There’s a feature that few know about. After many hours with customer service, I got it working, so I decided to post this here.

You can download the StoreBuilder software which is the shopping cart guts, so to speak. If you install it on another host, you can run your store from there. Or you can just run it on your local computer (not sure why you would want to).

I played around with this hoping I could generate html pages that I could FTP to a new site. But it doesn’t work that way; the software is the actual server that generates your site, so it has to be installed on a new server.

To download it:
Log into your StoresOnline storebuilder site.
Click on Account
Click on Merchant Services
Click on Other/Misc.
Click on Pro Download

Follow the instructions for downloading and installing.

Now here’s the part that I learned.

1. In order for it to run properly, you have to ask customer service to send you a license file.
2. They will email you the file. It will be called StoresOnline.license. When you get it, put it in the config subfolder of where you installed it. If you took the defaults on installation, it will be c:/program files/storesonlinepro/config. Tip: if you don’t remember, you can look at the properties of the shortcut. In Windows, click on Start/All Programs/StoresOnlinePro/ then right-click on Configuration and choose Properties. What it shows under “start in” is the path of the config directory.
3. Follow the instructions to log in, but, and here’s the important part, use the original password supplied by StoresOnline before you changed it to your own password. It will be listed on your license agreement you got in your welcome set.
4. The StoreBuilder looks exactly the same as the vanilla version of the one online. You have to rebuild your store (you can probably export products from the online storebuilder and import them into your local storebuilder).
5. When you click Publish, it creates a .jar file in C:\Program Files\StoresOnlinePro\files\export\9999XXX\(your license #)\publish. Note that 9999 will be the first four digits of your license number.

The jar file is like a zip file. I had hoped that uploading the jar file to a server would let me run the site on another host, but it doesn’t work that way. I assume the software uses the jar file to display your site.

You can follow the instructions to view the published site.

Tip: if you don’t have the instructions anymore, you can still get to them. Go under your start menu/All Programs/StoresOnlinePro/Readme.

I hope this info. is helpful.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »

Well, I already mentioned this in the comments of a previous post because somebody asked, but it deserves a post of its own.

I unpublished my StoresOnline store.

The main reasons are that

1. I was paying StoresOnline $25.00/month for hosting, which is a huge amount BUT
2. It isn’t true hosting.

What I mean by that is that I don’t have all the normal things you get with hosting.

I don’t have true email for one thing. I only have an email for my site domain that I can forward to another email. But it isn’t an email in itself; no inbox, can’t send a message from it, etc.

There are very few templates to choose from, and they all load horribly slow.

But the main reason is that I don’t have control over my site. I was promised by at least two salespeople at my original seminar that I had complete control over the html.

Turns out, that was true for a prior version of the software, but with my version they took away the ability to customize. This means that if I want to add a survey that pops up when someone leaves my site (which involves adding something to the body tag), I can’t.

If I want to speed up my site by cleaning up some of the template code that makes it load slowly, I can’t.

I only have the control that StoresOnline decides to give me through their Store Builder software, but that ain’t good enough for 25.00/month of hosting fees.

So…would I recommend StoresOnline to someone else?

Up until this evening, my answer would have been “That depends.”

Yes if:

• You’re not very technically oriented and you want some software that’s easy to use. AND
• You have a really, really good product to sell with not much competition. If you have other competition, people are going to leave your site because of some of the limitation like the slowness, and go somewhere else.
• You don’t know much about internet marketing. (Their online library of tutorials is part of what you’re paying for, and the information is pretty good.)

No if:

• You’re a programmer or a web person and you’re used to being able to customize your own html. You’ll get totally fed up at the limited amount of access you have to your own site.
• You subscribe to internet marketing newsletters and you really want to take your site to the next level.

Now, here’s the killer. I said above that I would have given that answer before this evening. My new answer is, I would not recommend StoresOnline to anyone.

Why, you ask?

Here’s what happened to me.

When you purchase, you pay thousands of dollars for “licenses” for either three or six websites. There are no other fees…they tell you that access to customer service is free as long as you publish your first site within a year.

I bought my three sites in April 2007 and published a few months later. Everything was fine.

Only after you publish, you pay an additional $25.00/month for hosting fees. I was verbally told that I could unpublish my site at any time and I wouldn’t be charged the $25.00 while it was down. Fair enough.

But here’s what I found.

In StoresOnline’s own terminology, the word “publish” means to make the site live. You click on a Publish button to upload it to the internet, etc. So logically the word “unpublish” would mean to make your site not be live anymore. So I requested for them to unpublish my site.

BUT, and here’s the kicker (and it’s not something they tell you)…I went today to log into my license and found out that my license itself has been canceled. So not only did they make my site not live anymore (which I asked them to do), but they canceled my website account, even in the unpublished design mode. I can’t see my pages or images, can’t get FTP access to my files, can’t access my store front at all.

They’ll gladly give me access back IF I pay them an additional $10.00/month.

Can you believe that? Even though I paid thousands of dollars for three licenses, they can deactivate them just because I unpublished the live site.

