eDirectory.comReviews of edirectory.com

Where to start.. I read through the good and the bad, and looking at the bad thought, "No, no company could be as bad as these people say". It is TRULY just as bad. My experience felt like this was a company from an early 2000s time capsule. Now I do want to say there is some good to this company. The people were nice, and they are genuinely trying to provide a service for those who need it. This is the entire experience from start to finish: Intro Meeting: I had an intro call with a gentleman to see whether the product could do what I was looking for. He seemed to want to stick to his script (About features I'd already learned about), and when I'd steer the subject to the specific items of importance to me, he seemed to get annoyed. This should have been a warning, but I persevered. During this meeting I was mislead as to what capabilities the system actually has. The Product: The system is atrocious, it took nearly two weeks before I could get access (After I paid for it), due to numerous bugs and problems in the software. After I finally got access , to my chagrin I learned that all of the features I needed were A) Either behind a paywall or B) Would cost me upwards of 2K to get "custom coded". The sites themselves were sloppy and while they looked good for the mid 2010s, times have changed. Overall I was extremely disappointed as not only had I wasted nearly a month trying to get a project going, but it was going to cost another astronomical amount to get some basic features. I decided to let my payments lapse, and got an email saying my account had been suspended. I assumed that meant I would not be charged again. There was no mention of them charging again or anything of the sort, only a link to reactivate the site. Keep in mind that you can't cancel your subscription on the platform, you have to reach out to support. Well I was surprised two months later to see a charge on my card. As it was a weekend I had to wait for service to be available the next Monday. I explained my case, and they were gracious enough to offer me a refund and cancel the subscription there. The problem was I during the time I had to wait for service to be available the exchange rate changed. So I had money withdrawn from my account without my consent, and when I asked for a refund I received 20% less than what had been withdrawn. I brought this up with the company and they said there is nothing they could do and would not make an exception. It wasn't a large sum of money, but it is the principle. Overall, if you are a retiree and enjoy solving problems for a hobby project and have unlimited money to spend on a company this is your platform. And I don't mean this in a negative way, there is a place for this company, and it is for those who have plenty to spend and want a hobby project. If you do have a budget and want something modern that works well, there are plenty of other options out there. I for example have been able to achieve a better result (including full functionality and a much better UI/UX) than what I could have hoped for with eDirectory by using Webflow and Airtable. The kicker is it was a lower cost for an entire site than it would have to get a custom form made on eDirectory.

Sales focused approach, old rigid software and everything is a paid addon. I am a developer and my client chose eDirectory purely because of their flashy website and promises it contains. A lot of claims that on their website are not true, or they make it look like you can't get the same thing for free on other platforms. Their communication is sales focused, they quoted us about 4 times as much for a simple feature that I know I can build on another platform for 1-2 hours (I'm a developer). I built that feature on another platform (a 3rd party software) in 2 hours. They needed 13 hours to make that on their own software? My client paid for a discounted development hours package - yet they failed to mention that and quoted us in full aside. One department doesn't know what the other is doing - we had emails from a sales rep, then from a developer, didn't know who to turn to with what, each was telling us to go talk to the other about X. Their software is very dated, it does the basics right, but as soon as you want something custom - that's when they bog you down with inflated hours. Their software has very odd, limiting requirements - it requires CentOS to run - no normal hosting company will give you that, so you are limited to either pay for some obscure custom server with CentOS or you pay them for their hosting - which is slow (they are not a hosting company, obviously). I tested a simple demo eDirectory running on their hosting against a simple WordPress demo directory running on a cheaper standard hosting and WordPress performed better. Their system can't even do simple things like customising your header or footer without coding it all in HTML. No visual builder for that - that's very 90s. Every other solution that's out there is better in that. To summarise - Stay away if you don't want to be stuck with an old system, a team that will milk you for money and inflate the development prices. You are much better off using WordPress and one of the many directory solutions available there.

The product does not work as advertised. We discovered numerous bugs that never should have made it into a finished commercial product and spent considerable time and effort documenting and addressing these issues with the support team. Several features (most notably the ability to properly display opening and closing times of business clients) do not work, and we were told that a) we could pay their developers to write custom code to address this or b) wait for a "fix" to be released in a future version of the platform. After giving the company multiple opportunities to address the issues we had, we requested a refund, only to be told they won't provide one because it had been too long (3 months) since we'd made the purchase. Most of that time was spent trying to obtain resolution to issues before we finally gave up and asked for a refund. It should be noted that we were initially promised a refund, only to have that walked back by another member of their support team. We bought a Source License, only to be denied access to the source code because we weren't buying a dedicated hosting plan from them. This company's customer service leaves a great deal to be desired, as it would often take a week to receive any response to issues we raised. EDIT: The company provided a response to this review offering to put our site on a dedicated server we provide, but this is not an acceptable solution to us because it would require another outlay of funds that I do not wish to make. Additionally, I find it interesting they would respond within one day to a bad review but take a week and a half to respond to support emails asking for assistance with product issues. At this point, our experience with them has been so negative that I do not wish to continue their service and AGAIN (4th time) ask for a refund. If they aren't willing to do this then I will dispute it with my bank and provide the entire email chain of our conversations with them as proof we should receive a refund.

