Wee Little Interspire Review Update


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July 21st, 2009 by Chris

Well, I officially got tired of waiting for a reasonable way to input product variations, so I fixed it myself.

I sat down today, the baby miraculously slept for 3 hours, and I cranked this out. All told, it took me 4 hours to build a new frontend that allows me to quickly add product variations, potentially cutting down the time required by dozens of hours per product for complex products.

Note, I am not a professional programmer (not in my definition), I’m a bit of a hack. I may have been considered professional at one time, but as my interests moved from being a freelance developer to SEO and site management, my programming skills never improved further, so now I’m pretty far behind true professionals. I also was completely unfamiliar with the database schema and had to familiarize myself with it. And yet… 4 hours later, here it is.

Again, the issue with their cart is that suppose you sell a T shirt, that comes in 10 colors and 10 sizes. They require you to enter pricing information for every possible combination of color and size, even if they don’t change the price at all. Then suppose you add gift wrapping as a yes/no option. That then ups the form lines you have to fill out from 100 to 200, just that.

With my script instead you define a price for 10 colors, define a price for 10 sizes, and define a price for no gift wrapping and yes gift wrapping, 22 total definitions, as opposed to 200.

In my original review on Interspire’s cart I provide an example that results in 103,680 definitions you must manually fill out. My script does the same thing with 50. Would you rather fill out fifty form fields, or one hundred thousand form fields?

Anyways, this script is for sale if anyone wants it, $50, what a bargain for all the labor it’ll save you. Just paypal $50 to paypal at thebeasleys.org and I’ll email it to you.

Related posts:

  1. Interspire Shopping Cart 5.5 Review
  2. CubeCart Review Update
  3. Things I dislike about Elance
  4. An Experiment in One-Product Ecommerce
  5. Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 Review

Posted in: Ecommerce »  by: Chris

9 Responses to “Wee Little Interspire Review Update”

  1. Edward Cook  Says:
    July 25th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

    Do you have any recommendations for a small business? I’ve been using EcommerceTemplates for 4 years but am becoming more and more disillusioned with the quality and features. I have been looking at Interspire very hard over the weekend, but came across your review and got my eyes opened to the costs, which I definitely can’t afford or justify. digiSHOP by Sumeffect is another I’ve been looking at, but their template system doesn’t seem to be nearly as advanced as Interspire’s. Do you know of an Interspire equivalent without the price tag?

  2. Chris  Says:
    July 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    CREloaded (I’ve used it, it is powerful and relatively inexpensive, but skinning can be rough if you can’t find a premade skin (many are available)).

    CS Cart (not used it, looks decent, a lot like interspire).

    xcart (one I’m working on now, so far so good)

    cubecart (read my reviews on this blog, for some applications it is alright, but it has it’s problems)

  3. Tommy  Says:
    October 1st, 2009 at 7:21 am

    I’m interested in your script about product variations.

    Is it still possible to set stock level to each combination of variations(eg. size/color) after applying your script?

    If so, I’d like to buy one!

  4. Chris  Says:
    October 1st, 2009 at 9:12 am

    Yes, all normal interspire admin backend functions are intact and functional after using the script, so you can edit whatever.

  5. David  Says:
    January 4th, 2010 at 7:34 pm

    customer service is rubbish and they have become money grabbers. Going by past experience I made a purchase and it’s like I am dealing with a different company. I waited 3 days for a response to service request, when I gave up through frustration and requested a refund, was told no, refer to terms, no matter what I said, the wall was there and that was the terms that I was meant to have read thoroughly.
    It was suggested I should have taken a trial, however when you access bigcommerce via interspire you don’t get this option. I have spent a week trying to explain my case, all to no avail, this company is now officially rubbish.
    I won’t be dealing with them again, or recommending their products to any of my clients, buyer beware!

    In Fact just discovered they billed me twice for the same thing, I cant believe how much time I am spending trying to rectify my decision to go with them,,, never ever again.,… This company does not know how to be decent.

  6. Jeff  Says:
    March 4th, 2010 at 12:16 pm

    Chris–

    It’s cool that you took the time to do this–we’ve been doing a trial of the Interspire cart, and the first thing I called them to ask about was the awful functionality of the Variation tool.

    It’s pretty damning that you could pound out your own fix in a few hours, but they can’t seem to get around to fixing it, even though they admit on the phone it’s a frequent major issue for everyone.

    One question–does your variations script also work for downloadable products? For some reason, the Interspire variations are only allowed for physical products–the functionality simply disappears once a product is set as “Downloadable”.

  7. Chris  Says:
    March 4th, 2010 at 1:02 pm

    Honestly, I’ve no idea. I’ve never done any work with downloadable products.

    I imagine if you can get normal interspire variations to work with downloadable products my script will work (it still uses their system, I just made a better front end).

    But you’ll have to mod your cart to remove that issue.

  8. Billy  Says:
    March 17th, 2010 at 4:57 pm

    Chris -

    I am using interspire to launch my second company this time with custom built computers. Just by saying that you can definately guess what my problem is. I need each computer to be customized all parts - memory, hard drive, OS, graphics and so on..my question to you - will I be able to do this with your script in a time saving manner?

  9. Chris  Says:
    March 18th, 2010 at 5:52 am

    Yes. Assuming all you need are customizations based on drop downs, and not text fields for user write-in input.

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