Now that’s not right. I bought those licenses. They have no right to tell me I need to pay them more money to see my stuff.

I’m still making payments because I financed it, so I’m going to see if I can contest the charges with my credit card company starting the day I asked them to unpublish it.

So…my final recommendation is, stay away from StoresOnline.

Here’s what I’m doing instead. For a mere $5.00/month, I got hosting at a company called A Small Orange. Don’t let the odd name fool you. Their hosting package is pretty good. For one thing, I get unlimited add-on domains. This means that if I decide to open 10 stores with 10 different urls, it only costs $5.00/month total, not $25.00 per store. Their price is based on bandwidth, so if I start getting a lot of traffic (which hopefully equates to a lot of sales), I can pay $10.00/month, but not until then.

Then I installed a free (yes, FREE) shopping cart called Zen Cart. It is open-source, which means it’s free software for anyone to use. I’m in the process right now of setting up my first store to sell squirrel-proof bird feeders. Once I get that working, I’ll reopen my baby slings store.

Now, Zen Cart is not easy to set up. It’s taking me months, working on it part-time. But…there are websites where you can hire a web programmer to do stuff for you. For example elance.com, scriptlance.com, getacoder.com. These are sites that let you post what kind of job you want and then web coders bid on that job.

So you would just post a job that says something like “I want someone to set up Zen Cart for me. I already have product images and information, but I don’t know anything about web programming. I also want to be shown how to update product information and create new products.” Or something like that. Then coders will tell you how much they’ll charge you, you’d pick one, and off you go.

For a fraction of what it costs for StoresOnline, you can get a better storefront.

Man, I still can’t believe they want to charge me for something I already paid for!!

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 4 Comments »

I think one of my biggest complaints is that Stores Online has the most minimal integration with Paypal. What I mean is that the most you can do is link it to your Paypal account so that your store passes the total amount to Paypal for processing. You can also set the return URL so that if someone clicks on Return to Merchant, they will be brought back to your store.

But here’s what it DOESN’T do:

• It doesn’t pass the address fields to Paypal.
  
  Now I read it in a forum that it is possible to link a 3rd party shopping cart with Paypal so that the cart passes the address info and Paypal shows the fields, but doesn’t allow the user to change them. This means that your visitor enters address info on your cart, and Paypal uses the address when it handles the billing.
  
  The fact that SOL does not do this means either you must have your visitor enter the address twice, once on SOL and once in Paypal (which is really, really annoying for your customer) OR you need to take the address fields out of your SOL checkout page.
  
  If you do the latter, you run into a big problem:
  
  Since your SOL website doesn’t know a thing about the visitor’s address, you cannot set up shipping according to country. You can’t offer free shipping just for the US, for instance. (I found this out the hard way when a woman from Canada got free shipping! I’m not sure I’m going to make a cent on that order.) And Paypal doesn’t allow you to restrict the country list, so someone from Albania could order my product, for example. I’m pretty sure my drop shipper won’t ship to Albania.
  
  
• It doesn’t pass the order details.
  
  This means the confirmation email to your customer has a description of the product as "online purchase" which looks both stupid and unprofessional. It also means that you have to go to two places to see the details of the order: to Paypal for the customer’s name and address and then to SOL for the product that was ordered.
  
  
• It doesn’t let you pass a payment page parameter.
  
  What I mean by this: Paypal will let you set up different payment pages and assign a code to each. So if you have a website that sells, let me see, baby slings and another that sells bird feeders, you can have one payment page with your baby sling company logo and another with your bird feeder company logo. Most shopping carts let you pick one of these when setting up the integration so that someone who buys a bird feeder will see the Paypal page with the bird feeder logo at the top. SOL does not allow this to get set. This means that if you have multiple websites you’re trying to integrate with your single Paypal account, you should either have no logo or a generic logo to avoid showing your customer the logo for a different company than the one he is purchasing from.

The bottom line is, SOL just hasn’t made the effort to give us the type of integration we need to give our customers a smooth shopping experience.

So…I want to start selling bird feeders. I have a drop shipper all lined up. Do you think I’m going to utilize my second StoresOnline website that I already paid for? Nope. For one thing, I’d have to pay 25.00 per month for hosting (their charge is per website). For another, I’ll still have these Paypal issues.

So I purchased hosting with A Small Orange for 5.00 per month and I’ve installed Zen Cart (a free shopping cart.) I still have to use Paypal, but they have some of these extra integration features that Stores Online doesn’t.

On a side note: There are other problems with Paypal that are not related to the SOL integration. For example, just last week I had a woman purchase a sling using Paypal’s option to pay by bank account. Unfortunately, this is considered an eCheck and takes 5 business days to clear. After a few days, the woman canceled the payment.

I also had a customer supply a different ship-to address (it was a gift). On the Paypal email receipt, it showed that the address is Unverified, which was very confusing to her.

This is why I plan to dump Paypal as soon as I get enough orders to pay for a true eCommerce account.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | No Comments »