Non-existent support for their buggy product.

This company will pretend they are super professional and supportive but as soon as you need support, their true colors come out! The support team is a joke! They ignore your calls and take WEEKS to call or email you back when you leave a message. They have a great product, but if you are looking for a great product and great service, this is not the place to go! You will spend SO MUCH of your precious time waiting on these people. Save yourself the frustration now and go someplace else. BEWARE!!!

eDirectory software is far inferior, even when compared to the most basic $50 WordPress directory plugins. Here is how: 1. No comment module for blogs and articles. They only way to post comments is via Facebook. This feature was available for older versions, but now have been removed from the latest release. I was quoted $600 for basic comments and $3000 for replies to comments. 2. Search is very outdated and non-functional. If you make a typo i.e. 'Brazil' vs 'Brasil' or say 'Pizza' vs 'Piza' - there is no suggestion or fuzzy search. Visitors have to type the exact phrase. 3. No tags - Visitors are unable to filter search results using tags such as - Free Parking, Accept Credit Cards, Accepting New Patients etc. The only way to narrow down results is by 'Category' or 'Location' 4. No author pages - You can't see all the articles or blogs posted by an author. There are visitor and sponsor profile pages, but you can't aggregate content under a profile. 5. Login (Visitor and Sponsor), claim and add listing workflows are useless at best. Most sponsors abandon adding listing because the workflow is too long. 6. Google Maps is the only mapping service option. You can't use Mapbox or OpenStreetMap to save costs. 7. Images are real low quality. No PNG or SVG support. 8. Unable to filter articles and blogs by author or date or tags. 9. Very limited customization options and all the basic features, such as nested menus, global javascript insert are sold as 'plugins' Basically, the software is pretty stripped down to sell customization, professional services and plugins. I would rather hire a WordPress developer to extend a $50 plugin.

Dear readers, I just want to cry, I spent so much money on this company and on their modules, and my sites do not function normally. Customers will never come to such a poor quality product, you can never run a business. I have been with this company for many years, but this year I saw the complete lack of professionalism of the support group. In March of this year, I ordered upgrade of the sites for a new version. Additional modules were added about which I warned support group in advance. Tons of emails has been sent. They promised me to transfer and save files, instead -deleted my sites and did not provide the saved data. I have lost over a thousand dollars. The service is terrible, since March they have not been able to fix errors/bugs, the subscription payment system does not work on sites- never expire. Constantly some kind of breakdown. List of major breakdowns: 1.images could not be placed in the center, html did not work for about 4-5 months 2.the forum module did not work for about 4 months 3. email alerts notifications did not work for about 4 months, it was impossible to interrogate something to fix 4. The information you see for category wasn't the same on both front and back end - for one month could not reach, no one listened to me, they said at first that everything was in order there. 5.there were many different other problems... Moreover, I found out that when you buy additional versions, they are partially not translated into another language and company again asked for money for customization, although it was written on the official website (Available in 7 languages) that each language module has its own language. In configurations- Geography and locations possible to write in SEO , meta only in one language, and this will be appear in all your different language versions!!! I asked them improve this part, because site are not fully multilingual, it's not useful if they will run in own site with one language, they asked for that $600 for customization. The sites don't function normally for a long time and no one from the support fixes it! You pay subscriptions but they don't provide normal support services. From the user's control panel, the functionality is very poorly organized: participants cannot delete their ads only listing; if a participant has a lot of ads, they are poorly displayed on the control panel, most of them are not visible - it's hard to find out; correspondence/ leads is not designed for a large number of letters, etc. It is very difficult to manage. The cost of customization in the company is very expensive ( in my opinion) from $ 60 per hour. They do not know how to admit their mistakes - there are many such cases! I often contacted support and tried to explain the problem by showing it on screenshots and links, in response I received: that it should be so. After sending a huge number of e-mails to consider the breakdown, they finally began to move and do something. This process took from one to four, five months sometime. Few bugs/breakdowns were never repaired since March, now we have September month, many e-mails were sent. I declined payment support service subscriptions, until all problems will be resolved! I have to sue this company for the damage caused.

eDirectory does not have a fully integrated payment gateway, which is very critical for paid monthly/yearly memberships. They advertise payment integration with about 8 or so third-party payment systems not Stripe and PayPal. What they don’t tell you is that there is NO cancellation integration. Anyone can become a member at their own will be they can’t cancel at their own will (red flag). You will have to create a contact lead box specifically for cancellation. Once you receive a request for cancellation, you have to manually delete in eDirectory, then cancel in Stripe, screenshot the cancellation in Stripe (they don’t send confirmation emails because of the eDirectory integration), attach said screenshot to a new email, and send to the member as a confirmation email. This is not professional or user-friendly, even though it’s customary for every other membership based platform. if you want them to customize this integration for you, it will 1 mo+ and cost you an additional $2000+. You also have to pay for every single minor change, including making your logo bigger, changing the link colors (links are built in blue regardless of your themed color), changing “enquiry” to “inquiry” if you’re US based, etc. eDirectory offers products/services that are nowhere near functional as advertised and this will affect your business, income, and name (ie. Fraud disputes, payment disputes, payment issues, refunds, etc.). Save your time and money and go with a different platform.