I'm curious to see if anyone here has purchased a membership there. There are quite a few scripts that you could use there if you have domains that apply to those types of sites. I emailed them once some time ago but never got a reply so I never went ahead w/ the membership. If the scripts are halfway decent, it's not a bad price to pay at all for what you get.

So if anyone has experience w/ this site, please do let me know. Thanks!

Wow.. great looking scripts and web sites, BUT I guess you kind of get locked in the offer and will have to stick with them by paying annually year after year. You cannot take the product with you, so you are stuck with them. I always prefer to have a freedom of running my own business. People who sign up for such services must not fully realize the complexity of running their own business.

Best,

I didn't realize you had to continue paying yearly. I thought you could pay the yearly membership continually only ifyou wanted to keep getting updates and access to newer scripts. Maybe I need to look at this again more closely. It looked as if the scripts and designs can be downloaded and you can use them on your own web server.

EDIT: Also, apparently the people who sign up for this sort of thing most are those that try to then sell these "complete" websites on ebay. There's quite a few such auctions on ebay.

They are rubbish. They are selling a bunch or freeware and affiliate software with templates.

reneeBee : thanks for the info. Doyou have personal experience w/ this? I do know that a bunch of ppl buy them and try to auction off the sites on ebay. I figured if the scripts are halfway decent they might not be too bad.

I sure do. The ebay market is saturated with them. Apparently the GPL freeware license allows you to sell free software. Iwill suggest that you check out a lot of the freeware yourself before you buy their membership.

Thanks reneeBee, appreciate your input.

I emailed dotcombuilder a simple question at their contact link before I signed up, and got "no" response. Four days later I sent another email, no response again. In my opinion this is a terrible way to do business. Plus they dont offer a phone number. They lost my business thats for sure.

WebsiteDesigner: You are absolutely right. I also sent them an email and got no response so ofcourse i'm not doing any business with a company like this.

I have been a member of DotComBuilder for years and you just can't beat it. $99 for 450 or more websites and 25+ PHP scripts is a great deal.

They are not freeware or GPL scripts. It's obvious they have an inhouse programmer who is creating them because they are all in the same basic format with the same basic installation. I think that their auction script is a version of EveryAuction which is GPL, but it's very customized.

I really don't know what more you could want. I highly recommend them.

So it takes a negative comment about your company on a public forum for you to acknowledge potential customers?

What more could we want? How about a little bit of customer service. I'm sure I speak for many people here when I say that if the scripts actually ARE quality, I'd be more than happy to pay a lot more than $99 for them. But I would never do business with a company that i KNOW doesn't care about customer relationships. It's obvious from dotcombuilder's apparent reputation as a company that never responds to client inquiries that customer service is not a top priority. THAT, is inexcusable.

EvilHaider, I agree. What tops it off, is the bull about having excellent 24/7 service on their website. In my opinion this is false advertising.

some of the site designs are awesome like the greeting card site, the travel site and the shopping carts.

the scripts suck, a lot of them are buggy. the photo rate script is horrible, the shopping cart is plain buggy and the greeting card site could come with a little more then 3 crappy sample cards.

if you are trying to make money off of this, then dont buy it...those days are long gone. when these people first started a few years back, then yeah you could sell the templates for $2000 on ebay, now its oversatuated and you'd be lucky to get a $1 bid. i used these templates as basis for some site designs, that's pretty much it.

and if you need help on something, forget it. support is near non existant.

anybody need something? ill sell some templates to try and recoup my $99

haha thanks but I think I'll pass hostdeez. I'm actually no longer interested in these scripts so this thread can be closed now

I've used DotComBuilder for about 7 months with success. True, ebay does seem to be drying up for these (except when new designs are introduced). The greatest opportunity exists in selling these sites OFF of eBay.

I usually get a reasonably quick response when I email webmaster AT dotcombuilder. For support, I have found they respond to support tickets in reasonable order also. I'm satisfied.

To clear things up, you don't have to continue paying the membership to use whatever sites you have created, but you DO have to continue paying in order to continue creating them. It's $99 for six months, $149 for a year. Renewing for six months is only $59.

The greeting card site DOES come with more than 3 cards - it comes with 6. Granted, that's still not a lot, but what do you expect?

I've found my membership to be very worthwhile.