I’m not done with it, but I like the software, it does a lot of what I like out of the box, has good support, a community surrounding it, thousands of templates, hundreds of mods, etc. And it is very competitively priced.

It does happen to be on sale right now for 50% off, making it just $125, which is a really good deal. That is a full 50% off.

I don’t know when the sale will end, I think after the holidays, but my review might not be up by then (judging by my speed, it won’t be) but I didn’t want people to miss out on the sale.

So, let me say this, so long as you’re happy just installing a template (from a huge selection) that you only tweak minorly (with perhaps a new logo image) and so long as you’re willing to put a little time into learning the admin backend, and if you’re on a budget, I recommend this cart. Get it now before the sale ends. There is also a free version, but come on, if you can’t afford $125 for your shopping cart rethink your business plan.

And just so people don’t think I’m making the same mistake with this as I did with cubecart (write my review and then use it for a year and decide I was way too kind initially). I actually have used CRELoaded for over 5 years. Just not the newest version that my review is on. So I know the foundation is sound.

Oh… and I guess by nonlegislative decree from our nonelected leaders at the third reich FTC I must disclose to you that I received a free copy of this software to perform my review on. I’m glad they finally did that, because otherwise, us bloggers, you know, we could have destroyed society.

2996091721	12349	Captured/Pending Settlement	19-May-2010 05:21:48	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX5834	USD 321.08
2996091247	12348	Declined	19-May-2010 05:21:00	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX1251	USD 321.08
2996090463	12347	Declined	19-May-2010 05:19:43	Sadchik, Nikola	A	XXXX1006	USD 321.08
2996089776	12346	Declined	19-May-2010 05:18:31	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX3056	USD 321.08
2996089396	12345	Declined	19-May-2010 05:17:52	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX2150	USD 321.08
2996087233	12344	Declined	19-May-2010 05:15:10	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX4741	USD 321.08
2996086915	12343	Declined	19-May-2010 05:14:35	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX0838	USD 321.08
2996086430	12342	Declined	19-May-2010 05:13:37	Sadchik, Nikola	V	XXXX6155	USD 321.08

This has a Russian billing and shipping address, and as a rule I never ship to Russia. I have never had a legitimate order from Russia, the few I have shipped in the past all turned out to be stolen credit cards, so now, I never do. There are many countries I will not ship to because of the risk of credit card fraud.

Anyways, so I had this order come through and while I wouldn’t ship it anyways just to check I pulled up my credit card transaction logs. What do you know but this guy tried to place his order 8 times with 8 different credit cards, the first 7 of which were rejected. What are the chances he is legitimate? Next to 0 to be sure.

One thing that annoys me immensely about credit cards in general is that banks seem so apathetic about stopping fraud. I honestly think Visa and Mastercard could care less about credit card fraud. Merchants are the ones who fit the bill, they make their money even off a fraudulent transaction, so what do they care?

For instance, I catch fraud all the time doing my manual reviews, but there is absolutely no one who I can report it to. You’d think it’d be really really easy for the credit card companies to setup a website or a phone service where merchants could phone in suspected stolen credit cards. But there isn’t, not for Visa and Mastercard I can call my merchant provider to ask them to stop any transaction, but that just shelters me. I can lookup the card issuing bank and try to contact them (which is a pain if they are foreign) and warn them, but I need to speak the language, and it isn’t always possible to look it up or get an accurate phone number. With American Express there are numbers I can call, both to verify international addresses and report fraud, but not for Visa and Mastercard.

This is the computer age, why can’t they provide such an automated service?

Anyways, credit card fraud is often this obvious, if you’re the least bit diligent you can usually avoid most of it.

The card that finally worked in this case turned out to be from an Australian bank, so because there is no language barrier I decided to call them and let them know to block that customer’s account, my good deed for the day.

First let me say that Interspire has been fairly proactive in addressing the concerns raised by my original review.

Pricing

They have changed their upgrade policy to allow you free upgrades for 1 year regardless of upgrade type (previously you had to pay for major upgrades) after one year you can renew at 50% the original cost of your licence.

This pricing scheme is more in line with other software vendors out there, and is an industry standard. While Interspire is still expensive compared to many other carts, their upgrade policy is now inline and shouldn’t be a source of complaints.

Installing, Upgrading, Importing

I’ve done more upgrades of the software since my original review, and all went off without a hitch, except the most recent one, which to fix I merely had to uninstall and reinstall my template (two clicks). They’ve also added more templates.

I am annoyed though at the lack of persistent data though some of the template changes. For instance, welcome text at the top of the homepage. I have to re-insert it every time I upgrade a template. It would not be that difficult to provide a field that persists through template changes for that sort of thing, or footer text, etc. In fact, stick them all over, they’re really simple to do. vBulletin finally caught on a few releases ago and stuck option advertisement templates all over the software so when upgrading you could have those templates persist and not have to redo all your advertising.

Order Summary

What I said previously:

Why is it so hard for some carts to provide a printable receipt after checkout? Honestly, Cubecart doesn’t, OScommerce doesn’t, what is the deal?

Interspire does not do it either when you select payment of check or money order (mail order form) they provide this sentence: “Mail a check or money order in US funds, along with a printed order summary, to:” But don’t actually provide the order summary. I guess you have to wait for the email and print it out? What if you don’t get it? Why not just put the order summary on that page?

When you pay with a credit card through authorize.net Interspire provides a link for the order summary, but again, why not put the order summary on that page? There is a ton of whitespace on it, fill that space up!

The email summaries they send are nice, put that content on the page seen after checkout.

Still holds true. No fix there.

Categories & SEO

My issues with the category setup on the menu in regards to SEO and headings as mentioned in my first review are still there. I would like to be able to have more control over the category listing, perhaps giving prominent locations to products or categories I wish to promote more, I can’t. I would also like the ability to section off my menu.

Images

They now allow more than 5 product images. I would still like a lightbox to display them on product pages instead of a popup. Popups are old technology, take longer to load, and can be blocked.

Product Variations

What can I say? They’re trying.

5.5 included a new product variation handling tool and other upgrades.

Firstly, they paginated the product variation screens. So it will no longer crash your browser from information overload if there are tens of thousands of form fields (very possible).

Secondly they implemented a bulk variation editor. This, unfortunately, is almost worthless. It is like they just don’t get it. Let me explain.

Their tool allows you to filter variations and then edit the cost. Suppose you sell engagement rings available in silver, gold, and platinum. Each ring can be sized from 5-15, and can include a .5, 1, or 2 carat diamond.

Their tool allows you to replace existing values, which is not very useful at all. Say you have the following prices:

Gold .5 carat = $500
Gold 1 carat = $1000
Gold 2 carat = $2000

So suppose you need to increase the cost of your gold jewelry because gold prices increase at the wholesale level. You use the filter to select “gold” and then select say “add $30″ and instead of adding $30 to each gold ring, it finds every ring option that involves “gold” and replaces the value of that combination to $30. So now, instead of having rings costing $530, $1030, and $2030, you have rings costing just $30. Oops!

The solution is to go back and select gold and .5 carat and input $530, then gold and 1 carat and input $1030 and so on. Doing each combination individually. Which begs the question, I thought this was supposed to save time?

It does save time, if you’re only dealing with combinations that do not affect the price. Like suppose there was no price change depending on ring size. Then you could do a gold price change for all ring sizes at once. But the second you add a second price-affecting variable, you screw the system up.

This is true whether you’re editing or doing the initial setup of your product variations.

The solution would be simple, create a toggle to indicate whether you want to increment or replace existing values. If you did so and selected “increment” it would still filter out all combinations involving “gold” and then instead of saying “cost = $x”, it would say “cost = $current_cost + $x.”

Otherwise, all that they’ve done is created a new way to do things one at a time, which defeats the purpose entirely.

Also, it is far too easy to destroy thousands of existing variations. With the system as is you can easily accidentially not set a filter then hit submit and zero out or otherwise change all of your carefully done, perhaps 100,000 total, product options. That sort of devastation demands a confirmation step. I would strongly recommend Interspire code in a simple “Are you sure?” check, it will save someone’s butt sometime.

Finally, there is still no display of prices next to product options on the actual product pages customers will see. Almost every other cart will display the options, why? Because customers don’t like having to play “guess the price.” There are a couple Interspire hacks and modifications that address this, but so far, no support from the actual company. It should be a really easy change too.

Authorize.net Integration

I complained about their Authorize.net integration in my last review. They left out customer emails, they left out the entire block of shipping information, and they did not appropriately use the description field (to list the actual products sold, rather than just repeat the order# information).

They’ve fixed everything except the description field.

Shipping

Still no support for dimensional weight with UPS.

Reporting

They have added a monthly sales tax report, which was my main complaint.

Other bugs

They now allow you to use an SSL domain, but you can’t set it to be your same domain, perse. For instance many sites use http://www.example.com as their catalog, but drop the “www” for their SSL domain, you can’t do that with Interspire. Not a huge deal, but there.

They have also fixed the annoyance of not letting you know your current version in the admin area.

Order Management

Order management has gotten better, customer messaging is now included in all versions of the cart as I requested. However, the messaging system still just emails people to tell them they have a message, it does not actually email them the message, creating a second unnecessary step.

Final Thoughts

My thoughts on 5.5 are pretty much the same thing as my thoughts on 5.0. The cart is a Ferrari without tires. However, I see mechanics working in the shop putting tires on some wheels and so I am optimistic. The people at Interspire are listening to feedback, even here on my blog, and they are making changes based on that feedback. That is moving in the right direction, even if we are not yet at our destination.

As far as the product variations go, I still can’t fully recommend it for sites needing complex variations, but they’re getting closing, one more small change (the increment setting mentioned above) and they’re about there. In the meantime, my script that helps setup new products that need variations is always available. For other sites though, especially when you have a site owner not that adept at skinning, Interspire is attractive.

Also, apparently in their next version they plan to include the ability to print UPS labels directly from the cart, which would be stellar.

Coming soon will be my review of X-cart (almost done), and my review of the newest CRE Loaded (almost started).

Typically the discount rate for qualified transactions is the headline you see when you sign up for a new merchant account, and sometimes providers will purposefully lowball you a lower qualified rate (2%), but hit you with a bigger non-qualified rate (4%), knowing that many more of your transactions will be processed at the higher rate.

Each provider has rules for what constitutes qualified and what constitutes non-qualified. Typically for an Internet merchant you must run an AVS (address verification system) check and run the CVV code from the back of the card for the transaction to be qualified, but even then. If the card is certain types of reward cards, or business cards, or from a foreign bank, you can still be non-qualified (this is how the banks fund their reward programs), and you can’t do much about that.

Now, pay attention, if you also send incomplete information to your payment processor, such as Authorize.net, you may also be downgraded to non-qualified. This is one of the reasons I have complained about Interspire and CubeCart not using the Authorize.net API fully. Just because a field isn’t required by Authorize.net for the system to work, doesn’t mean it isn’t needed by the merchant or otherwise would be beneficial to include.

I recently ran into this problem with one of my sites where I had a custom shopping cart developed. The developer did not set up the Authorize.net module to send an order ID with each transaction, and Visa apparently requires some sort of invoice ID (it can be meaningless and random, but it must exist) to be sent with each transaction, or they downgrade you. So I had been getting 100% downgraded Visa transactions. Lesson be learned, go over your statements carefully or it could cost you (it definitely cost me).

The fix was simple for my custom cart, but it was knowing it needed to be done that was key.

So, when using software, make sure you pass everything possible to your payment processor, even if you think it is redundant, even if it isn’t required, if you have the information, pass the information. And when signing up for a new merchant account, ask for the discount rate for non-qualified transactions as well.

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.

Pricing

Lets start out with what is perhaps the biggest complaint with Interspire, the pricing. This software is not cheap. For the purposes of this review I was given their ultimate edition, which clocks in at $1800, plus more if you want to be able to download upgrades. For a small time person wanting to merely get their feet wet with ecommerce, this would seem daunting. Still, in the grand scheme of things, $1800 is not a whole lot. You’d pay more typically to have a custom cart or site developed, and you’ll likely make back your expenditure in no time. I like to tell people how I started my first ecommerce site (not my first profitable site, I took profits from my content sites to start it) with an initial outlay of $1200. That covered all my initial inventory, merchant account, SSL certificate, I used my existing servers for hosting, did my own design, and used free OScommerce. This site made $500,000 in gross revenue over the next 6 months. In retrospect I could have spent far more to launch the site and still been wildly profitable.

