January UPDATE: One month later and Goemerchant is still spamming me. They are not doing it several times a week, but I still get their lame come one emails. I hope some other prospective client reads this and realizes what kind of an organization they are considering as a partner. They don’t even respond to unsubscribe emails.
- - - - -
I wrote previously about Latter-dayVillage’s desire to upgrade our shopping cart to handle more merchants and allow them to make more LDS products available to our customers.
The search has not been very much fun:
- Many carts that meet our requirements are priced so high that only national brick & mortar stores could afford them. Several, including Zoovy, are fantastic, just too far out of our price range.
- One cart in particular (Nexternal) meets ALL of our requirements, except support for downloadable products. That is now such in integral part of our ecommerce model that we simply cannot do without that feature.
- One cart has part of the multi-vendor aspect done right, but has no good mechanism enabling us to accurately pay our vendors their rightful % of sales. This was considered a modification request; sadly their development quote for that ‘feature’ was more than their whole product license.
- One cart vendor (Goemerchant) actually has really riled me up. When I signified on their site that I was interested in getting product information, salespeople started calling me. When I discovered that their product is priced WAY out of our price range and does not include a real multi-vendor approach, I told them I was not longer interested. Suddenly I started receiving weekly email sales bulletins. The first couple of weeks I politely sent an email to their unsubscribe address; however, the emails kept coming. Next, I forwarded one of the marketing puff pieces to the salesperson who last called me, asking for her help in removing me from the list. After one week with no reply, and the marketing emails still coming, I’ve decided to report each and everyone as SPAM through spamcop.net until they stop coming. So be warned, unless you want MORE spam, do not ask GoeMerchant to contact you.
- Open Source options: there are still several open source carts that might still fit the bill. In most cases, for me at least, evaluating an open source solution involves an install and monkey process. I install the software and then monkey around with the settings and such until I can verify it will do what we need. This is due to one of the frequent downsides to open source software; lack of documentation concerning addons or modifications to base systems. There is usually no ‘sales person’ to call and ask pointed questions of; many times you have to dig through discussion forums or use them to get answers from the user community. The help is sometimes there, sometimes not, but that is what you get for free or very-little-cost software.
So here’s the score so far: 43 cart systems reviewed (multitudes don’t make the cut when I cannot find a multi-vendor option in their feature list) with three still in the running for consideration. Two of those are open source and I am down to the install/monkey stage. Of course I am still evaluating carts as I come across them, but the time involved is just mind numbing. However, Debra and I remain committed to finding the best solution for our customers.
