Complaint Review: Magento

We purchased the Magento Enterprise platform on approximately March 17th.  We started by working with an Magento Certified Solutions provider and we later moved to a Magneto Certified hosting provider.  We believed that we were doing everything right in our attempt to move to the Magento Platform as per their best practices.  One of the primary reasons that we chose the "Enterprise Platform" was the promise of an SLA that in our understanding would ensure uptime in the case of emergencies.  Instead, we have dealt with ongoing issues with the platform.  The most recent has been an issue that PREVENTS ALL ORDERS from completing, thereby rending our production ecommerce site inoperable for 9 days (as of Monday, Sept 6).  Calls into support "which have a 4-hour service level commitment" are handled by an answering service. 

We have found that Magento's "Certified Solutions Partners" are unable to directly interface with support resources directly and so at times when we were seeking out a time-critical solution, we were forced to act as a communications intermediary.  Over and over, communication would go like this Solution Provider -> Us -> Support Ticket Representative -> Developer and vice versa.  It also seems that the developer's that were tasked with working on our issues were in Europe or outside the US.  I don't fundamentally have an issue with this, but by necessity, it forced us to issue one cycle of communication per day.  When my site is down (which it frequently has been), I am available 24/7, and I wanted to speak with the persons handling our issues directly in order to expedite the communications cycle.  All my requests for direct contact were denied or ignored.

I have tried to contact other people within Magento to highlight the issues that we are having and to see what recourse we have when Magento misses their SLA commitments.  I have called or emailed our sales associate, Adi Adam, many times.  After completing the sale of the system to us, it seems that Adi has become completely unresponsive.  She does not return my calls or emails.  Without being able to contact her, I tried to reach out to her supervisor and I was told that Adi was responsible for the department.  Upon going to the "Internet Retailer" show in Chicago, I tried to find out who to contact.  I did reach out to her supervisor.  Upon explaining the problems, he quickly pulled me aside from the booth so that potential customers couldn't hear my complaints.  He expressed vague concern over the ongoing issues that I had, until I explained that it had initially been difficult to place the order at which point he expressed real concern.  There was no real concern or explanation for the fact that my sales associate would not return calls or emails after the sale was made.

We believe that Magento has ripped us off by not following through with their service commitments.  They have misled us by characterizing the system as an "Enterprise" as follows:

For businesses of all sizes looking for a production-ready, enterprise ecommerce solution without any upfront license fees. Fully supported by the Magento Team.

We have tried to reach out to Magento to find a resolution, but we do not receive any response.

Background Info:

Our most recent incident which has rendered our site inoperable for 9 days has been the most sever.  Here are some highlights of the details.

We submitted a service request detailing the error that was common to each checkout session:

We are getting the following when customers submit orders (we have been getting similar errors frequently.):Payment transaction failed.ReasonSQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1452 Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (`signuniv_test3/sales_payment_transaction`, CONSTRAINT `FK_SALES_PAYMENT_TRANSACTION_ORDER` FOREIGN KEY (`order_id`) REFERENCES `sales_order` (`entity_id`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE)Checkout Typeonepage

Customer:

....

My assumption is that the SLA would have dictated a resolution.  My experience with this an previous support incidents suggest that Magento is committed (but doesn't always follow through with) a response within the SLA time (no matter how immaterial in unproductive the response is).  Our experience has been that we would submit a support request, and 18 hours later receive a response like "What is the password to XXXX" (even though it had been identified in previous tickets).  When I inquired directly, Magento confirmed that their SLA only guarantees a 1-day response time and there is no commitment to resolution.  Given that even their 1-day 'response' commitment has regularly been ignored, I don't know what recourse I have when Varien breaks their SLA - it seems 'none'.

On Sept 2, I received the following response to a ticket:

Thanks, Marcus. I've informed our developer so he can check this. We'll be updating you soon with his findings.Best regards,Sheila

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4 days later (after sending multiple responses to the ticket, I have received no response.  Our site is still inoperable.

This is far from the first issue that we have.  We have had issues arise from attempted upgrades (their official documented upgrade process tells you to "hack into" the database), and we have had problems arise from well respected 3rd party modules (it seems that the Magento platform is inconsistent with the Community Edition - which all the modules are built for) - we have since removed all 3rd party modules.  Each time we have a problem, feeding the error message into a Google search identifies a huge number of users having similar problems.  For those considering the Enterprise Edition, I suggest that you evaluate alternatives or at the least, start with the community edition (so that you can utilize the extensions and community resources).  Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.