FAQ

Upon quote acceptance from the customer, we will send an invoice for the minimum number of hours on the project. This invoice should be paid upon receipt and must be paid prior to the start of the project. When the project is complete, we will send an invoice for any work completed up to the max hours quoted on the project. For projects over 20 hours, a separate payment plan may be discussed, typically breaking the project into 3 payments.

Not usually. We try to finalize work details and document them within the ticketing system. If your project requires phone conversation during the project we usually try to build that into the quote and bill our time. If you want to have phone call communication with your project, please let us know up front during the quoting process so we can evaluate your needs and build it into the project appropriately.

Our philosophy is to detail the project work within the ticket. We do this for multiple reasons:

• All of the requirements are located in one place and visible to all employees that may have contact with the project.
• All of the requirements are specified in writing, located in one place and visible to the customer for agreement.
• We have found that requirements given over the phone have a tendency to be misunderstood by one or more of the parties and can result in vastly different expectations.
• We want to make sure that all requirements are captured and it is very easy to miss a requirement when talking on the phone and taking notes.

Sometimes it is necessary to review details on the phone for a quote. We can schedule a call for this but prefer to have as much detail in email to prepare for the call as possible.

We typically do not schedule more than 4 hours of work on any given project per day to eliminate burn out and allow for customer feedback and engineer communication. It is customary for an 8 hour project to be scheduled out over 2-3 days. Please be sure and let us know if you have specific deadlines to meet.

The date sent on the quote is our next available opening. As quotes are accepted, we schedule the work. It is very possible that someone else may have accepted before you and their project was scheduled into the next available slot. We will advise you of your actual start date upon receipt of your deposit payment.

The engineer working on your project will contact you via the ticketing system advising you that the work has been completed and they will ask you for your confirmation on project completion. You are always welcome to reply and check in on progress.

If a certain customization is requested enough times, then we may turn it into a module. In that case, we will provide you with store credit.

We will not disclose any details of your project without your permission. If we did decide that we wanted to share your project details or customization we would ask your permission first. Any vital information would be redacted.

Normally, we develop right on the server, preferably a replicated development server that you may have set up. If we develop on the live server, we make sure to wrap our work with checks to make sure the changes are only seen with certain keys. We also have done local developments and passed the file changes over.

Since X-cart can be customized we prefer to work on your server(s) with your files. That is the best way to know our code changes will work with your particular site. If you need to make other arrangements for access to your site other than FTP or SSH, please let us know ahead of time as extra charges may apply as it may take us longer to manipulate files and to test.

We are about middle of the road when compared with most companies. Our rates are higher than some companies because we offer free support, and a full engineering team backed with at least Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering.

Our projects not only include the work, but test time, checking the site to make sure nothing else was affected improperly, and overall customer transition. In some cases, our projects will include local development and install guidelines for customers who wish us not to touch their site directly.