This is a guest post by Scott Carter. 

Six years of experience in ecommerce has taught me one thing: no platform is perfect. They all have pros and cons and often what separates the best from the competition is a handful of features and customer service. I’ve come to accept that I’ll never find the perfect solution without building it myself and let’s face it, ain’t nobody got time for that.

I recently had a project come up and spent a lot of time testing different platforms to find one that could handle digital products the best. For various reasons I settled on Bigcommerce and began building out the store. I knew from reading the Ultimate Bigcommerce review that I shouldn’t expect great things from their existing templates and that turned out to be true. They were pretty generic and didn’t suit my needs, so I began adapting a new one to the platform.

That’s when the fun began. To put it nicely, the Bigcommerce platform leaves a lot to be desired for programmers and developers. The only real documentation that they provide hasn’t been updated since 2009 and is missing just about all of the variables. It’s useless as anything more than a basic overview of the system and Bigcommerce uses a massive number of variables in their template designs, which means that you’re going to need to know what they are and how they work. There are a number of “Advanced Tutorials” published in their knowledgebase and on the forums that help developers work around some of the items normally covered in documentation, but that just means you have to spend a lot of time searching rather than getting work done. Fortunately a developer named Spring Merchant has created a template variable search on their website which is helpful, but not official or complete. I don’t understand why Bigcommerce can’t provide a complete list themselves. I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve spent trying to find variables and figure out why it is they they do or do not work. If you ask design or programming related questions when you contact support, even if they are specific to Bigcommerce variables, they copy and paste the “Sorry, but we can’t support custom development” response in the live chat window. I would agree with this policy if they provided decent documentation.

That brings us to the next issue: sometimes things just don’t make any sense. If you want to design a new template for Bigcommerce you have to start with an old one in order to be able to view all of the files. FTP and WebDav access doesn’t display all of the files on the server for some reason. You can’t test your new template without making it live on the server because there is no live preview or sandbox environment. To test a new template you have to save a backup of the existing template, upload the test template, make it live, test it, then back it up and re-activate your old template (I’m actually simplifying the description of that process). You also have to manually delete all of the files via FTP or certain images and other items will appear from the old design. Since there is no preview functionality, Bigcommerce’s recommended solution is to setup a trial store to test your design on, but that’s folly since there is no way to backup all of your store settings in order to make sure you’re testing it properly.

Speaking of backups, there is no single click solution to backup your store. Currently you have to perform manual backups in five different areas and as I mentioned, that doesn’t backup the myriad store settings at all. Why can’t there be a single button to backup everything at once?

Then there are the things that just don’t work or even exist. For example, you can’t display the raw product image. A variable to do so doesn’t exist. You can’t rename, add or delete templates – you just have to overwrite existing ones. You can’t display custom fields individually; it’s all or nothing. The login/logout variable doesn’t work outside of the top menu area, and there are many other variables that only work in certain panels or snippets for no apparent reason. There is no short description or excerpt field for products. No subscription based payment option. You can’t configure discounts based on different types of items in the cart, and you can’t automatically select a shipping option in the cart, even if that option is “FREE” and it’s the only option available.

I’ve been in communication with several people at Bigcommerce regarding these issues and after long delays between responses I was told that they are making improvements and that I should post my suggestions to ideas.bigcommerce.com. A quick review of the top issues indicates that there are a lot of other people out there who share my concerns, many posting them years ago, but without any movement from Bigcommerce. Out of the 20 items on the first page only two are in development; one of them has been without an update for almost three months and the other missed the estimate for implementation.

Like so many shopping carts before them, Bigcommerce has grown quickly and done a lot of things right. They provide an affordable solution that has the best product rule set creation tool on the market and their support is excellent as long as you’re just asking basic feature questions. Uptime and server performance are excellent. If Bigcommerce can find a way to implement more of the features their customers are asking for in a timely fashion and significantly improve their documentation and template system they could easily be the platform to beat.

By: Scott Carter is CEO of United Networks, a website development company located in Norfolk, VA. He’s also on the Google+ and the Twitter.

EDITOR NOTE: Ecommerce Platforms is an unbiased ecommerce review site that presents the great, good, bad and ugly of all the ecommerce platforms out there. We love Bigcommerce and recommend their platform to entrepreneurs every day, but no platform is perfect and we feel it’s important to inform our readers of all potential issues with even the best carts out there. 

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’m not a big fan of most ecommerve review sites out there. But there are a couple good ones, one of which is by ecommerce and surfing legend Andrew Bleakley.