It isn’t so much their upfront pricing that bothers me but rather their upgrade pricing, and in fact I’ve seen quite a few complaints about it from other users. Because I’ve been sitting on this review for 9 months I’ve actually experienced having to upgrade a couple times, and while it was free for me as part of the review, I do know that otherwise it would have been an egregious cost.

When first ordering your license you can sign up for maintenance that allows you access to upgrades for the period you request. This will add on an additional 20% to the product cost if you want a year of upgrades. But, it appears to me this covers only minor upgrades, not major upgrades. So if the software is updated from 4.0.5 to 4.0.6 it is covered, but you don’t get the 5.0 upgrade, because that is a major one (read their upgrade policy). Most other places will give you the upgrade for free within a year, that is fairly standard in the software Industry, Interspire has only a 60 day window, after that you have to pay for it (but they give you a 50% discount on the retail price, still, it is a lot of money).

On October 13th 2008 Interspire officially released version 4.0, it reached 4.0.6 by the end of March 2009, when 5.0 was released, forcing people to reup. My charge would have been around $1200 had I not gotten it for free. Furthermore, I couldn’t see what justified this being 5.0 instead of 4.1. When vBulletin (and I know I mention Jelsoft a lot, but they really are the pinnacle of website software in terms of customer service and whatnot) does a major upgrade, you know it, the new version is entirely different, it is an event. Interspire 5.0 has a lot of new features, but it is not a major upgrade in my opinion.

It seems to me like Interspire knows what their upgrade policy is and that they define product release milestones not by any accepted programming standards, but rather by what their budgetary needs are. I do not like this. I do not like this one bit. $1800 is a lot of money, but if it is a one time fee it is easy to justify, if Interspire is expecting you pay that every 6 months, then you’ve got a very high cost of ownership. Its one thing if they want to jump from 4.0.6 to 5.0 quickly if 5.0 is a major overhaul that changes systems to their core, it is a completely other thing where in any other software package the changes like with what you get with 5.0 would be considered a 4.1.

Now, as I said above, there are different pricing levels with different features, there are differences between the packages, the main one being product quantities. The cheapest package is $295 and includes capability for 100 products. The next one is $1000 and includes capabilities for 5000 products, and then the ultimate one I got that allows for unlimited products. There are other small differences and I urge you to compare them before making a purchase (if any).

Installing, Upgrading and Importing

Interspire has a very easy to use install & upgrade process, as I’ve mentioned I had to do it a couple times, very easy both times. My only issue is with the templates as I will mention below. Quick fast easy, no complaints here at all.

They also have importers for OScommerce, X-Cart, and CubeCart. I’ve not actually tried any of these. I’d be willing to try them if I had more licenses to play with and/or if Interspire started supporting dimensional shipping with UPS, but they are available.

Customer Experience

My main concerns are how easy is it to find a product on the site, add that product to the cart, and then buy the product. It is amazing how many carts mess this up. Interspire does a pretty good job with all of the above.

There are certain additions I’ve made in all carts I use to make it even better, I wouldn’t expect the software to do these, because for all I know I’m the only one that wants them, but I do find them incredibly useful.

1. Really, really, explain to people what the CVV is when checking out with a credit card. I mean, show a picture (wikipedia has some as I recall), it is on the front on AMEX, and on the back on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover. It is amazing how many people get confused on this, and then don’t check out. Interspire could do more here.

2. Make the final checkout button very prominent and flashy, flashing even. It is amazing how many people get that far and then don’t click it, this is more a problem with OScommerce and their final confirmation screen that looks like a receipt but isn’t, but still, it can’t hurt any cart. A small template change I could do, or Interspire could do. If they do it it is permanent, if I do it I gotta redo it after every upgrade.

3. Stress to the people to put in the correct billing address when checking out with a credit card. Interspire does this really good actually. They put a second place for billing address right next to your credit card number on the form, and if you put in the wrong thing, the error tells you why it was wrong (address mismatch) and again, presents that form on the same page for you to fix. OScommerce requires you to manually go back a few steps in the checkout to fix it, annoying for the user, and then they don’t buy from me.

Order Summary

Why is it so hard for some carts to provide a printable receipt after checkout? Honestly, Cubecart doesn’t, OScommerce doesn’t, what is the deal?

Interspire does not do it either when you select payment of check or money order (mail order form) they provide this sentence: “Mail a check or money order in US funds, along with a printed order summary, to:” But don’t actually provide the order summary. I guess you have to wait for the email and print it out? What if you don’t get it? Why not just put the order summary on that page?

When you pay with a credit card through authorize.net Interspire provides a link for the order summary, but again, why not put the order summary on that page? There is a ton of whitespace on it, fill that space up!

The email summaries they send are nice, put that content on the page seen after checkout.

SEO

I’ve got no complaints about the SEO for interspire’s cart. They support friendly URLS, give you control over your meta tags (not so necessary but nice) and page titles (very necessary). There are no duplicate content issues with non-canonical URLs like you’ll find in Cubecart with their reviews, or in OScommerce with a new URL for each way to view a product (from a category, from each category, from any category, or from the bestseller list or search results, blech!). There is nice keyword rich breadcrumb navigation, a nice text menu. From an SEO perspective it is an almost perfect platform. The one thing I might want is more product menu control.

For instance, it just lists all top level categories in alphabetical order. Great, but maybe I want to go two levels deep on my menu. Maybe I’d like to list a few of my most popular products indented under the category they belong too. Giving such products prominent menu links increases their intra-site link popularity, and is something I might want to do.

Category Management & Menus

Category management is good, other than the things mentioned above. I can drag categories to reorder them (though with a lot of categories, a numbering system might be easier). Categories can have their own custom template specified for display, which is a really cool feature, they can have images and you have full control over their title and meta tags. All told, Interspire has a fine category system.

On the menus, as I mentioned above, I’d like a little more control. I’d especially like the ability to put in headings (since I can’t do multi-level category listings). For instance say I ran a site for “Birds and Blooms” (a real-life gardening & birding magazine) I might want a heading for “Birds” with all the applicable product categories below it, and one for “Blooms”. This can be achieved with allowing selective multi-level display of categories (showing the top level category, and the next level down where indicated by the admin). Or with a sectioning system, either way, it’d be a good feature.

