RPMWARE RPMWARE REVIEW CORAL GABLES Florida
Upon signing up you get a 30 free trial. During that time you can activate the manufacturers you want to sell and with a little css coding, have a branded site. Boom, you are essentially done.
The issue lies in if you have any vendors that are NOT on their system. You will have to take all of your product data and create a spreadsheet to have them upload. The year, make and model must be concise. You can list titles, descriptions and other information but unfortunately this will not get uploaded for weeks. You may get your products loaded but the title and descriptions and meta data are indefinitely delayed. Why is this an issue? If you are planning to sell through Bing or Google shopping (Google Merchant Account) that information is imperative to get your product to show up. Also, your site will need to be re-indexed and without that data already loaded, you will get swept under the rug by the search engines for months.
We switched initially and saw a 85% decrease in traffic to our site. Reasoning shows it is due to RPMWare's team of Matt Gold and Kyle West not managing their customers in a way that facilitates good business practice or shows a long term commitment to their customers. You can create all your products online if you want to do it item by item. If not (who would?) you can send them their spreadsheet formatted and wait. Painfully wait. They state it can take weeks or months to get this data loaded, you will be past the free period and will essentially be paying monthly for a product that is useless for organic or paid search results.
Oh, if you think about complaining, they will threaten to turn off your account. So if you do not like getting treated like a mushroom and pay for something that barely works this is not the solution.
You get a system that initially you cannot sell anything through via Google or Bing, you send in support tickets that tend not to get any replies so you try all avenues online to get help and they threaten you? Being a two man team there I am sure is difficult but what they are doing is counterproductive and frustrating for many customers.
I called over 8 stores that use their system and they all parrot the same thing. Not worth the time, no support and sales have dropped off. Not many stick around for a long period of time. I can see why.
Hopefully Matt Gold and Kyle West get their act together and realize that they cannot grow or become successful unless they have stores that can actively sell and be set up correctly fast.
Selling products correctly - Not available
Loading you own products - Delayed by weeks
After a glowing referral of RPMWARE I decided to give it a try. In the event you are looking to use this software, here are the issues I have found and hope that it helps with you deciding to use or not to use this software. ** OUR DECISION IS NO AT THIS POINT **
Upon signing up you get a 30 free trial. During that time you can activate the manufacturers you want to sell and with a little css coding, have a branded site. Boom, you are essentially done.
The issue lies in if you have any vendors that are NOT on their system. You will have to take all of your product data and create a spreadsheet to have them upload. The year, make and model must be concise. You can list titles, descriptions and other information but unfortunately this will not get uploaded for weeks. You may get your products loaded but the title and descriptions and meta data are indefinitely delayed. Why is this an issue? If you are planning to sell through Bing or Google shopping (Google Merchant Account) that information is imperative to get your product to show up. Also, your site will need to be re-indexed and without that data already loaded, you will get swept under the rug by the search engines for months.
We switched initially and saw a 85% decrease in traffic to our site. Reasoning shows it is due to RPMWare's team of Matt Gold and Kyle West not managing their customers in a way that facilitates good business practice or shows a long term commitment to their customers. You can create all your products online if you want to do it item by item. If not (who would?) you can send them their spreadsheet formatted and wait. Painfully wait. They state it can take weeks or months to get this data loaded, you will be past the free period and will essentially be paying monthly for a product that is useless for organic or paid search results.
Oh, if you think about complaining, they will threaten to turn off your account. So if you do not like getting treated like a mushroom and pay for something that barely works this is not the solution.
You get a system that initially you cannot sell anything through via Google or Bing, you send in support tickets that tend not to get any replies so you try all avenues online to get help and they threaten you? Being a two man team there I am sure is difficult but what they are doing is counterproductive and frustrating for many customers.
I called over 8 stores that use their system and they all parrot the same thing. Not worth the time, no support and sales have dropped off. Not many stick around for a long period of time. I can see why.
Hopefully Matt Gold and Kyle West get their act together and realize that they cannot grow or become successful unless they have stores that can actively sell and be set up correctly fast.
