Repeat attempts are the ordinary shape of buying a website in India, not an unusual misfortune — and the reason is structural, sitting in how these projects are sold and paid for rather than in the character of individual buyers or vendors. Which is useful: structural problems have structural fixes.
We can’t give you a percentage, because nobody publishes one. What we can say is what the complaint record and the market’s own behaviour show.
The moment it happens
You’re not alone: how many website buyers are on attempt two or three is a question people ask quietly, because it carries embarrassment. You assume you were careless, or too trusting, or that you should have known better.
Then you read a complaint board and find your own timeline written by strangers, repeatedly, with different names and the same sequence.
What the record shows
Three observations, each verifiable if you go and look:
Repeat attempts recur across buyer narratives. The complaint boards carry many accounts that mention a previous failed attempt — a first developer who took an advance, a second who part-delivered. Multiple attempts is a common pattern, not an outlier.
The public signal doesn’t reflect it. NCR web company ratings cluster tightly at 4.7 to 4.9 across hundreds of reviews, including firms with substantial complaint histories on other platforms. Which means the ordinary buyer’s main filter — the star rating — cannot distinguish between vendors on the dimension that matters.
A whole content genre exists to explain the disappointment afterwards. The volume of Indian material answering “my website is live but I get no enquiries” is itself evidence that the expectation was set wrong, at scale, before purchase.
Why the market produces this
Five mechanisms. None requires anyone to be a villain.
Price is the only comparable variable. A first-time buyer can’t evaluate code, design or process. They can compare numbers. So they do, and the market responds by competing on price, which squeezes out the attention the work requires.
Large advances are normal. Half up front, or more, is a widespread practice. It transfers most of the risk to the buyer before anything exists.
Domains get registered in vendor accounts. Often for administrative convenience rather than malice. The effect is the same: the buyer can’t leave, and renewal notices never reach them.
Scope is verbal. No written list of pages, revision rounds or delivery date, so every disagreement becomes a matter of recollection.
Post-payment support has no economics. At the low end of the market there’s no money in the price for a year of small changes, so it doesn’t happen. Buyers experience this as being abandoned; vendors experience it as work they were never paid for.
| Mechanism | Fix available to you | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Price-led selection | Compare on written terms too | Free |
| Large advance | Pay 20–30% | Free |
| Vendor-held domain | Register it yourself first | ~₹1,000/yr |
| Verbal scope | One page in writing | Free |
| No support economics | Agree a maintenance plan, or accept per-change fees | Priced |
Every fix in that table is free or nearly free. That’s the point of understanding the mechanism rather than the individual failure.
What this changes for you
It isn’t a judgement on you. You bought using the method the market presents — compare quotes, pick a reasonable one, pay the advance. That method has a high failure rate. Following it isn’t naivety.
Being unusually careful about the person isn’t the answer. People are hard to read and reassurance is free. Structure is what survives being wrong about someone.
Your total is your real budget. If two or three attempts cost you ₹40,000, you were always a ₹40,000 buyer. Doing it once properly within that is the cheap route, not the expensive one.
Your experience is worth publishing. The complaint record is only informative because people wrote it down. Given how little the star ratings discriminate, a detailed factual account is one of the few signals that actually helps the next buyer.
The five conditions that break the pattern
For your next attempt, in order of importance:
- Register the domain yourself, in your own account, before hiring anyone.
- Small advance — 20 to 30 percent.
- Payments against stages you can open on your phone, not against dates.
- Written scope: pages, revision rounds, delivery date, and the year-two renewal cost.
- Agree what happens after launch — a maintenance plan, or a clear per-change rate. Decide it before you need it.
None of those requires spending more. All of them require asking, once, in writing.
What to do this week
- Read three or four complaint entries about website companies. Recognise the pattern.
- Total what your attempts have cost, and treat that as your real budget.
- Register your domain in your own account today.
- Write the five conditions down as terms for your next hire.
- Post a factual account of your own experience.
If you want it done the certain way
We’ll accept all five conditions in writing before you pay anything — and tell you plainly if your scope suits a cheaper vendor. Register the domain in your own name first either way; we’d recommend that whoever you hire. WhatsApp us; we reply in about five minutes between 9am and 7pm.
Related reading
- Where burned buyers warn each other
- Add up everything: the true cost of failed attempts
- How many local businesses have a dead website?
- The conditions to set the second time
FAQ
Is it normal to have a bad experience with a web developer in India?
Common enough to be a pattern rather than bad luck. Complaint records carry many buyers describing a previous failed attempt, and the causes are structural — price-led selection, large advances, vendor-held domains and verbal scope.
Why do so many website projects go wrong?
Because the buyer can only compare price, advances are typically large, domains often sit in the vendor’s account, scope is verbal, and low prices leave no economics for post-launch support. Each of those has a free fix.
What should I do differently on a second attempt?
Register the domain yourself first, pay a 20–30% advance, tie payments to stages you can open, get scope and the year-two cost in writing, and settle post-launch support terms before you need them.
