As I mentioned the other day, I’m planning on moving my store off of yahoo and onto a better eCommerce host. I spent the last couple of days trying out my top three choices. Here are a few notes I took on each…

Volusion
I spent two days going through Volusion and getting a feel of their interface. Tanya commented on my last blog and sent me this, which talks about their problems with bandwidth, so that makes me pretty skiddish.

Plus one of the features most important to me is customization. If I can’t use my own template, I can’t be bothered. And if it’s too complicated I can’t be bothered either. Volusion says theyre customizable, and I played around with their WYSIWYG editor a bit, but the free trial doesn’t give you FTP access so I can’t test my own template out. That’s a major thumbs down right there — I’m not going to give you $150 and then realize later that I can’t use my own design! But beyond just that, volusion is very, VERY powerful. There are actually a lot of features that I don’t need, and some of it is really complicated but if you watch their training videos, you’ll get the hang of it.

Shopify
I’ve heard this place is a bit more “simple” but I don’t really need something as powerful as Volusion. I also like that they use store tags, it seems easier to customize my site than V. Their interface is definitely prettier, although it looks like CJ and Volusions’ looks like wordpress (ew). They say they use store tags but they don’t seem to be as flexible as the store tags on Yahoo! stores…which probably both good and bad. Their tag language is called liquid and they have serverside software called Vision that allows you to customize your store design. If you ask me, “Vision” is pretty pointless, and fully customizable it’s not. The give you templates that you can edit, which is a pain in the butt if your design is already done. And there are sub template pages you have to edit, about six of them, and that makes it even more annoying — imagine having to make the same changes six times. Oh, and on top of that since they’re .liquid files you can only edit them BY HAND and not with a WYSIWYG editor. Yeah, NO way. I’m sure I could have figured out their langauge but I gave up after a while. Since I’ve heard better things about corecommerce anyways, it’s not worth wasting my time.

CoreCommerce
Oh boy, I’ve heard SO many good things about their services, but after starting their free trial yesterday, I have NO idea why. First off, their user CP isn’t very attractive or well designed. And there seems to be a lot of bugs in their system. I go to add something, and it doesn’t show up. I go to edit one little piece of text, and an entire form field will dissapear. Then I tried to customize the layout. Their system for customization seems to be the easiest and the most straight forward — you can upload your design, and they’ll break it up into a header and footer for all your pages. Simple, right? Well, if it actually worked correctly, I’m sure it would be. I uploaded my design, I went back and checked the html files, and all the right coding is there. I clicked view site…NONE of my layout is showing up. There are just a bunch of boxes with logos in them. There’s no layout on any of the subpages either.

Of course, my first thought is to go to support. Oh, wait, they don’t have online chat support. To me, that right there is a major, major site. You can not run a professional business that has anything to do with webhosting without online chat support, preferably 24×7 support. So I decided to be patient and submit a ticket. I waited, and waited, eventually went to bed, woke up, still no response. Over 15 hours later, I finally received a reply from the team…and it was a non answer answer. I really don’t get how anyone can rave about their services. Sure, I’ve only been using them for 1 day but their support is HORRIBLE and that’s not excusable.

So I’m kind of back where I started. I’m not loving any of these three choices, although I’m leaning a bit towards Volusion. But the most obnoxious thing is that none of them will give me ftp access so I cant fully test out my template, which is extremely frustrating. On top of all that, I’ll have to change the urls to my pages after I’ve spent so much time and money building backlinks to the ones I already have. Ugh. I had no idea making this decision would be so complicated!