Add any comments or questions regarding the DotNetNuke Smith Shopping Cart tutorial from Issue 63

Hi Lee,
I'm just about to implement an online store and paypal payment using the DNN Store core module (using your excellent videos from March 2008), when I see the latest issue and your tutorial on the Smith shopping Cart.

Paying several hundred dollars for the Smith products (plus payment processing etc on top by the looks of it?) as opposed to spending nothing on the DNN Core modules is going to be hard to justify - but I assume you have many (genuine) reasons for including a tutorial on the Smith products on DNN Creative.

Could you perhaps just summarise the main advantages of Smith over DNN Core for me please - so I can make a quick judgement between the two and whether the extras on Smith are worth the expenditure.

Many thanks

Rob

I have installed the cart on a localhost dnn 5.5.1 and so far the admin pages load extremely slow and when I try to save a product, the connection times out. I have made some adjustments to localhost settings and firefox, but so far I can't get any products set up for testing. Any ideas for troubleshooting?

In the cart, on the product setup screen we were using the Ajax tab control with the DNN texteditor and it turns out that the dnn editor and Ajax do not work together well. In the latest version of the cart 3.95 we have have changed the ajax tab control in the add product screen to a css jquery tab control which loads 100% of the time and is alot faster loading. If you already have Smith Cart v3.95 installed there is a hotfix available for download. If you send me an email to kat@smith-consulting.com I will send it to you.

Thanks!

In the cart, on the product setup screen we were using the Ajax tab control with the DNN texteditor and it turns out that the dnn editor and Ajax do not work together well. In the latest version of the cart 3.95 we have have changed the ajax tab control in the add product screen to a css jquery tab control which loads 100% of the time and is alot faster loading. If you already have Smith Cart v3.95 installed there is a hotfix available for download. If you send me an email to kat@smith-consulting.com I will send it to you. Thanks!

I had trouble with the Smith Cart. I do not recommend it.

Mark - Comments like yours do not help the reader or the manufacturer of SmithCart. It's fine if you don't recommend it but help everyone by explaining your difficulties. As an example I will give my recommendation below:

I'm not a web designer but rather an application developer. However, I needed to build a website to sell my product and am a hands on kind of person who wanted to try it myself. I chose DNN for a number of reasons but that's not the issue here. My requirements were to download products and issue license keys after completion of a sale. I also include with the sale limited access to a help desk on my site. SmithCart met all of my needs so I purchased it. Since my downloads are post licensed I don't use the SmithCart download feature but simply allow download of the product by anyone. The download is initialized as a 15 day trial. When a purchase is validated SmithCart sends an invoice which includes a license activation key using their serial number feature. They also have a feature that will create a DNN user when a purchase is validated. I use that to create a Subscriber role for the purchaser. The useful part of this is that SmithCart allows you to include a time period for the Subscriber role. So I am able to allow time limited access to my help desk based on the edition of my product purchased.

This is all working great and for a web design newbie, pain free. However, I did run into a problem with sales tax. Turns out my state is one of 21 now to come up with a new taxing scheme that's not relative to County, City or Zip Code. They use what are called Taxing Districts which may even split a city. Leave it to the Government to take something easy and make it complex. Smith Consulting worked with me to come up with a solution and actually added a feature to support it. This is customer support at its best.

With that explanation I highly recommend using SmithCart.

By the way I'm not affiliated in any way, other than being a customer, with Smith Consulting. Please visit my new site cadontechnologies.com when it goes on-line. Hopefully by the end of this quarter.

Thanks!

Like you, I have found many vendors in the DotNetNuke universe to be very helpful.  Those that are should get some recognition.

I always encourage people to take their questions and issues to the developers directly. 

I also recognize that a particular module may work for one person, but may not meet the needs of another.  Like you, I agree that a recommendation without reason isn't as helpful as one with a reason.

I agree with you both, even though I'm the one you are gently correcting. In order for my warning to not use Smithcart to have any weight, it must have some context so a reader can try to understand if my problems will apply to them or hopefully not.

The thing is. I respect Lee and Joe what they are doing here with this site and the useful forums and help they provide. And I toned down what I really wanted to say in my negative review in order to keep their forum presence in keeping with its purpose of providing useful help instead of a platform for unhappy customers to vent.

