to your clients stating a personal emergency and offering a refund if they can’t wait in line for support. I know it would have helped me not be so irritated and frustrated as a 20 year business owner. And it might help salvage your hard earned 99% 5 star rating.

    I’ve been trying to get support too, just been ignored.

    I only purchased last week and feel that it shouldn’t be sold if the support option isn’t available.

    Just an email explaining would help but to sell a product and then just ignor the customer is really poor.

    Like others we’ve invested a lot of business time in this and feel badly let down.

    Any recommendations for similar products with support?

    I left a support query 9 days ago that hasn’t been answered. Other than that Sunshine works perfectly.

    grahammansfieldphotography

    (@grahammansfieldphotography)

    Well I have been using this product for the last year without issue and with good support from Derek. In fact I sent a support issue in just 2 days ago and had a response the next day. Mind you I am a premium customer.

    Hello,

    Thanks codedaddy for your message, I was going to buy this plugin for one of our clients I will now being looking elsewhere.

    Premium support queue is back to normal, I will be getting to this forum soon (but free support is not guaranteed)

    Super, thank you!

    Yes, i’m a happy customer ??

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)
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