Mike P.

I have used many e-commerce platforms and auction software. ILance is by far the worst collection of code ever put together by a developer.

It is untested, unsupported and unprofessional.

Not a single feature in iLance works properly or have been thought out. They advertise a plethora of features, yet none of them work properly in a production environment.

Their forum is full of bug reports that have been sitting there unattended to for years. They keep promising a new release and when it finally arrives, it is even more buggy. Now it has been over a year without an update.

They will not refund you because of the nature of the software licensing. Many angry customers have left for other solutions as this company is run by 2 people out of a house in Canada, so do not expect any corporate professionalism there.

What else can I say about iLance? I really tried left and right, even hired 2 developers to fix their messy code, and I was told it would cost thousands of dollars. I was better off just doing a total rebuild. And by the way, iLance does not have a single document for developers to use as reference / guide besides a poorly written manual that is meant to be a summary of each feature. Why is this important? Ask any developer. For a project this large, without a blueprint or developer resources, they will charge you threefold, because of the times it takes to figure everything out and sort through thousands of lines of code.

Now to make things really messed up, they only offer one theme and if you dig into the packaged theme, you will see a developer or designer that is clueless about frameworks and css. It's a total hack job. Again, a developer or designer will look at this theme and either laugh or charge at least a 1000 to rebuild it from scratch using a proper framework.

Finally, this software is not open source as they claim it to be. Some critical files are encrypted, and three developers told us that it is a complete waste of time to try to rebuild or fix iLance given the encryption. So in an attempt to protect their work, they rendered iLance useless for those who want to completely customize it and fix it. Unethical and borderline criminal to say the least, given that their marketing material state that it is completely customizable with complete access to the source code.

My advice is stay away. This company is not going anywhere. Never have, never will. My total loss from this mishap was at least 5,000 when you add hosting and business development.