Complaint Review: Storesonline

Storesonline claims that they have proprietary software and outstanding customer service to quickly help you get your internet storefront established. This is not really true.

From the above statement, here's what's true:

1) Storesonline has propriatary software (although it is not very good for reasons stated below),

2) Storesonline has a customer service department (although I don't think their customer service department knows much about their product). I have also found their customer service department to be very rude.

3) You can create an internet storefront with their product.

Here are some of the problems I discovered with Storesonline:

- The Online Tutorials (this is the only version of a manual that you can get) cannot be downloaded

- They support an online coupon, however, this only allows the customer to print the coupon and bring it to your physical storefront. The customer cannot enter a coupon code via the internet storefront and automatically receive a discount. So, if the customer does not live in your immediate area, coupons are meaningless to them.

- You can build your product info in Excel and then upload it to Storesonline. However, the product features are not loaded in the order they are listed in the spreadsheet. They appear to be listed in a random order.

- While their product supports product variations (ex. Size S, M, L, XL), you can only partially build product variations in the excel import spreadsheet. After you import the product data, you will need to go through each product via the web interface to add any specific pricing or part number info.

- Storesonline's web interface continually takes over the foreground when running multiple applications, and is extremely annoying.

- When importing product variations from Excel, you must enter them in the reverse order from the order you want them displayed in. Nowhere in their manuals does it mention this. Once you make a mistake, it takes a long time to correct it.

- If you put quotes around any part of a product description when importing the data from Excel, their software will move the quotes to the beginning and end of the entire product description.

- Their tech cupport does not always know what they are doing and sends you on wild goose chases. For example, they told me to use a particular FTP client application for uploading pictures to their site, and they sent me the software via e-mail, but the software did not work. I found another FTP software package on the internet for free, which worked just fine.

- The Merchant account they sell you is too expensive. Theirs sells for $999. You can get one elsewhere for less than $200.

- They do not include your own domain name in the package they sell you (i.e. www.yourstorename.com) but force you to use their name (i.e. www.storesonline.com/yourstorename. If you wish to have your own domain, you can get it from them for $15/month. This is outrageous, as you can get your own domain name elsewhere for $15/year.

- When you define the default URL for your website (i.e. www.storesonline.com/yourstorename), it only works for the default home page. All other pages revert to the site number (i.e. www.storesonline.com/123456) and your store name does not appear ever again in the web address bar.

- When you relate products, and then upload them, and then re-upload them later, each related product will be listed twice. You then need to manually correct each item, which takes 1-2 minutes per item if you have a broadband connection.

- The Storesonline interface could never work over dial-up connection. It would be way too slow due to the way their interface works.

- I sent a letter of complaint to their president (Poelman) which went without response. If the president doesn't believe in providing good customer service, you can bet the entire organization won't either.

- Storesonline has a "business partner" to provide you with coaching so that you can more quickly build your web site, and to improve your chances for success. However, their partner expects you to pay $5,000 - $15,000 for this service, yet they will not give you a business proposal in writing. Do they expect that this is how reasonable people do business?

- Storesonline does not publish a toll free number for their customer service organization, however I found one that works. It is 877-492-6490.

- When you relate products to each other, you need to manually retype the description of each related product. Their software is not smart enough to be able to populate use the product number of the related product to automatically pull the related product's description.

- Their on-screen receipt does not display in a printer friendly mode. The right 1-1 1/2" of the screen are not printed, which includes most of the pricing information.

- Their system is sophisticated enough to automatically send an e-mail confirming the receipt of an order, it will not automatically send another e-mail acknowledging the shipment of the order, including the tracking number.

- If you are using Storesonline's software to set up web sites for other small businesses, you do not have the ability to set up a 2nd username and password so that your client can log in and settle transactions/add tracking numbers only. You must either do this yourself or give them your password, which allows them to make any changes to the web site, including deleting it.

- Their software cannot prohibit a shipping option to certain area. For example, UPS does not offer ground service to either Alaska or Hawaii (for obvious reasons). However, you cannot prevent a person in either Alaska or Hawaii from selecting UPS ground as their shipping option. The only way to prevent this is to add an excessive surcharge to the UPS Ground shipping option for only Alaska and Hawaii, sot the customer will choose another option to avoid paying an arm and a leg.

- You cannot automatically have a limited number of products appear on a single page (so that pages don't load too slowly), with the extra carrying over to extra pages. You need to manually map products to extra pages, and then map the pages to each other so that a person can jump from page to page.

- You cannot specify the sort order of products on pages. For example, if you want to have things sorted by price, color, brand name, etc. you are out-of-luck.

Steve
Glenview, Illinois
U.S.A.

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