First Scribe

We needed some custom Magento development work done, which honestly should not have taken them ultimately longer than a week or two at best. I understand that First Scribe has lots of other clients, but it was apparent that we were at the bottom priority for them as our small list of development items they somehow stretched out nearing a year to complete. Trying to get any information or status updates from them felt almost impossible the vast majority of the time, if they provided info at all. It was like they would respond only to get us to go away again, and repeatedly didn’t provide the development work or updates on what was going on by the dates or within the timeframes they themselves had stated.
It was very frustrating to work with this company as they provided us an estimate for the completed work (that is, all of the development items we wanted complete) and yet only finished half of them. Then in addition to all the time delays and excuses, they came back saying they wanted more money… when not even yet half the work was done. Some of the times they tried to shuffle the blame for their own functionality they developed out being broken onto us, although we weren’t even touching anything with our Magento site the entirety of their development period. At one point they claimed their development was complete, but our staff continued to find errors directly related to their shoddy work.
First Scribe was an expensive mistake for us not only for not getting everything they had promised to develop in the budget they quoted, but also for the huge delay we had in finishing and launching our new website. We only ended up with half of what we’d asked and ultimately, had to hire a real Magento developer at extra cost to finish up the rest of what we needed, as well as fix their work.
We did not utilize their SEO services, although they seemed to push us hard at times to try and get us to purchase those services from them. It should be noted within the development we asked for was for us to tweak additional meta and social sharing info on our end, which was botched by them, doesn’t work as they claimed — in addition to them simply installed an AddThis extension (which should be a red flag to any others with actual developer knowledge who have encountered that service’s hijacking issues over the years).
I’m really disappointed in our entire experience with this company and would not recommend them to anybody. They were really frustrating to deal with and very trying waiting to hear any correspondence or real update info from.