Curious how Core Commerce Compares to Volusion? – I have lined them up and done the leg work for you. Read it here
I’ll be honest, I have only just recently found out Core Commerce existed. In all my years and all my searches it has never crossed my path. As far as I can gather it has been around since early 2008 (whether it is based on a product from before this I don’t know yet). It has not been around as long as Shopify, but longer than Big Commerce.
It is quoted low key. Only 130 odd followers on Twitter, a handful of blog posts each month, 2000 forum posts, 1000+ forum members, not a very deep site (a bit of content here and there but nothing to rock the bookshelves). From first impressions this morning until now, all I keep thinking is that Core Commerce is Big Commerce‘s baby brother.
I had heard some great things about it once I started looking into the product, but no huge enthusiasm like I had seen with Big Commerce, Shopify and even the Volusion fan boys.
Templates
If you read the Core Commerce website they brag about the quality of there templates, including claiming there’s are better than Big Commerce, I think not. Bad Core Commerce. Your templates are passable. Your templates are serviceable. Your templates are usable. But they are not better than Big Commerce. They are out dated to put it mildly. They are a big step up from Volusion, I agree with that, but they are quite a long way off the Interspire/Big Commerce templates.
It’s not all bad news though, the customization is good. Lots of options to change, lots of fine grained control – it’s a bit clunky but it works and I can definitely see people using it at the expense of hiring me. Big points for that, and the other shopping carts would do well to offer as many design customization options.
SEO
Optimization
Pretty crappy. A lot to do with the template you select, but there is a lot of CSS embedded in the page. There is no canonical URL’s, no robot meta tags -I’m not impressed, I hope they are getting on top of this.
Meta tags
Good (there are even some guides and help text).
URL’s
Lazy and ugly. Not exactly user friendly with ID’s and other identifiers tacked onto the end of most pages. Better than some offerings, but showing their age.
Integration
Google Products, Shopzilla are all in there which is a nice feature. Plenty of room for text and page content.
Admin Interface
Really ordinary. While all the options are there it lacks the polish of shopping carts of similar price, in fact I think that is the best way to sum up my initial thoughts of Core Commerce.
It lacks polish. Not a death sentence and it has some great features, such as PCI-DSS Compliance for one. This should help it gain market share especially if Big Commerce doesn’t hurry up and get compliant.
Don’t forget to check my post CoreCommerce vs BigCommerce for a more detailed run down of the features, strengths and weaknesses.
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Tags: CoreCommerce
what about corecommerce’s claim to be the only XHTML compliant coded tool when compared to Yahoo, BigCommerce, Network Solutions and 3D cart, There comparison can be seen here: http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce-software-comparison.html.
Also they are the only ones with onboard eNewsletter too (can save you the cost of signing up for iContact or MailChimp).
I agree with you on the templates, i just don’t get it – why make everything else to tempting and then throw in low end plain looking templates to choose from, makes no sense to me unless they’re trying to upsell on the customized design services.
I wasn’t really impressed with the included newsletter stuff, it seemed like an after thought. I am surprised Big Commerce/Interspire closing down Big Response and sending people to Mail Chimp instead. I am a huge fan of Mail Chimp it does such a complete job.
Core Commerce (and Volusion for that matter) really seem to believe that there templates are good though and that bothers me – it shows a huge lack of understanding of the market and of consumer expectation.
Thanks for your comments Nicola – keep them coming
Hi Andrew. I work with CoreCommerce. We are actually adding new templates shortly more focused on specific industries versus the more general themes we have now. You will notice in the next 45 days over 20 brand new templates.
Wonderful news. I will keep an eye open and make sure I revise my review as soon as you do.
Thanks for getting in touch we all appreciate how available Core Commerce have always made themselves
Hey Andrew:
In the past few months, we’ve added several new templates and we are working on several more. You can see what’s in use now and what will be completed in the next few weeks. Being a former web designer, I’m not easily impressed with designs, but these new designs have me excited.
Check it out:
http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce-templates.html
Thanks,
Matt DeLong
President/CEO
One other thing, all our newer templates work with our logo creator tool where clients type text in to generate a logo that matches the current design they are using.
Did you see us in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272850463019656.html
Thanks,
Matt DeLong
President/CEO
Hi Andrew,
I’m currently comparing CoreCommerce vs BigCommerce.
While Big Commerce does seem to be feature rich, I’m dismayed by all the negatives people have been saying about down times and lack of tech support for website issues.
Is it true or is it simply Big Commerce is growing too fast?
I have only heard of a few instances of very short and acceptable downtime. I have never not been able to speak to tech support when I needed and one time when I had my back to the wall contacted Mitchel Harper on twitter (the owner) and got sorted that way.
What I can tell you is that in my years working the support desk at a web hosting company is that people with online stores called on mass if they visited there store and it wasn’t available – even if the problem was at their end – and screamed and yelled about the millions this was costing them They are a special breed that tend to exaggerate the effect of any downtime on there sales (which they really exaggerate to try and get compensation).
Don’t disregard what they are saying, at the rate Big Commerce is growing it is highly likely that they will occasionally have issues with availability – everyone does – call them yourself and ask about the issue and what they are planning to do about it in the future.
That should clear up both of your issues with them :0)
Thanks, judging from your comparisons, I’ll assume BigCommerce is a good place to start.
I like it jump on a few free trials and play around – you might have different feelings. My preference at this point is Big Commerce, but I wouldn’t talk someone out of Core Commerce just for the sake of it.
We are a current customer of Corecommerce and beyond the templates, there are SO many other drawbacks. I would advise potential customers to really look hard at other solutions, I wish we would have. For starters, their Quick Books interface is a NIGHTMARE. Whoever set it up had zero accounting experience. We now manually enter everything because it made such a mess of our systems. Coupons are very limited, for instance no way to give a free item with purchase. No ability to put subitems/skus on sale without changing the price — ie if you want to put your blue shirts on sale, you can only do so by changing the price – no abilities to add a sale price. Shipping is a disaster. You can’t run anything but plain vanilla without issues. It is always off. It has cost us a lot of sales. Then there is tech support. It is fine just so long as it isn’t a weekend. We’ve had our site go down several times on a Friday or Saturday and be down the whole weekend. We had a full outage for several hours just a couple of Fridays ago. No way to contact support, tech support number just tells you they are closed. They say all you have to do is ‘put a ticket in’ – fine, if you can get to the admin – which you can’t if the servers are down. Frankly this company is just too green to be trusted yet. We are getting ready to relocate. Too many issues = too much sales revenue lost.
@Kate: We have no incidents of sites being down all weekend, that’s total nonsense! We are occasionally hit with sophisticated DDOS attacks (like everyone else) which causes a HUGE SURGE in traffic (100,000 packets per second). That causes our DDOS equipment @ Rackspace to kick on and it takes a few minutes to be up and running.
I won’t bad mouth BC — as they are a strong competitor….keeps us on our toes.
I just wish they do the same.
Thanks,
President/CEO
CoreCommerce
Mr DeLong,
YOUR people are the ones doing the bad-mouthing. Decided against your company because the sales guy kept bad-mouthing big commerce. Unprofessional, to say the least.
Hi Andrew, I’m looking to switch to either BigCommerce or CoreCommerce and can’t decide. Here are the current prices for both as of today 4/21/2010:
BIG Commerce
Setup Fee $49.95 $49.95 $49.95 $49.95 $49.95
Monthly Fee $24.95 $39.95 $79.95 $149.95 $299.95
Products 100 500 1,000 Unlimited Unlimited
Bandwidth 2 GB 3 GB 5 GB 15 GB 30 GB
Storage 200 MB 300 MB 500 MB 1 GB 3 GB
Extra Bandwidth $5.12/GB and Extra Storage $0.10/MB
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Core Commerce
Setup Fee $49.99 $49.99 $49.99 $49.99 $49.99
Monthly Pricing $24.99 $39.99 $64.99 $99.99 $159.99
Products 100 250 1,000 5,000 Unlimited
Bandwidth 2 GB 4 GB 7 GB 20 GB 30 GB
Hard Drive 250 MB 325 MB 500 MB 1 GB 2 GB
Extra Bandwidth $2/GB
Extra Storage?