Andrew’s review site isn’t like most out there, it’s unbiased, full of great information (especially the comment sections sometimes), and it’s fun to read. We also share a lot of opinions… we both love Shopify and Bigcommerce and really, really hate OS Commerce.

Anyways, late last year Andrew Bleakley was interviewed on a new site called Ecommerce Fuel, and I thought it would be interesting to our readers so I’m going to share it with you:

What do you think of Andrew Bleakley’s opinion on finding an ecommerce platform?

Here are 10 of our favorite online stores that were created after reading one of our reviews:

Stampede Clothing

Smart Dress

Betterbla

Skinny-Teatox

Kuzy

Dahlia

Polly Products

Linus Bikes

Fashion Wonderland

Tint Art

It’s no secret that we don’t like many of the ecommerce platform review sites out there. Most are scams. The review sites simply award the best spots to the company that pays them the largest lump sum, or the highest affiliate fees. Example: “Zippy Cart” – one of the largest ecommerce review sites in the world is simply a “pay-to-play” site where whichever shopping cart pays the most gets the better rating. Their rankings are absurd. Pinnacle Cart #1, Shopping Cart Elite #4, and NO mention of Shopify or Big Cartel? It’s ridiculous. I suspect sites like that semi-blackmail companies… ‘sponsor a review’ or ‘pay for editorial time’ otherwise we won’t review your platform. I hate that crap.

Anyways, I say all this mostly because I feel like ranting. It’s my blog and I’m allowed to rant every now and then. But also because I’m sick of people thinking that’s how this site works. We do not accept lump sums of money to increase a carts ranking. We get emails almost every day from marketing and affiliate departments, even some pretty well known CEOs offering us very good money to either rank their cart, or move them from #6 to #2 or whatever. We refuse every time.

The whole point of this site is we are an UNBIASED review site. This isn’t a full-time job for us, we review and post articles in our spare time.  We do this for fun, and we do it to warn people of the bad online store builders (OS Commerce!) and tell people about the good ones (Shopify, Bigcommerce, Corecommerce, etc.)

Now having said that we do have affiliate links in our articles for some of our carts. So yes, this site does generate a bit of revenue for us. But money does not play any role in our reviews or rankings. For example, Volusion has a very generous affiliate program where they pay lots of money if we bring them a customer. That didn’t stop us from demoting them (significantly) when we felt they didn’t deserve their ranking anymore. Some of the carts we recommend to people we’re not even members of their affiliate program so we don’t get any kickback at all.

Anyways, I just wanted to get that off my chest. To repeat, for all those affiliate managers and ecommerce platform executives that are reading: no you cannot pay to have your cart reviewed. No you cannot pay to have us bump your ranking up. 

Thanks to all our loyal readers. We really appreciate your support. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, debate, argue, and of course add me to Twitter.

Here’s the fun part… can you guess which is blue? Since Google Trends only allows me to measure five search terms at a time, I chose: Bigcommerce, Volusion, Shopify, Core Commerce and 3dCart. Which ecommerce platform is exploding in US search volume? That’s Shopify.

Of course search volume doesn’t exactly represent how fast each platform is growing, but it’s a fun way to gauge public interest. Clearly there are a lot of people Googling “Shopify” and Volusion is doing pretty well too, although they do seem to have plateaued a bit. It seems to me that Bigcommerce could be at the beginning of a steep climb, which should be no surprise to anybody.

Anyways, congratulations to Shopify for peaking the interest of many and winning the US search volume award by a landslide. If you would like to try using Google Trends yourself, go here: http://www.google.com/trends/

Does my Google Trends graph surprise any of you? Let me know what you think in the comments. Also, as always feel free to find me in the Twittersphere.

Today we decided to remove 1.5 stars from Volusion‘s ranking, moving them from 3rd place to 7th place on our Top 10 Ecommerce Platform List. Here’s a little video I made about it:

James and I have been recommending Volusion to individuals looking to sell online for well over a year now. After countless emails and comments complaining about Volusion downtime, bandwidth charges and customer support, and now looking at Volusion’s decision to smack a hidden and undisputable charge of up to $25 on each of their merchants, it only made sense to reevaluate their platform and standing.

After careful consideration, we removed stars from Volusion’s “pricing” ranking, which affected their overall score enough to take them from our Top 3 and put them to #7.

What do you think about Volusion? Were you affected by their “PCI Security Fee”? Let us know in the comments. 

