Do not accept this project if you…

When you’re communicating with a lot of people from all over the world, it’s inevitable there’s going to be a lot of glitches anyway. But, when you’re working in eCommerce, especially Magento sales, things just get a tad more complicated and, at times, quite funny.

Here are some of my favorite not-so-ordinary inquiries and quotes from “the trenches”. All of these are real-life examples.

At Inchoo we pay special attention to our content marketing efforts as inbound has been our focus for many years.

Incoming!!!

As a result, we’re getting quite a few inquiries week in, week out. And these can be very diverse – from pleas for some quick fixes or asking for some general advice to requests for quotes for full projects. We’ve seen quite a few messages that had us raise our eyebrows, watch in awe at what we had just received, or simply have a nice laugh (or at least a chuckle).

So, why not share some of it with you? Here’s a selection of some we found interesting and just a bit confusing at times.

Funny typos… or perhaps not?

Ok, you have your run-off-the-mill “Magneto” vs “Magento” battle (and I believe everyone around Magento world is guilty of making this mistake at least once). But, there are some twists here – we just recently saw one “Meganto” as well 🙂

Sometimes we would get messages with lines that you could clearly contribute to typos, but at times we had to wonder if that was really the case.

Some of these real-life lines:

We are looking at responsible website as a must have.

Can you explain how can eCommerce help me sell stuff online?

Please reply to us with a quote and time of complication.

I need it. Now.

Now, we have various services listed on our website, and people have different needs and are looking not only for quick, but immediate fixes. And sometimes we can’t really tell what they had in mind when they send in their inquiries. Quite often we would get a message like this:

SEO this web.

I really need it.

HELP!!!!!!

I only need you to… and this is how long it will take you

Don’t you love those types of inquiries where the sender makes it look like they’re asking you to do something completely trivial, as if they’d do it themselves but for some reason they can’t be bothered? And some also have a good understanding of how long a certain task would take us.

Site is 95% done, we only need you to jump in and make it ready for launch.

I know it takes only 10-15 hours for this task, don’t try to rip me off.

Blast from the past

You know how you sometimes get a lead with quite an outdated Magento version installed? This one should probably take the cake (granted, it was a couple of years back when we received this inquiry, but still, the stable version at that time was 1.6 or something like that)

Hello, I am running a very old version of Magento 1.0.19870.4.

If you are rather new to Magento, this was indeed the official designation of one version. Would you recommend them a move to Magento 2 now?

Setting proper expectations

And, I saved the best for last.

This has to be one of the most straight to the point instructions for not accepting (or quoting for) a project we ever got.

Project conditions:

• Do not accept this project if you are working on more than 3 projects at this time.
• Do not accept this project if you are not a MASTER in Magento and all around it.
• Do not accept this project if you will not start immediately (Work will start the second we make the agreement and all the hours after it without one hour of stop).
• Do not accept this project if you do not have phone support and live chat support.
• Do not accept this project if you don’t know how to deal with the modules we have purchased.
• Do not accept this project if you think you will have problems.
• Do not accept this project if you won’t give us immediate support when we need it in working hours.
• Do not accept this project if you work less than 8 hours a day.
• Do not accept this project if you won’t be able to assist us in the future.

The list is very clear. So, would you accept this project? 🙂

Sharing is caring

So, what about you? What are some of your favorite funny misunderstandings or just plain strange communications you experienced in everyday work? Are there any projects you’d like us to accept and believe we can help you with? Our Magento development team can accept your project – just drop us a line.