Last week I was explaining how I’ve gotten a headache searching for an online shopping cart for Mrs. Gibbs’ new clothing company.
The only solution recommended by my hosting firm Intuit that appeared to be suitable (Quickbooks integration was a requirement) was Network Solutions’ Pro E-commerce service.
As I started to relate last week, there is less to this service than meets the eye. In fact, it was the sheer tediousness of the Pro service’s user interface that prompted last week’s Backspin rant titled “Slaves to the browser.”
Anyway, I have already started outlining a few of the many problems I’ve encountered trying to get Network Solutions’ Pro to do what I wanted and concluded with the question, “What else could go wrong?”
Before I deal with that question, let me relate what is at the heart of the problem with Network Solutions’ Pro service and, I suspect, many of its other e-commerce offerings: The company acquired its e-commerce product from MonsterCommerce and, following the acquisition, “improved” the service. That would be all well and good except Network Solutions neglected one teensy, tiny detail: It didn’t update the documentation!
That’s right. The documentation explains not just a slightly different product, it is a wholly different product! Words fail me. Well, almost. I mean, how can you, in all honesty, offer a product that isn’t finished? And charge a fairly hefty monthly fee for it?
Herein lies the problem you often run with trying to find a complex service like e-commerce that you can work with: The sheer enormity of the product means you can’t find all of the serious “gotchas” until you are deeply committed to using the product. By then your investment of time and money makes moving to something else very difficult.
An example of this kind of gotcha is the idea, pitched by both Intuit and Network Solutions, that the Pro service integrates “seamlessly” with Quickbooks. I could go on at great length as to the height and width of the speed bumps, but let me just give you a couple of my “favorites.”
First, if you don’t require all purchasers to register, then all orders that get downloaded to Quickbooks are shown as the customer being “Webstore Guest Customer”!
Second, let’s say you have to charge sales tax in California. This means you must charge the basic CA sales tax of 7.25 per cent plus the added sales tax levied by each of the 37 tax districts the recipient lives in (this can be as much as another 1.5 per cent). The Network Solutions Pro service does the calculation correctly, but the tax details don’t make it into Quickbooks on download, leaving no obvious way to track the taxes levied for each tax district. You can’t even parse the data from the new order notification e-mails that are sent to the administrator because these are, to all intents and purposes, unstructured.
Now you might think that the feature “download orders” would work, but this just provides a useless summary of orders. Heck, you can’t even download customer data unless you have forced or persuaded them to actually register!
That’s enough. I could go on but there’s no point. For the moment I’m stuck with Network Solutions’ Pro and I’ll just have to deal with it.
Next week; you’ve sent in lots of suggestions for alternative e-commerce solutions. We’ll take a look at what you like.