Bren B.

Previously, I noticed that weareunderground.com's Vantage theme's product pages opened on my laptop screen looking awkward. There are 2 wide bands of white space, the product graphic is huge, and you always have to scroll to make up for the poor layout. I reached out through Shopify and they referred me to the theme's developer.

The initial response from the company was a form letter (see below) that said they could not provide detailed changes in designs and they referred me to two low-cost programming companies who could/would help. I was particularly crabby that day, as many are these days as we struggle with many things that are hard enough, without also having other world issues that are beyond our control.

So, I wrote a crabby, sarcastic letter responding to the person trying to do their job during this difficult period, and then I wrote a highly detailed, crabby review.

Today, Richard Bairstow, the CEO of weareunderground.com, responded to me directly, explained the specific programming reason for the "white spaces" at the top of my product pages (some companies use them to insert information and some do not. Mine does not, so the spaces are blank). He then sent me specific code to add that would solve this issue. Here's the quote of what he said:

"Hi Bren

I am reaching out having been made aware of the response and the emails that have gone back and forth between yourself, Shopifys support team and a member of our team.

We do add margins to the elements on the product pages to allow space for content. Some of our customers like that space, others do not. Unfortunately it is very much a split and there isn't a way for us to make everyone happy at the same time.

What I don't like here is that the issues you were having are simple to fix and take seconds to apply.

At the top of the product page we have the breadcrumb trail and then the product section conent. I have some code below that you can easily paste in to remove that space.
Each line is commented so that you can see which one each impacts.

In your store admin open: themes > Actions > Edit code
On the next page choose the Assets folder and then select the file named: Stylesheet. Css or stylesheet. Css. Liquid ( depending on your theme version).

Scroll all the way to the bottom and paste this in:" END QUOTE
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I (Bren) won't include the code here.
I sincerely appreciate Mr. Bairstow's attention to customer service, even to cranky old customers like me. A lot of work goes into selling templates, I'm sure. But, it's impossible to anticipate every possible customer use or situation.

My only remaining criticism of their business process, in order to avoid creating issues that should not have existed, would be to amend their process so that when customers take the time to go through Shopify, get a referral back to them, and they take the time to explain what, to the customer, is an important issue, to not be quickly dismissive in an email. Many of us are not programmers (why we bought the templates in the first place).

Weareunderground could potentially create another revenue stream by differentiating levels of design support on Shopify where they sell their work currently: e.g., Basic template for do-it-yourselfers $180. Template with 20 minutes of tweaking: $240; Design support for 3 hours: $500 (or whatever you think the market will bear and you want to charge.) If you have low-cost programmers, who "know your code very well," just outsource them as contractors, rather than making it sound in a letter like "it's not our problem, go talk to these guys." The work process... same. But, the PR impression is totally different. The CEO was not pleased that such a simple issue was handled the way it was, so I suspect that he will be making appropriate changes in their process. I wish them well.
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For the record: Below is their first letter in response to my inquiry. (I have deleted my crabby, sarcastic response.)

Here's their form letter to me:

Hey there folks,

Thanks for reaching out to Underground Themes!

While we're happy to answer questions and fix bugs, editing the theme in this way doesn't fall under ours or Shopify's support policies. We provide free support for the themes but in order for that to remain free we can't personalize the theme to each store owners individual tastes as a part of that.

That said, if you are looking to make changes to your store we recommend working with Task Husky or Hey Carson who offer low-cost small theme tweaks and knows our code well. Alternatively, Shopify does also have a large developer marketplace for code changes and theme modifications.

We are more than happy to still assist with theme support issues that you might have but can't extend that to include theme modifications.

Have a good one!