Yesterday, Volusion surprised merchants with an “up to” $25 PCI Security Fee that will be put on their next monthly bill. Here is their message to merchants that was not made public:

“PCI SERVICE FEE: Due to increasing Internet security risks and growing regulatory compliance demands, Volusion is making extensive investments to maintain industry-leading PCI security standards. In order to continue delivering this highest level of security for your business, we must pass on a portion of this monthly cost to you of $25.00 (€19.35). You will see this fee reflected on your next monthly invoice found at https://my.volusion.com/PlanUsage.aspx. Thank you for being a valued Volusion merchant.” (Source)

Not surprisingly Volusion merchants are outraged.

On Facebook:

“Why is it there cheapest plan only 15 dollars it should be over 25.00 because of the new fee.” (Source)

On Convergent7 Forums:

“I for one am absolutely livid about this. One of their PCI upgrades caused the customer checkout problem we were all having that started back on January 8th that took them about 20 days to fix, and cost (Us anyway) thousands of dollars in lost orders. And now they want to CHARGE us for the pleasure?” (Source)

“This may be the impetus that gets us to another platform. I am already sick of paying more than everyone I know on other platforms – all of whom get better service and less hassles. It’s bad enough I’m now getting nailed for taxes, but now another $25.00, which will also be taxed. It is a B/S moneygrab and Volusion just doesn’t care. So what if they lose a couple hundred accounts that are completely fed up. They will make that all back 50 times over with a $25 hit to 10s of thousands of accounts. Geez, it may even be a way of them weeding out accounts like most of us that don’t like Volusion and express their opinions candidly.” (Source)

I am very surprised that Volusion is making their loyal customers pay for their own security infrastructure costs. What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments.

Edit (2 hours after publish): One of Volusion’s marketing guys, Matt Winn, sent me an email shortly after I published this article asking if I would provide their response. It furthers upon why they are passing these charges on to their customers. I have included it below.

Hi Rachel,

Hope this message finds you well. I saw the article you posted on your site and was hoping that we could add a spot of clarification and explanation from our side. Would it be possible to include our response to your piece?

While it’s understandably never ideal to pass on fees to our customer base, our top priority is ensuring that our merchants’ businesses are as secure as possible. With security threats increasingly impacting our industry, the demands for regulatory compliance grow as well. Staying ahead of this security curve requires significant investments, the majority of which we’ve addressed without passing unnecessary costs to our customers. To help supplement remaining investments, merchants on our standard plans are seeing an increase of either $1.83 or $3.74, with merchants on larger plans seeing a higher increase that aligns with their demands.

Enhancing security measures while maintaining a high quality, affordable service is a balancing act that we continue to face – our goal is to do so with minimal impact to our merchants.

Let me know if this is possible.

Thanks!
-Matt

Introduction

Up until now, Squarespace was only a SaaS based content management system (CMS) which offered a designer friendly website builder, blogging platform and hosting service. Now they’ve dipped into the world of ecommerce with Squarespace Commerce.

Squarespace was founded by Anthony Casalena in 2004 and has been slowly adding updates along the years. The biggest update was in July 2012 when they launched Squarespace 6 which added portfolio templates, responsive designs, and opened way more control up for developers.

But this isn’t about Squarespace, this review is about Squarespace Commerce. Some might not know this, but people with Squarespace sites have always been able to sell online simply by adding something like PayPal or Ecwid. But that wasn’t ideal. In fact it was quite awful.

And so now Squarespace offers its users the option of selling online. This also opens Squarespace Commerce up to the world of potential online retailers looking for a shopping cart to suit their needs. Which is why we are going to review Squarespace Commerce.

Before we get into this review, it is important to note that Squarespace Commerce is only available in the US. So for all our European and Australian readers, sorry, better look elsewhere.

Squarespace Features

As a CMS Squarespace has plenty of features (widgets, integrations). You can integrate Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. It is not as robust as WordPress or Blogger, but it’s not lacking in any important functionality.   As an ecommerce platform, their feature list is extremely small. But I think that’s what they’re going for. In their release they say:

“The Squarespace Commerce interface is ideally suited for use with small stores (<200 SKUs).”

With regard to features, you simply can’t put Squarespace Commerce up against Shopify or Bigcommerce. I would compare their feature list to Bigcartel. It’s very lightweight, but still offers the important stuff for a lot people looking to sell online (basic coupons, packing slips, MailChimp integration, customizable emails, and more). I think right now this solution’s feature list is for merchants looking to sell only couple products within the US, who do not need a solution that is scalable.

