Finally giving up

[MegaFemaTron2]

I'm finally letting ISC go. At this point, I don't care what cart I use as long as it's not ISC. I've been testing CS Cart and Open Cart and they are ok but I think I'm going to go with Prestashop. Zen cart was looking pretty good too.

I'm dumping all of my inventory and starting from scratch so I figured this would be the perfect time to go with a new cart that is up to date and where there are templates I can manipulate already available. My beautifully designed ISC site had a good run but now it's time to make it scream "I'm a shop not a fancy info site" and have more control over the display of the stock to the customers, etc. And I don't want to do any more changes to the code directly whenever I want to do something custom. That is more of an issue than anything else. I'd stop developing custom features because I was sick of worrying about breaking something and having to go back through everything to remove the custom code or replace everything with a backup. Even when I wasn't tinkering with it, somethings stopped working (like the product suggestion drop down when you type in the search box).

So I'll let you know how to switch goes.

[Martin]

You're not alone...

I've just had to write a new payment module for Stripe* after problems with my (now ex) payment gateway and even Royal Mail is getting a bit update but after that, it's time to put my efforts in Magento.

I've been warned by BabyReflux that it's a monumental task but that's pretty much what I've been faced with using Interspire so aside from some serious learning curve I should find my feet with a little paid assistance here and there.

Interestingly I note that for all the much vaunted "BigCommerce" advertising and self-congratulatory back slapping in Forbes et al, things are very much business as usual with things like the Royal Mail shipping module so out of date as to beggar belief... well for anyone who didn't live through ISC

So, yes, I too am striking out to pastures new and taking my business in a development curve... Hope your little journey works out well too




*Yes I'm aware that there's a paid Stripe module out in the wild but it's sold by schysters R'us and I wouldn't touch it with a 500 foot bargepole.. But no I'm not selling it, I don't have time to write and/or support modules for ISC anymore, especially as most of the users are now using heavily compromised versions.

[MegaFemaTron2]

I hear you Martin. Although my ISC site works fine I had to really be honest about long term success with it and how much I wanted to spend either paying someone to suffer through adding features or suffer through adding them myself. I'm all about passive income. I want to spend more time marketing the site than tearing through the code trying to add what updated carts already have.

So far Prestashop is looking like a wise decision. I'll know more when it's ready to go live to replace ISC.

I met a woman at an internet business meetup group I attended this week who started using Big Commerce about 3 months ago and she's already ditching it. She would be their ideal customer I would think... no coding skills, willing to pay rent on a cart, small-medium size inventory, just want something out of the box... She said it's not easy enough for her to use, she hasn't been successful with support and she has trouble hiring someone to help with it.

Although I'm not a big coder like yourself. I have to admit I'm pretty excited to try making at least my own modules for pulling data from my supplier into my cart on the backend and sending orders directly to the suppliers warehouse. Although I already saw a reasonably priced module that will make a csv of orders and send them to the supplier by cron. I like that option as well.

[MegaFemaTron2]

So much for Prestashop. They just released a 1.6 version that's absolutely ghastly. The previous version was barely tolerable enough but now they are forcing responsiveness on the backend, buttons are failing, themes are breaking and the backend is now layed out like Wordpress. How shameful. My template was responsive for the frontend. But there should be an option to turn on a responsive template in the backend; one without all the GIANT buttons and text and what not. I went back to the previous version but then what good is going with the cart if I have to stay with an outdated version... Another thing, I was reading some comments about 1.6 on the forum and some programmer mentioned it being a good thing there are issues to keep the work going and I couldn't help but think of the folks at ISC breaking stuff or leaving stuff broken to keep the support contract payments coming in. Maybe in a couple of days, I'll be less annoyed and see things differently but I don't know... It just seems like PS should be working on fixing bugs and adding real usable features instead of a fancy, colorful (broken) backend theme you can't change.

Just did the rollback and never felt so relieved to see a functional admin area in my life (an admin area that wasn't that great to begin with). Goodness that was awful.

[MegaFemaTron2]

Well I acted a fool and now I'm into Prestashop again. Until it breaks. mwahahhahaha Must have been those Grade school colors they have splashed all over the new admin that sent me into a fit of rage. hahahahaha After some pouting and realizing the competition wasn't that great either, I re-installed 1.6 and it's actually easier than the older version. I wish there were more amazing templates for prestashop though. Like wordpress. There are some wordpress templates that make me drool. I like amazing designs. Not just any ole thing will do.

[Martin]

Let's be honest, Interspire treated us like fools, we acted accordingly until finally we lost faith in pretty much everything...

Anything else is going to be a step up... well... except BigConmerce...


For myself, I've just updated the SagePay module, Royal Mail (my own Contract version) and even made the Paypal module multi-currency so couple that with a bunch of other stuff to make things simpler I've done my time and Magento will get my unfettered attention in the Summer once all my actual product development workload has loosened up.

Have to say that shifting the order management to Linnworks was the best decision I've made though... talk about making life easier!

[MegaFemaTron2]

Hahahaha Thanks Martin. It's true. Switching to a new shopping cart from ISC feels like leaving a really bad relationship. I'm all touchy about it and skeptical of new shopping cart relationships. hahahaha

I do really like Prestashop now though. I definitely feel like I have more selling tools than I ever would have been able to add in ISC. I decided to redo my entire catalog from scratch. I'd previously had over 7k products but now I'd like that number to be 2k or less; especially now that I have somewhat of a clue about marketing which has plagued me forever.

Keep us posted on how things go with Magento. I'll have to check Linnworks out too.

Cheers!

[DBMAN]

I've seen an recommended Presta here as well but haven't made a switch.

I'm curious as to your procedure and any lessons learned since I'm sure at some point I, too, will make the transition. Your information is especially useful given you clearly have a large shop and transferring all of the product/category information is always the big thing that stops everyone.

Redirects too of course but that is another story depending on how the urls show up (which I forget with regards to prestashop frankly).

[MegaFemaTron2]

I'm in love with Prestashop now.

A few things... I'm not sure what's going on with the theme part of PS but it seems like it's a real nightmare. I've bought 3 themes so far and 2 were pretty much broken (didn't work as expected) and the third one is outstanding because the developer/designer is outstanding and takes his time and does real testing. I'm using his theme now. But the issue is the other 2 I bought didn't work like they should and those were the next best compared to all the rest. All the themes I've looked at (tons) have lots of comments about the themes having issues. So it kinda seems like this shop is tough to make themes for and a lot is involved. It's also a bit scary that major updates to PS renders a theme completely unusable. Folks using a 1.5.x version of PS were not able to upgrade their shop to 1.6 unless they changed themes or their theme is upgraded and based on my theme's creator, there were an obscene amount of changes that needed to be made to update a 1.5.x theme to 1.6.

As far as moving the products, I wrote a script that could pull the products out of the db and put them in the Prestashop csv import format. That makes the movie easy (can do the same with customers, etc. too) But I ended up not using it because I'm trying to scale down my shop and only carry the best products so I've decided to start from scratch. So I wrote a script to take the xml dump from my supplier and put them in the Prestashop csv import format so I can manually go through the list and when it's edited how I want, I can just import it.

I just imported the manufacturers today and it was so fast and easy.

I can't say too much about the redirects because I've had a traffic problem with my site for a while so when I make the switch, the impact will not be significant. I barely have visitors or backlinks anyway. So I'm just making the switch and not worrying about that.

I'm thinking about making my store into a shopping club though instead of a plain ole shop. Doesn't seem hard to do with PS.

[DBMAN]

Thanks, guess I'll have to see how it goes but hopefully a while away still.