AShop Commerce Review

I thought I’d give a review of Ashop so that others searching for an ecommerce platform could learn from my experience. I did their free trial but needed more time and signed up; after much struggling I wound up cancelling my account with them. I invested about a month of my time trying to set up my shop. The first, and most serious problem is that their support staff is generally clueless when it comes to anything but the most basic of features. The serious part of this statement is that they make things up to fit what you want so you think they are knowledgable. When implementing the promised features I found them to be completely mis-represented or missing. Details follow at the bottom for anyone interested.* The second big issue is their support outages. I got used to being able to contact a support person through live chat or email. Without warning on three occasions they disappeared for several days. Meaning, no phone, no chat, no email. Gone. And, things were broken. Apparently they were installing a global update. I found out by searching the community forum and found posts like, “Oh no, they’re doing it again!” No email, no big notice when I logged in. They did post after the update was in progress a note on Twitter but that seemed a little late to me. The third and perhaps for some a deal breaker was the broken shop installation after said update. Missing front page, products and description photos mixed with other products. Inventory counts out of whack. My store had not gone live yet but what if it had? Yikes. And my shop was broken at the same time as the support outage. The back-end user interface completely changed and they removed many features that I was using often. Finally, when I asked for my mere $69 back for the first month I was told “We don’t do refunds.” I asked several times and even bumped it up to whatever passes for management. A big fat “No.” Although I was initially excited about Ashop and it’s features, after a month’s time of rigorous investigation I have to give them two thumbs down. *Here is what they promised and could not deliver: 1) Inventory count in fractional amounts, i.e. I have products sold by length of one yard and wanted to offer partial lengths in half yards but keep the pricing of one yard. They cannot do this. They can make it look like it works but the inventory will never be correct. 2) Individual products can have variations (yes), then those variations can have multiple photos, no. They promised the ability to have multiple photos for each variation and can only do one. Also the storefront “look” is a little off when you have many variants. 3) There are many ways to keep track of inventory. One way is to keep track manually. The more common way is to let your store keep track. What I mean by this is if you have ten doodads and sell three your inventory reads seven. Makes sense? The default in Ashop is to *not* keep track. Let’s say you have 800 products. This means that for each and every product you need to click on a tiny button, click on an item in the pull-down, hit save. EACH PRODUCT. There is no other way to do this. The broken promise? A new column in the spread sheet to automate this. My conclusion is that Ashop will be good if you have a small business with not a lot of products. You should probably use one of their out-of-the-box templates and not tweek it too much (in case those tweeks disappear during an update). On the other hand if this works for you you should probably stick with a different cart solution anyway. Basic is basic and available with most of these ecommerce solutions. Oh, and I forgot. They were willing to custom code me solutions to the above three features for a price with an indefinite delivery date.

Having been an Ashop customer for over three years, i have now left after the release of Version 4. Up until this point i simply put up with the lack of access to support, little niggles in the software and the lack of development. Version 4 was what can only be described as a total and utter shambles, which hadnt been tested in any shape or form and was forced upon ashops customers on mass. We are talking absolutely bug ridden, checkout not functioning and much much more, which you would be the reason as to why i have left. Not so, the reason i have left is Ashops attitude which is to firstly deny that there are any problems and then to just ignore you as a customer, leaving you totally in the dark. I know this seems hard to believe in this day and age, that any business would understand the value of their customers, but apparently not in Ashops case and just in case you think i am just a bitter ex customer have a read of the version 4 release thread on their own forum. My advice is to steer well clear!

I am an Ashop customer, have been for 8 years and have stuck with them though many a bad upgrade and reductions in functionality. During the version 4 release back at the beginning of August i decided i had had enough and decided i could no longer stand by and be quite regards the mess that the software and support was in, despite being warned by other customers that Ashop could be quite nasty if stood up to. I didn’t believe it but then on the 19th of September i received the following from Ashop:

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Dear Mr Driver NOTICE OF TERMINATION It is with regret that we feel that our mutual working relationship has broken down to such an extent that we have now to give you notice of our intention to terminate our Agreement. Therefore we hereby give 45 days notice that we shall discontinue all of our services with you and your company. This means store# 3710 will be closed by 4th November 2013. Please take this email as statement of the official notice of termination period as stated in our terms and conditions paragraph 6 -6.2 With regards Ashop Commerce Yunus Atalan

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Seriously folks, if they can do this to a customer of 8 years, who had spent time, energy and money in creating a store that had rank and loyalty, then believe me when i say that they will do this to anybody who dares to question them. I now have to try and move my store to a new platform so that i do not miss the Christmas sales period … worst of it is, i cant even download my data from Ashop because it is still failing … as it has been since the August upgrade to version 4.

If you are looking to sign up with Ashop, i have one piece of information that you need to know: – I was with Ashop during their version 4 upgrade, which was an absolute catastrophe which place a lot of their customers business’s in dire trouble. There was much heated debate on the forums as their support staff where either non existent or useless. Anyhow, one customer was fairly vocal about the problems that they where having and Ashops response was to close their shop down. This was a customer who had been with them for ages. They simply shut their shop, just like that. So be warned!

Was with this firm for about two years and have to say that having moved to a new provider i am now receiving a level of customer support that you would expect. Ashop support are technically inept, rude and extremely unfriendly. With regards to the software, the base price is comparable to other shopping carts but if you want the extras then these cost a lot more and make it one of the more expensive options on the market. I can say through bitter experience that if you are looking for somebody to host your online store front then do not entrust this important part of your business to Ashop! P.S. I have only given them half a star and this is because there isnt an option to give them no stars!!!!!

I run a sporting goods store and last year I knew we had to get an online website. I compared a few other products and decided on Ashop because they were cheaper and had a lot of features the other ones didn’t like SEO. My son helped me with setting it up and we had a sale in a week. I think online is the future and we sell 50/50 online and in-store now. The support staff are helpful in solving our problems or answering questions when we have them. My only comment is it takes awhile to figure out where everything is and how to set up, but I noticed they have a help popup guide now that explains things for you.

I used this company, i say company in the loosest terms as really they are just a bunch of amateurs dotted around the globe who have cobbled together some software that they then have the front to call a shopping cart. Anyhow, long story short the software is worst than poor and the staff are rude and aggressive and it really isn’t the kind of company (again loosely used) that you would like to entrust your online business to!