Complaint Review: WPMU DEV

I am reporting WP MU DEV as a shady, fraudulent company. I have had a horrible experience dealing with their customizable Wordpress themes and dealing with their customer service department.

Beware, this website is based out of Australia, which makes it easier for them to scam international customers (because you can't get in touch with their customer service team via phone unless your phone permits international calling).

The main issue I have been having with WP MU DEV has been the issue of a purchased product: a downloadable theme for my Wordpress site. When I downloaded this theme AFTER paying a $19 subscription fee, I immediatly tried to customize the theme from my Wordpress dashboard. Immediatly, I found the theme to have bugs. I have downloaded other themes from various theme manufactureres and never experienced a problem until I used WP MU DEV.

I tried for a couple of hours - reading Wordpress' official guide as well as going through several video tutorials to see how I can fix the problem. Nothing worked. 

I then contacted WP MU DEV support team to vent my frustrations with tryng to see what was going on with this theme. I asked for a refund. A couple days later, I received a response from Alex R. who told me that he would not issue me a refund until I filled out a ticket to see how they could fix the problem.

Alex told me I had one of several options; I could either go to their member's forum and scrounge around for community members to help me find my solution (in other words, get help from other subscriber buyers who might be able to answer my question, not professionals) or talk to a live support specialist.

I tried the live support chat, but that didn't work since their time zone is not congruent with the US time zone. Therefore, unless I stay up until 3am, I will not be able to get help from an online specialist.

I then went to the member's forum to see if I could find an answer to my solution. I did find a similiar topic from months ago of a lady who had the SAME issue I had. Looking through the responses by other member's and some of DEV's support employee's, they STILL couldn't help her with her issue and it was never solved.

This is when I became scared. I had just purchased a theme that is inoperable and Alex, after several back-and forth email conversations, didn't even try to just forward my main requests over to a technical issue person. Instead, he told me to fill out another ticket, having me explain the problem all over again. Now I would now be subject to wait several days for this issue to be responded to. 

Instead of just asking me initially to explain the problem in detail and forward the message over to his tech department so that they can clear the issue up immediatly, he kept sending me back to their website's very messy and disorganized un-user friendly links so that I can solve the problem on my own. 

When I went to the member's board area, where member's go to find solution to theme errors, I would fnd that the response time would be 2+ days and they still wouldn't fix the problem, instead of just dealing with a error all in one swoop.

This makes dealing with their company frustrating, because not only do you not get support from professionals like they promise, you waste a lot of time searching for solutions that can't be found in particualar to your unique issue!

To make matter worst, I told Alex to just cancel my subscription indefinently. Instead of honoring my request, he just sent more emails stating that he would not reissue a refund and to keep trying to get the problem cleared up with a specialist. 

I told him that I already purchased a theme that works perfectly from a competing company and that I just won't be using their theme. He said, because I already downloaded it, he couldn't refund UNLESS the problem was not fixed. Well, three days later, the problem is NOT fixed and still NO REFUND.