Customizing Templates

Interspire is by far, hands down, the easiest cart I’ve ever had to skin, it is miles ahead of anything else. First of all, it has a wordpress like one-click install of a new template you can download from their free template library. Chances are you’ll find one with a color scheme you like, then you can easily do the few customizations you need to do, such as specifying your logo image.

Secondly, they have an awesome inline-editing tool whereby if you’re logged in as an admin and you’re viewing the site you have the option to edit the page you’re currently viewing. It is an extremely intuitive tool, I could figure it out without looking at any reference documentation. You can do some point-click-drag editing dragging boxes around the page, or open up the files (again direct from this interface) and move the content that way. You can also use this tool to discover which files are responsible for markup you’re selling, it tells you. No more having to play “guess the template” when figuring out which file you need to open to make a small change to your template.

Thirdly, their markup is extremely clean, well commented, and intuitively named. A CSS class name lets you know what it is for, it isn’t just some programmer’s shorthand like .crc (center right column? I’d rather not guess thank you). So if you do need to do some hard editing (and I didn’t) you’re good to go.

You can also of course edit the textual content of various pages from the backend, and in fact the cart even includes a quasi CMS for articles/pages of content or store news. As well as the content of any store emails.

The one problem with this whole system is upgrades can break your templates, even the ones you’ve gotten from Interspire, and to fix it you need to get the new version that they provide, which overwrites all your changes. It would be nice if, perhaps, it only overwrote the templates you had not changed from the default, and for templates you HAD changed it gave you a side by side comparison to help you port over the changes to the new files… like vBulletin does it for instance.

So, the few minor changes I’ve made have to be redone at times, and that does get annoying.

Adding Products

Interspire has some of the best product adding features I’ve seen, with a few caveats. You can easily add all the product information, all the standard stuff, they have a very nice WYSIWYG editor, and it is easily to select one or more categories. They also allow you to select shipping weight AND dimensions (though they do not use those dimensions with UPS). You can also add a fixed shipping cost, on the product (most other carts allow that merely for your whole store) and you can offer free shipping, again, just on that one product. I appreciate that flexibility.

You can also turn on inventory tracking on a product by product basis, there are options for fill-in-the-blank fields for customers to fill in during checkout, and product level discounts, all really accessible. One really cool feature I’ve not seen elsewhere is the option to specify the template file for displaying the product page. This means that you can use different templates for different products really easily, how cool is that?

There are also tags, page titles, meta information, all for you to fill out as well, and some accounting software settings I don’t use, but if you want to integrate your cart with accounting software, I’m sure you’d like them.

The images leave something to be desired. I’ve seen carts that allow one image, and I’ve seen carts that allow more than one. Never have I seen a cart that allows 5 images, but not more. It would seem to me once you code the many::one image to product relationship, your software should be able to support any number of images, or certainly more than 5. This arbitrarily limit should be lifted. You should be able to upload any number of images that are automatically resized into thumbnails for a public gallery page as necessary.

Finally, there are product variations….

Product Variations

The main problem with Interspire’s shopping cart is their horrible product variation system. By “product variation system” I mean that system found in shopping carts whereby you can create options for a product, such as colors, or sizes, thus allowing someone to buy a shirt in x-large and green.

The way Interspire has their system is extremely powerful, more powerful in fact than most other carts I’ve tried, it is also extremely excruciating to work with.

The power, and the problem, is that Interspire allows you to set option details for every possible configuration. Blue in small, blue in medium, blue in large, blue in x-large, green in small, green in medium, green in large, green in x-large. And so on. And when I say they “allow” you to do this, I really mean require, because there is no other way to use their system. So, thinking ahead, what you end up having to do is fill out a row of form fields (including possible image upload) for the product of the number of product options multiplied together.

If your product has only a few scant options, this is not a big deal, but if your product has more options, boy howdy. Suppose you were selling engagement rings, you have a ring and first you must choose a ring size, 5-15, in whole and half sizes. 20 options right there. Then you have to choose a finish (silver, 10k, 18k, 24k white or yellow golds, platinum, tungsten, titanium, carbon, stainless steel). 12 more possibilities. Then you need to choose diamond size, setting, and cut. Say 6 different options for each. Giftbox, yes or no? 2 choices. So, just in this example, you have 20*12*6*6*6*2 = 103,680 rows of form fields to fill out. This is not a joke, this is not an error, this is the sad truth. I’ve had browsers crash using their shopping cart because I did not have enough RAM to display the page that was generated. Another user posted a complaint on their forum and for good measure he copied and pasted the entire thing into the forum, it took him over 25 posts to get it all (with the per post character limit).

Technical issues aside, how do they expect someone to sit and fill out all that information? The cheapest data entry person in the world is still going to break your budget for having to do that much work for a single product, yes, a single product. You’ll have to do this for each product on your site that has options.

Every other cart I have ever seen does this better. For instance, a 1 carat diamond may add $1000 to the base price, you don’t have to type that in a thousand times, you type it in once and the software knows to apply it to every size, setting, and cut option. Doing these kind of repetitive iterations are why computers were invented in the first place, why does Interspire not take advantage of that ability?

Now, they way they do it is powerful. For instance suppose one particular build is more expensive than others, say, a size 15 ring costs more because it uses more metal, but how much more it costs depends on the metal used. Using their system I could go in and specifically define this, I can’t do that with other carts. But with other carts I can otherwise get the product entered in minutes, not weeks.

I don’t know why they have not fixed this yet. As I said before I was asked by their CEO 9 months ago to review their software, and I noticed this issue right away, and I told them about it, and they said they’d fix it. Maybe there was a misunderstanding, but it hasn’t been fixed, and me waiting for it to be fixed is why this review is so late.

They don’t have to scrap their variation system entirely, they merely need to make two front ends for it. One, allowing the computer to take user-inputted rules and fill in all the blanks, and the other to allow the user to go in and manually edit any one of the rows as needed. They can even do it with a little javascript scriptlet. In fact, if they don’t do this, I may hire someone to do it myself, it’d be an extremely small job, and probably take a day of work at the most. It would be the equivalent of using excel or another spreadsheet, highlighting a column, and doing “fill down” with some value.