The site I’m currently hosted with charges nothing for Bandwidth/Hard Drive space. So I am in unfamiliar territory.
As for number of products, I have a small product line so not a big factor. But for someone who wants to offer between 251-500 products/month then the pricing is in favor of BC at $39.95 vs CC $64.99
But starting at 501 products is in favor of CC
BC: $79.95 vs. CC $65.99
At 1,oo1 products it’s still in favor of CC
BC: $149.95 vs. CC $99.99
Once you offer 5001 products it’s back to BC
BC: $149.95 vs. CC $159.99
But the Bandwidth/Storage for CoreCommerce is equal to and usually more generous that BigCommerce on the first 4 plans. So my gut says that if you are offering 5001 products you are probably in all likelihood going to be pushed to the higher Bandwidth needs and for BC it’s steep at $299.95/mo for over 15 GB/month. From 8-14 GB CC is still only $99. Huge difference in price.
In addition CoreCommerce also hosts your store with Rackspace which is the best one out there w/no downtime (but not according to the last post).
Thoughts anyone? I’m really on the fence here….
Thanks!
Lisa
Have you tried the free trials – as they are about neck a neck start trials with both and see which one “feels” better. Personally I usually go with Big Commerce -but I am nothing if not flexible
Kate,
You have written post bashing CC and pushing BC in other forums. Show your real identity as a BC employee. That is just disgusting.
What do you think of CoreCommerce’s new templates? I think they look pretty sharp.
I really like some of them. I participated in the survey’s when they were trialling some of them and they have really come a long way. I am holding back full praise until I see the HTML but Core Commerce has done a great job.
Jason,
I am not an employee of BC, I’ve never used their cart and this is the first review I’ve ever posted of CoreCommerce. We did NOT have a positive experience with them and I wanted to share it so that others can make an informed choice. Nowhere in my review did I post anything about BC, nor would I since we haven’t used them. We did take a look and based on feedback from their tech support they are not an option for us, since we require very advanced shipping options. Since your reaction was so extreme, it makes one wonder if YOU are employed with CoreCommerce??
Currently we are looking at 3dCart — anyone have any experience with them?
I am currently with Big Commerce. I have never had an issue during normal business hours getting ahold of someone in the tech department. I started with their free trial to see if I liked their system. I chose them because they met my needs at the time. However, I am now having a hard time. I have ~12,000 products that are on the site. Availability of these products changes and old products need removed and new products need to be added. Since they host it, I do not have access to the database back end to integrate with my distributors back end. This is hugely frustrating now. I now have to upload a 12000+ line item spreadsheet (.csv) file and it truly does not like it. It hangs everytime. I was told to break the spreadsheet into 500 item segments, um, NO, that is 24 uploads every two days. I continuously have customers buying items that are not in stock and should have been removed from view when I uploaded. The only way around this is to purchese the non-hosted license for ~$1800 and create my own sql database. Unfortunately, I am just starting and will eventually upgrade to this, but capital investment at this point needs to be scrutinized.
I am totally a newbie at this sort of thing and I tried BC first. There were a few things I didn’t like, so I tried CC. I find that CC is much less intuitive and things that should be simple are not. There is a real lack of online support that is beyond the basics. And it’s not easy to find things when I search for them. However, they are usually pretty quick to answer questions. Unless they can’t figure something out, then they just seem to not respond. I’m going to switch back to BC.
While you are looking around check out the free trial at Volusion – it might be a case of third times the charm.
I am setting up a CC store this summer and intend to migrate from another host soon. Online documentation is very week but support has been amazing to quickly answer all the questions I’ve fired at them. Some things in the admin are not intuitive but I can deal with that as long as all their amazing list of features continue to be solid. I haven’t set up the quickbooks integration yet but I hope it’s better than Kate described. The real test will come when I transfer my domain and start doing business there…
I had experience on Volusion and Bigcommerce but I’ll comment separately. Volusion is a very old architecture that is loaded with all kinds of workarounds designed to get effects which should be built into the basic software. It is incredibly cumbersome to work in compared to any modern platform. The templates are terrible – and I mean terrible – you have to have a designer. Even then, the store itself does not navigate well. It is not xhtml validated and a typical site has thousands of errors. Now on the plus side, if you have a huge catalog, and ship from different warehouses, it has a lot of functionality and a very developed API. But it is not the store for a small business in my opinion, or small-to-medium size businesses. Newsletter is no great shakes because you have an email limit per each plan and you have to pay extra for anything over. If you do a lot of email marketing you are better off with a 3rd party plan anyway. Rendition of images is prehistoric and out of date — not customer friendly. Same I would say with options. All okay if you’re very small or very big – nothing in between. Can’t even integrate paypal express yet.
I might add that Volusion navigation is very slow, and frequently you have full screen blackouts when going from one page to the shopping cart, for instance which turns off customers. We had massive cart abandonment problems there. Page loading times varied way too much and were way too high, and this is a criteria now being used by Google to rank pages.
3D Cart is a very good platform with very good service. They have strong integration of payment methods and their own merchant accounts with USAPay and it’s great and well integrated with good rates. Only drawback is their templates are limited – but VERY MUCH BETTER THAN VOLUSION. A modern program, fast to work in, fast page loading, modern image presentation and options. MUCH BETTER CHOICE FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESS THAN VOLUSION. They also have very affordable data base services, and I think they can bring over your entire catalogue for you for about $500. More developed than Big commerce in a lot of ways. Very good webmail interface and API.
One more negative about Volusion – they really stick it to you for any extras and one thing you have to be careful of is that they count OPTIONS as separate products for the purpose of calculating your monthly fee. So if you have one hundred products with ten size and color options – that is one thousand products for billing purposes. This is not done at 3D Cart of Bigcommerce.
Now on Bigcommerce – I have mixed impressions only because they do not properly represent how much development they have ahead of them. It is very good I think for small to medium size businesses. The comment here about the importing process is accurate. The import functions are in their infancy, and the API is in it’s infancy. They have the basics, but even if you wanted to import variations from one BC store to another you cannot do it because you cannot export your variations. A very alarming skip there in development. I would say template system is the best of all of these options by far. The navigation is very fast and user friendly, checkout is smooth and very much propels the customer through. Paypal express and Google express checkout well integrated. Great image and option presentation (you get prices and not price differences). Some templates have logos that can be customized. XHTML validated – and that is becoming very important, especially in good linkbuilding and SEO. They do NOT HAVE A WEBMAIL INTERFACE, AND THEY ARE NOT VERY CANDID ABOUT THAT DEFICIENCY IN THEIR PROMOTIONS. Documentation is very slim to none. Knowledge base is very lean. There are a lot of good videos and phone support I have found good – ticket support is spotty with a lot of variation in knowledge with the staff. I am having a big issue now with an email problem caused by switching domains that is over their head. They have no email expertise there and the problem has been kicked up to level II but it is just laying around and now I’m being abused by the staff for doing too many tickets and emails – or that they are too long. Imagine trouble shooting an email problem and the support staff telling you I should only write one sentence — it’s a very esoteric problem on the server with an erroneous association with the wrong domain – and they cannot fix it – their reaction when they don’t understand something or don’t know something is to blame the customer for doing something wrong. This I find unacceptable. Not universal – but should not happen at all. I still have no confidence they can or will ever fix this. So if you want state of the art webmail interface don’t go here. They have tons of development to do and they are understaffed. There were glitches in my template that were dealt with but unfortunately half of the support staff assume you have done something wrong every time you contact them, rather than reading, understanding and responding to the ticket. This has spoiled what otherwise was a very positive feeling about the software. I still think it’s the best selling platform of these choices but they have a lot of work to do to really get this up to where it should be to compare with their representations. One thing, they do not count options as products so we are saving money here.
The Webmail/domain issue concerns me too. They must have an affiliation with google. Asked them too as if you go with Google, the details in the header show your personal gmail instead of the domain.
Their solution: Go with GoogleApps
Did that work for you?
Yes, Google Apps was a satisfactory solution, in fact more so. The best part apart using Google Apps was that my shop and email were not tied together so during outages I could still email customers to explain the problem and invite them back when it was fixed.
