Theme Updater & Backups | OOTS

I have received an email telling me that they intend to delete the free plan of this app, so think twice before to buy one of Out of the Sandbox theme: without the app you will have to start new every time they publish an update! I am utterly disappointed by their policy...

This app makes me want to switch to a new theme company entirely. I (along with seemingly several other users) have an issue with Flex rendering on mobile crawlers, so google believes my site is not responsive. After emailing back and forth with them, their only solution was to install the updated theme. But, you can't download and update flex anymore without using their app. This app costs 80+ per year. If their theme doesn't work on mobile, then why would I be responsible for paying to update it? Out of the Sadbox used to be the best Theme providers, and now its just so terrible, and falling behind other apps I use on other sites.

Awful app and for the amount the theme actually cost I'm not impressed. I have a layout issue so the theme doesn't load web pages properly in mobile desktop mode and I've asked many times for help but never get a response

Getting rid of the Free Plan and starting to charge $9 for it? Big Mistake!

You, As a Company that sells templates (For Big Money!) and charges money in order to update them, create very, an extremely bad business relationship between a provider and a consumer.

Does Microsoft charges money for their Automatic system Update?

Or Does Adobe Charges Money for their Automatic system updates?

I can provide you with many more Companies With good and Loyal Marketing towards their Customers.

But You are simply getting Greedy. That will be a downfall for you if you actually gonna initiate your policy.

Customers and their Loyalty come First. Without Customers and their Loyalty there is No Business. Don't Forget about this golden rule before getting greedy

difficult to work with. Resistance to helping their client. Days to get help but it is false help!

I'm in complete agreement with all the recent (re)views of this company. I've bought two of their themes; Turbo ($350) and Flex ($450). One of the main reasons we chose to buy these themes is because the FREE Theme Updater helps to make their very high price tag slightly more digestible. Their recent decision to start charging for this app is a ridiculously shady move; luring people in with a free service and subsequently charging for it is the ultimate form of greed.

...And before someone replies to this review suggesting that manual theme updates are still free - the idea that manually updating the theme is supposed to replace the Theme Updater is laughable.

This behaviour coupled with THE WORST customer service we've ever come across, is enough for us to leave $750 on the table and go in search of a company that values their customers.

This is quite frankly disgusting behaviour. AVOID AVOID AVOID.

After extensive research of multiple Shopify themes, I have decided to provide my rating for my paid Premium Turbo theme.



Here are my reasons why:



I initially opened my store over three years ago. I opened my store during the pandemic, and was initially selling mask. However, I knew at that point that in the future, I wanted to also sell apparel. At that time I hired a designer to create my Shopify for me. I was not familiar with themes, or anything to that extent as I paid the designer to do all the work. I closed my store a year into the pandemic, and put a in construction notice on my store front, as I rebuilt for my apparel store. The designer who built my Shopify store used the turbo theme. As back then I was not familiar with how themes were placed into Shopify. I am now under the impression that the designer used either his own turbo theme, or a stolen turbo theme on my store. Because I was familiar with the turbo theme I ended up purchasing the theme myself about six months ago not even bothering to look at other themes, that was 100% my mistake.



I have recently in the last 2 month or so been reviewing Shopify dedicated themes themself (Both Free & Paid) and wow is all I can say! Dedicated Shopify themes offer way more ability for customization than the turbo theme, which is supposed to be a premium theme. The Shopify themes allow you to do basic things as changing margins/padding/spacing in each section, using gradient colors, they provide product tabs with icons, some of the themes also allow you to upload your own icons, they allow you to choose the background color of your pop-ups, they also allow you to use pages as dynamic sources in collapsible product tabs (to allow you to have a size chart), Some themes even come with built-in cookie banners, they also provide count down timers and much more. all of these things that I’m mentioning here that come with Shopify themes do not come in the premium turbo theme.



The Turbo Theme is a Good Theme, however, it’s one of the oldest themes on the market and I believe it has a lot of catching up to do, especially to simple basic features that are standard on Free Shopify Themes.

Whenever you reach out for assistance they typically state that they will submit feedback on your behalf or refer you to a developer for assistance.

Sorry but it's rubbish. It just doest even try to update the theme. Just installs a clean new copy of the updated version.

There is always an error or something that stops it working - but then nothing works at all. Been trying on and off for months.

In response to developer response - It transfers nothing over, not even the colour scheme. I understand the limitations of custom code of course - but it makes zero effort to even try and work with unaltered templates.

You buy the theme and now they want you to pay to be able to update theme automatically? Greedy. Greedy. Greedy. That is a service that we shouldn’t have to pay for, especially when it was provided for us originally - and now they’re doing ‘take backs’??? Plus I go into the app to figure out how to unsubscribe and there’s no info!! Don’t buy from them if you haven’t yet.

I did a lot of research and selected OTSB for our theme choice. Never had an issue, questions were answered timely, and no problem with previous updates.

I didn't so much mind the $9/month if it kept my theme updated which I assume is the proper thing to do. So I did sign up, did update the Responsive theme with this latest update, and now ALL of my critically important options are a mess apparently from some light customizations for options and for the cart by another popular and commonly used app provider. Even on the product pages the options are all out of order!

I submitted a ticket 2 days ago to OTSB w/no response yet, and then submitted a priority ticket yesterday, which I should have done initially not realizing how critical this problem is.. The timeframe for a ticket response says the same thing- 1-2 days so what is the priority ticket advantage? And I do NOT want to talk to someone from zendesk with a generic response that never takes care of a problem.

What is the advantage of updating if it deconstructs the current theme/website? I could have stayed with wordpress for that! This was our whole purpose of selecting OTSB for shopify!

We are launching this site NEXT WEEK!! I contacted a shopify expert and they want hundreds of dollars to update these few lines of customization! WHAT??? No thank you!!!

I am also reading all the complaints here and the responses from OTSB do not sound very empathetic or helpful to those having problems with the update.

We were fine with previous updates and NO ISSUES until this most recent one! I am hoping to hear from someone TODAY and how this will be taken care of!

I would advise anyone considering an OTSB theme to hold off. I am happy to provide a previous positive review AFTER this has fixed!

UPDATE: I did receive an email back from OTSB and they did take a little deeper look at the issues we had with the theme update. They were very courteous and somewhat helpful but basically threw it back to the options app we were using to fix the issues. Interesting that one of the suggestions was NOT to do the update, or use a previous saved version before the update, and work out the issues later. This is opposite of what OTSB suggests on their site. We did work with the options app and they have been very very helpful. Again, we did not expect OTSB to fix these (light) customization issues, but did expect a heads up notice that upcoming updates can and most likely will affect the architecture of your site. The majority of Shopify users are not web developers, coders etc. . Most purchase a theme so as not to have build a site theme from scratch (note: a big selling point on the themes is you can customize it however you want), which is why we switched to Shopify/OTSB..It was our expectation that this would resolve the Wordpress issues of a current site, however at least Wordpress always gives you a heads up on major updates. We are continuing with it for now as we have quite a bit of time and money invested, but we are wiser to the communication and limitations we experienced and hope that OTSB sees all these reviews and will give their fellow business owners and customers a better experience in the future as promised on their sales pages.