The second problem with product variations is the frontend. The way they are displayed in the template is completely obtuse and hinders purchase decision making by the consumer. Many shopping carts will display the options, and next to them they will display the price for that option. Interspire does not, instead they force you to select the option and then the price on the page changes, and if you’re good at mental math maybe you can do a quick calculation in your head to figure out how much that option cost you. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t want to force my users to have to do mental math to spend money with me. I want to make it as easy as possible for them to spend money with me.

Users who use price in their purchase decision (which is most users) will want to know how much options cost them up front without having to play “tour the dropdown list.” Like in a restaurant you can get a steak, smothered with mushrooms is a dollar, cheese is another dollar, add salad bar for $3.99. Users then make a decision based on how much they want to eat and how much they want to spend. Contrast that with just a vague mention on the menu of “Mushrooms and cheese are extra, as is salad bar, when you order your server will tell you how much extra.” Who would like that?

I prefer using radio buttons for option selections (like OSCommerce does I believe) with the price increase (or decrease) displayed next to each option. Users can then easily see what options cost them and make their decision appropriately.

I’m not saying Interspire has to do it only my way, but doing it only the way they currently do it is a bad idea, they should at the very least provide an option to store admins for a variety of ways to display product options.

Authorize.net Integration

I don’t try out every payment gateway when I review a shopping cart, I try out the ones I use, and I use authorize.net.

Interspire’s integration leaves something to be desired, specifically they leave many fields blank, and improperly use others. This limits the usefulness of Authorize.net. I’ve had a custom cart developed, and paid less than $1000 for it, and that included an entire site, I paid less for it than what Interspire charges for their best cart, and it included a more fleshed out Authorize.net connection function.

To be specific, in the below transaction receipt EVERY FIELD under “Billing Information” should be filled out and EVERY FIELD under “Shipping Information” should be filled out. Additionally, under “Order Information” the “Description” field should not just redundantly list the order number. It should, instead, list the actual description of your order, ie, the contents of it. “1 diamond ring, pack of cheetos” like most other carts do, and like what Authorize.net says the field is supposed to be used for.

Merchant : StoreName.com (5555555)
Date/Time : 11-May-2009 02:42:07 PM

========= ORDER INFORMATION =========
Invoice : 1
Description : Your Order From StoreName (#1)
Amount : 49.95 (USD)
Payment Method : Visa
Type : Authorization and Capture

============== RESULTS ==============
Response : This transaction has been approved.
Authorization Code : 05555B
Transaction ID : 555555555555
Address Verification : Street Address: Match — First 5 Digits of Zip:
Match

==== CUSTOMER BILLING INFORMATION ===
Customer ID :
First Name : joe
Last Name : smith
Company :
Address : 123 Main Street
City : Springfield
State/Province : MS
Zip/Postal Code : 55555
Country :
Phone :
Fax :
E-Mail :

==== CUSTOMER SHIPPING INFORMATION ===
First Name :
Last Name :
Company :
Address :
City :
State/Province :
Zip/Postal Code :
Country :

======= ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ======
Tax :
Duty :
Freight :
Tax Exempt :
PO Number :

Shipping

Like most carts there is a bevy of shipping options, the one thing I care about though is missing. Support for UPS shipping based on package dimensions. I don’t know if most shopping cart developers get that two boxes can weigh the exact same amount and yet one can cost hundreds of more dollars to ship because of product dimensions, this is true on air and International shipping. UPS supports this in their API, Interspire allows you to specify dimensions on the product screens, why not connect the dots? This feels like a perpetual complaint of mine, most carts fall short here. OScommerce has this as a contribution you can install, CREloaded contains this out of the box. And X-cart supposedly does too. Interspire though falls short. Supposedly this is high on their list of priorities to add in the future though.

One thing they do that is really nice, that some other carts do not do, is have shipping zones. So you can offer say, UPS for domestic shipping and USPS for international, or free domestic and paid international. This is one thing I miss with my OScommerce stores.

Reporting

Interspire has amazing profession reporting features, blowing any other cart I’ve used out of the water. Easy Google analytics and Adwords integration, real-time graph generation, all out awesome stuff.

But perhaps the most important report they left off.

This is something where I think sometimes the developers could benefit from shadowing an actual merchant, or perhaps a US merchant, maybe it is different in Australia. Here, in the US, most merchant have to collect sales tax, and like every other cart Interspire has a zone system for sales tax collection settings. But, in addition to collecting tax, we then have to forward that tax money to our state governments, usually once a month, sometimes more or less often. Most shopping carts include a “sales tax report” that lists the taxes collected by month. This is awesome, this is great, this is absolutely necessary. Without such a report you need to go through, viewing each order, and manually add up by hand the tax collected. Actually, last time I had to do this manually, I used an custom SQL query I ran against the database directly, but still, it took more work than what I can do now with other carts, which is click a link in the admin and get a list of monthly revenue with tax & shipping broken out.

Minor Bugs

Interspire doesn’t list the version number of your current install in the backend, nor is it easily found in the header of source files. At one point I forgot which version I was running and had to go look at the original zip file from the original download. This is just weird. They do send upgrade notices telling you of a new version, but they don’t let you know what version you currently have. I’ve never seen any software, shopping cart or otherwise, that doesn’t remind you which version you’re running in the backend.

There is no way to set an SSL domain. You can turn SSL on or off, but not set your SSL domain. I’ve never seen another cart leave that out, you shouldn’t always assume that if your URL is www.example.com your SSL domain will be exactly the same, at the very least “www” usually isn’t included, but sometimes (especially people on shared hosts who use shared SSL) it is something wholly different.

Order Management

Their Order Management is awkward, and perhaps better than Cubecart, but I like OScommerce over Interspire here. First of all, they make it somewhat difficult to email customers a message about their order. For one, you can’t even do it unless you buy the most expensive cart (emailing customers about their order is now a premium option say what?), then it is just awkward. You can’t do it on main order screen, or while updating an order to mark it as shipped with a tracking number. You must click a message link to open a new page to view or send any messages, then there is no way back, you can only go to your mass order list and find the order you were working on again, not that easy to use. Time is money and the extra time it takes to email customers, something that will need to be done often, hurts. I much prefer OScommerce. You have a checkbox to indicate if the customer will be emailed when you update the status, yes or no, on every status update. This is really nice. And then of course a text box for putting in comments that can be included with any such update. Quick, easy, powerful. This is the type of feature you take for granted in software like OSC, but when it is gone you realize how important it was.

