last year when my wife wanted to start selling children's books. I looked
around the net for good CF shopping carts (there are a bunch!), but when
you really look at features and costs, there were only 3-4 that truly
would be considered good players. CFWebstore and CF-EZ-Cart were my final
top two, and I spent about two weeks trying out the live demo of both of
them. I finally settled on CFWebstore for a number of reasons, including:
- MUCH easier to administer and set up. I was up in CFWebstore in about
two hours of work, and it took at least four days and about a half-dozen
E-mail's to Bud (author of EZ-Cart) to get *partially* installed.
- More professional looking out of the box. Both products were good, but
raw out of the box, CFWebstore looked more professional and gave the
perception of truly being a "real" e-store instead of an opensource hack.
- Code structure and comments. I knew I'd be extending whatever I purchased
to meet my exact needs, so I wanted something that was well documented and
relatively easy to add to. CFWebstore really was the better of the two
products in this regard, although both were fairly complex. Mary Jo
(author of CFWebstore) added a number of extras in different directories,
so my ultimate extensions were minimal.
- Number of sample sites. CFWebstore had a whole slew of examples for me
to look at, and that made a big difference. I saw how customers had
customized the store, and it really gave me some concrete examples of what
the product was capable of. EZ-Cart didn't seem to have that same "library"
of sites (at least when I was reviewing it). Also, while both stores had
samples stores that I could play with, it was easier to use the CFWebstore
version, so that was helpful.
- Finally -- and a major factor -- was that Mary Jo spent considerable time
with me in a pre-sales format. Bud didn't (or wasn't able to). I had sent
Mary Jo a huge list of questions (probably four printed pages) and she
answered every question and concern I had. Even before I purchased. So I
truly felt that I was going to be able to get the help I needed when I
went to install and configure the system. That was the deal-clincher for
me.
Both were priced similarly, so they were a wash in that regard.
So how did I feel after the purchase? Great. I have never regretted my
choice for a single second. My wife's store went live on time, and it
looked beautiful. It had no bugs, and when we went to make our first
series of major changes about two months in, I was able to do it without
much effort. I have even added a couple of fairly sophisticated add-ons
to the product to support our unique store requirements. I wrote those
in fusebox too, so that showed how well it scaled.
And now that the new version is out, it's INCREDIBLE. It's completely
rewritten in fusebox, and it is light-years ahead of the version that is
out there right now. Honestly, it looks like Amazon out of the box. ;-)
I'm going to upgrade my wife's site soon with the new version, and I can
tell right now that people are going to love it.
Seriously, you will NOT go wrong if you purchase CFWebstore. It's the best
CFML e-commerce/shopping cart system out there, in my opinion.
thanks,
bruce bergman
(http://www.JoyfulTales.com)
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