IN SUMMARY:
Pros:
Easily add you auth.net account for cc processing
Turn on/off vehicle models
Turn on/of preloaded vendors
If you are a small store starting out, decent system
--> If these serious issues get corrected I will provide an update to this review
1 Updates & Rebuttals
RPMWare
Coral Gables,Florida,
USA
It is a Rip Off when you're not actually Ripped Off?
#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Thu, September 29, 2016
This is the first complaint of this nature that we've had in 10 years of being in business offering this service. We are flattered and thought it would be beneficial for everyone if we respond.
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RPMWare by its nature tries to make things easier for shop owners and website operators to get up and running. Although we offer 300+ brands preloaded, the simple fact is; we just don't have EVERY brand under the sun. However, we publish our Catalog and let you know exactly what we do and don't have before you sign up rpmware.com/catalog). If we had zero brands preloaded - we'd be like any other e-commerce service out there - where you would have to load all your products one-by-one or populate loadsheets. The feature of allowing you to add your own brands via spreadsheet is a pretty normal process - but yes - concise and accurate is a must. As for turn around times, we batch many loads together and process them at once in order to not apply excess stress on the system. If you just missed a load, yes, it can take up to two weeks for your data to go live... but in the grand scheme of indexing and ranking - two weeks isn't much and hardly a major factor. Additionally, you always have the option of bypassing the spreadsheet load and using the Admin to enter products which puts them online immediatly.
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Any brand new site is going to see a drop in traffic - because older inbound links are updated to the new URL structure, content will need to be reindexed, etc. However, we do allow you to recreate content pages or forwarding pages for your most popular inbound pages with identical URLs. We do and have managed our customers best interest for over 10 years. Many of our clients have been with us that entire run and even more 5+ years. As mentioned, it's worst case a two week wait for data to be loaded unless there are issues with it (not valid, incomplete, etc - this is 100% on the user since it is generated and submitted by them, not RPMWare). As for having this extend trials past the free period, I suppose that's true - but thinking data not loaded during a free trial renders an entire system useless seems a short sighted. Regardless, we are always happy to extend trial time if there is a situation like this.
<<Oh, if you think about complaining, they will threaten to turn off your account. So if you do not like getting treated like a mushroom and pay for something that barely works this is not the solution.>>
We usually treat our mushrooms pretty good. But I highly doubt anyone threatened to shut down an account because of a complaint. However, we always state that you are under no contract or obligation to stay with RPMWare if it's not right for you or providing the expected results... before or after we take a penny from you. If that's taken as a threat, we're sorry - but we also don't want customers paying for a service they don't see as a value.
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You can sell through Google and Bing day 1 - there is nothing stopping anyone. As for threats, perhaps you're just misinterpreting it.
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Eight stores is a pretty small sample size - especially considering you tried RPMWare because another shop gave us a 'glowing referral' as you stated. I'm also not sure how you would identify shops that aren't using the software... but I digress. As mentioned, MANY customers are 10 years veterans and even more are in the 5+ year club. If that's not long term, I don't know what is.
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10 years in, we're doing pretty well... but thanks.
The bottom line is:
There's no good answer to your broader concerns. We have clients selling $1M+ a month and hitting front page of Google on many search terms and others that never really get off the ground. RPMWare is a tool, just like the tools in your shop -- what you get out of those tools is directly related to how you use them.
You should treat making an investment in RPMWare like buying a dyno. Anyone can buy and install a dyno, but just having it doesn't guarantee success. At the very least, you need to understand how to operate it and get the word out that you have it. But then you're just like everyone else who owns a dyno. To really succeed you need to become an expert, tune some fast cars, host a few dyno days, and build a reputation.
RPMWare (or any website for that matter) is no different -- it'll only return what you put into it.
If you want awesome product data (images, descriptions, fitments, etc.) for 300+ brands at the click of a button, then RPMWare may be right for you.
If you don't want to deal with the hassle of managing an e-commerce application and all the related server and security issues, then RPMWare may be right for you.
If you'd rather spend your time selling parts, building cool cars and making customers happy instead of begging manufacturers for product data and sorting through spreadsheets, then RPMWare may be right for you.
But if you spend your time complaining about everything that's wrong, then choose to call RPMWare a Rip Off because some of the features aren't up to your standards... then I'm not sure you are really focused on your business... or know what a Rip Off actually is.