We have a customer that wanted a custom Ecommerce website. I got involved with someone on here a while back that said he can help with the customization and he suggested that we use cubecart. So I got a template put together and he did the customization work. I had some more questions for the client and the client never got back with me. We started this project back in December 2007 and of course we took half down for payment. June 2008 rolls around and we upgraded to a new webserver. His website got left behind and was not transferred over. No backups no nothing.

He calls back in July wanting to finish the website. Well we kind of lost it since it never got transferred, but I agreed to do it anyway but we couldn't get to it until August. The client was unhappy to hear it would take that long but agreed. I got a programmer to install the contributions we needed and we got everything setup again.

Everything seemed to work ok but now I have some problems. It seems that since their was so many contributions installed certain things don't work correctly anymore. To much coding inserted from different sources it is now just a big mess. The programmer won't return my messages and now I am just stuck. I was going to pay him to fix it but now stuck.

I cannot fix this by myself and I have failed to find anymore help to fix it. No one wants to deal with it.

So since I cannot get this website completed, now what? The client wants his website. We have done over 50 websites and never had this issue, but this one has so many add ons from other people, it just doesn't work together.

I want to complete this website but this is a mess. We like to keep our customers happy not upset, but I think I will have to let this one go.

Any advice for me?

It's tough to give advice because it really depends on the client and how he/she reacts to certain things. You know him best. One thought I had while reading your situation would be if you could sell him on the fact that the new Magento Open Source Shopping Cart is far superior to Cube Cart! Magento has done a good job marketing itself almost similarly to how a proprietary software markets itself. So people tend to get "ooohed" and "ahhhhed" by it's overall appearance.

You can tell him that Magento does not have that many contributions yet, so customizations will be far and few between. But Magento should be able to do most of what he wants to do already. Just a thought!