So who do you recommend for hosted shopping cart with integration with ebay, facebook, on site blog, and twitter? I am looking for something that seo’s well, has a wide array of templates and allows me to run one inventory but sell in multiple places. Product line is small, less than 250. Looking for under $50 per month. Thanks for your thoughts.
Big Commerce (with the next version which is out in a month or so) should satisfy your needs. Otherwise Core Commerce
Andrew,
I totally agree with you on Corecommerce lacking the polish of for example 3dcart and bigcommerce.
I’ve been trying out all 3 the last week or so… and came to the following conclusion:
I love 3dcart. I had a beautiful site up & running in 20 minutes, the admin area feels great and is easy to use.
I love the fact that their templates can stretch to 90% of the screen width. A lot of people have HD screens now and a 90% site just looks so much better then having this landing strip in the middle of your screen as with most other shops.
Bigcommerce – Very easy to work with as well. Templates are OK but I preferred 3dcarts look & feel. Also, if you use the standard templates, I liked 3dcarts much more.
I hated the fact that they sent me about 30 mails within a week of signing up.. even though some of them had some good content it felt VERY pushy. All they did is push me away.
And now for the surprise… I think in the end I will go with Corecommerce. No, it doesn’t look as good as the other two and it will take 10 minutes more to get used to. Oh and the templates are still rubbish (but the new ones should come soon plus I will make my own anyway)…
but…… they just offer better features!
For me the two most important ones being:
* They offer multilanguage (I can not believe the other two don’t!) – a BIG plus in Europe.
* They have an excellent rewards programs.
These are two things that are hardly mentioned anywhere but i think are very important to a lot of people!
Would be nice to hear your thoughts…
Yes Big Commerce do use the hard sell – but that’s what they have always excelled at – they are marketing superstars – how do you think they took Bog Commerce from nothing to one of the top 4 shopping carts in less than a year. Luckily for them the software lived up to it’s hype for the most part – it come from good stock I suppose.
Don’t worry about the polish on Core Commerce – they have been madly polishing away – expect it to shine next week – I have seen preview screen shots and it looks 100 ties better – it is going to start stealing quite a lot of business from the others, especially BigCommerce.
I like 3d Cart – still looking into it completely so I won’t comment to prematurely, but it does everything it should and does it well
Ah that’s good to hear. I’m really curious about the new look!…
When looking for alternatives, I stumbled upon another cart that also offers everything I’m looking for and more: Searchfit. It seems like they have all the features and more compared to the others and according to some sites they have the highest retention rate and happiest customers of all of the competitors.
I am going to try it out in the coming days, but for now it would be cool to hear people’s opinion!
Thanks!
Love to hear how it goes for you – I have deliberately ignored it because of the TOPSEO’s badge on the home page, but I would be curious as to how you find it
Back again.
I’m now trialing cs-cart and searchfit.
CS-cart has everything the others offer plus more, and it’s a one time buy of about 200$ instead of a fixed amound per month. Plus, and this is a huge advantage I think, you’re not limited on bandwidth if you host it at Siteground for example.. so no surprise bills.
Also, if the company goes bankrupt or anything else happens, you’re store won’t just go offline. It’s your store hosted by your provider.
If you get a domain at siteground (but there are more providers) you can install it with 1 click and you get a 60 (!) day trial.
I’m currently also trialing Searchfit, which also seems to do the job very well. It offers more then core and bigccommerce and it looks and feels a bit more “professional”.
The templates really suck though, but I don’t care since we will have our own design.
So… still a bit in doubt between the two
Anybody got experience with searchfit or CS-cart? Please let me know….
Choices, choices!…
I am not a fan of Searchfit – it looks dodgy especially with that TopSEo’s badge on it – call it guilt by association.
CS Cart looks very good. I have only given it the quick once over but I like what I have seen so far
Hi Andrew,
I don’t know this TopSEO site.. but I see that searchfit is indeed nr 1 there and well, to be honest, they do offer a LOT of features. Why would this be bad exactly? All the other shopping carts are doing crazy comparison’s, etc.
See for example this article: http://www.3dcartblog.com/analysis-of-a-lie-3dcart-vs-volusion/
Andrew,
Thanks for this great post! There is a lot of really good information here. Unfortunately we are looking to leave CoreCommerce and really need help deciding on which route to go. I can confirm Kate’s assessment of Quick Books and it is why we are going to have to leave. We’ve tried repeatedly to show tech support what the issues are and why they need to be resolved and we are continually shut down. They just don’t want to deal with it. I loathe the idea of leaving but we are spending so much money on accounting that it is no longer sustainable. We are growing too rapidly to make it work. They’ve been great otherwise.
We will try your recommendations and thanks again for the great conversations and feedback!
thanks kim for your feedback on corecommerce. i am just researching for a new supplement site, and loved what they offer.. but for sure do not want to have to manually move things to an accounting software. too bad they never listened and changed it
What I’d like to know is why does Core Commerce not offer as good a user interfaces as say Weebly.com, which is only $40 for per year for a decent, non e-commerce version.
On Core Commerce, doing any of the following things is a big deal, but on Weebly, it’s very easy to do, right on the screen:
Resizing or moving your logo, resizing or moving images, creating links and putting them where you want to, etc. What’s the problem with having an equally good, on the fly interface, like cheaper packages have?
I will say that I like their inventory management system, but what should be the easy part, i.e. graphical manipulation requires a programmer.
Can somebody provide more specifics on the Quickbooks problems that are mentioned above by Kate and Kimberley? We are seriously considering Core Commerce but I would like more detail on the accounting problems that are mentioned earlier.
If you don’t already have QB set up for your business it may work. But if you have an existing QB company set up that you’ve been using it does not integrate at all–but you have to integrate first to figure that out. Set up accounts that our CPA couldn’t even figure out what they were. It simply did not work in any way, shape or form.
If you are using Quick Books set up a new account, DO NOT USE your existing one, it will completely trash it. Here is the biggest issue – if you have skus (which pretty much every business does) you are going to have major issues. For example you have a shirt and it is has sizes or colors. You would have a product id for the shirt, and then the color or size would be the sku. In QB it keeps track of these skus so you know what kind of inventory you have, how much you’ve sold of each color and size, etc. It is one of the standard reports. But CoreCommerce does not handle skus, at all. (They call them options or personalizations btw) The price comes over with the product. For every order, every product comes over with 2 lines. One for the main product and then another line for the “personalization”. But the pricing is on the product line. So, QB can’t capture that a sku has been sold and at what price and it screws your inventory and sales reports completely. Especially if your skus have different prices. And god forbid you’ve changed the order somehow, like updated the shipping costs, then it deletes the personalization entirely when it sends it over to QB, so you just have the product and you have no idea what color or size you just sold. In order to correct the problem, you literally have to go into every single order manually and change every line to what it needs to be. Otherwise your reporting does not work at all in QB. We sent itemized screen shots to show exactly what they were sending, what needed to be sent and why what they were doing was incorrect. Here was their direct response: “the prices are never sent over to QB for personalization or option line items because in our system we don’t store those individual prices. We only store the price for each line item. That is the way it has always worked with the QB integration”. And that was that. So, if you use QB, plan on having to change every single order so that your reporting will work. Like Gigi, our accounting costs have more than tripled since we went with Core. They absolutely refuse to address the issue. They are NOT compatible with QB no matter what the claim is. Yes, they will download your data, but NO it is not compatible with the way QB works. If you are using QB, you will need to plan to increase your accounting budget a great deal to compensate for the amount of time it will take to fix the issues they create.
Hey All,
I’ve taken a real good look at this particular branch of these comments (in regards to Quickbooks). I’m going to speak with those above me and the developers and see if there is anything we can do to change/alter/rectify this for everyone out there. If there is anything we can do to make things easier for our customers, we try our darndest to do so.
Kristopher Martel
CoreCommerce Support Supervisor
thank you Kristopher as it seems this is the one area where people are leaving you, and one area that those about to get started and avoiding you. it seems you have a great system, but adding on a lot more accounting work to counter the download issue is just not an option for most.
Please keep us posted.
fiona
Kristopher,
You were the tech I dealt with on this issue, you were the one that posted the response I have above. If you check Ticket ID: 100702-092469 you will see the screen shots I sent, the detailed explanation of why what you are doing is incorrect, and the full correspondence we went through. It is only one of many tickets in our account on the quick books problems, but it will be the one you will want to use to show your developers.
