StoresOnline: Final Verdict

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I unpublished my StoresOnline store.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 »