It goes on and on

[niko]

Well I haven't seen the most important issues sorted, such as freight, and the menu is still the link rather than say DHTML menus with mouseover effects is very sucky, out of date and shows we are still battling with an archaic design from 5 or so years ago. I have another web site that is easy and fantastic to administrate www.gpsaustralia.net/shop

It may appear generic like many other online shops currently but it works and works well, and is free to use. Updates are regular and although not as flexible as Ezimerchant in many ways I quite like the simplicity and of course the ease to which it can look professional without having to pay anyone. I think it is about time David you stop peddling your mates web design services and brought ezimerchant presentation to the now. The templates need to be updated for sure. There are many free quality made templates for oscommerce and another program I want to trial is called VP-ASP but looks to be of the same vain as OSCommerce in respect of administration but has much better postage handling and templates to choose from. What I am saying is, I can't see why I would update to vesion 4 assuming it will be more than $49.95!

[dferguson]

Hi Niko

The V4 update is free to all registered, paying members of the GTS service.

If your serious about selling online, then not getting a custom template is crazy. Its a fact that end customers will be more likely to purchase from your site if they percieve your site to have a professional appearance. It helps to gain their trust.

V4 (beta) has not got any new templates (yet), these will be saved for the final release - HOWEVER, using a generic tempalte for your website is not ideal and I would still recommend merchants get a template made regardless of whom they get it from.

For the record, we reccommend two companies for web template design.
1. Practical-webs.com.au - Based in WA
2. Itliterate.com.au - Based in NSW

The ONLY reason we reccommend them is because they actually know how to create ezimerchant templates. Me nor any other staff member has ever met Mel at Practical-webs and we do not get paid any kickback or affiliate payment for the reccommendation. Aaron from Itliterate is a work collegue and I reccommend him to clients because he does great artwork, again no payments nor kickbacks are paid for reccommendations.
We reccommend clients to them because they can offer our clients professional tempaltes at cheap prices - it keeps out clients happy. We are also always looking for other web developers who are capable of creating professional ecommerce tempaltes for ezimerchant.

One such newcommer is www.tangentdesign.com.au (http://www.tangentdesign.com.au) - they created the ezimerchant site: www.hellotiger.com.au (http://www.hellotiger.com.au) (adult conent, be warned). We would be happy to reccommend them to clients as well.

As you say, OS commerce has a large range of free tempaltes (as well as ones you have to pay for), as well as great customisation features, but why are you not using it? Its free!
I would suspect its because its to hard and painful to use on a daily basis, has no on call tech support (which means there is no one responsible for its functionality and security) and overall its not as suitible for your business as ezimerchant.

I also think many of the V4 beta clients who visit this forum would disagree with your statements regarding V4.

We have added many significant features to V4 which help marketing (Promotion codes, data feeds) as well has hundreds of small updates to make the day to day management of the site much easier and quicker. Many of our merchants live their working life inside ezimerchant - updating products etc. Small changes we make the the UI can save many hours work.
We know for a fact that merchants who have upgraded to V4 and used some of the new features well have increased their sales by significant amounts.

Features like:

PayPal express checkout
DataFeeds
Promotion Codes

These features, when implemented well can lift sales and exposure. Why wouldnt you upgrade!

[dferguson]

I would also like to add a comment about the category navigation.

We are working on new ways to create more flexible navigation - that looks good, and is easy to implement. But as of now, a good quality site can still be accomplised by use of CSS. See www.jewelry-by-anixi.com (http://www.jewelry-by-anixi.com) as an example.

[dferguson]

See http://forums.ezimerchant.com/showthread.php?t=773 for comments on just how well our new data feeds feature is working for some clients.

The post by Ocean Storm Tackle 1 for example...

for all those out there that havent given the data feeds a go. you are missing out!

I implemented them into clix galore, google, au.shopping, my shopping and get price and the results are more than outstanding!!!

my google traffic has soared now that all my pages have been quickly indexed. and my sales through clix galore, my shopping and au.shopping have been mind boggling! Deffinately worth While feature of V4.

If there are any merchants out there that want to make comission from my site then you can by going to clix galore and checking out and requesting our data feed catalogue marketing from them under Ocean storm fishing tackle.
we sell fishing stuff.

For those merchants that want to get more exposure I deffinately recommend the data feeds in the new V4 . take advantage of this feature!

[dferguson]

Niko, with custom themes, its possible to create the nice menu's you want.. Take a look at this website I found: http://www.kidswardrobe.com.au/ as an example.

[Ocean storm tackle 1]

I deffinately think version 4 is great!
I have had personal oppinions that i have submitted in the wish list which david knows about. I cant see why you wouldnt upgrade to V4. it has made me thousands of dollars if not into the tens of thousands of dollars worth of extra income from the new features and i only upgraded about 2 months ago now i think....

I highly commend the effort david and ezimerchant has gone to with the new V4 and although realistically far from perfect to every individual need i think the upgrade ads worth to the product.

[niko]

www.gpsaustralia.net has a forum and a shop. The shop uses OScommerce and the forum uses VBulletin and integrate with a button. What I think I might do is join clix galore and see what happens

[extralite]

Well done David for leaving this thread on here when it seems the initial criticism was a bit harsh. Your suggestions for the people to contact IF someone wants to personalize their template is good information. I never thought of it as "peddling your mates" product so i hope you continue to provide the information.

As for Ezimerchant itself. Whatever product your provide, there will be passionate supporters and passionate critics, so I hope David you don't let the critics get to you too badly. There are probably other products better suited to some people, but Ezimerchant is also ideal for a lot of people. Limited time to learn how to do it themselves so wanting an easy off the shelf product.

In defence of Ezimerchant, it has done what i needed. It was very easy to set up. I have upgraded it slightly once we knew we had a business and now the website looks fine. Support is great. There are some small annoyances, especially in the customer data base side of things and its searchability and bulk emailing, but nothing to be too concerned about, and Ezimerchant improves as it goes along. If i spent the time, i could probbaly fix it myself.

So well done for all your efforts.

[Pip]

Niko, I think that was pretty aggressive & rather unprofessional. We've been using Ezimerchant for approaching 5 years now. To say I am happy is an understatement. We are well into a seven figure turnover, with annual growth rates approaching 80%. Many of our competitors use OsCommerce etc, and our customers report that competitive sites are clumsy to use & that it is difficult to find what they are looking for. They love the simplicity of Ezimerchant, including how easy it is for everthing to be found. No-one wants to visit a website that is a labyrinth, including me.

I can also vouch for the professional appearance that a custom template has give us. Even if there was a template available that was specific to our industry, it would be simultaneously used by competitive websites. And who wants to look like your competitor? The ONLY way you can give your site a unique appearance is to fork out a very paltry sum to have one designed for you. It doesn't cost much, and gives you a unique corporate identity.

We have no issues with freight, despite sending orders of varying weights (500g to 22kg) to all postcodes within Australia. We use a flat freight fee, & it provides us with a small profit on freight.

We upgraded to V4 without a single teething problem, and it fully addressed the very few improvements our customers were asking for (login for regular visitors etc). I was hesitant to upgrade initially (no time to learn new things these days - too busy processing orders!) but wouldn't change a thing.:D

Niko if your business is not growing to your expectations, I think some advice from a business adviser like www.basi.com.au would be of more benefit than slanging at your software provider. Basi have been of enormous help to us.

So Dave take heart, I think you're a goddamn genius.

Pip