Complaint Review: Cart Designers - Austin Texas

I don't usually leave bad reviews, but I do not wish this to happen to anyone else as I'm reading threads/forums on other people using Cart Designers services and getting a horrible experience as myself.

When contacting them, they said they'll give me a custom design for $4000 - and of course their sales guy, or rather CEO, was quite convincing in the matter. Let me just say - I didn't get $4000 worth of services and had horrible customer experience while at it.

We were told we would get the following:

• custom design
• 3 custom images
• completed time frame of 2 months

After 2 different designs which took a month to get, both were absolutely horrible. It looked like a web design from 1999. Their next design wasn't any better. I was starting to think this was a different company when looking at the designs on their website. How can they be so completely different?? So, I said to go ahead and use one of their template themes, but seeing as how I was paying for a customized theme price, I asked if I would get my money back since they're no longer creating a custom theme for me. No response on that end, except a final rendering of my website (exactly copying their template theme). 

I'm thinking - ok, at this point, I just want a new website up so I'll swallow some of that cost. Bad mistake - I should have fought it to the end. Now if they copied a template and it worked perfectly, but they were able to fix a few things I wanted differently, I would've been ok with spending for the customized fee. However, not only did they copy the design to a T, but they didn't change ANY of the main things I asked since they said they didn't have the capability to change it or it would cost me extra. WHAT?? 

There are so many awful things about this company I could probably write a whole page on. But to cut to the chase, here are the worst things:

• Scheduled calls - expect them to ALWAYS (each and every time) be 10-15 min late
• Rude customer service - Their coding broke our website at 12pm on a Wednesday - but we didn't get a call back until that evening, where the CTO said "it's not like it would be detrimental in our sales" - who are you to tell me whether $1000 or $10,000 makes something detrimental. His reason? It's 7pm and he's about to leave.
• Testing quality - absolutely poor. Our checkout page was broken - how do you not test this? Drop downs weren't performing properly - again, how do you not test this and how do you expect customers to find their product?
• Time of completion - what was supposed to take 2 months, took 6 months to complete.
• Communication/support - don't expect them to get back to you until 1-2 days later.
• Hand holding - don't expect them to get anything right without you having to hold their hand throughout the entire process. By this I mean, literally drawing out where everything needs to be, telling them how things should hover, where links should be located, how pages should look, how information should be displayed, what colors don't match and not to use.
• The worst part of all is they will not admit their mistakes when they make them. The reason for our pages not working during the migration? "Your old designer used old styling methods". Okay - so what if they did, you had my complete login information. Wouldn't you change all of the old styling methods before migrating my system over and launching it, causing it to break?

Bottom line: Please do your research and use another company. Cart Designers was a complete rip off. I didn't get anything to show for a $4000 redesign and development. I probably could've paid for a $200 theme and gotten the same thing.