I hope you all do reopen this issue, it will make the difference between us staying and moving on.
Thanks!
Have been with CoreCommerce for 2 years and finally we have had it. Text editor is a nightmare–change one letter of one word and the entire page disappears. Save text and go to view store and it’s all scrambled. Text on web pages change & get scrambled without any action on our part. We now have scrambled text & are missing parts of web pages–again, without having even been to those pages. QB integration was so bad it cost us hundreds of dollars in CPA fees to redo our QB–not to mention the time we spent trying to integrate. Google integration for anything but traffic tracking doesn’t work. Many tickets they said they had to pass on to engineers and never had a resolution. Downloadable products are limited because limited to 2gb of space so we have to have network solutions host our DL products. Forget trying to ship anything other than with one option offered. “Ship To” and shipping instructions come up for DL products which cause tons of confusion with customers & tie up our phone lines & we are told it can’t be fixed. Worse of all we are in a different time zone and tech support closes early for us and they are not available on the weekend. So this weekend, once again, we will lost sales.
I am sorry for any problems you had. I am not sure why you said we aren’t open on weekends. We are open everyday of the week for support, phone, tickets or chat. We have been that way for a long time.
Nick, that is not correct. I called the tech support number on Friday afternoon and Saturday & there is a recording and no means to speak with anyone or to leave a message.
this is such great feedback everyone.
Gigi you confirm what others said in more details. So who did you all go with? the features of corecommerce seem great, muti ship address /taxes / international/webchat/downloads/wholesale-retails prices, integration for accounting, languages,
I would rather pay more but get a platform that can grow with us, we are launching in about 8 weeks and need to get this piece set. the corecommerce site was down saturday night not a good sign.
volusion people say is cumbersome. big commerce does not have pci approval correct?
need 24/7 tech support in case anything goes down is needed.
we only have about 10 products, world wide sales, 2 different brands, ebook and video downloads
many thanks
So, I’m searching for a new shopping cart provider because Core Commerce just disabled the site I had been working on for over two months. Get this, their “auto-send” emails never came to me, which by the way I am one of those email hoarders that never deletes anything – yikes! So when my credit card was changed by my bank (moving from visa to mastercard)and declined because a new card had been issued they canceled my account. I had forgotten that card had been used for my core-commerce account (doesn’t this happen to anyone who shops online regularly?) Anyway, when I received notice my site had been canceled I contacted them. To make a truly horrific customer service experience short (3 supervisors later) The only way they would “recover my account from Rackspace” was if I paid them 6 months in advance. Oh sorry, they finally reduced it to 3 months in advance. It’s not even the point that I could have got it all back for a mere $75.00 but it’s the point that they treated me as a credit risk because my card declined. I don’t know about the others out there that run an e-commerce site but cards fail all the time for various reasons and for this company to hold me hostage was horrendous in my opinion. The only thing they had to say for themselves was “WE DO SEND AUTO EMAILS WHEN A CARD DECLINES WE DON’T KNOW WHY YOU DIDN’T GET IT?) My end take on Core Commerce? If this is the service I would have received had my site actually been transferred and gone live… whew! seems like I escaped bullet here. Core Commerce = Terrible Service.
@Gigi I assure you we are open on weekends. I think you called our sales line which is not open on weekends. Our support line is. They are 2 different numbers.
In regards to the store being disabled. If you are past due for an extended period of time your store will become disabled.
We don’t think you are a credit risk, but we have manual labor to restore the backups from tape and then reapply those changes to the database and web server. This process takes a few hours, not seconds to re-integrate a store which has been removed. Instead of charging a fee for this, we just do 3 months in advance so you don’t have to pay any fee for our labor. We also allow you to enter in multiple credit cards, just in case your card is declined.
Message deleted because it was nonsense
You can contact our support line 7 days a week here:
1.888.221.6019
Not so. This is the number which states it’s after hours and doesn’t even let you leave a message.
I was just hired to redesign a awful looking core commerce site. Do you know if it is easy to integrate a wordpress blog into their site. The tech support said a subdomain would be needed.
Any input before I begin would be greatly appreciated.
You need to set up the blog on a separate subdomain (like blog.yourdomain.com) on your own hosting
Thank you Kimberly for the detail on accounting errors now I finally get the visual on what the difference and issues truly are. We are about to fix on a shopping cart thank good ness only 8 skis but still added time and not a true easy download. Are there any other accounting softwares that might work? Or if you could do it all over again would you just not have gone with corecommerce?
Quick Books is sort of an industry standard for us. Another accounting option might be something like PeachTree, but it is really dependent on what will work with your company and most importantly, what your accountant recommends and can use. CoreCommerce only claims to be “compatible” with QB. Again, they are not. We already had 10 years worth of data in our quick books so switching wasn’t an option. Core Commerce was our 3rd ecommerce platform, we grew out of the previous two. Yahoo stores, then VPASP (couldn’t handle shipping routines). But if we had to do it over again, no, based on the extensive issues we’ve had with Core, I wouldn’t do it again. They have this really bad habit of making changes to the software at major holidays (just did some major updates last week) which throw things into chaos at the worse possible time. I wish they tested their stuff better before they did releases. We found a bug within hours of the release which gave a customer free shipping. We can reproduce it, they say it isn’t there. We don’t want denial, we just want stuff to work. And telling us that this is just the way they’ve always done stuff and they aren’t going to change it, even though it is wrong and doesn’t work, just doesn’t help. For little stuff their tech support is great. For bugs, they balk. I have 10+ years in web development and internet marketing, so I am not a newbie. I’ve been trying to point out issues, that if corrected would make them awesome. We will begin looking for a replacement, but not until after the holidays. I am not looking forward to our accounting bill at the end of the year though
Exactly our experience on all points.
Kimberly.
This os terrible as they seems to have one of the best all-inclusive shopping cart options out there, they could totally take a good market share if they listened to great advise. Lucky we have no systems in place yet just gathering data and such helpful feedback so make the right choice. So any idea who you will go with next?
Hello,
We are in the process of choosing an ecommerce solution for a new online store. Wow – never anticipated the challenge it would be to choose the right company! We thought we’d go with CC, but after reading some of the above info – not so sure. I was concerned after reading about tech support not being available, so I just called the number provided above. It is Sat afternoon and they were there and did answer. However, they would not answer any tech questions I had without me first having an account or a trial account. They said I could sign up for a trial and then they would talk with me or I could call sales on Mon. That was a bit odd and a slight put off.
One thing that I did like about CC was the fact that they have their PCI rating and BC does not. Is this a real concern?
Thanks – good discussion from everyone.
olmstead, let me know what you come up with in your search.
Fiona –
No idea who we will go with next – that is why we’ve been following this thread. We are in the holiday season right now, so no time to even think. I don’t know how many people reading this will ever try and do an SBA type loan but we just went through the process. The accounting was a HUGE issue. I had no idea, but the fact that the CoreCommerce cart is screwing our QB data nearly lost us our loan – we were very nearly disqualified because ‘it was not accurately transmitting actual data, it was costing too much in accounting fees and creating discrepancies/irregularities in the books’.
Olmstead – PCI compliance is a huge issue. You need to be PCI compliant if you are a merchant. The consequences of being hacked and having data stolen amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Just a side note, CoreCommerce failed our PCI scan the first time, they ‘adjusted’ some settings so we are now in compliance. You will end up paying more in credit card fees if you are not compliant. You will also have to pay annual fees to convince your processor you are compliant. This is why open source carts and storing credit card information on your server in a database isn’t a good idea. If you are hacked, you are responsible.
Does anyone have any experience with StoreFront? Any feedback would be appreciated!
ah, what a nightmare ;-( i did send an email to corecommerce directing them here and the did say they were going to look in to the specific issues but it seems you had already done that. Well i sure do not want to get down the road later and have to be changing and with a startup all the additional hours on accounting is not my idea of fun. I checked out 3dcart which seems promising will let you know what my research finds. and will check in to storefront.
thank you for the details..
My website just went down. Core Commerce site appears to be down as well–can’t even log into admin page to let them know my site is down. Not cool.