I guess I’ll have to tell you my sad story in order for you to judge for yourself if the recommendation is valid or not. Here goes. You’ll be sorry you asked.

I purchased and installed the shopping cart. Because of other duties, I was delayed in installing the cart for a little over three months. After getting into it, it came to my attention that any customer to the shopping cart was able to enter a negative quan y on their purchase item. And if they did, the cart would enter a negative dollar value in the cart totals. By doing this on one or more items in their cart, they could effectively reduce the total cart cost to zero dollars or close to it. I thought this was a big problem. Without a fix, I didn’t think the cart could be used. I reported the bug and was told they had been notified about that bug a short time ago and that they had fixed it since I purchased. OK, fine. But in order for me to get the bug fixed, I had to get the upgraded version. Smith Consulting does not fix bugs in their customer’s purchases. It fixes bugs in their new releases. And their policy is to allow customers to get upgrades for only three months after purchase. So if I wanted the bug fix, I would have to purchase the shopping cart again to get the latest release that included the bug-fix.

I can understand having a time limit on downloading new releases with product improvements. However I was pretty upset that they did nothing to try to help a customer who had a defective product. They really could have offered to fix my cart. At the very least, they could have given me the version that contained the fix and was released within my three month download period. I asked for the fix for their bug. They chose to push for another purchase.

They said I could also choose to get future bug fixes by purchasing the maintenance package offered on their website. The cost for that was $20/month. Hmm. I shopped for the right cart at the right price and found it. Now I’m finding out that the cart that I thought costs $199.95 really costs $439.95 in the first year once you pay for the maintenance agreement too. That was an aggravating unpublicized price increase. I went back and looked at Snowcovered and there is no mention of the maintenance agreement anywhere on the sales pages for the cart. And more importantly, I didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for the use of this cart.

So yes, I was aggravated by 1. The inflexibility to solve their customer’s problem caused by a serious flaw in their product. 2. The requirement to purchase the product again in order to get a fix. 3. The fact that the only mechanism to get bug fixes after three months is to pay a monthly fee to them indefinitely into the future. 4. The fact that the maintenance agreement is not mentioned, apparently on purpose, on the Snowcovered pages where the product is sold.

That was enough to make me give a gentle warning to good people like you to not use this product. I would think. It pains me to tell you the rest.

I wrote a negative review on Snowcovered.com about this issue. Even before my review was posted, Smith Consulting contacted me and offered to refund the money in trade for removing the negative review. I thought – so here is how their reviews look so positive on Snowcovered! I always read the reviews before buying. I had been duped into believing that their customer service was top-notch by all the positive reviews saying so and the lack of negative reviews. Now I know where all the negative reviews went. They were removed with deals such as this.

Still, they were trying to help me with this offer, better late than never, so I accepted on the condition that they return the full amount of my purchase so I could get the fixed version with the same money. But Snowcovered’s return policy does not allow refunds that long after the purchase. Smith Consulting would still give me a credit on the new purchase for the amount of the old product minus Snowcovered’s commission but not for the full purchase price like they agreed to. (I have emails proving my claims) I said no. The deal was for the full price to be returned. They would not do it. They now have gone back on their deal with me.

I had already removed my negative review on Snowcovered as I had promised on my side of the deal. They had not done their side of the deal. I went back to Snowcovered and submitted my review again. And they didn’t post it. I kept checking. Still, they didn’t post it. I checked their reviews policy and saw I couldn’t put actual dollar values in the review so I took them out and resubmitted. I emailed their support team and received no reply. I resubmitted twice more with increasingly more gentle negative reviews. Still Snowcovered did not post them. Now I have the belief that the reviews on Snowcovered cannot be trusted because they are rejecting (at least some of ) the negative reviews.

As a result of all this, my customer who I was doing this all for was very unhappy with the experience and it reflected poorly on me. They decided to purchase a second copy of the cart just to get the bug fix and to preserve the large amount of work they had already done getting their products into the software. The additional expense, the disagreements with Smith Consulting, their pushing for an additional sale instead of real assistance, their going back on their deal with me, the absence of a mention of the service agreement on the sales pages, the hidden costs, and the bugs in the software – all put together makes me give a recommendation to stay away from Smith Consulting.

This rant I’m on is what I was trying to avoid earlier. I know this is not the place for this kind of detail and ramblings. But I sincerely want to save other people the trouble that I went through. If there is no place to post a negative review, then how will good people ever find out about the products to avoid?

