[florafauna.com]

I've been extremely impressed with the software, but the documentation is pretty sparse, and the support has been generally bad.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[Flow]

Did you find the knowledge base? -> http://kb2.cs-cart.com/

My experience with cs-carts support is actually quite good. They usually reply within a day. If they are very busy you will get a reply that it will take a little bit longer.

Thing is, this forum should answer about 99% of your questions. Tip: use google search and not the forums, which is pretty bad.

[zeero6]

We have been with CSCart since 2007 and never had any problems with supoort at all. Always get things solved quickly. As Flow says there are lots of helping people in these forums to guide you.

[BarryH]

Hi

Support is sometimes slow (or appears to be) due to the time differences. To be fair, CS have mostly come through for me!

[Struck]

No doubt that the majority of their resources are currently being consumed by the upcoming & soon to be released Version 3 (including Ultimate Edition). So, hang in there!

[florafauna.com]

Will version 3 apply to the multi-vendor edition as well?

[jegesmaci]

I haven't had any problems with Support. After understanding the time difference and that they typically reply next day for me I started to change my expectations for their communications.

[NairdaCart]

florafauna.com, on 26 March 2012 - 01:50 PM, said:

I've been extremely impressed with the software, but the documentation is pretty sparse, and the support has been generally bad.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

I switched to Cs-Cart from another product purely because the documentation with CS-Cart is so good compared to a lot of other shopping carts.

The knowledge base site and docs site have told me everything I need to know quickly and easily. Far more than I ever found out in over a year of using a rival product.

[Flow]

Well, you can't expect them to customize your shop for you. If the problems is with the software, they will fix it for free. Unfortunately, most of the time the problem is with the user or server configuration.

They could of course charge $ 1500 for the software and include more support then the usual support points (which should still be enough to get you going), but instead they kept the software very affordable and let us only pay for extra support, which is totally fine with most people.

[clips]

We've been with CS since 2007. Support has usually been strong. The only time I remember any slow times would be close to a new release. They do have a tendacy to deduct support credits at times when they should not (like when they help fix a bug), but they have always refunded.

I have dealt with a lot of different companies on the support side. Both before and after purchase. By far CS has been more consistant and better than just about any of them. Just try to deal with support from Quickbooks and you will quickly appreciate the service from CS. Oh wait, try to go to eBay, Paypal or Google for some type of support, if you can actually reach a live person. YIKES! I believe that overall CS has done a good job on the support side...well, maybe with the exception of fixing some bugs like the Quickbooks add on that have been broken for quite a few years.

[grayloon]

I'm in the U.S. on central time. If I put in a support ticket any time after 9:00 a.m. central time, I have to wait until the next day for an answer due to the difference in time zones. That would be my only complaint regarding CSC support.

[Flow]

clips, on 19 April 2012 - 02:06 PM, said:

Oh wait, try to go to eBay, Paypal or Google for some type of support, if you can actually reach a live person. YIKES!

Google support? I never, ever even got a reply.
Paypal support? Do they even exist?

Cs-cart has been into my server numerous times to fix things that were my fault (I know now). Sure, sometimes I had to wait 2 days, but they did fix it and they never paid for extra support: the points that came with my 3 installations were more then enough to get me going.

Remember, this is not a huge company that can handle extreme peaks (for example right after a release) too well. Also, if you look at how often questions are asked here, again and again (people don't ever seem to search) I can only imagine how much questions they get. Also, people seem to be extremely impatient. I've seen people asking questions here to say in 1 hour that nobody responds and the cs-cart forum sucks.

My 2 cents: if you want a company that takes your hand and walks you through everything, then find one that you can pay 15000 dollar for a webshop and hope for the best.

If you don't want to spend that kind of money, but if you do have some patience and some knowledge about servers, webdesign and all that stuff, cs-cart is an fantastic solution for a very little amount of money.

Talking about service, I can not say enough good words about PSP Skrill (formerly moneybookers) who always responds with proper emails and usually solutions.

[Struck]

I received 40 Support Points when I purchased & started using CS-Cart in 2009, I still have 40 Support Points sitting there and don't know what to do with them. I would be willing to sell them to any whiners requiring continual daily handholding for a fair price of $150.00 USD.

[Darius]

Flow, on 19 April 2012 - 03:55 PM, said:

Google support? I never, ever even got a reply.
Paypal support? Do they even exist?

PayPal (Europe) support is pretty decent, always get a reply within a day if its a hurry you can always call them.

Now if you are current cs-cart member, logged in, cs-cart even hides live chat function in their site. