I’ve been making a lot of last minute decisions recently. Well, not really; these changes have been a long time coming but I expected to put them of for a while. First was changing the entire layout of the site, which I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. I think the store could look a lot more professional and put together, and I think it will improve sales because customers will “trust” the site more (and it’s really hard to get that trust when customers have never heard of you before).

I actually put the finishing touches on the layout today, but I had some problems installing it so I contacted Yahoo! store support about it and, well, their answers (or lack thereof) convinced me that it’s time to move to a better ecommerce solution.

Yahoo Should Probably Go Suck An Egg Or Something
Here’s what happend with Yahoo! that was essentially the final straw. I don’t use templates, I design the store myself, of course. When I first designed it 2 years ago I used a dreamweaver plugin. That plugin is only compatibable with Dreamweaver 7 (and some earlier copies) which was released in 2004. Yes, 2004, a whopping six years ago. And it’s never been updated since. It’s basically impossible to get a copy of Dreamwever 7 unless you spend $600 and buy a used one on ebay or amazon or something. When I asked support if they would ever update the program, he said “Ive only gotten 2 or 3 requests for that in the last 2-3 years”. Really?!? I’m supposed to believe that amongst all your clients who have signed up in the past few years, only “2 or 3″ of them custom design their websites using Dreamweaver? That’s hogwash if you ask me.

It seems that Yahoo! likes to make it’s customers do everything by hand. And updating a layout is just one thing it doesn’t do. It also doesn’t…
-Track inventory by options
-Automatically update category pages
-Cross out original prices when sale prices are added
-Allow you to do mass mark downs on selected products
-Have any apps or image galleries beyond just ONE photo per page
-Allow you to have more than one email account

….and yet they charge $30 more than almost all the other ecommerce services I’ve come across.

Mind you, I contacted their development team back when I first started with them, close to 2 years ago. In the past two years the only upgrade they’ve done has been allowing you to choose items to exclude from a coupon code. Yeah, that wasn’t particularly high on my list of demands.

Choosing A New eCommerce Solution

I’ve pretty much narrowed things down to three options….

CoreCommerce
Volusion
Shopify

And in that order, kinda. Shopify is one of the first that I looked at, but I’m already not loving the support. I’ve heard good things about the first two, slightly more about CoreCommerce but Volusion has all these amazing, free store apps and Ive already gotten a chance to speak with one of their reps (CC doesn’t seem to have 24 hour support). It’s going to be a really, really tough decision, but I have to make one QUICK if I have any shot of getting a refund for this month from Yahoo! And I’m not going to be happy camper if I have to spend another month with them.