eBay Prostores Suck?
- Author: admin
- Filed under: eCommerce Hosting
Dec 9,2008
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The reason you say that Prostores does not suck is because you are not trying to host a commercial site on it; I am. There are no issues with the server reliability, but as a store it lacks features. I will be brief here. NO international priority shipping. It has user defined merchant tables that you get to change ever time USPS changes its rates.
It has poor product attributes and attribute management. It has poor invoice editing. It has poor shipping features with only simplistic capabilities.
However the worst part of Prostores is how it is organized internally. The development team is walled off from the customers and does not listen to input; they always think they know best. It is a typical ivory tower setup. They don’t even listen to the their own tech support people nor inform them on what is coming.
It is an eCommerce system for hobbyists and not for people wishing to have sophisticated eCommerce stores. I cannot wait to leave. My opinion of eBay has deteriorated greatly since subscribing to ProStores. You say who knows more about eCommerce than eBay, well lots of folks. eBay is struggling and making many dumb moves on its auction site also.
Prostores is a loser. Save yourself some trouble and look elsewhere.
In that case, why not try Yahoo! Store. They don’t have the problems you mentioned.
In response to this article and the loser that Steve Gill is: You can have international shipping with priority mail, you just need to set it up through an external account. Product attributes are not weak, they work how you set them up. If you don’t know how to set up the attributes, then it’s your loss with messing something up.
If you have a request or like to see something added, you can always send it to them through an e-mail. They do tell you that most improvements will be in the next version they release. They update it three times a year.
I agree with Stephen. Prostores have all the features that an online merchant needs. You only need to know how to setup through the admin panel.
What I don’t like about prostores is the plan is 30 dollars a month and has many features but not a couple big ones that count. Next option, you guessed it HAS those two critical features but is twice as much money per month. What are these two critical features that their affordable plan lacks you say? Data space and Data Transfer! The basic plan only gives you 50GB of transfer for crikey’s sake!!! For 30 dollars a month anything less than a thousand is so 1999. This is the main reason that I choose monster commerce instead. If prostores would allot a reasonable amount of data space and data transfer in their basic plan, I’d switch quickly. But they don’t so I won’t use them!
If you want unlimited bandwidth and storage, you may want to look at Yahoo Store. A reputable name, trusted by many.
I am a web developer for an online Academy that has designed custom php scripts to integrate Prostores and Moodle.
We have been happy with Prostores but we absolutely require the XML API. We are using Prostores XTE 2.0 which is being phased out, see:
https://navisite.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sys_kb_id=6ee8d9e30a0a3c1b006c1d04fcfeb51f
We have been trying to get support on XTE 3.0 for over a year with no luck. The new version requires registration for an app id. I don’t care if support for the new Api sucks but at least give me an app id don’t leave me hanging. Either say yes we will give it to you and follow through or say no and I’ll take my business elsewhere. Waiting anxiously for a response from the Prostores devnet team…
Update: Prostores Devnet turned out to be very helpful in resolving the above issue. We are now up an running with XTE 3.0. Thank you Prostores Dev team!
B+ rated by BBB which is not bad. 28 compaints since inception in 2005 is amazing given the number of customers ProStores has. Traffic for Prostores.com domain receives ~.5M monthly unique visitors (not bad and trend is neutral) according to Compete.com. The only issues that I have had with ProStores is that any customizations through page template manager render any problems that occur yours (i.e. no support) and no easy mechanism to automate back up store design and data. Mabye in the next release. Thanks for sharing.