I purchased 6 'kits' for $7140 CND in October of 2003. This amount was financed by a company that Stores Online set up and the payments run $338.49 a month for 2 years. Neither they, nor I have missed a payment since I signed up. They take they're money like clockwork!
I activated one of them, a 'storefront' in January of 2004. The other 5 store fronts I intended to sell to people that I knew wanted ‘easy to use' ‘plug n' play' ecommerce storefronts. I wanted to test the product, and make some money to pay for it, before reselling the rest of the storefront.
**The guy that sold me the store fronts KNEW that this was my intention when I signed up. THAT was the reason for buying 6 rather than 3.
The 'easy to use, point and click' method of creating the storefront was a nightmare. You HAVE to know HTML to use this interface, if you want to make your site look decent. Tech support, by the way, knows NOTHING about HTML and could provide NO help or information on it. I know HTML, VERY well, and it was STILL a hassle!!
The tech support was no better than the product, actually worse; they were rude, short and utterly unhelpful. There was one exception. After a week of fighting with them I finally found a tech that knew what they were doing and corrected the problem in 5 minutes.
But it was a case of spending hours a day in the online chats to find the ONE person that knew anything.
Once the storefront was active and up, I thought my problems were over. This was NOT the case. A little over a week ago, my supplier discontinued one of the products I am selling online. I went to go into the section of the storefront to delete the product and found out that NONE of the areas of the storefront that modified the online store worked. I could get into the stats and see what orders were made, but I cannot access the areas that modify the pages, products, forms, or ordering rules.
I emailed and went into online chat, and they told me that the servers had been down. Then that they had been upgraded.
I got an email response that they were up and running. They weren't. I went BACK to online chat. Was told it would be 15 minutes, so sorry for any inconvenience.
Next day, still down. I emailed them again. Was told at that point that it was MY computer. Went BACK to chat, was told it was my computer again, but no fix was offered in chat, I had to get to a 'real world meeting' so tech said she would email me the fix. I never got that email.
Went BACK into chat and demanded to know how to get my money back and shut this off. They stead fastly ignored that questions and proceeded to tell me to just click this and it will work. And that it was MY computer.
I have tried to access the system with 4 different computers, 3 different OS's, one of which was off site, so different ISP as well. Still can't access the areas of the storefront that manipulate the products or how the website looks. Can't activate or build any of the kits that aren't activated yet. I tried just to see if I could get into them.
Stay away from this company. They are good at taking your money and promising the moon and stars, but don't deliver.
The product is NOT user friendly and the support system only works if you live in a perfect world and you don't actually need their help with anything.
Kim
Chatham, Ontario
Canada