Squarespace Ease of Use

Building a website and online store with Squarespace Commerce is pretty straightforward. The user interface isn’t as intuitive as I expected (given their reputation) but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy.

I love their drag and drop functionality. Some of the other carts we review here could learn a lot from them.

Things do get complicated if you’re trying to do anything, well, complicated. Custom domains not purchased through Squarespace are tricky, and although they say “not a line of code is needed” some features simply do need some coding. Example, if you want to notify your customers that an order has processed, you need to configure your email settings which involves some complicated stuff for someone with little technological knowhow.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace Commerce only has one pricing plan, which is $30 per month. This comes with unlimited physical and digital products, unlimited bandwidth, storage, 24/7 support, and more. It’s important to note that the free custom domain only comes with a one year annual plan ($24 per month, but you have to pay a whole year in advance). Squarespace offers a 14 day trial with no credit card required.

Squarespace has never been known as a bargain website builder. It’s a premium solution and costs more money than many other solutions. Some of their free templates are of very high quality, so I believe often it is worth the price. They are similar to Shopify’s templates, you are getting a website design that is likely worth over $10,000 for a fraction of the cost.

Quite honestly however, given Bigcommerce offers a plan at $25 a month, Shopify offers at $29, and Bigcartel offers plans anywhere from free, $10, $20 – I find it difficult to believe they will keep their pricing like this.

$30 per month may be good to get Squarespace blog owners to add the ecommerce functionality to their site as an upgrade, but for people shopping for an ecommerce platform and for people who are comparing the service to Bigcartel, Shopify and others I’m just not sure the value is there.

Squarespace Templates & Design

This is Squarespace Commerce’s strong suit. These guys are known for design. The templates that Squarespace offers are exceptional. I counted 23 different themes, all with hipster names like Devlin, Five, Wells, Hudson and Dovetail. They are beautiful. They can be easily customized and they are responsive so they’re all (I think) mobile friendly.

But, most are created with blogging, photography, or art in mind… not ecommerce. I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes, but at first glance it seems like Shopify’s themes are clearly made to sell, where as Squarespace themes were made for other reasons. I imagine in the next few months or years, Squarespace will be releasing some ecommerce specific themes which I can’t wait to see.

Selection wise, Squarespace offers a very small amount of templates. Shopify has over 150 now I believe, Bigcommerce has over 100, Volusion has 120… but some of those you need to pay extra, and especially with Volusion some are just awful quality. At least every one of Squarespace’s templates are high quality.

Right now, I would say Squarespace’s design is one of the best and even with their small selection I would put them above most ecommerce platforms.

Squarespace Inventory

Squarespace Commerce supports multi-dimensional product variants (size, color, weight). They do not limit your number of SKUs but looking at their interface it’s very clear that their inventory management is built for small stores. This is a good solution for people selling a few different products, but if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs you are going to end up pulling your hair out.

Squarespace SEO & Marketing

Squarespace Commerce’s SEO and marketing functions are pretty impressive. You can edit page titles, meta descriptions, make custom URLs, and they all include XML sitemaps, and valid XHTML code. You can even use 301 redirects easily.

They have full social integration so you can connect with customers via Twitter, Facebook and other sites. You can also sell on Facebook.

Some important marketing functionality is missing however, like abandoned checkout recovery. Since it is a new ecommerce platform they don’t have any ecommerce / marketing specific apps to extend the functionality of their stores, so right no their marketing platform is very lightweight.

Squarespace Payments

Squarespace Commerce only offers one payment gateway and that is Stripe.

Stripe is easy to set up and is very popular these days in the US. You will be charged 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge. There are no monthly fees or anything with Stripe.

It does however take 7 days for the funds to be deposited into your account. Other limitations include only being able to accept Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discovery.

Squarespace Security

Given this is a brand new ecommerce platform I can’t really say what their security and uptime is like. Squarespace has a pretty good reputation for uptime, but I have no idea how they might handle large volumes of sales. My guess is that they cannot handle extremely high volumes of requests without going down yet.

I am surprised that they don’t mention security in their announcement of Squarespace Commerce. But since Squarespace Commerce only offers one payment gateway, Stripe, your checkout and payment pages will be served over SSL. It’s all PCI-certified and quite secure.

Squarespace Customer Support

Squarespace has a comprehensive knowledge base for building websites, but their documentation on ecommerce is still thin, which is fair enough because they just launched.

