I need to take a step back for a moment and make a few comments about the “scam” factor.

If you google StoresOnline, you’ll see a lot of complaints and claims that StoresOnline is a scam.

Here’s my 2 cents:

A scam is something that suckers people into giving their money and then provides them with a shoddy product or no product. Case in point: there are home improvement scams. This actually happened to a woman: a “roofer” knocked on her door and said he noticed her shingles look waterlogged. Since she did notice a leak, she let him do an estimate. He told her it is worse than he thought. He needed to redo the entire roof and replace beams. It would cost her about 8,000 but he could arrange market-rate financing. She agreed. He began work before she signed papers and ripped off her roof. Then she was presented with papers for 27,500 for 16% interest! When she complained, he said if she didn’t sign, he’s was going to walk away and leave her with no roof (cold weather was coming) and put a lien on her house. She signed. After the project was done, her roof leaked worse than before and she’s still paying off this enormous loan. (source http://www.consumerlaw.org/initiatives/seniors_initiative/home_improv.shtml)

Now, that’s a scam. The roofer was in with the bank and the whole point was to get this woman into a 27,500 loan at 16% interest.

Is StoresOnline a scam? Even though I don’t have my site up yet, I can say, absolutely not. Did they promise me a porsche and deliver a VW? No. Even with my minor complaints about the storebuilder software, all-in-all I’m extremely pleased. The interface really is simple enough that a non-techie person should be able to do it. And their 24/7 live chat is really beyond customer service. Think about it, these people are sitting there at 3am just in case someone has a question. They really don’t need to provide that.

If you Google, you’ll see that one site with complaints is ripoff.com. Just the name invokes bad feelings. It is a site where people can post complaints. However, if you read this report: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/218/ripoff0218805.htm you’ll see that they investigated the claims and found no truth to them. Many of them that sounded like they came from consumers were really posted by competitors and people wanting to drive down the price of the stocks.

Now, I have no experience with this company prior to my seminar in May 2007. It could very well be that some complaints are legit—I see a lot of dates from 2005. Maybe they made a lot of changes since then, I don’t know.

Also, some say 1) the price is really steep and 2) the hosting is expensive.

As far as the price being steep to buy the websites to start with, I agree. However, I don’t care how much it costs if I can make that much back in sales. I’ve tried to do it myself. I have a friend who is hosting a site for me for free. I tried to sell a product with Paypal buttons. So far I’ve made about 100.00 and I’ve had that site up for a year. It doesn’t look that professional and I’ve really had to spend a lot of time getting it up. I’m ready to try something else.

Really what you are purchasing is not only the store software, but all the training and support that goes behind it. I glanced through the internet marketing tutorials they have the other day. Good, good stuff. Pages and pages of basics including keyword reasearch, pay-per-click advertising, keyword density analysis, etc. etc, etc. Also sources for drop shipping, directories, etc.

As far as hosting, sure you can get hosting somewhere for 9.95 per month. But my freebie site is currently offline because I accidentally exceeded my bandwidth (I put videos on my salespage–big mistake). Is my freebie site truly an ecommerce site? Not really. Sticking paypal buttons is really not the ideal situation.

Again, I think it all comes down to whether I make money or not. My goal today is to get my site up and running.

So far, would I purchased StoresOnline again knowing what I know? So far….yes.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 10 Comments »

My product has about 100 variations in style. The way I’m setting it up, I’m putting them in as 100 different products, which is how other sites selling the same product are doing it.

I was happy to use their import products function which lets you import from a csv, tab, or xml file. However, it isn’t 100% perfect. One of the fields didn’t import correctly (the meta description was blank in the product). Also, it doesn’t let you import all the fields you need to. For example, you can import a URL to the product image, but not to the thumbnail image, so I still had to go in by hand and edit 100 products to add the thumbnail. Also you can only import the parent product fields, but not any of the child fields (such as different sizes that are available, etc).

I guess I’m 85% satisifed with the product import.

I had another instance of the online chat rep telling me the wrong thing. I registered a domain with GoDaddy and added it to my site. I asked the rep how I get email working so that someone can send me an email to mydomain.com. She told me they don’t have any email capabilities and I would have to arrange that with GoDaddy. But later as I was poking around, I found that they do have email alias capabilities. You can set up a particular email address within the domain to forward somewhere else. So…I ask you, why didn’t the rep mention that?

Arrrg.

Addendum: there are two different ways to import: via comma- or tab-separated file or via xml. Turns out that if you use the xml feature, you can import child fields such as variation (sizes, colors, etc). In fact you can import just about any product field except for the thumbnail url. I think this is a bug.

So here are two tips for anyone wanting to import products.

Tip 1
If you don’t have any child data (specifications or variations), then using a tab- or comma-separated file is fine. However if you’re like me and have very similar if not identical variations for all your products, do this so that you can upload the variations instead of adding them by hand:
1. Set up one product manually exactly the way you want it as far as colors, size, specs, etc. goes.
2. Export the product, specifying XML
3. Edit the exported xml file. Copy/paste the xml code to account for other products (the code will be in between (and including) PRODUCT and /PRODUCT tags. )
4. Import this tweaked xml.

Tip 2 (Important!)
When you import, if you don’t check “Update Products” it will overwrite your products. If you do check this, it will update your products with whatever fields you have in your upload file.

I stupidly thought that since I had just exported the xml file, that file contained everything. So when I added some products to the xml and uploaded, I did not check Update Products. But then I remembered that I had gone in by hand and updated all 142 thumbnail image urls. D’oh! Sure enough, after import, all 142 of that field were blank.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »

Well, I found one thing about the interface that is limiting.

The pieces of the pages are called elements. You can put a predefined element on a page such as a search box, or you can create your own elements.

However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to create an element and use it on more than one page. I created an element which contains sizing information for the product I’m selling. I want to show this information in the sidebar for all the pages where the customer has to select a size.

So, I created the element and put it on one page. But then when I went to another page and tried to add it, I couldn’t find any way to do this. I checked with customer service. It turns out my only choices are 1) to create a new element for each page where I want to show it by copying/pasting the text into a new element or 2) put it on the "background" layer, which means it shows on every page.

There is no way to have a user-defined element show on only certain pages.

Hmmm..it seems like this is straight-foward functionality that should be there. There’s no way I want to change the text in multiple places if my information changes. And I really don’t want sizing information to show on a page that has nothing to do with ordering.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 1 Comment »