To make this even worse, the message you enter with Interspire doesn’t even get emailed to them. They mere get emailed that a message was sent, but to read it the customer has to visit your site and login. What a hassle. Why not just email them the message, add a link to reply if you want to track replies, but let the customer read the notice from their email software.

Final Thoughts

I don’t know how to feel about Interspire. On one hand, they have a nice outreach system at ideas.interspire.com and at first blush they seem to really care to make the product their customer’s want. On the other hand there was this snafu over the product variation upgrade I was told would be included in a release, and I’ve also heard reports of them censoring ideas posted when they involve pricing complaints. Then yes, the pricing. Interspire is one of the best carts I’ve used. The issues I have with them are issues I feel strongly about, but I also think they could be easily rectified making Interspire a cart that fits my needs perfectly. On the other hand they’re expensive, and they seem like a greedy company that will manipulate their upgrade policy to get the most possible dollars from their customers in a sly way. If they really wanted more money they could just charge more up front, but they don’t, so people feel tricked.

In the end I would call Interspire a Ferrari with no wheels stuck up on cinder blocks. It is high end, with a lot of features, and a high cost of ownership what with repair costs and insurance. But because of the hobbling of the product variation system it really doesn’t have the wheels to make it go.

Can I recommend them? The only thing that gives me pause is their pricing. I’ve found tons and tons and tons of complaints on the Internet about their pricing and upgrade policies. Do I want to recommend them and get you locked into having to pay thousands of dollars a year for minor upgrades? Could you find other carts that do better or the same, for less money? I think their cart is worth the initial price tag, I’m just not sure they as a company care about the customer so much as the customer’s wallet and how best to milk it. I also, obviously, cannot recommend them for any site that needs to ship large packages, or sells any product that needs variations or options, if you try to use it with either of those you’ll just be swimming up stream.

If Interspire fixed their product variations and released an equivalent of OScommerce’s UPS XML Dimensional Support contribution, and I got a better vibe from them in regards to upgrade pricing, such as a change in their policy, and their importers work. I would probably import at least one, possible more, of my existing stores onto their software. But there are a lot of “if’s” there. So until all that happens, I think I’ll have to keep looking for my vBulletin of the shopping cart world.

The next cart I plan to review is X-Cart, and as always if you’re a shopping cart company I’d be glad to review your software.

I first got a Wells Fargo merchant account with one business and after one year they jacked up the rate so I switched. Later when I was opening another business I got another account from them. I mentioned my previous experience and the guy said they would not jack up the rate or if they did I could cancel.

Wells Fargo you see operates with the classic bait and switch sales scam.

In truth my rate was jacked up, so I called the same guy who helped me last time Wells Fargo jacked up my rate increase, and together we set up a new account.

These were not small rate increases, these were large rate increases. Two totalling 0.8%. Which is huge. On $10,000 of volume in a month that’ll cost you $80, if you process more it’ll increase. It was going to cost me more. I was looking at an increase of a monthly fee of over $200 a month. What if your phone company could jack up your wireless rate in mid contract?

Wells Fargo claims that this increase was passed down from Visa & Mastercard. I don’t buy it. Why don’t I buy it? Because I have two merchant accounts, and my other one did get a rate increase as well at the same time. How much was my rate increase with the other account? 0.05%. Big difference.

So now, I call Wells Fargo to cancel, because why not? I’ve got another account already set up. They tell me I signed a three year contract and there is a $500 cancellation fee. I read the contract I have, the maximum cancellation fee is $200, and it was only if cancelled in less than 2 years, not 3. Are they rewriting contracts now? In addition to of course having their sales rep mislead me to originally get me to sign up?

Unfortunately I feel kinda stuck. Terms within the agreement limit my legal options, and terms within the agreement indicate that if I merely ceased using them it’d constitute termination. I don’t see how they feel they can change some terms without changing other terms. My only hope is pressure, if this post gets ranked high on Google they may cancel my account for me just to shut me up (and if you folks wanna link to this post to help, it’d be awesome). I’ll also be pursuing options with my state attorney general, and with the BBB.

In the meantime, let me recommend Mike Montefusco. mmontefusco AT banccard DOT com. He is the one who has twice helped me out after Wells Fargo jacked up my rate, and the merchant accounts he has gotten me have always had competitive rates and have never had their own rates jacked up by as much as .4% at one time like Wells Fargo. If you need a merchant account, contact him.

The small bugs I mentioned in my above review are still not fixed, and that is just indicative of an overall culture of incompetence on behalf of the CubeCart developers. They remind me of building contracts who do just the bare minimum to get by. Far too many commonly desired features, needed features, features that would be standard in other carts, are passed off to third party developers. A common excuse given on CubeCart’s official forums is that such-and-such feature exists as a third party hack and so doesn’t need to be a part of the official core or supported as such (such as… a contact us form. CubeCart doesn’t come with a way for customers to contact the store owner through the website, you need a third party mod to do that. Unbelievable? Believe it). Unless you pay more for it, official support is all but absent, it is nearly impossible to get a word from a developer. Contrast that with vBulletin (which is in my opinion the best produced software in this class), which has rampant official support on their forums, ticket system, and otherwise.

The backend system, which initially seemed nicely designed, is anything but. When you actually start needing to do work on it, you often have to play “guess the file” to figure out which file controls which feature. Asking a developer which file it is so you could do the fix yourself would be a simple question for them to answer, but they do not. Another annoyance is their official site requires no less than 4 separate logins for 4 separate systems to use fully. I kid you not.

Then there are all the little annoyances. They give you the option to put a captcha on everything, or nothing, with no middle ground. So you can choose to not have a captcha on user reviews, email to a friend features, and email contract forms, or you can choose to have a captcha in all those places that need one, but also in the checkout form just so you can be sure that no less-than-savvy perhaps-elderly person ever buys a product from you, and of course all those spam bots with credit cards don’t buy Christmas presents through your site. What does a spam bot want for Christmas? I don’t know, but apparently the developers at CubeCart wanted to be sure that they couldn’t buy from you! (note, no other cart does this).

