ShopSite Customers have to pay big for needed programs!

[ALEXANDRIA]

WISH LIST
You say you offer a wish list but what this does is takes your customer to another site to buy another companies product and the company hosting the wish list is getting paid by you the Shopsite customer to send them your customer list. IT TAKES YOUR CUSTOMER OFF YOUR SITE!

To have a real wish list you have to be hosted by the Shopsite hosting company and not by another hosting company which sells Shopsite.

COUPONS
The coupon feature is for one coupon per customer. Have you ever heard of a coupon for one customer. If you offer a coupon you can't do it by a date range, it has to be for one use only. If you do it by date range one customer can use the coupon numerous times. So if you don't buy the Shopsite add on you have customers using the same coupon over and over again.

SALES REPORTS - THIS IS THE BIG ONE!
When I went with the Shopsite cart I ASSUMED the number one rated shopping cart would have numerous sales reports. Only if you have a $5000.00 windows based add on can you have real sales reports or you can do a lot of work every time you need a sales or customer report.

FREE shopping carts have better sales reports and it is free. I wish I had stayed with my free cart. I can't now in this economy.

Shopsite has an forum with all the requests like this and nothing has been done for years to make it easier.

I have realized their whole game is to get you to buy and then hike up the price by making you buy all the add on programs to make your life not a living H----.

So please don't believe Shopsite has what they say you need.


Alexandria

[MgmtSpec]

There are a lot of 3rd party wish list systems - I would think there is something reasonable out there.

Doesn't sound like you've read over the coupon options - there is quite a bit of flexibility. Additionally, you can set discounts by groups.

SS is an e-commerce tool. It is not meant or priced to be Enterprise software. The assumption is most will DOWNLOAD order details in an accounting program. Many SS users have 'real world' stores and like to combine all accounting into one application and process reports from there.

With Free carts you get what you pay for...IMHO

[websiteproducer]

Hi Alexandria,

I hear ya ... it was very frustrating when you first start working with Shopsite but it is a very powerful e-commerce tool.

I felt the same way when I saw WISH LIST ... I was excited to use it only to see I had to deal with some third party that I had to pay - hopefully that changes in the near future - that model doesn't work for us.

COUPONS however have always worked for me. I would do some more testing because I can setup a coupon, for one product or multiple products, have a date range and many customers use it -- although in theory the same customer can use the same coupon many times - which in our case it doesn't matter since we're interested in selling product. But try some tests, it works.

SALES REPORTS - Shopsite is really not a reporting tool. Instead, setup Google Analytics, a free tool that is easily integrated with Shopsite. It is great and will let you know everything you need to know from highly visited pages to sales and lots more.

As in everything, no software is a magic bullet but if you ask around and try/test new tools, you'll see that creating the right combination of tools (from a few sources) and you'll get the overall solution you need.

Good luck.

--Will

[jnarayan]

> SALES REPORTS - Shopsite is really not a reporting tool. Instead, setup Google Analytics

When Alexandria meant sales reports, I believe she is talking about reports on sales volumes, $ revenues etc. Google analytics is not the tool for that. Google analytics will let you measure traffic, clicks, and conversion rates. What you need is a tool that can analyze order / sales data and produce reports.

If you have plenty of free time, then you can do this by hand. Download the sales history as a text file and load into excel and analyze. Or if you have more time, create access databases to do the analysis.

If you don't have much free time, then one of the plugins may be the way to go.