We were considering to switch at CoreCommerce from our bespoke solution, but eventually decided to quit this idea because of feedbacks above. More over admin panel turned to be very inconvenient and site was quite slow probably because we are in Europe.
What we found attractive is an open source PrestaShop. Don’t use it yet, but feedbacks, functionality, a lot of add-ons and available support (online forum and you can contact them directly as well) make them as very reasonable option.
Thanks for the heads up on PrestaShop – I will put it on my list of stores to check out.
i love all your feedbacks, this has become the most honest review for the e-com platforms. we’ve been using cre for the last 3 yrs and kept on patching holes – really tired of it, and after they charged our credit card $12k for over limit bandwidth, an error they did admit, but still not acceptable imho. we set out to search a new platform, pretty much come to magento, BC, CC and 3D. i almost went w/ BC since a friend’s shop got it but now 3D is looking nice as well. oh plus searchfit (kinda more costly but seems to be a solid package).
one thing i didn’t see a lot of mentioning is multiple channel management, we sell on ebay and amazon as well, how do these platforms compare? any experience?
eZa, i did look into presto, but dude, all forums are in french! if opensource is your thing, check out opencart instead. we don’t have IT people in house so we decided not to use any of the opensource, not worth the headache when something goes wrong.
Daz – Core does have an integration for eBay and Facebook, but not Amazon. We have not used them so I can’t provide you with feedback, but they are available. Thanks for listing Searchfit, looks promising. Anyone tried it out?
I’m stumped. After months of research, I opted for Big Commerce but as we’re ready to take it live, we’re uncovering a host of significant problems that are deal breakers for us. My developer is recommending we move to Pinnacle cart (so far found a couple of things I wish it did better but overall appears to meet our needs, will be testing the option capabilities tomorrow). I was looking at Core Commerce but have read enough here to raise doubts, plus my developer said they have some “development problem and they appear to have no interest in fixing it.” I do not know what that pertains to.
I’ve dealt extensively with Yahoo but that’s also why I do not want to use them. My last company also had a Magento store but that implementation is long, expensive, and unreliable as I’ve heard horror stories of software updates that break the store.
Last employer also had a 3dCart and was not really impressed, but it looks like they’ve made substantial improvements to the cart, and I do know it will handle the complex option variations I need.
So I am at a loss, I want us to be up and running in 30 days. I have invested time and money into Big Commerce and am dismayed to find they don’t cut it. These are my problems with BC: variations don’t come remotely close to meeting our needs (we have custom furniture with lots of options, no commitment or even information on whether the coming updates to options will meet our needs (had a nasty convo with Lee Sellers), and now I find that they are NOT PCI, and according to my developer there is NO window on when they will be.
This is what I NEED:
1. the ability to handle lots of options on one product that might include 100 fabrics, 8 or 9 arm choices, 8 or 9 seat options, padding options, cylinder options, base options, frame options, caster options (yeah…this is a big deal for us)
2. option library and the ability to add multiple option to the same product (Miva and 3DCart do this, unfortunately Pinnacle does not)
3. Excellent SEO
4. Wholesale and/or tiered customer groups
5. Shopping feeds, affiliate program, social marketing
6. PCI Compliant
7. Import and export of customers, products, and ideally images, variations/options
8. Extremely customizable layout/template capabilities
9. Google analytics integration
10. Shipping zones
11. coupons
12. pricing changes with options
This is what I want:
1. Hosted solution
2. m-commerce
3. images that include zoom, unlimited secondary images preferably in scrolling gallery
4. Custom tabs for product description (I dictate both tab name and content on a product by product basis)
5. Product reviews, youtube integration, like it, add this
6. Great store management dashboard including quickbooks integration
7. Call for pricing option
8. Layout control of category pages, ideally should include product order
9. the toughest of them all – the ability to make most products “ship free over $” ONLY to the continental US AND be able to exclude some products from the offer without a coupon
10. 24/7 customer service
Any ideas on best fit?
What solution did you finally find? We are currently with storesonline.com and need to move.
Thanks.
We went with Big Commerce. Of all the carts I’ve worked with, this has been the smoothest experience and the fasted deployment. Sometimes the customer service people are stupid, but with some insistence, even they will hunt out the answer to what you’re asking for. We just upgraded to get the new options. I’ll let you know this weekend if it now fully meets the needs of our customizable products. That’s been the biggest issue for us, their old way of handling “variations” couldn’t handle our chairs that had 100 fabric choices, 8 arms, 4 frame colors, etc. It’s supposed to do that now but I’ve been on the road and won’t get a chance to test it until tomorrow. Fingers are crossed.
Hi everyone,
I am planning to try out Fortune3. They look quite good and provide everything I need.
The only thing I am not that keen about is their templates. But I can try to customize mine.
Has anyone used them? Any feedback?
I am on a free trial now, the software appears good but the ultimate test will be when my shopping cart is fully operational, with many products on it etc.
Thanks in advance.
This looks very interesting, please let us know how it goes.
some updates on our progress, we’ve decided to move on w/ 3d cart and running stone edge order manager as our fulfillment software. i realized the cart itself is not as critical as the real operation system. i’ll keep you guys posted on the progress.
I built a site in CoreCommerce and found it to be really easy to use overall (but then I make careful notes so that I can later backtrack to how I did things, as, yes, it isn’t completely intuitive). I’ll admit that I still don’t like their templates (why oh why do techies think they are artists?? Sheesh, what they think is attractive…yikes!)
Later, we were convinced by an SEO firm that we should change to Magento because of all of its SEO capabilities and this was a HUGE mistake!
Magento is apparently the current ‘darling’ of the SEO crowd but it is positively a nightmare and puts the site owner at the mercy of a third party [developer] because you can’t easily make changes, which we need to do constantly.
Magento has very, very limited options unless you purchase add-ons and have a developer integrate them, putting you at the mercy of the developer.
So now we are trying to decide what to do and are trying to find a shopping cart that we can manage AND has SEO strengths. I haven’t seen SEO mentioned much in the posts above.
Can you elaborate, Andrew, on the SEO strengths of the shopping cart software that is currently ‘out there’?
We were looking at BC, but lots of people having lots of trouble with QB integration, and you can’t print shipping labels from within BC. Deal breakers for us.
Hello
I’ve been setting up a dual language site using Corecommerce for several months now. I’d looked at a lot of offerings although none of them to any great depth. From the outset 3d cart looked impressive, but I also felt it would require more knowledge than I had to offer, so decided to discard it.
I chose CC mainly because of the multi language/currency features, had Bigcommerce offered such facilities I’d have probably gone with that product. This was my first attempt to set up an E-commerce site and its been something of a learning curve. I’d class myself as a slightly technical person who’s probably only 20 years out of date with current technology.
There has been very little up to date CC documentation/information for the majority of the time we’ve been loading, that situation continues although the recent introduction of Web seminars has helped. Yes there were lots of videos but they were out of sync with the current releases. This has necessitated lots of contact with support (see later) and lots of time learning from mistakes, quite apart from the times when I’ve simply been stupid.
A lot of software upgrading has gone on, personally I feel there’s been something of emphasis on style over substance, it does look prettier now but loading up products has become an even slower affair. Importing is not really an option since the import routines won’t support a second language or a number of other features either. CC offers lots of facilities in theory, although in my own experience theres often been something to stop me using quite a few of them.
Shipping options fall very short of the mark for our situation. For instance there was no way to automatically change carriers as the weight for a shipment went up. So in the UK you couldn’t send by letter post if below a given weight, then automatically switch to a parcel carrier if its above that weight.
There have been quite a lot of bugs, in my opinion, but I’m not sure that CC are any worse than other current software developers, we have recently moved banks and whoever did their software testing should consider doing the honorable thing! It seems that programmers (or engineers etc) simply don’t seem to test the most fundemantal things anymore, yes they can fix bugs quickly, but only after you’ve wasted your own time stumbling over and then detailing them. Sending out emails to your first customers with the wrong shippping dates is very embarassing. We have had some downtime too with 2 minute response times etc, these were resolved after a couple of days but it doesn’t help your confidence, or the confidence of your customers.