Then there are the emails, the email confirming an order before an order is complete is both annoying, and confusing, and can cost you money. One of the most popular third party modules out there turns this off. Does CubeCart consider adding a simple admin option in an update to turn it off? No, because their culture of incompetence means that if a third party individual provides a hack, let their customers mess with it, they don’t need to include that feature. Also consequently stock levels are decreased by these incomplete orders, which makes their stock management nearly worthless.

There are many minor issues and bugs that if I were hiring someone to code this for me custom, I would not have released final payment yet because they aren’t fixed, really simple fixes that just go ignored.

They also do not provide an easy way to add new order statuses outside of the default. Many times a store owner will be able to do this from the admin area of the cart, but not with CubeCart. You need to edit at least two files, I say at least two because I’ve found one and made edits but it hasn’t stuck, so there must be another, which I’ve been unable to find, and yes, I’ve asked for help. No such luck there. If this were a forum script it would be equivalent to not allowing the creation, edit, or deletion of usergroups in the admin backend.

All told the admin options of CubeCart are probably the weakest of any cart I’ve seen. Usually most software in this class has pages of admin options, CubeCart has a page. When you just install it with default settings this doesn’t matter, but as you use the software for a longer period of time and start to want to change things, this is a huge roadblock you run into.

Order management is also lacking. The inability to search for orders by customer name is a real hassle. You can search for customers, and then view orders for that customer, but it is very easy to cut those steps in half, and most shopping carts do that. Then the way they display order information means that if a customer has a longer name or address all of it is not available on the screen at one time, you literally have to scroll multiple text boxes to view it all, which increased the labor needed to process each order for shipping. Finally, they need to offer more control on order-page-based email communications with customers.

I’ve been asked by the developers of both X-Cart and Interspire to review their carts, and I plan to do so in the coming months. Whichever one I like more I’ll likely switch my CubeCart sites to, and recommend instead. I’ve already used Interspire (started my testing of it) and their admin area is awesome, except for one issue, which I’ve informed the CEO about, and he has told me they will fix it in the next version. I’ve not yet started testing the brand new version of X-Cart, but the press release lists some new features that make me drool. Interspire is a lot more expensive, but X-Cart is on parity with CubeCart price wise, and so if you need a cart to use right now and can’t wait for my reviews, perhaps try one of these.

Unfortunately, I can sum up the software in one word, amateurish.

Installation is a little abnormal as they really want you to turn on full 777 permissions for various different folders so that files can be written. Why do it this way? I don’t know, but then of course Apache ends up being the owner of said files and I had to go in through SSH as root to reassign ownership back to the user account so that I could use it to edit files, all told, that’s much more complicated than say WordPress or vBulletin, which are the standards (in my opinion) to which all other programs should hold themselves.

Once installed I opened up a file to check it out and start skinning the store, and my eyes were blasted by HTML I have not seen since the 90s, honest. All tags are capitalized, there is copious use of <CENTER> and <FONT> and nested tables galore.

Adding insult to injury the developers, for whatever reason, failed to design their software using includes for the header. Seriously, there is no header include for this software. If you want to edit the code that makes up the header you must in fact edit every file. Even the <title> tag must be individually edited in every file.

This all makes me wonder, there is a menu include, and a footer include. Additionally there is a tag system whereby content can be inserts into the design much like WordPress, and yet for some very basic parts of the site these features were not used.

Which is how I’ve come to the word amateurish. It isn’t that the software is wholly old fashioned, out of date, or obsolete, it is that it was built seemingly in an amateurish way, ie, not professional.

I almost at this point decided to just give in and use CubeCart for my next ecommerce project, but I got this Avactis license for free, and so I thought I might as well make the best of it. Plus I felt that to write a good and honest review I really needed to see the software through.

My main worry of course was that the amateurish markup would permeate the rest of the code and result in other problems, I wish I could say my worry was unfounded.

Proceeding to skin their tagging system for doing the templating was cumbersome and unintuitive. It is as if they tried to make up for the lack of a basic header include with extraneous includes elsewhere. For instance the main menu is made up of no less than 9 templates that I can find, the actual functions to print the links themselves are buried elsewhere, and I couldn’t find them. A seasoned developer might say that to change a link to indicate a current location one could just change a CSS class, but not this software, they need an extra template for each individual menu link status.

I ran into this same problem when dealing with images. I was going to do the typical thing I do and just upload larger or irregularly sized images and in the code set a maximum width that would then make them all line up or otherwise be the same size. Where would one expect to find the code that outputs an image on the product page? Well could it be in avactis-templates/catalog/product-info/default/product-info.tpl.html? You’d think so, but no, it isn’t. <?php ProductSmallImage(); ?> is all you get. There are no other applicable templates in that directory. So next I checked all the templates in the avactis-templates/catalog/product-images/default/ directory. No go there either. I looked all over for it, in the files that you get with the zip, in the files the program creates on your server during install, I couldn’t find it. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to find it.

See, in my opinion the developers of Avactis don’t quite understand what exactly they’re trying to do. Everyone hates OScommerce because the layout is not separate from the programming, making it a pain to skin. Avactis sells itself as a cart that does have separation but, really, they don’t. They’re using a function buried somewhere to print an IMG tag, that is layout, not programming.

This is not an isolated example, this is indicative of the software as a whole. They’re way overusing their tagging system or whatever they want to call it and it doesn’t work well.

Moving on, the admin area has some good parts and bad parts. The available store settings are sparse, there are some weird defaults you must get rid of yourself. I like, overall, the product & category management, but much of it is done with popup windows, which are annoying. I know the developers know how to do layer based DHTML popups, which are much better to use. I know they know how to use those because some of the neatest features of the admin backend use them, so why not use them to replace the standard popups? I don’t know.

They have a feature I’ve not seen elsewhere that I like that allows you to specify product types, meaning you can set some standard features for a single type of product and then when adding a new product you select that type and the defaults get populated. But here is the thing, when adding a new product if you don’t select a type it doesn’t let you add the product, and there is no such thing as a default product type. So, every time you add a product a popup window opens, then you select the product type, and the page reloads, every time. Even if you only have 1 product type, you have to jump through this extra hoop every time you add a product. Obviously the intuitive thing would be to set a default that automatically loads, saving you an unnecessary step.

The supported payment and shipping options is below average for a shopping cart, though the big ones are provided. There is also less flexibility in customizing the couple such modules that I used as opposed to what I’ve gotten in OScommerce and CubeCart.

