Is using website clone script good idea?

Hello, I am working as a developer for one project. Basically the idea is to make something similar to Taskrabbit, but for smaller and more specific local market. The people that I am working with are thinking about buying Zoplay’s quick-rabbit-script (if I understand correctly, it’s some kind of php magento script) and my job would be to make some modifications and expansions to it, so it suits our needs.

The script promises most of the functionality that we need, but I am afraid that the it will be poor quality, buggy and basically just quickly put together to somewhat work and look good, and that it will be pain in the ass to expand and modify it. I personally would prefer building the app myself using something like Laravel as the API backend and Angular on fronted, because I think that would be a better solution in long term and it would be easier to add additional features in the future. But maybe I have just heard some bad stereotypes about website clone scripts and they are not as bad as I think.

So my question is, does anyone have experience with scripts like this, are they any good and what would you do in similar situation?

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Well I guess it would depend on the budget. Using an existing platform like quick rabbit will significantly reduce development time. Where as building everything from scratch is going to be very time consuming. If the client is satisfied with the features of quick rabbit including the admin it seems like that would be the best route. I didn’t see anything in the literature about that using Magento though but if it is Magento is very well known ecommerce platform. It ain’t perfect by any means but provides more than what is needed for most ecommerce operations out of the box and can be customized as needed. I would try to demo the quick rabbit with the client to guage the extent of changes necessary. From that discovery process decide whether quick rabbit will satisfy a majority of the client business needs without having entire re-engineer the quick rabbit platform. If you have to reengineer quick rabbit platform to satisfy the clients needs than perhaps alternative ecommerce platform is more appropriate which could include building it from scratch.

I think using clone script is a perfectly viable solution, as it reduces the development cost, time & efforts significantly. And if the script is customizable, the quality of your web portal shouldn’t be a concern. Customization may seem difficult initially, but overall, this approach will save you lots of time. And if you have your doubts about quick-rabbit, you can also check Yo!Gigs, which is pretty much the same script but has a few enhancements & plus points.