We have a second store (single language) that was also loaded onto Corecommerce, which currently only has about 6 products. I am seriously considereing moving it to Bigcommerce and have already had a 15 day trial. The store is a type of Teeshirt shop, and configuring the possible options on Corecommerce is virtually impossible (or at least impractical). In my opinion Corecommerce currently offers better facilities to add multiple options to a product, where it slips up is if you want more than 1 product like that, in which case your will find yourself reentering most of the data again, there is no way to copy or even export/import lots of it. The current BC approach looks different, it is less flexible for each individual product, but much better at duplicating/copying once set up. BC say this area of code is being updated and have shown some examples, whereas CC told me they had nothing planned. So each system will suit people differently depending on their requirements.
It may sound bizarre to consider running the two shops on different platforms, but frankly the amount of common ground between the two is stunning! So it might not be that big a deal.
A special word about support –
I found BC support so be a little slow, and somewhat arrogant and disinterested, but to be fair I’ve had very little interaction so that opinion comes from a very small sample and I could fully expect others to have a better experience. Whereas with CC support I feel I’ve had a rather large interraction (more than I’d have liked in fact). Personally I’ve found the CC support to be generally very good indeed, I usually raise tickets and they have responded within very short time frames, even at weekends, although being in UK the time differences are a bit of a drag. Actually on reflection I’ve been stunned with how good they are, but then they need to be. With hardly any documentation and quite a lot of bugs they are probably the mainstay of the product.
I have been looking at bigcommerce and Corecommerce.
Signed up for a trial with Bigcommerce last week, the store didnt automatically open they had technical problems, it said it would email login details. Email didnt arrive however I got a range of other emails.
They resent out the trial could’nt remember password at this point so email address into email field for reminder – no password arrives even within 24hrs. Sent another note to the account manager get another login and credentials from her eventually get in.
I have found massive fluctuations in the speed of the backend store, I think it is potentially more feature rich than corecommerce but it has been a painful experience thus far and a potential risk for us.
What is BC general uptime, reliability and consistency like?
I see that CoreCommerce has teamed up with an SEO firm. Has anyone had any experience with them, either with or without Core Commerce?
Thanks for your review Andrew – very useful. One thing others reading this may be interested to know is that although CC supports digital download products such as software, mp3, PDF etc., it doesn’t provide Software license key distribution. Other carts such as 3DCart, AShop and Volusion (there are others too) allow a list of license keys to be entered in the admin panel and the cart emails the customer a license key on successful payment.
I’ve recently been searching for a new solution for a client and have been looking at CoreCommerce. However when watching one of their YouTube videos on design templates they mentioned you only have access to edit the header/footer templates and the general CSS. I take that to mean that you can’t alter category/product/detail pages. Is that the case? I’m not interested in using their templates, but rather porting the current site over and picking up the extra features of the admin area. Not being able to have 100% control over the design is a big deal breaker.
I am also researching a new ecommerce provider. This post has been very helpful as I evaluate the different options. Scott – I will be interested to hear what you learn about control over the design – that is also my main concern as well as SEO functionality.
As of now, Bigcommerce is PCI Compliant. They even have live chat support now. But i noticed that they cant stay on on time with the live chat. Corecommerce, they are coming out with great new templates, but there are some things i do not like. Like the pop up cart, it keeps saying this stupid Login as Customer. what is that? I want to remove it, but tech say oh that’s the way it is. It’s hard to use the ups live rates. The videos were so outdated, it did not help me. I had my Bigcommerce store, i used they’re live rates easily.
But i noticed, after i finally set up the live rates with CCommerce, that CCommerce charged $1. and change more than Bigcommerce. Ex. CC was like $10.89 BiGC was like $9.28 big difference.
So that threw me off. And some other little details that should have been fixed too. Like their emails. both cart email templates are horrible. You really need to customize them if you want to add stuff and yo look nice. But i am leading towards bigcommerce.
You can modify the text in CC’s edit words/phrases
CoreCommerce appears to be one of the very few that integrate directly with Quickbooks POS. Can anyway speak to their experience with CC and QB POS integration and/or offer advice on other better alternatives!
Wow. Depressing is a word that comes to mind. I just did the free Trial w/BC & CC and after fighting what should be simple-setup (I’m a web designer as well) & then hearing the nightmares above I’d rather go old school, build my own site, use Paypal and have to do some things manually. Why not? After all looks like I’ll end up right at that place anyway.
The time to fight the frustrations = the time it would take to manually do everything.
Seems the big players BC/CC/Magento etc… are all about a year out of really improving QB syncing, functionality, support and listening to their customer base.
I will follow the thread w/hope.
If anyone finds an oasis in this desert of solutions, let the rest of us know
@Jen I have been with corecommerce going on 8 months now. Let me recommend using their 15 day free trial, just to see if they fit your business needs. I have had no problems with QB at all. It’s a pretty straight forward process to set it up. Also, their support team is some of the best in the business. They always respond promptly to each ticket response I send in, and will go to the limits to see your issues get resolved. I would recommend anyone to CC no questions asked. I wish I could have said the same for BC and Volusion.
Also, I do enjoy CC integrates new feature around every 2-3 weeks. It keeps the cart fresh. Their templates are coming along nicely as well
Just got this email from CoreCommerce
Dear Valued Sum Effect Software Customer:
We are contacting you to inform you that Sum Effect Software, Inc., which provides the software-as-a-service product CoreCommerce, recently discovered that our files and software were compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network.
A few weeks ago, we were made aware that certain fraudulent $1 authorize.net transactions were being made outside of our system. Based on these reports, we promptly commenced an internal investigation into the fraudulent charges. As we started our investigation, the fraudulent charges stopped. However, these fraudulent charges re-commenced last week, and we determined late last week that our network had been illegally accessed by a third party.
Specifically, files containing credit card numbers stored on Sum Effect Software’s servers were illegally accessed by a third party. While these files were encrypted with industry-standard MD- 5 encryption with a random hash generator, it appears that the intruder may have been able to decrypt the files by illegally reverse-engineering our software applications. The intruder went to great lengths to conceal the fact that he or she had accessed our network, software and files.
If you or your customers provided names, addresses, phone numbers, and/or credit card information through our systems, it is possible those names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers (excluding CVV security codes) and expiration dates may have been unlawfully obtained. In keeping with PCI regulations, CVV security codes are never stored and, therefore, could not have been accessed.
If, on the other hand, your customers utilized Google Checkout, Amazon Checkout or PayPal, this intrusion would likely not affect you because those entities do not send credit card information to us in connection with transactions made through their respective websites. However, be cause our investigation is ongoing, we are notifying all clients of the data intrusion to ensure that each client can take whatever steps it deems appropriate under the circumstances.
To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, you will need to notify your merchant card processors. You also will need to notify your customers to encourage them to be vigilant, including carefully reviewing their account statements and monitoring their credit reports for suspicious activity.
In addition to making you aware of this apparent network security breach, we have taken several steps in response to this intrusion, including:
1. Changing all passwords and modifying our software applications to ensure there are no vulnerabilities resulting from this unauthorized access to our software and systems;
2. Engaging an outside, industry-recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation of the event;
3. Obta ining an independent assessment of our network to identify any measures that can be taken to fortify the security measures we already have in place; and
4. Quickly taking steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure to provide our clients with even greater protection of non-public personal information and credit card numbers.
We also have reported this intrusion to state and federal law enforcement agencies. Our team and outside investigators will continue to work around the clock on this matter to determine the identity of the intruder and strengthen the security of our systems.
We want to thank you in advance for your patience as we complete our investigation. Sum Effect Software takes data security extremely seriously, and we sincerely regret any inconvenience to you or your customers. We will continue to work to ensure additional measures are taken to secure personally identifiable information, and we are committed to continuing to provide you with quality, reliable support services.
If we obtain further facts about this incident, we will contact you to share additional information. In the interim, if you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact us at (615) 790-0823. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Matt DeLong
Sum Effect Software, Inc.
core commerce hacked. I am cancelling my brand new account.
Lori- Did you find a solution? We are in a world of hurt right now. We are with Core Commerce but their systems have just been hacked. Our credit card data was stolen and they were able to get into our merchant account and place a bunch of $1 transactions. Fortunately we never store customer card numbers, but it was a huge inconvenience to lose our credit card while waiting for a new one. We have lost all faith in Core Commerce, mostly because when we contacted them about the fraudulent charges going through our merchant account, they said they knew nothing.
