About once a year I look into other shopping carts to see what’s out there, what people are saying and to see if there is anything I should be using. Right now I primarily use the ShopSite Shopping Cart because it has been extremely reliable, it has a bundle of great features and the custom templates are easy to work with. ShopSite works great for small, medium, and large businesses but it’s not dynamic (both a good thing and a not as good thing) and it tends to be a little harder to work with for my largest clients. I have one client with 20,000 products using ShopSite and the cart works fine but updating the database can be a chore, although I don’t think this will be easier with another cart.
I started my search based on some recommendations by customers and what I found was very disheartening. I examined about 10 shopping carts where I looked at features, abilities, support, integration with Joomla and WordPress, ability to customize and lastly, the reviews. Many of the carts made it through the list but all failed when it came to reviews. There I found a consistent pattern of customers complaining about…:
- bugs, lots of bugs
- being used as the guinea pigs to sort out the bugs rather than proofing first
- being charged for upgrades that were nothing more than bug patches, and those bug patches came with bugs of their own
- a total lack of support once you ran out of the trial period
- the forum, Facebook, twitter and other support related pages that hadn’t been updated in 4 years for one cart
- free shopping carts that cost thousands of dollars for support
- a general feeling of being dumped once the shopping cart company got their money
After a week of intensive research I only found one cart that I would consider but it was very expensive and there were still complaints by developers of sloppy and inefficient coding that makes it slow and bulky. In the end my conclusion was that I really appreciated ShopSite that much more. THey put out useful updates with interesting, even exciting new features. They test the upgrades before making them live and although there are occasional bugs they are usually for more extreme circumstances and free bug patches come out fairly quickly. It doesn’t break and the support is great (depending on who you are hosting with of course) which means I never get calls in the middle of the night from customers.
What bothered me a lot was how these companies are advertising one thing and delivering another, and leaving a wake of customers who feel cheated. I run into this especially when it comes to SEO companies. Many people are quick to brush it off as “just business” but I believe that honesty and integrity doesn’t get left at the door. I give 150% to all my customers and I like to work with companies who realize that getting the dollar at the expense of the customer is a poor way of doing business.
Sorry for my little rant but I have to say that this is the first time when I completed a search for new products and came out discouraged…maybe better luck next time?
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