Shopping Cart Options

Hi,
Great post that goes into the real world details many don’t realize until it’s too late. IA Modules (eC Integration & Automation for QuickBooks) is one of the few Intuit Gold certified developers with eCommerce Shopping cart solutions for both QuickBooks and QuickBooks Point of Sale. IA is the only one with a 100% QB user base. That focus is evident when discussing all the points in this article.

I totally understand the truth behind each of your points. IA’s philosophy is offering solutions for the real world, not just for marketing hype. PDG and the POS sales team over-state alot of key things like image handling, seo handling, and power for reliable synching.

1. SEO
One key issue is the SEO urls. In the real world QB businesses don’t have the money to pay consultants to deal with the slow and tedious work of making mod rewrites nor do they have the time or expertise to realistically do it themselves. IA knew that from day 1. That’s why it’s both automatic and features a flexible url format generation capability for advanced needs. It’s zero work for clients to setup and maintian plus our templates create these out of the box. You would not have spent even a single hour initially of later with our solution.

2. Hosting performance and price
One reason the web connector is unreliable can be due to the lack of development on PDGs side which can lead to erratic unreliable behavior. Another reason can be due to PDG’s claim of hosting it anywhere, even super cheap hosting plans. In the real world, POS users can have thousands of items (etc.) and hosting platform needs to have the performance on par with this very real scenario. That’s why IA Modules only uses Virtual Dedicated Servers for each client as part of hosting solution plans. Because IA manages them, they remove the complexity of a VDS solution and because they only use VDSs, they are offered in plans at a fraction of the cost of competitors. NetworkSolutions eC (formerly monster commerce) would charge $300+/mo for VDS while IA’s range from $75/mo to $150/mo.

3. Modern & productive QB-focused wizards
Another great point you made is about user friendliness. Many people reguard PDG’s interface as very outdated. IA’s is modern and pleasing to look at with many web 2.0 features, in addition to having a plethora of QB focused wizards for completing setup and management tasks quickly.

4. Resizing wizards for multiple high quality pix
Another EXCELLENT point you made is the over selling and over stating of the capabilities of the POS system to make thumbnails. It’s TOTALLY inadequate. Shared server hosting plans like PDG is made for and most eC vendors provide simply do not have the horsepower to batch process multiple image resizing. Also, they simply save development cost by not including or supporting image resizing wizards. IA Modules has included this for years. 1 picture in two sizes is not suitable for eC and it’s absurd for PDG and POS sales to insinuate that it is. They are just covering up their shortcomings so shame on them. IA Modules has image resizing wizards that auto match reisized pics to items. It can make thumbnail, standard and hi-res pictures with fit to size/height/area settings. It also has automatic facility to handle the common need for up to 3 additional sets of images for alternate views of items. Advanced templates in a free gallery are also included to make awesome detail pages you see on expensive sites.

5. Analytics are included with IA plus we encourage users to add Google Analytics to their Footers which adds alot of capability for free and can be done in only 5 minutes.

6. Easy to tailor
IA includes a free library of made for quickbooks templates that noone else does. QuickBooks speaks XML. Any professional will tell you that the best way to work with XML is XSL, which was made by the world wide web consortium (W3C, same group that made HTML and CSS specifications). XSL is not much more than HTML so it’s the most designer friendly option too. It adds a couple logic commands to the mix that just look like HTML. So…for designers familiar with HTML experience it’s the perfect solution…which is, after all, what the W3C intended in the first place. You can literally pick your template parts, the parts that best suit your site’s needs in each region, and then tailor them in DreamWeaver or by hand. If you don’t know HTML or need help, designer services & support is available and there many videos to show you common things plus a wysiwig editor for clients to use to maintian non template static content.

There’s alot to a sucessful eCommerce site and non-quickbooks focused solutions simply leave too much out. These days alot of companies over market and under develop. If you’re looking for a eC solution that is 100% made for QuickBooks and it’s users & their needs, checkout http://www.iamodules.com.

I think you’re being overly harsh. I think you are giving support a bad rap and your ’slow support issues’ are really more of the ‘involved design or custom development’ variety which is a entirely different animal. For example, you can’t compare a support request like ‘help me setup my credit cards to run’ as the same as ‘please custom develop application feature code for me’. Ditto for design. Alot of people mix them up. Think it’s all the same. It’s not. I also think alot of people compare IA to some mythical company that doesn’t exist, where everything no matter how complex, is done in but a minute.

Development and design take time, and you gotta wait your turn. People that don’t want to can opt for IA’s expedited rate consulting (which is only more on par with standard current rates elsewhere) and time and again, that stuff gets done really fast. Also, typical support gets resolved really fast at IA. Need a server restart or help with a particular feature or synching something, or a password reset…. or something that is in fact support….IA is on it, right then. Come to chat and then even a remote desktop support session if needed. Again, support is fast with many ways to get help from videos to online chat to remote desktop and tickets. But…support is not design which in turn is not development.

Calls are answered and those that are missed are always returned promptly and same day. However..if someone wants to call a particular developer about a particular complex custom design/dev topic, then yes, you may have to wait. But then again, you are not calling IA, you’re calling a specific person and you’re not asking for typical support, you’re asking for something outside of typical support. Thus saying IA never returns calls is totally misleading to anyone reading your comment because you are no doubt portrying your calls that wre not returned promptly…as if they ever could have been. they were never ‘quick answer support type calls’ in the first place, so lets not pretend that they were.

Support tickets never linger that long unless they are not support tickets, but rather custom development or design requests, both of which i’ll remind everyone PDG does not offer as a service at all. IA does require time to prepare and schedule design work. Design work is not support. IA also requires time to consider modifications to their product on behalf of some customer request. Neither of these are support. Perhaps you prefer IA to be more like the ‘other guys’ and just say NO! Other competitors are usually unwilling to do any modifications to their product in between releases, for any specific client. IA often enhances the product within a month or so of receiving needs requests from clients, often w/o a fee being charged even. In that light, it’s hard to accept IA being called slow….when the other guys are not slow…it’s more like ‘never’.

For example, it’ll be a cold day in hell when you get the intuit cart or netsol cart modified for your needs. 3 weeks of waiting will seem like the blink of an eye. And as far as support….well, you’re in india, because they fired hundreds of us based workers. If/when you look, you’ll notice in their support agreement, you cannot even talk to them about more than 1 issue per call and for no more than 1 hour. Why put IA down for doing what these guys wont? Maybe you just wanna give IA a hard time and flame/sabotage them online even though they do more and go farther than their competitors. Maybe you’d like ‘NO’ told to you promptly like the ‘other guys’. Maybe you’d like design and development done faster, but hey, i don’t see anyone else doing it any faster. IA’s expedited work is always done within a few days.

The moral of the story is….It’s important to know the difference between support and design and development.