We just tried the free trial with 3dCart and they can’t handle our shipping routines. Big Cart can’t do Quick Books. So, any advise would be greatly appreciated!
@Cindy, From what we were told the Credit cards within the admin area were not stolen, they did however advise us to monitor our statement in the coming weeks just to make sure. They have some kind of 3rd Party security company doing investigations into this. Our company is hurting from this, just as I am sure Corecommerce is. However, this can really happen to ANYONE (ie. SONY) if you are not familiar with that they were hacked by someone a few weeks ago, so to loose faith in CC is a stretch, as it can really happen to anyone. I’m sure sony spends Millions on security measures each year, all it takes is one weakness and BAM! You’ve been hacked.Anyways, I still love the CC product and I am going to ride through this storm just as they are (Corecommerce) and i’m sure Most of their customers who were effected.
Actually that’s not true. Our credit card data was stolen. How do I know? It was a fairly new card, one specifically for our business and one we’d never used any where. So despite what CC wants to tell us, the data WAS stolen. Our merchant account was most definitely hacked and when we called and talked to tech support about it, they told us they’d never heard of it. We got the same emails from them as everybody else, but bottom line, the information was stolen. We had almost $6K in attempted charges on our business card. This whole thing really has us upset. You might want to ride the storm, but I think we need to bail.
We did go with Big Commerce. I’ll know by Saturday if the new version can handle our complex variation needs but it is supposed to. I just upgraded it yesterday but am on the road and haven’t had time to test it. We do use Quickbooks but haven’t tried to integrate it. Our accountant said it can be done and we’ll probably attempt that shortly, but for us, the overall richness of the cart and the speed at which we were able to deploy the store were far more critical factors.
Even if it doesn’t fully integrate well, the orders can be downloaded as a CSV file and they have an API available so we can manipulate the data. Our volume of orders is not so huge that we can’t handle this and again, the richness of the cart itself was our first priority.
The decision has to be based on what your firm needs. Good luck.
this is great feedback about the hacking of CC. If this just the sign of the times or a weekness in the security system them have. What are the ways around this? to only use paypal check out etc? any ideas we are about to get going on designing a store and need to know with which platform we will put it on. many thanks… great feedback and expirences that all have shared, thank you
Like Cindy said, we had our data stolen too – our credit card was stolen – we only use it for CC so we know it came from their breach, and a number of $1 transactions were tried through our Merchant account.
To prevent this, NEVER store credit card information from your customers. In your merchant account (like Authorize.net) having your fraud setting to require CVVS – this is the 3 digit code on the back of the card. It is against PCI compliance to ever store this code, so a person has to have the card, in theory, to have that number.
Having our settings this way did not prevent the hacker from trying to use our account, it only made it so all the transactions they put through were declined.
It was extremely inconvenient to have our business credit card stolen, because that was the same week we decided to start using it for purchases and every single one was declined, which was embarrassing to say the least. But I was relieved our credit card company caught it immediately. The hackers had tried several thousand dollars worth of charges for hotels, trips, car rentals and software. And just a heads up – any time you see a charge for .99 from Itunes that you haven’t made, immediately call your card company and report fraud. That is usually what they start with.
We have so much invested with our site and our cart right now. I am at a loss. Like Cindy, I want to bail, but I just can’t find another solution that I am happy with and has everything we need. To move means a massive investment in time, resources and funds, then we have to retrain our entire staff. But on the other hand, I just don’t know how we can stay. They lied to us when we called about the situation and the emails they’ve sent out just seem to be skimming the surface of how bad this really is. They are more damage control than an apology. Not very happy right now with any of it! But mostly relieved we are ultra paranoid when it comes to our customer data.
So is it authorize.net or cc where te data was stolen from? We are just about to get started on pur website and hot to spend all the money and time with the wrong one. We will have a lot of auto monthly orders so the data is saved, if the data was save on authorize.net then is it not them that the issue is with? Sorry don’t quite get the way it all works yet. Also would it be an option to use a check out with paypal or amazon as they seem to have longer track record? Many thanks all for sharing.
No, It was Core Commerce that was breached. Every merchant that stored credit card information from their clients, in Core Commerce’s databases, had this information stolen. In addition, the hacker was able to obtain the transaction keys to Authorizenet. That is how they were testing credit card numbers for validity. Transaction keys are what are required to allow a transaction to be processed through a merchant account. With the transaction key, all they could do was process transactions. They do this to test whether or not a card is valid. If it is, then they start making purchases on it. They always test first, .99 charges to see if they go through, if they do, then they start ramping up with larger and larger purchases. It hurts the merchant because these fraudulent transactions being put through their merchant account are then charged back to the merchant. So you are out transaction fees and in some cases the credit card companies charge a charge back fee. So that .99 fraudulent charge can cost you $20.99 or $30.99 if there are fees.
If you are going to have reoccurring charges, I would highly recommend you use PayPal or Amazon, since they are then responsible for storing the data, not you.
I am with corecommerce currently and am not happy at all with the recent breach. Customer service is incredible but it is not enough to make me stay. I have been looking elsewhere but it took me three months to decide on them!!! So Frustrated!!!
Hey Lee,
I commented earlier on this. I agree their support is incredible. I am frustrated as well as I’m sure most people who were effected are. Are you dead set on Leaving CC for this? As I said before This attach can really happen to anyone who is on the internet, (See Sony) It’s a shame to leave a company with so many great features for something that is out of their control. I’m still Riding the storm. Maybe that’s just me though.
Has anyone used Able Commerce? Heard anything about them? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Ross – more power to you for staying. But this was NOT out of their control. If you are going to run a hosting/ecommerce company then diligence is necessary. And I am sorry, but I do not feel they handled it appropriately. They should have been upfront about it long before they were, there were a lot of comments in the forum about issues long before they came clean. We got nothing but denial. I’m with Lee. I am completely frustrated, feel very betrayed and extremely upset that we have to start all over again at square one to find another cart. We’ve overlooked so much stuff, but we just can’t any more.
This is an email I sent to CoreCommerce(who also own ZippyCart) requesting a refund for misrepresnting their site. The sales rep stated that if I could prove they misrepresented their site, he would refund. I was only wrong on one of my statements, they do have it stated they no refunds will be issued. However, I requested termination 11 hours after I signed up with them. Bad Customer Service, and they were quit rude! WIsh I would have seen this page before I siged up with them. I will be happy to Facebook and Twitter this. I will make sure the cart I sign up with is not owned by Matt DeLong!
: Administrator can control the maximum amount for a gift certificate
Gift certificate management system – is what matched me from zippy cart
Tie coupons to specific products, vendor or categories- you are implying I can have a vendor on my site
Quantity based discounts for products – a gift certificate is a product, it is sellable
The vendors have their own admin interface where they can login with their web browser and update their inventory and add products.(again, gift certificates are products) -this was the deciding factor for me choosing corecommerce. I have been looking for a website since April 8. This is not something I jumped into sir. I chose to take my time and do extensive research. I did not want to jump from cart to cart. I have 5 children and help another business with their website, I do not have unlimited time, that’s why I did research. It’s not shame on me for not taking your Trial period, it’s shame on you for misrepresenting you website and it’s capabilities. You told me to show you where you misrepresented and you would refund my money. I believe I have shown enough evidence of that. I would appreciate if you would please follow through with your word and refund my 39.99.
This was on your terms and conditions page, I did not see anywhere stated that no refunds would be issued for canceling site.
If your order is canceled after your credit card has been charged, we will issue a credit to your credit card in the amount of the charge.
Robin,
1) We do not own ZippyCart
2) You CAN create gift certificates in our cart, however what you were wanting is for Vendors to control their own gift certificates and be able to set maximum/minimum quantities of these said vendor-based gift certificates, neither of which were advertised as a part of our cart
3) You purchased an account without even going through our free trial that we offer, however once you found out that it wasn’t going to work for you, you wanted a refund for said account, which our terms and conditions (which I am starting to doubt anyone ever reads) clearly state that we have a no refund policy, which you agreed to when you signed up and purchased an account
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience you’ve had, however you should post the full story of what happened instead of just one side.
