I don’t have the time or patience to learn the ins-and-outs of shopping carts, but I need something. 1Shoppingcart still has the free trial period, so perhaps I’ll take the plunge and try it.

I installed zencart on my site last week after 3 months of using just the Paypal checkout system, which I have to say is pretty good. I put this in as a ‘temporary’ solution because my virtuemart (joomla) broke.

Now I had one customer who had an aversion to Paypal, and since I have merchant facilities that were basically doing nothing, I installed zencart through fantastico in cpanel on hostgator so this person could use her credit card without going through Paypal.

It took me about a week to get it all mostly right, then once i had it setup i made it active.

no sales for 4 days which was unusual, now I have with a friends advice think I have tracked down the problem.

With zencart you are faced with a not insubstantial sign-up form BEFORE you put in your card details / paypal details whatever, and I think customers who are faced with this quickly get put off. The form needs to go in AFTER the customer has bought, that way they have no choice but to put in their details.

KISS principle, but so far I have found no way to do this in zencart, so back to good old Paypal for a while !

Good luck all you Ecommercers, btw, if anyone knows a SIMPLE step by step processor let me know !

Thanks,

Andy.

Note : My application is in asp.net.

I really appreciate your help.

Thank You.

One thing I can’t find out how to do with 1shopping cart is to create a customized form for a particular product – (ie – specific size, colour etc) and it seems to me that there are a few too many negative comments about 1shoppingcart here already for my liking. Anyone suggest another shopping cart solution? cheers, Andy.

BTW, i have found Mailchimp an excellent email marketing system.

Previously to get orders all we had to do was go to the order page, check the orders we want, change screens, the selected orders showed up in a special window, high-light the orders and paste into a Word file and save.

BUT NOW in the last few days 1shoppingcart.com changed the order retrieval process in such a way that it is now labor intensive and orders can no longer be retrieved quickly. In the new, supposedly “improved” process, we must check orders we want, then leave the site and WAIT as the orders go into a cue, and then WAIT to receive an email link. When the email FINALLY arrives, we must go back into the 1shoppingcart.com site to download the orders.

So step one is a big time-wasting go-around. Before it took a very few minutes to get the orders. Now it is a several-step go-around.

Previously an order came as below:

135176017″,”email36@yahoo.com”,”Jane “,”Doe”,”",”123 sw 34th pl”,”apt 90″,”gainesville”,”Florida”,”32608″,”United States”,”123-456-7899″,”",”",”",”",”Jane Doe”,”5411-0211-6211-4011″,”11/2008″,”Mas”,”Offline”,”10/24/2008 1:23:00 PM”,”NAME OF PRODUCT (1)79.95″,”COCHAN”,”84.95″,”0″,”",”",”",
“”,”",”",”",”",”",”",”Jane Doe”,”123 sw 34th pl”,”apt 90″,”gainesville”,
“Florida”,”32608″,”United States”, “UPS ground – US continental”,”5.0″,”",”",”",”",”",”",”",”",”",”0″,”",”",”",”0″,”0″,”US”,”0″

If there are several orders, they came in one after the other. It WAS easy to highlight and pluck out the info, drop into the invoice to process the order. We could merely print out the above to keep as a “raw” order for back up.

Not any more!!!

In the new, supposedly “improved” process, after we FINALLY get the order, it comes in an excel spread sheet with numerous columns. The columns are horizontal -with a zillion columns which spread about three feet horizonally – literally!!! Yes, we CAN cancel some of the columns, BUT it is next to impossible to get one order onto ONE page.

This means in order to print out the spread sheet to keep as a “raw” order, it will print one order across 2 or more pages!!! So to get a “raw” order on ONE page, we must futze around with the spread sheet. Who has time for this?

The order data is all in lower case, which means that it must all be retyped and not just copied and pasted into the invoice. Again, MORE work!!!! Each excel column is narrow, so that the data in it can not be read or viewed without manually altering each column!!! MORE time wasted futzing with the blasted excel spread sheet.

In short, 1shoppingcart.com’s supposed “improvements” require time-consuming, labor intensive work to prepare the data BEFORE one can start processing orders.

So we decided to leave the service for another easier shopping cart. Well, not so fast!!!

1shopping automatically billed us – without checking – for a full year at $599 – $100 more than in the previous year. We were billed on 9/18 and today is 11/4. Since has been more than 30 days since billing us – 1shoppingcart.com will refund ONLY 50% of our $599 or $300!!! We get to eat $300 because we don’t want to deal with the convoluted, labor-intensive, annoying process that 1shoppingcart.com fantasizes is an improvement. Further, if we wait too many more days to cancel, they will pay us back only $150 – 25%!!!!

Do you hear that sucking sound?? Sucking us and our wallet???

At the time that 1shoppingcart.com billed us for the entire year – without checking if we wanted to renew again or if we still wanted to pay for whole year instead of paying monthly – 1shoppingcart.com had the old, better, easier order retrevial system and not the new horrible, labor-intensive, time wasting process. Today was the first time that we encountered this horrible so-called up-grade. Had they had this horrible process when they renewed us, we would have quit immediately. Too bad.

I has increased my sales with he upsell features, and now I am working on using the email marketing portion on the website. Thank you 1shoppingcart for the shove in the right direction.

Rhys C0mley
http://www.AfricanCures.com/