Not Impressed By Cubecart Service

[Guest tla0177]

Please CubeCart reps, if you know your product is not ready for release....do not release it. I'm on my third week of testing AFTER moving my entire site to a new host. After searching for somewhat decent e-commerce software, this was an option of course in my Cpanel fantastico scripts. Two options, v3 or v4...of course I'm going to go for the upgrade seeing that it is an UPGRADE.

A 30 day trial is offered...of course with no support so I'm left to wonder about this messageboard digging for tips here and there. I mean, I would assume a company would want what ever little profit they can make so they would offer advice on prolonged issues. Especially issues that have been plaguing them for a couple years as seen by the number of threads posted.

Let me provide a summary of my issues,

sporadic checkout issues in which customer are not prompted with a checkout screen so orders are stuck in pending status.

Email notification is an issue depending on who decides to take responsibility (the hosting company or cubecart). This is based on mail settings asked by the host that are not apparently liked by cubecart (or visa versa). Port 25, 26, 465, secure settings, localhost, mail.whatever.com, secure.hosting whatever, etc., just tell me what it is and I will set it up.

Secure checkout, as you turn on this option of course once in awhile errors all all over the screen. What is the point of having the option if you ask me.

list goes on and on.

Now before the "CubeCart Protectorate" comes in saying I should have this...I should have that...trust me. I've done did it all. Re-configured CSS coding, manipulated scripts...debugged the life out of the site. Harassed my hosting company etc.

This is beyond ridiculous. I'm not even going to even go into how much money has been lost in sales.

And you want me to purchase the copyright and license so I can get support????????? What kinda ripoff scheme is this.

I am actually alot more pissed than what my post reflects but for the sake of respect, I'll maintain myself.

[Guest Brivtech]

I'm sorry your experience has been a bad one. It's not a perfect world, and it seems that you had more than your fair share of imperfection.

I can't say my experience has been the same, and I haven't experienced any of the problems you've mentioned. It's worked for me very well straight out of the box, and I now have several stores all set up running very smoothly. I don't use Cpanel or fantastico, I install it myself, and subsequently always have the latest version.

While I appreciate your frustration, I think it's a bit unfair to blame CubeCart for problems that apear to eminate from your hosting setup. Like most software programs, updates are always released, when unknown bugs are found or new features added. I think the concern should rather be if no updates were ever issued. I take great assurance from the fact that the developers are working hard every day to address any outstanding problems, rather than sitting back and doing nothing about it.

This is certainly no "ripoff scheme", and I'm sure the developers would take objection to that. There is always room for improvement though, and I hope your comments wil be taken into consideration by the developers.

I hope you are able to resolve your problems.

[Guest]

I share the same experiences as Brivtech. I also find the CubeCart developers very helpful.

Adam

[vokf]

Why are you losing money - did you not test V4 on a spare/sub domain before running it on your live store?

You've obviously had problems, and I guess lack of documentation may have helped.

Regarding emails: - does "Tell a Friend" work? The email notification has a few interlocks, and obviously testing this will be slow for you, but the "Tell a Friend" feature will quickly test the email sending capabilities of the site/server.

Start off with sever: localhost and everything else blank.

I can see your problem with lack of direct support from CC Support. With CC3, I can fully see why they had to keep support for paying customers only.

CC4 is a commercial product - you either go somewhere else at the end of the trial, or pay for the full product. Its still a fairly young product, so community support won't be as strong compared to the older CC3.

I'm did read some info from Al about looking into providing pre-sales support for CC4 (I think!), so it could be worth a Moderator clarifying this point.

I didn't want to post a "It works for me" post, (although it does), I hope you get things working soon.

Jason

[Guest]

After 5 years of being online, it still amazes me just how different servers can be set up from each other. A lot of webhosts think they're trying to provide a better service when they adjust settings away from the defaults, but in the end, they create problems for end-users such as us.

That's one reason I chose to go with a VPS, so I could configure it the way that I need to for the scripts that I run on my sites. It's almost as good as a dedicated server, but for a much cheaper price.

I have to echo Jason's post and ask why are you losing sales. Never, and I mean NEVER use an untested script in a live environment. It generally takes time to learn how a script works, and what conglomeration of settings that are required to run that script on your particular host. ALWAYS stick with what works UNTIL you test a script and verify that it will work better.

The same is true with any major upgrade. For instance, I'm still running CC3 because a couple of the mods I depend on have not yet been updated for CC4. Even so, I've installed a test copy of CC4 into a subdirectory of my site, copied my CC3 database to a new database, and did a test upgrade to verify that everything works as expected. There was one issue that was related to the custom order numbers that I use, and so I'll have to find a fix for that before I upgrade my live store.

The point of this is that you should never be losing money when testing out a new script.

The other point of my post is that different webhosts will have different settings, and no script can work with ALL of them "out of the box", although it is possible to build in compensation for any server setup that is previously known. If you've read through as much of the forums as you seem to indicate, you've no doubt run into many posts suggesting a more "standard" hosting provider as a solution for several problems.

There are an ungodly number of CubeCart stores in operation online. (Do a search for "powered by cubecart".) For you to claim that the software "isn't ready for release" is inaccurate and unfounded.

[Guest tla0177]

I understand all the replies but in using v4 and having to be constrained by the 30 trial use, how can I feel comfortable purchasing it just to have support when I am getting the issues I have now. I guess I should ask will I get a refund if I am not pleased with the product. This is just one of the many scenarios I see especially seeing the Cube is primarily based outside of the US.