This is their reply email to me:
I’m sorry, however you are entitled to no refund:
https://www.corecommerce.com/license.html
Please see section 5, paragraph 5.3 (Effect of Termination)
——
Thanks,
Kristopher ******
I am all one to put a company in it’s place for wrong doing. However, someone saying they will tarnish a companies reputation because they don’t give them a refund because THEY did not use the free trail, you know that is just not right, or ethical. Here in the USA we are all so very spoilt that almost everything one can get their money back, the rest of the world they would laugh at that thought. Don’t slander others, admit your faults and move on. That is what a free trail is for.. to test it for a little while before you buy it. Yes, shame on you, and shame on you that you would threaten in the manner that you did. Now, there is plenty that CC has done that is not right, which we all have interest in knowing about. But this I believe is not one of them. sorry CC, that you have to spend your time on this verses doing what you should be doing and making right what might of happened with the security breach as mentioned in this forum.
Thank you Kristopher, I believe by putting both emails in, I was telling the whole story. You verbally said that if I showed you your company misrepresnted itself, you would refund. Would you also like me to be honest about your tone of voice and how rude you were when I said I needed to cancel? Also, when I did show misrepresentation, you disregarded me?
Furthermore, it goes way beyond that sir, I wasn’t even with your company for 12 hours, when I discovered your website was not entirely accurate.
I will make sure that future companies I choose do have a refund policy. There are plenty that do offer refunds. You can have a recision period on anything you purchase, including a house! Shopping carts are usually not fully functioning unless purchased. Free trials do not usually offer everything that a purchased cart does.
I made a mistake in saying Zippycart was owned by CC and apologize for that. I am not slandering, but stating facts.
This is a quote is from your webpage “The vendors have their own admin interface where they can login with their web browser and update their inventory and add products.(again, gift certificates are products.” And yes you offer gift certificates, however I would hardly call it a gift certificate management system. You simple have gift certs. Managment System implies a whole lot more than putting certs on your site sir.
If you can show us where it says that Vendors can offer their own Gift Certificates and be able to manage them thusly, I’ll be happy to look into a refund for you for misrepresentation.
However, past that, I apologize for the inconvenience you had with our company
Re: CC v BigC
I’d like to know if the BigC folks are experiencing these same issues. The CC customer service can take days to get a *solution* to tickets most of the time & the WYSIWYG works some days and others it’s glitchy. So basically unless you abandon their control panel & do all the HTML/PHP by hand you have no reliable means to edit your site. Ex: several times recently they’ve had to upload files for me b/c their is some issue they’re resolving on the backend so only they can make the change. One was activation of my gateway– glad i didn’t wait till the last minute to rely on the WYSIWYG to add the APIs. Now it’s the PHP itself- you can’t do PHP changes right now though the editor cos of a fix they’re working on.
I’m worried that if I continue and go live I’ll have ulcers when something needs fixing and I can’t get help for days. Like others I’ve invested hours and hours tweaking it/fighting it at this point, it pains me to think I’ve got to start over somewhere.
BigC people- are you having these issues?
Better yet- is there a WYSIWYG cart that has OUTSTANDING customer service, so that I’ll feel like issues are treated with urgency on behalf of my store/customer experience????
Thank you in advance for your responses!
Jen
I’ve not had any problems with the WYSIWIG in BC but I learned years ago to create my code offline first in case something does happen like an Internet connection blip.
As to their customer service, it’s only six days a week at this time, not 24/7. They are usually quite quick but sometimes their answers do not actually answer my question and I have to be either more specific, or more persistent. They like to refer you to their extensive help guides when you ask a problem. By the time I contact them, I’m well past the generic help guide point.
I got excellent 24/7 support with Yahoo, but then we were paying them more than $13K a year in fees! (a multi-million dollar store, but still they are very expensive). However, Yahoo has design limitations which means we also spent a small fortune in outside development costs and there were limitations with the shipping manager and offering tiered customer group pricing was not possible.
Having researched most carts and worked with several, it would appear that none are “perfect.” You have to figure out which trade offs you can live with.
Sigh…
We just cancelled our free trial with them after learning they can’t handle our shipping routines. Here is my impression – templates are completely editable, but a challenge to do so, sort of a steep learning curve. We were getting the hang of it, but it takes some getting used to in order to find stuff. We were also unable to remove some of the default images. Was NOT impressed by the customer support at all. We put a ticket in to get help with the shipping routines and after quite a while there was still no response. We ended up doing the live chat and it wasn’t very helpful. It is very difficult to get customer service from what we experienced. The cart has a lot of options, but I have to say, I was rather stunned at how a cart can have such advanced options, yet miss stuff that is incredibly simple. They seem to be very proud of an 86% satisfaction rate for their tickets. I find that rather appalling as well.
Americommerce is next on our list, anyone have any experience with them?
Magento, as suggested below, was crossed off the list a long time ago. Mostly because it is open source. Which can be good, but also very bad. Since everyone has the source, it is much easier to hack and find ways into. Not a good thing.
americommerce.. actually i visited their site a long time ago and just went back and I was quite impressed with all they offer. I know we can dream, but it would be so great to have one cart that just did it all, had a great reputation, 24/7 support. I am starting off first time in this field and have total analysis paralysis.
Hi everyone,
First of all, sorry to hear about some people having serious issues with CoreCommerce. That was one cart I considered using and I am glad I didn’t.
I now use Magento with Nexcess as webhosts for it.
What can I say – it is the best platform I have experienced so far.
Basically, I have full control over the look & feel of my site plus the general site security guaranteed by Nexcess plus to ability to tweak it any way I want, literally.
But then again, I do my own HTML / CSS so I don’t need to use anyone’s control panels (only my own Magento’s Admin Panel) to upload whatever design/information I need.
Also, since Magento is open source there are tons of plug-ins for it provided by 3rd parties that can be used with this platform.
Although I didn’t need to use any templates for my site since I do my own HTML, as far as I understand you can purchase such templates from 3rd parties and plug them in to your Magento site so that you don’t have to depend on Magento developers for this sort of thing.
You can also use any payment gateways you as well as accept credit cards directly on your site etc etc.
So far, I have not seen anything better than Magento.
You can check the way I optimized it for my site here:
http://solar-shop-international.com/
It is still work in progress though.
Hope this helps – just my opinion
.
Irina
With regards to stlen credit cards we had an incident just 4 weeks ago. Our card details were stolen and used to purchase tickets for Disneyland Paris and to purchase an Apple Ipod from the Apple website. We have a shop with BigCommerce and with EKM and we have the same credit card as payment for these two. interestingly we never had an issue with EKM but the card details were stolen soon after we subscribed to BigCommerce….
Update. I’ve been testing Big Commerce on trial. It is incredibly easier to manage your design the Core Commerce and much more intuitive as to where to find settings. Much less glitchy/buggy. The tutorials are excellent compared to CC & the literally walk you through the major pieces first w/these videos & instructions to guide your settings.
The View Cart/Checkout is much more modern/feature rich/clean… with #of items in cart as a default feature. Also, your cart totals are displayed by default on the right side panel. Many more simple defaults that are nice.
The topbar defaults are much broader with Wish Lists | Gift Certificates | Order Status auto available.
I’ve been able to tweak the design in 1/3 the time (estimate). If I can get PayPal and my tax requirements integrated – I believe I’ll switch over to them. I don’t expect they’re perfect but I anticipate having fewer tickets in with them b/c so far everything that I’ve done has required no guidance/tickets. It seems like a much better WYSIWYG editor.
So far much smoother sailing along…
Jen
The truth about core commerce templates and customization is that you have to know some html to get these templates to work. They have spacing and placement issues that cannot be resolved otherwise. The drag and drop feature is a total scam. Does not work AT ALL! The tech support I spoke to yesterday affirmed this and said they would be removing it because it simply does nothing.
I would not recommend Core Commerce to anyone who wants a solution that works right our of the box. It doesn’t. -Oh and their templates suck
@M Not sure what you are talking about, if I look at the CoreCommerce templates, they look pretty hip to me, better than I can design on my own:
http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce-templates.html