Search the company’s exact name plus the word “complaint” before you pay anything — that ten-minute check reaches records their Google rating will never show you. In this market the rating is close to useless as a filter, which makes the complaint search disproportionately valuable.
The moment it happens
Where burned buyers warn each other becomes relevant at two moments: before you pay, when you’re trying to check someone, and after you’ve lost money, when you want to warn the next person.
Most people skip the first and only discover these places during the second.
Where to look
Six places, in order of usefulness:
| Where | What you’ll find |
|---|---|
| Consumer complaint boards — search the name plus “complaint” | Detailed narratives with dates and amounts. The richest source |
| Google reviews, filtered to 1 and 2 stars | The specific failures. Ignore the average, read these |
| The company name plus “fraud” or “refund” | Forum threads, Reddit, Quora |
| Trade and local WhatsApp groups | Ask directly. Fastest honest answer available |
| Google Maps reviews of their office location | Occasionally a different, franker set than the profile reviews |
| Their own portfolio sites, opened and tested | Whether the work is real, live and functioning |
Ten minutes across the first three is enough for most decisions.
The four patterns that recur
Reading complaint records about website companies, the same four shapes appear repeatedly. Knowing them means you recognise the early stage of one while it’s still cheap to exit.
1. Advance paid, then silence. Money taken, work begins or doesn’t, replies slow, then stop. The most common shape.
2. Part-delivered, then stopped. A site reaches roughly eighty percent — visible, incomplete, not live. Then either more money is requested to continue, or the vendor goes quiet. Worse than the first pattern in one respect: sunk cost is higher, so buyers keep paying.
3. Renewal paid, service stopped anyway. A buyer pays the annual renewal and the site goes down regardless — usually because the payment never reached the actual hosting or registrar. This one is specific and worth watching for.
4. Registered under the developer’s own details. One buyer reported their site being registered against a developer’s personal email; when they applied for a payment gateway, the verification details didn’t match and transactions were withheld. The site existed. Money couldn’t move through it.
That fourth pattern is the least anticipated and among the most damaging, because it surfaces months later at the worst possible time.
Why the star rating won’t save you
Agency ratings in Delhi NCR cluster tightly at the top — firm after firm sitting at 4.7 to 4.9 across two or three hundred reviews, including companies with substantial complaint histories on other platforms.
Two consequences. A high rating carries almost no information, because everyone has one. And the useful signal has moved entirely into the detailed negative reviews and the off-platform complaint records — the places most buyers never check.
So invert the usual method. Don’t look at the score. Filter to the lowest ratings, read what those people describe, and search the name on a complaint board.
How to read what you find
Not every negative review is decisive:
Weight heavily: specific dates and amounts; multiple unrelated people describing the same sequence; complaints about post-payment silence; anything about domain or login access being withheld.
Weight moderately: complaints about delays, if the site was eventually delivered. Late is a different problem from never.
Discount: vague dissatisfaction with design taste; a single angry review among many detailed positive ones; complaints where the buyer clearly never supplied content.
Treat as decisive: a repeated pattern of taking money and not delivering. Two independent accounts of that is enough.
When you find nothing
Common for small and newer firms, and not itself a red flag. It does mean you fall back on the checks that don’t depend on public record:
- A GST invoice from a registered firm
- The domain registered in your own account
- A small advance and stage-linked payments
- One past client you can actually phone
- Written scope including the year-two cost
Absence of complaints is not evidence of reliability. Structure is what protects you when you have no information.
Writing your own
If you’ve been through this, write it. Dates, amounts, what was promised, what arrived, quotes of what was said. No adjectives.
Post it on a complaint board and as a Google review. Given how compressed the ratings are, a detailed factual account is one of the few genuinely useful signals in this market — and the boards you probably wish you’d checked exist only because other people took twenty minutes to do this.
What to do this week
- Search each shortlisted company’s exact name plus “complaint”.
- Filter their Google reviews to 1 and 2 stars and read them.
- Ask in a local or trade WhatsApp group.
- Open their portfolio sites and test the contact forms.
- Where you find nothing, apply the five structural checks instead.
If you want it done the certain way
Search our name the same way you’d search anyone’s, then ask us for a client in your trade you can phone. Domain in your name, published price, GST invoice, payments against stages you can open. WhatsApp us; we reply in about five minutes between 9am and 7pm.
Related reading
- How to tell your web developer horror story
- You’re not alone: buyers on attempt two or three
- How to spot a developer who might disappear
- What proof rebuilds trust after a bad developer
FAQ
How do I check a website company’s reputation before paying?
Search their exact name plus “complaint”, filter their Google reviews to 1 and 2 stars and read the detail, and ask in a local trade group. Then open their portfolio sites and test the contact forms yourself.
Why do all web design companies have high Google ratings?
Ratings in Delhi NCR cluster at 4.7–4.9 across large review counts, including firms with complaint histories elsewhere. Because nearly everyone has a high score, the average carries little information and the detail in negative reviews carries most of it.
What complaints are most serious about a web developer?
A repeated pattern of taking payment without delivering, withholding domain or login access, and service stopping after a renewal was paid. Multiple unrelated accounts of the same sequence should be treated as decisive.
