Shopping Cart Fail
OPEN SOURCE SHOPPING CARTS
EXPOSED
This is a long post that I highly recommend reading because it exposes the truth behind why most shopping carts are killing your business.
Hosted Shopping Carts like Big Commerce and Volusion are failing you with hype and false promises of being the perfect platform for you while behind the scenes, they clearly know they have a vaporware platform that is failing the majority of their customers. After all, how can anyone succeed with 15% downtime each month, half-baked features, half of the new released features are sold to you through nickel and dime method where you will be charged $10 extra per month for a feature that should have been included in the software from the very beginning (why are you paying monthly for software updates?), and finally pushing their app partners down your throat. The reason they push their app partners because they rather invest marketing dollars to sign up new customers instead of developing their software. The app partner software is usually filled with bugs and should have never hit the market in the first place. Platforms like Volusion and BigCommerce can disappear tomorrow and no one will care, and believe me they will disappear one day. Only the government can sustain spending millions on marketing and payroll while failing the majority of their clients.
Today, I am writing about another group of open source Shopping Carts like Magento, ZenCart and OpenCart that promise you that the grass is greener on their side of the fence.
They look so attractive, feature rich, sophisticated and best of all FREE, or is it not free after all?
You cant beat sophistication and free unless you expose the truth behind their agenda. What do they have to win for having you use their open source platform?
Magento is the biggest piece of sh*t out of all them, excuse my language. Every time I hear about Magento I cant help it but compare them to Google. They let their customers build up the community around their platform and then they sell them out like cattle.
Open source has two kinds of founders, open source heroes like the founders of Linux, who had a vision to develop an open source platform for themselves and others to use, and then there are the founders of companies like Magento who created a platform for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the open source community and selling out the first chance they got.
eBay purchased Magento for well over 180 million dollars. Why did eBay buy Magento you wonder? No, not to help the eCommerce community or Magento customers. Lets not forget that unlike Magento who claimed to be a nonprofit Open Source company (even though their original business plan was to sell their web design services from their parent company Varien), eBay is a for profit publically traded company. eBay purchased Magento to squeeze the juice out of it. Magento powers 12% of the top eCommerce websites in the world and eBay saw it as an opportunity to get those companies to sell on eBay. The day eBay purchased Magento was the day that 140,000 companies saw their doomsday turn into reality. eBay cant even get their own API under control after ten years, you think they will get the broken Magento anywhere?
So lets look at one scenario of a company who chose to use Magento and how it failed him miserably. Michael needed to upgrade his eCommerce system, he chose to go with the Magento community edition. The demo looked incredible to Michael, Magento was exactly the software he was looking for to use for his online business (or so he thought). Magento had a sophisticated discount features, multi store support, custom web design functionality, advanced options, etc. Michael was so excited that he envisioned his company becoming the leader in his niche. He was mostly excited about all the apps available in the app store, such as complete eBay and Amazon integration. He couldnt believe his eyes that he can have a system that would have cost him thousands, and now he can have it for free. Little did he know that all of those features only looked exceptionally good on paper.
Here is what happened to Michael one year later.
First, the shared hosting Michael chose for $200 per year didnt work out because the websites performance was slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter. Michael had to upgrade to a dedicated server with licensing and started paying $300 per month. Michael had to hire an IT expert to help him with troubleshooting DDOS attacks, hosting issues, website hacks and corrupt database when the server would fail. Michael spent $5,000 in IT and consulting fees. Michael paid $10,000 for a custom web design that was delivered 6 months late. The custom design looked incredible for exactly 5.5 days until Michael decided to upgrade the Magento community with a new release. That new release wiped out the design, and since all the code changed it couldnt be restored, Michael than paid another $4,000 to redesign the look and feel for that would work with the new release. It took two months to recode, and that design lasted for exactly 30 days until Michael realized that half of the website had broken CSS and the checkout was not working. The design firm blamed the release and the only way to fix it is to upgrade to another version and start the design over for the third time. Michael did upgrade the third time but decided to stick with the NON CUSTOM default template.