They offer 24/7 support free with every plan, live chat support, and an active forum for peer-to-peer help but nobody is talking ecommerce yet.

Telephoning into their 24/7 support can sometimes take a while to speak to someone, but their support personel are very good. They do not outsource support to India like some companies do.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed building my site and online store using Squarespace. The company has always had a very good reputation as a blogging / portfolio site builder and moving into ecommerce was a natural choice.

Squarespace Commerce could be a good ecommerce platform for those who wish to create a stylish online store with few products and functionality in the US.

I do not think it’s ready to compete with platforms like Bigcommerce, Shopify, Corecommerce or the likes because they simply don’t have the features. Their ‘app’ just isn’t very robust, so I can’t see anybody migrating from a full-fledged ecommerce platform to Squarespace. But, I do think it stands up nicely next to Bigcartel as a lean and stylish solution for artistic people. I also think it could be a very strong platform for people currently selling on Etsy or eBay who are looking to upgrade.

We look forward to seeing Squarespace Commerce grow. Although we have currently ranked them in the middle of the pack, you should note that it’s above some platforms that have been around for quite some time, like 3dcart and Magento. That’s impressive for a new cart. Lots of potential with this shopping cart and we think in the next year or two it will become strong contendor against some of the top ecommerce platforms.

What do you think of Squarespace Commerce? Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Today, website builder Squarespace announced the highly anticipated Squarespace Commerce. We have heard rumours about Squarespace Commerce for some time now.

In their blog announcement Founder and CEO Anthony Casalena said “[ecommerce has been] the number one most requested feature across the platform for half a decade.”

About Squarespace Commerce

1. Squarespace Commerce will work with every Squarespace template.
2. You can sell digital and physical goods.
3. Their only payment gateway right now is Stripe.
4. Their variant settings make it clear it will be best for smaller stores with less inventory (<200 SKUs).
5. Squarespace Commerce is included in the normal Squarespace ‘Business Plan’ which costs $30/month.
6. There will be no transaction fees.
7. Coupons, taxes and shipping will likely be fairly lightweight, at least for now.

We’re excited to get our hands dirty with this new ecommerce platform.

What do you think about Squarespace entering the world of ecommerce? Let us know in the comments!

I’m going to tell you about Shopify’s soon-to-be-released new platform soon, but first I want to go over some quick industry news. Last July Shopify, Bigcommerce and Volusion all announced upcoming new versions.

Shopify announced the much anticipated “Shopify 2” with a teaser video and let in a small amount of stores to test the new platform. The first reactions were overwhelmingly positive.

Bigcommerce started an ‘early release program’ where merchants could apply for access to their revamped admin. As they mentioned on their blog,  they “uncovered a few issues and inconsistencies” and they’re currently working to fix them.

I haven’t tried Bigcommerce’s new control panel, new themes and carousel builder, but I can’t wait until they have ironed out the kinks. Some of the screenshots they have released on their blog look absolutely gorgeous.

Volusion announced an update with Volusion V13, but it was pretty underwhelming.

Anyways, the first ecommerce platform to make real progress with their new version is Shopify, who just announced six new features that Shopify 2 will include. Shopify plans to invite some merchants to try the Shopify 2 beta before it’s released. Lucky for me, I got a sneak peak.

Here’s what I think:

1. Partial Refunds

You could always offer partial refunds with Shopify but you had to do it though PayPal – which was pretty annoying. Now you can offer partial refunds from within the Shopify admin. Finally! Love it.

2. Better Variant Editing

Shopify completely redesigned their product editing page. Now adding and editing products with lots of variants is much easier.

3. Improved Search

Shopify 2’s new search and filtering functionality has been significantly improved across all pages (products, orders, blog).

4. Meta Descriptions

We could edit meta descriptions before, but an app was needed. Now this functionality is built in.This seems to be a bit of  a trend with Shopify. Over the past few months they have been releasing features that replace paid apps that used to be required to give a store that functionality. We think this is a step in the right direction.

Final Word

Quite frankly it looks amazing. Shopify notes that Shopify 2 is still in beta so we will likely see more improvements and changes over the next while. It is a huge improvement over Shopify 1 and we are thrilled with this update, even if it did take them 7 years to release… it was worth the wait. Look out Bigcommerce. Look out Volusion. Look out Magento. Seriously.

Check back regularly to get updates on all the popular ecommerce shopping carts. And as always, feel free to reach out on the Twittersphere.