After I thought I was done I decided to test the checkout, which, unfortunately, is cumbersome. The person has to click fully far too much to check out. You hit checkout and you get a cart summary and a billing & shipping address field. Pretty standard. Then you hit a button at the bottom called “Place Order.” Okay, you click that, and your order is not placed, maybe the button should say something else? The next page is for picking shipping & payment method. Then again, a “Place Order” button. This time my order must really be getting placed right? Nope, next page is an order confirmation screen, this time the button at the bottom says “Confirm Order” so really, this time it must be done? Nope. You click confirm order and your order gets entered into the database & you get an email thanking you for your order… but it isn’t placed, because you haven’t paid for it yet, you’ve picked your payment method, but not made payment. How many customers get confused because of that? CubeCart does it too, but there is a free community contribution to turn it off.

Now, this unmodded unhacked installation also threw me bugs when I tried to turn on a check payment method. Additionally the email sent to thank you for your non-paid-for order, that, by the way, says nothing about the order needing to be paid for still, has a few typos in it. Which brings me back to amateurish.

Now, look at the order summary too:

Subtotal of Items: $49.95
Global Discount: $0.00
Promo Code Discount: $0.00
Quantity Discount: $0.00
Discounted Subtotal: $49.95
Shipping & Handling: $13.81

One thing Avactis isn’t shy on is providing you ways to provide discounts, lots of functionality for automatic discounts… which I do not want to use, and if I’m not using them perhaps you don’t need to let my customer know how much of a miser I am?

There are other shortcomings as well, but this review is getting long enough, suffice it to say Avactis is no CubeCart, it isn’t even OScommerce. Unless someone comes by offering me another free cart that I haven’t tried yet, I’ll be going back to CubeCart 4 for my next ecommerce project, and I recommend you do as well.

Is it really so hard to think of an original idea or angle? Apparently so, for what I had feared did come to pass. As you may recall in my original introduction to this site I said that while I was going to be upfront with everything about it, I hoped that no one would decide to merely copy me, and instead use my method as inspiration to come up with their own angle or product.

Yet, one loser did copy my site, and not only did he copy it, he asked for advice on it here in the forums, he spammed my blog to promote it, and on other forums he more or less assumed my identity by appropriating my gardening inspiration for making the site, and my webmaster inspiration for making the site. He was so dishonest he could not even admit on a money making forum that he stole the idea, and instead had to copy elements from my initial blog post to tell to others to talk up his own ego. Then, on a gardening forum, he also copied elements from my initial blog post explaining how he was looking for a tumbler for his own garden. This type of blatant dishonesty is so extremely annoying and it really ground my gears.

This episode has also really been the last straw for me on two fronts. I had always considered officially registering the copyrights to my sites, but it was always something I put off. No longer, had I registered the copyright to my compost tumbler site I could have bullied this weasel for what is likely all his cash, when you officially register your copyrights you can get statutory damages, the threat of which is usually enough to get a fat settlement check from the fool dumb enough to copy your intellectual property. Ask anyone who had stolen images from Corbis. Without an official registration you can only get actual damages (his pitiful profits) and an injunction (aka, get his website taken down, which is something I accomplished with DMCA notices anyways). I will be writing a long article on copyrights and registrations soon, based on what I learned in this process.

The second thing is I do not think I will share any more new sites publicly again, everything just ends up being copied. Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was sharing the money making potential of my coupon site (which I had stumbled across through revenue experimentation on another of my sites). When I did so there were less than 10 main sites out there competing, afterwards it blossomed into hundreds, I had one Indian group rip off multiple of my sites to copy my cross linking methods. The competition surely hit my rankings and my income. I will of course continue to share things in the private area of Website Publisher’s forums, but not publicly in blogs and what not.

However, I did say I would share information from my one product ecommerce site, and so, here I am, one year later.

The site has been a tremendous success. Surprisingly enough it hasn’t even been seasonal, I figured mostly lots of sales in the Spring, and not much the rest of the year. I was wrong. In fact December has been one of my highest sales months so far (apparently, all the cool gardeners want compost tumblers for Christmas).

Since it started just a year and a week ago (more or less) I’ve had over 340 sales. That averages just under 1 a day, and for most of the year I had poor search engine rankings. My rankings have really started coming on strong since January though, and I’m now #1 on MSN for my target keywords, and on Google I keep bouncing between 4 and 7. I’m not getting much love from Yahoo, so I do fear an MS/Yahoo merger that could result in MSN ending up with Yahoo algorithm.

Anyways, profit margins are slim on the product which means credit card processing fees hurt my overall margins (the fee of probably around 3% aggregate is on the total cost, not my profit, which is only around 20%. So on a $200 item, the fee is $6, my margin is $40, so the fee is 15% of my margin, yikes!) but what can you do? Still, the site is very profitable for me.

Since the search engine rankings have improved I’ve been doing at least 3 sales a day, some days as high as 5 or 6, and it is still just April, much of the country is too cold to do much gardening yet.

My marketing plan has worked well. PPC advertising was profitable and helped keep the sales coming in before my organic SEO started paying off, then of course the plan to reach out to bloggers for reviews has to have contributed to my SEO success, I’ve gotten lots of nice incoming links from blogs (without spamming comments). I’m doing another set of blogger reviews this Spring, which should hopefully help cement my position in the top three of Google.

One thing I regret not doing earlier is to offer a mail order form on the site. Some people prefer to send checks rather than use credit cards online, and when they do so I have zero risk of a chargeback and don’t have to pay any credit card processing fees. Really, a mail order form is a great idea.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that for March (and surely for April) the compost tumbler site beat my sword ecommerce business in total revenue (if not total profit), I really never expected that (though it won’t last, my sword business has new developments that will take off this year). When I made the site I was just hoping for profitability, maybe one sale a day, and averaging three now it is very nice. I’m guessing through the summer, especially if I improve my SERP positions even more, I’ll get up to averaging 5 a day.

Let me take this time now to, yet again, recommend ecommerce. You don’t need a big operation, a small operation selling just one product can work well, especially if you’ve got related content sites for cross promotion. Think of a product or something that would compliment your content sites well, and read the other blog posts and articles I’ve written on the subject. Just don’t copy my sites, please.