Every time Magento would make a new release, they would call it critical because it fixed hundreds of bugs. Michael had to hire an IT to upgrade the release for him every time costing him $20,000 in annual IT fees. What Michael did not foresee that every release that fixed the old bugs, introduced hundreds of new bugs. Since Michael was on the community edition, the only support he would get was from the community on the forums. Besides the long wait time to get a reply, most of the community was filled with consultants who would give him a vague answer and then demand to be hired to get the full answer. Magento barely responded on the forums, and after eBay took over they laid off most of the forum staff, so it became a ghost town. Nowadays you will get no answers from the community forums if you are on a community edition, your only choice is to go enterprise and pay eBay $50,000 per year.
Michael hosted his own Shopping Cart which made him liable for credit card data and this required him to be PCI compliant. The whole time Michael was in business he was not truly PCI compliant because he couldnt afford it. Yes, he did pay $150 to scan his website, but that did not make him magically PCI Compliant. To achieve PCI Compliance it would cost Michael over $60,000 between hardware and QSA audits, and $30,000 every year. Michael thought Magento was compliant because they advertised PA-DSS compliance. But what he missed was the fact that it was only available in the enterprise version, and also the fact that PA-DSS still requires PCI compliance which costs money.
Michael also found that the native Magento features were not as impressive as he first thought they were. For example, their website search would never find anything that his customers would search for on his website. Michael had to sign up with Nextopia and pay another $300 per month to have a hosted search. The last straw for Michael was when his free eBay app integration failed, and he found out that there is no support for it. The developers of the free eBay app were only able to reply at midnight the next day. When Michael finally reached the developers by Email, they told him it will take four weeks before they can fix his issue and release a patch for it. Michael finally realized as everything in life you get what you pay for, when you get something for free you get no support. Michael learned his lesson that never again will he get lured into the FREE software scheme, but in the meantime Michaels eBay business was down as he couldnt update inventory or listings.
Every night Michael would go to sleep at night feeling an Adrenaline rush because he had so much money invested and he was no longer running his business, but the business was running him. He was no longer just selling products, but he was maintaining software, legal, developers, and consultants.
In the beginning, he loved the idea of eCommerce, and towards the end he dreaded it. He finally understood why so many people fail in eCommerce, and he was clueless on how anyone can succeed after what he has experienced.
Michael is a real person, and fortunately for him he found Shopping Cart Elite right before he was going to call it quits. When we spoke to Michael, we told him we can give him every feature he requires along with enterprise marketing features, plus a fully managed hosting environment, developer and consultant free software, one on one VIP support and PCI compliant solution, for a few hundred dollars per month. He replied to us, This is the first time in the past year that I am feeling hopeful, relieved and excited, THANK YOU!.
His only regret was that he did not find Shopping Cart Elite sooner, and no one ever told him what he was about to experience with Magento.
Shopping Cart Elite is different from any other Shopping Cart in the market because we have a different core focus from any of our competitors. Our core focus is to Build the Worlds Most Sophisticated eCommerce Solution, and we plan to do just that. We understand eCommerce because we ran multi-million dollars B2C and B2B operation for six years back in 2001. We were developing Shopping Cart Elite all the way back in 2001 in-house from the ground up for our own company. This is around the time oscommerce was just being born. Take any executive team from any competing Shopping Cart and they have ZERO EXPERIENCE in running a successful consumer product eCommerce business. How do they even understand what they need to build as their core platform without ever having any experience of day to day operations? This is like putting Kim Jong-un to rule the Army of North Korea while he doesnt know his arse from his elbow.
We are the only software company who truly understands all the factors that will make an eCommerce business automated and successful, and we are building affordable tools around those core factors for the eCommerce industry.
Having the experience of running an eCommerce business, building the software in-house and now building an eCommerce platform, you are certainly crazy if you are planning to operate a open source shopping cart for your online business. There is a much BETTER and less expensive solution in the market right now.
Regardless of how well or how poorly your company is performing right now. You unquestionably have a leak in your business, and the leak is your Shopping Cart Software. It is leaking your bank account, it is leaking your sales because it has bugs all over the place that you dont even know about, it is leaking your staffs time, it is leaking your success, and it is leaking your precious life on this planet. It doesnt have to be this way, and you dont need to wait until the water fills up to your neck before you take action.
Try Shopping Cart Elite, because this is the only way youll ever get your business on the right path.