(Note: I did go back to Snowcovered today to check my facts before posting this message. I was surprised to see a number of negative reviews for the Smith Shopping Cart there now. They weren’t there just a few months ago when I was trying to get mine posted. Their average number of stars is 2 out of 5 at this moment. And further, the Smith-Consulting.com website is not responding. I don’t wish them to go out of business, but I do hope that negative reviews would push them to review their customer service policies and history and make some (big) positive changes.)

Mark,

No problems.  In fact, I think that your "rant" is a constructive post.

I had an "issue" with a module that I purchased.  Some 6+ months after the purchase, I asked for a refund for a module that I had decided not to use.  It was a several hundred dollar purchase.  The developer (a really GOOD guy) was willing to refund, but I was well past the Snowcovered time period.  He refunded his amount -- not the full purchase price -- and I appreciated that.

The moral of the story (at least for me) -- there probably are lots of terms and conditions to purchases that we make that we don't often discover until it is too late.  I much prefer those vendors who issues upgrades for a year.  They are at the top of my list.

I fully understand Mark, because it happened the same thing with me. 98% of what has happened to him happened to me.

The only differences are that my bug was not the same, and the proposal they offered to me to withdraw my negative review on Snowcovered was a 75% discount on the purchase of the new Smith Cart version.

I'm afraid of the lack of quality of Smith Cart (hope not), particularly the low quality of the support .

I truly hope that Smith responsible will change his way of viewing the relationship with customers.

I had just started evaluating Smith Cart when this forum post began heating up. The requirement I'm working on includes recurring billing for both products and subscriptions which based on the research I did narrows the available choices down considerably. I priced and tested a number of DNN and non DNN alternatives including Catalook which I personally feel is a very comprehensive product but a bit overwhelming for the average productivity developer such as myself and Shopify which is a great service but does not offer recurring billing and would leave me with some integration challenges.

I've installed, configured and successfully tested the Smith Cart trial against an Authorize.net sandbox account. I did have a couple of issues with the module but to be fair my DNN skills are only average. One issue was resolved within a day through help on the support forums from the Smith Cart team (even though I haven't made a purchase yet), I was able to work around the second issue which I received very good community support on. Aside from that it took very little time to get it up and running.

When I compared the pricing of the products that do offer recurring billing to the Smith Cart module It appeared to me that Smith Cart is not unreasonable even with the annual support fee.

The module is performing very well on the dev site and it looks great. I'm 99% certain that this is the route I will be taking so if anyone has additional experiences they would like to share I would l appreciate hearing them.

Thanks! Steve.

I do agree with Mark regarding to their customer support, they have a lot of customer support channels like email, forum and ticket.
Non of them get replied, I ask to return the product they said you paid the money and you have the software, use it anyway..
it is not function till now with me. I think I understood their message of how to use it, it is to be used as garbage.

The Smith Consulting shopping cart is an execrable piece of software. Their standard reply to bugs is "Well.. it works for me!". I could never get the shipping to work. Customers report the dreaded "Object not set to reference of object" error message occurring randomly. SmithCart doesn't include its order number in PayPal or Authorize.net transactions, so matching orders is hit-or-miss. Bundle pricing didn't work. I had to create one product with a price, with three subordinate zero-cost products. Guess what? Customers could delete the master product, and get the three subordinates for nothing. Surprise!

I have switched my shopping cart to Infusionsoft, because I need to know what customers have bought to make practical use of drip marketing.

Also, I am preparing to upgrade my DNN from 5.6.7 to 6.2.8, then 7.1. I had customized code in SmithCart, and I dreaded having to upgrade my SmithCart custom code. Their support is useless, I would have been left hanging in the wind. I have come to the conclusion that having a DNN-based shopping cart is putting too many eggs in one basket, and putting oneself in a very vulnerable position of having one's e-commerce taken hostage by a DNN upgrade gone wrong. Best keep the two separate, gives you more flexibility and options.

Two other choices are:

1. CartViper - I have used it with good results. Support has been excellent, and I was able to get some custom features that we needed added by the developer at reasonable cost.

2. Hotcakes -- is a rather new module, and with a somewhat hefty price. But I have heard good things about it.

Here is a review of modules, about a year old: http://www.dotnetnukefool.com/Blog/catid/2.aspx