eCommerce bugs, crashes, and other problems?

Aaron Simon

Hello fellow Convio organizations,

I’m curious to hear about the experiences of other organizations regarding eCommerce.

I’m about to go live in a few days and am wrestling with about 10 bugs and problems in Convio’s system.

I’ve just experienced a very scary two weeks of our eCommerce being down from a error that was allowed to go out in the last update. This was a huge setback in the critical last weeks before going live. It was very scary to watch as two weeks rolled by without Convio being able to figure out what was wrong.

The combination of all the bugs and this eCommerce crash has caused me to wonder what other org's (with live sites) experiences have been.

Many at Convio have been quick to blame bugs on my site, saying that my site is “highly customized”…which couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m concerned that others are being told this same thing to cover up problems within Convio’s own system.

How quickly have you found Convio to be in fixing bugs? Has your eCommerce ever crashed? If so, for how long? Any other stories to share?

I’m wondering if Convio will really allow this posting to stay up or if they will delete it in order to further hide what seem to be some very serious problems.

I have found a great BLOG which has a string going about Convio right now. Check it out at: http://nonprofitsonline.blogspot.com

toddt

I have been hard on Convio for the e-commerce package. But I must say, we have made great strides with it. I have identified a few bugs whick I worked around or got them to fix or address.

I have NEVER been down that I know of.

The truth is, one must study, ask questions, push back, and be a squeeky wheel sometimes, but the basic software works. Just is not robust or customizable.

I have a few issues with it, which Convio has taken note of for me:

1. I dont like that the store URL does not have my domain. Bad for search engines.

2) Sustaining gifts and reporting not well thought out

3) Store module should intergrate better with main site. Why have interests set on articles if you can't display product interests on the same page?

4) No breadcrumb navigation on product pages

5) Store homepage not truly customizable

6) USA only flag set on product level but shipping rates set on store level. this causes problems

7) Tying shipping rates and product inventory with other databases impossible. Leads to heavy manpower issues to manage the store.

But with all that said, it is holding our heads above water and we have tripled online sales just by learning more about the software and asking key questions. Our account manager has really helped us get through our tough times.

bwoodlief

The Convio "eStore" is not currently a very robust product. It really is more of a simple "shopping cart" rather than a true eStore. Our organization has struggled for months to get our store online with Convio... to Convio's defense we were also attempting to setup a seamless datasync between our offline database with Convio's database (this in itself was the source of most of our problems). But the sheer number of products we have in our store has almost overwhelmed Convio's store product.

So far the store has been up a week-or-so and has been successfully processing orders. We haven't run into any particular bugs yet. We have been waiting months for a response to the enhancement request that we have into Convio to address specific glaring deficiencies in the store product (ie. searching store inter-catagorically, related product features, dynamic shipping options, multiple shipping options, etc.).

--B.

nuytiepo

Hello! Do any of you eCommerce users use CCH for online sales tax? Are you having problems with it? Are you using point of sale or point of delivery to charge sales tax? We are not tax experts and it seems like the onus is on us to decide which one is correct. We can't seem to get this right and we've been using this product since December 2007. We are a non-profit org in Chicago, IL. Please help if you have any info. Thank you vey very much.