Hello Igor,
My biggest problem with Big Commerce is something is wrong with the code at checkout and they are not trying to fix it, so I am losing 3-4 customers a day and very angry customers at that. I dont so much care about the lost sales, I care most about the customer and its embarrassing. Big Commerce is one of those companies that you talk about in your videos (I have watched many), they just want to keep harvesting new customers. I am considering switching the template which is easy just to see if the code fixes itself but I feel it is something in the servers.
Steve,
Let me tell you a little story about the checkout process. It is the most critical and fragile thing in an ecommerce platform. In fact it is so fragile that I specifically asked my developer to carbon copy me any reports of any errors that happen on any Shopping Cart Elite store during checkout directly to one of my mailboxes and I review them along daily. The checkout is extremely critical and important that it works perfectly for everyone. This is the final phase of the sales and it is a horrible event to make that last step fail.
You see the checkout portion has TOO MANY points of failures. Some of them we have control over and some we dont.
We dont control this and must find workarounds
1) UPS/USPS/FEDEX Live Rates
2) PAYMENT GATEWAY
3) THIRD PARTY FRAUD TOOLS
4) THIRD PARTY API from Google Checkout/Paypal
5) Failed Browser Sessions (when user times out and returns)
6) SSL connection
7) GEO IP location that was not found
8) Conflicting shipping services selected
We do control this but it also requires the customer or the store owner to participate
1) Correct information entered not to corrupt anything
2) Correct shipping address
3) Misspelling for zipcodes and cities
4) Correct supplier information
We do control this internally but their are cases where a conflict would create a point of failure that we must overcome
1) Combining all items with correct shipping amounts
2) Correct insurance or warranty amounts
3) Combine Items
4) Consolidate Items
5) Pick out the correct boxes for shipping if supplied
6) Pick the correct supplier and warehouse based on inventory
7) Correct zip code databases to offer proper country / city location
8) Taxes on certain items and not others
9) Surcharges for certain items and not others
The list goes on and on. I think over the period of 3 years, we have probably invested over 400 hours in improving the checkout and we still find ourselves fixing something minor each month.
So the fact that your checkout is failing and Big Commerce is doing nothing doesnt surprise me, you would need a full time developer to handle that task alone.
Considering they have HUNDREDS of cool templates developed by Indians Outsourcers who know nothing about their system, its impossible to maintain all of them, so even of they have a full time developer it still wouldnt work.
I would not be surprised to find out that out of all the Shopping Carts who offer hundreds of templates that they rely on the user to maintain or third party developer to maintain, take all their clients combined and you will find them losing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in lost sales because each year.
UPDATE 10/22/2012:
Igor Soshkin
CEO
Skype: myseo101