A review of Reliability of PremiumPress Themes + 24 customer reviews

Reportedly PremiumPress themes did’t receive updates from one year

A big update regarding this post

Founder and lead developer of PremiumPress finally addressed the issue I raised and he is agreed to provide free upgrade to all users who had bought old framework themes. I personally checked his claim and he upgraded my account for free.  Surprisingly my account is upgraded to Premiumpress VIP bundle (that includes all PremiumPress responsive themes). You can also try it. Just create a support ticket and ask them to upgrade. This step of Mark Fail is admirable.

If you are thinking to become a user of DirectoryPress ( Responsive Directory Theme ), ShopperPress ( Responsive shopping Cart Theme ), CouponPress ( Responsive Coupon Theme ) or any other PremiumPress WordPress theme then first, you must read this report by this real user of PremiumPress.com.

Read this review how PremiumPress developer cheated his loyal existing customer base just because of lust of earning extra money.

I want to clarify that I am a real customer of DirectoryPress theme developed by Premiumpress.com and due to a lot of technical bugs in this theme and poor customer support I left the decision of applying this theme on my Directory website. However I tried a lot to fix all issues, testing it on a development website but finally, I realized that utilizing this theme may ruin my directory listing project anytime in future. Well, before I tell you more about harms of using PremiumPress themes, I will tell you how PremiumPress developer Mark Fail victimized all paid users of DirectoryPress and other PremiumPress themes like ClassifiedPress and ShopperPress etc, and looted their hard-earned invested money in buying these themes.

I bought DirectoryPress, 2 years back under following license;

• Lifetime product upgrades
• Unlimited site installation support

These two points are so much attractive that anyone can decide to buy a WordPress plugin or theme that seems to be good and useful. Anyone wants to buy a product that offers free upgrades for life.

They can not disclaim it, I have a proof that they offered themes under lifetime upgrade license. Check this link and they have mentioned “Lifetime Upgrades” on their site Homepage. Thanks to web.archive.org

After purchasing the theme, I became very much disappointed as this theme had several bugs and many of its module did not work 100%. I asked support and they always replied in a very irresponsible way and almost denied to help in resolving issues. Finally I decided to wait for a new version with bug fixed and some very much essential improvement.

In September 2013, When I visited PremiumPress website, it seemed to me that a new version of DirectoryPress had been out and I had a look on its demo. I observed some good changes on demo. I could not wait to download it. But it was a shock for me because that demo did not belong to DirectoryPress but it was the demo of a new product by PremiumPress called “Responsive Directory Theme”. I at once realized that it was a trick by Mark Fail to charge extra money to existing customers of PremiumPress. It is the first time when a plugin or theme developer did so.

Company must mention this on its website that every major upgrade will be chargeable and users will have to pay for that version.

I wrote on PremiumPress forum that it was not fair to stop the development of your running product that was being used by thousands of users and to start the same product with a different name. One employee of PremiumPress politely slapped me, replying “ that Responsive Directory Theme is a completely different product and it is not related to the DirectoryPress in any way.” I know he was getting tricky to satisfy me. There were some other sycophant users had taken the side of Mark Fail. But reality was, “All PremiumPress customers had been cheated”.

Let me give a simple example;

Suppose you are using the famous Builder theme “Ultimatum” Lifetime updates license. This theme is used to create custom layouts using WordPress. After one year of purchase you come to know that the developer stopped the development of  the Ultimatum and started a new builder theme “Ultimatum 1” that has 95% features of “Ultimatum”, saying that “Ultimatum 1” is a totally different product and existing customers of “Ultimatum” have to buy “Ultimatum 1”. Tell me honestly, what would you feel in that condition? Should “Ultimatum” have not  been developed rather than creating a new product “Ultimatum 1”. And if it was not possible to develop existing product to that level, developer must have offered free upgrade to existing customers.

One year had been passed, I again visited their site and found that old themes has been removed from frontend. Seeing such, I logged in to my PremiumPress account and I observed that there has been no update for DirectoryPress since October 2013. One year without a single update; This simply means that product is not being taken care and its development has been stopped.

Recently, I have contacted them to confirm whether the development of old framework is stopped or will it be developed. Here is the reply from the support that confirms that they have successfully cheated old framework customers.

My Experience with DirectoryPress and PremiumPress support

When I installed the theme, I had to work for hours to achieve basic theme customization because the theme control panel is not user-friendly at all ( however it looks fancy and advanced ). I had to face many CSS  bugs and when I wrote to support, they were unable to resolve any of my issues. Once, when I updated the theme, my WordPress database got corrupted.

Furthermore, it is not easy to transfer listings from the old framework to the new responsive framework. Mark has created a plugin to do this but, it does not work 100%. There are many users who have no way other than hiring a web developer to transfer website from old to new framework.

PremiumPress Responsive Directory Theme Alternatives

• Templatic Directory Theme
• Directory Portal

PremiumPress Shopping Cart Theme Alternatives

• Bazar Shop ( Amazing eCommerce WordPress Theme )
• Bee Theme ( More than an eCommerce theme )

Responsive Coupon Theme Alternative

• Clipper Theme
• Coupon Reveal Plugin

PremiumPress Responsive Real Estate Theme Alternatives

• Templatic Real Estate Theme
• Themeforest RealHome Theme

You can easily find all these themes, searching these on Google

Actually, It’s not about some dollars. It’s about reliability of a company. It’s about breaking faith of thousands of loyal customers. Online business runs on blind faith in a company because we can not control them and most of the companies run their business with full reliability. But there are some who cheat to earn more than enough.

I request you all people who read this post, please share it, write about this cheating on their blogs and forums so that Premiumpress.com developer and founder Mark Fail could realize that he was wrong and he should upgrade the license of all existing users of old framework of PremiumPress. However, I don’t want this for me because in my opinion, there are better alternatives on PremiumPress themes, now available in the market.

Update – Old framework seems to be dead now. Mark Fail says “Go to Hell” to his old customers. See the Screenshot taken on 2015 April 29.

This guy has lost all of his credibility leaving old framework orphaned.