new user: looking for ecommerce cart

[Deb]

You'll certainly want to contact Rich@RSmarketing.com for some extra feedback in this area.[nbsp][nbsp]He's the local E-Commerce guru ....

Future plans include http://www.MerchantQuest.com but not all of the needed pieces are in place for this to go live yet....

You may also want to check out the e-commerce section of http://www.aota.net/

Deb
[nbsp]- Want Better. Want More. Want Perfection.

[Rich]

Evoir:

Take a sneak-peek at http://www.merchantquest.com for shopping cart solutions that have been integrated into the FutureQuest server environment. Although not officially in production yet, if you are in need of something right away, let me know and I'll be glad to help.

Rich
rich@rsmarketing.com

[Evoir]

Hello,

I am interested in your services (I found out about you from the boards at infopop). One thing that I would very much like is to host our own commerce cart (right now we use yahoo! Shopping $$$) But I haven't seen many carts that are robust (multiple shipping options, template driven - yet highly flexible, allows html in template)

ok, do you all recommend one, (MIVA?) or are you partnered with any carts to bring the cost down to your users?

Thanks very much!
Evoir

[Evoir]

Thanks!

We are a small but growing web presence. We have a UBB already that is just picking up speed, and I am on a steep learning curve of web building. We definitely want to get our shop off of Yahoo! Store and onto our own servers (save $) and MIVA was highly recommended to us.

Can you tell me the difference between Drop in Miva Merchant and Drop in Miva Order? It wasn't clear to me. What are the benefits of paying the monthy fee through your company rather than buying the Miva Merchant Software for $495.?

If you are inclined, you can check out our shop and site to see which you think would fit better, at:
http://www.curvemag.com
It should (if I am doing my job well) be self evident where the shop is and such. We hope to grow the shop more with our new plan...maybe double in size.

Thanks again,
Evoir

[Rich]

Can you tell me the difference between Drop in Miva Merchant and Drop in Miva Order?
Merchant is a full-featured cart where Order is only a single page display of products. Order is intended for merchants with only a few items to sell. You can also see the difference between the two products by selecting the demo buttons in the descriptions section at http://www.merchantquest.com.

What are the benefits of paying the monthy fee through your company rather than buying the Miva Merchant Software for $495.?
1. Products have already been integrated and tested in the FQ server environment.

2. Products have been integrated and tested with each payment service offered (currently Authorize.Net and Signio) with others pending testing.

3. You are guaranteed that the product is "ready to use".

4. 24-hour priority response support from RS Marketing.

5. The monthly fee includes updates/patches as well as future upgrades and enhancements from Miva.

6. The monthly fee includes bug-fixes and enhancements from RS Marketing that are only available in the Drop-In FutureQuest products.

Considering your site's large product line and use of categories, I would suggest using Merchant.

Rich

[Evoir]

Ok, this all sounds great.

I think it would make sense for us to use Miva, but perhaps we would buy it outright and deal with support ourselves. I thnk $99/month is a bit steep for a product that costs $495 outright. I understand you'll give full tech support, but when I called Miva in the last week, they seemed to be ready and willing to give support themselves.

Will FQ be installing the Miva Empressa for those of us who choose to purchase the shop outright?

[Evoir]

Oh, btw, the whole idea of MIVA for us is to get away from those monthy fees, we pay that much at Yahoo!Store.

ok, later.

[Rich]

Will FQ be installing the Miva Empressa for those of us who choose to purchase the shop outright? You will also need to purchase the Empressa engine and install it on your site.

[Evoir]

We will need to install the Empressa Engine even for a virtual server hosted with FQ?

[Rich]

We will need to install the Empressa Engine even for a virtual server hosted with FQ? Yes, Miva Merchant will not run without the engine installed in your cgi-bin and cgi-ssl.

The Drop-In Miva Merchant and Order product pricing includes the Miva Empresa engine.

Rich

[JoeT]

I am very happy with futurequest.
I think that that merchantquest.com is too exspensive to be considered. Why would you want to pay $99 a month when you can get much more exposure from the Yahoo Mall. Sure you may limited in what you can customize but you can still make an appealing site.
Plus it looks like valueweb http://www.valueweb.net/products/commerce_hosting.html#top_page offers a better package with Miva Merchant at half the cost.
My $0.02

[SneakyDave]

Joe, thank you so much for the Yahoo Mall/Shopping link. I have a client that I'm trying to decide how to go about providing a commerce application for, and this just might do the trick.

One question I had regarding FQ with this service. Yahoo allows a domain like "shop.domain.com" to map or zone (whatever the word is) to "shopname.site.yahoo.net", but it requires FQ to add the following entry to the zone file:

shop.domain.com..[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp] IN[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp] CNAME[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp]shopname.site.yahoo.net

Will FQ do this, and for what price?
[This message has been edited by SneakyDave (edited 04-27-00@4:49 pm)]

[Brian]

If you did decide to use Yahoo’s service you may change your cname by going to the order form @ http://www.futurequest.net/Order and note that it’s a cname change, and what needs done.

Keep in mind remotely hosting brings up several issues, but can be good or bad depending on what you need.

-Brian

[Evoir]

I am still looking for a solution, without having to pay $100 a month (we do that now with Yahoo!Store-and don't get much exposure from them, either)

I have seen hosting companies that offer the MIVA engine as part of a "commerce package" (total hosting bill runs around $50/month, including hosting and all)

Is FQ ever going to offer anything like this? The reasonm is, I have heard numerous GOOD things about FQ and am looking to move my domain, but want to also integrate MIVA as our shopping cart, and we are tired of paying so much a month for ecommerce (hell, we even process all of our orders offline, anyway!) We just need the interface.

So, sorry to be a pest, I am just asking again, in a different way, hoping to hear an answer that I want.

Thanks again,
Evoir

[Evoir]

Oh,

or if you know of REPUTABLE hosting companies that do offer this.

(I know of communitech and now Value web...I have heard fishy things about communitech, and nothing much about value web) Really I want to be on FQ!!!!!!

hopefully we can find a solution that works and allows us to use your services.

Evoir

[Brian]

If you are processing them on your own, have you looked at shopping cart programs?

-Brian

[Evoir]

Brian,

I have looked a bit. Then we went with Yahoo! because it was so full featured. See, we need something with multiple shipping options, somewhat dummy-proof (templates driven) and customizable.

I know a bit of cgi, now that I have been building a[nbsp][nbsp]bit (only to edit, not to write it), but the carts I saw out there didn't seem to have the features I want...[nbsp][nbsp]

do you have a recommendation I could look into?

Thanks.