E-Commerce Solutions

E-Commerce Solutions

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Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Tuesday 9th February 2021
quotequote all
Evening all...

At 4.10pm this afternoon, I pulled the trigger on an email shot out to 8000+ customers/subscribers to launch a new product that I've just spent the last four weeks going through sleepless nights to get it into the country, and is now sat in our warehouse ready to ship out.

At around 4.30pm, our current ecommerce provider had an internal systems failure that took down all three of my websites. They're all still down. They've had a hardware failure at their data centre, this has been identified and a man is driving new hardware there, two hours away.

Now, I get that these kind of things happen... But given how much we now rely on our e-commerce, I think we need to look at alternative solutions, with better response times to outage. With our retail shop closed due to lockdown, our ecommerce is more important than ever!

I run a company which has three websites, currently paying around £500-600 per month for a hosted solution, I do all our of our design work and maintenance myself in house. We turnover around £700k across those three sites at present.

I'd welcome any suggestions for platforms/solutions below.

Many thanks

Jon

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Tuesday 9th February 2021
quotequote all
Cheers chaps... DS, perhaps drop me a PM, I’ll reply with an email and we can schedule a chat.

This can never happen again....


Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Tuesday 9th February 2021
quotequote all
Good news, we’re back up... just 5.5 hours later.

Will be looking into Shopify in the morning. Nearly just typed Spotify, clearly it’s getting late.

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Wednesday 10th February 2021
quotequote all
Thanks everyone... We've been with EKM now for nearly ten years, and have grown our websites to a good point, but looks like Shopify is the way forward for us to now grow further.

From what I can see, we still need three accounts for the three websites... Oh what I wouldn't give for a solution where we could manage all three from one login!

I just need to look into how easy it is to migrate, whether I can do that or need to get someone to do that for us, and the best way of processing transactions in whether we use Shopify payments or we keep our own card processor. Our rates are much better, but wondering if the integration is worth the extra fees.

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Wednesday 10th February 2021
quotequote all
JPJPJP said:
Have a look at www.shopitcommerce.com that is setting itself out as a shopify alternative
Now that looks interesting... Especially running multiple shops from one account. Thanks for that.

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Wednesday 10th February 2021
quotequote all
Have signed up for a couple of trials so I can use the back end systems and see how they compare.

What's more striking is the total radio silence from EKM... If I was Anthony Chesworth, and my network had gone down taking out all my customers online stores, I would have had an email out by 10am this morning.

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Wednesday 10th February 2021
quotequote all
Registered for a demo with Shopit this morning, supposed to be live in 10 mins... they make you a sub domain to work on. Hasn’t been put live all day, technical fault. Doesn’t bode well!

Shame as I’ve read all the blurb on them and like everything I’ve read so far.

Dr Interceptor

Original Poster:

7,801 posts

197 months

Wednesday 10th February 2021
quotequote all
It is now setup, got the email in at 20:53.

Will be having a good look at it tomorrow....