In another post here in Gibbsblog a reader of my recent Gearhead column asked what ecommerce solution I finally settled on. I'll go in that in next week's column but if you insist on a spoiler it was Network Solutions Pro Ecommerce. They claim that this service is provides an easy-to-use design editor or customize your site with your own HTML and offers "Seamless integration with QuickBooks."
What NetSol did to be able to offer this product was acquire MonsterCommerce just over two years ago. In the intervening two years they have "improve" the offering but exactly how isn't obvious beyond the fact that most of the documentation is for the previous MonsterCommerce version so the screen shots in the manuals are totally different from those you actually work with.
I spent an hour on the phone withone of Network Solution' senior engineers yesterday and detailed to him most of the problems I've had. I think it is not unreasonable to say that what Network Solutions offers for ecommerce is good to alevel but their tech support is very poor, the documentation as I noted is appalling, and there are a hundred "gotchas" that are unacceptable in what is supposed to be a professional service for which they charge $99 per month.
I'll go into this in greater depth in my next Gearhead.
The bottom line is that unless you go way up scale then in a market of generally awful ecommerce solutions Network Solutions stands out as the best of a bad set of choices.
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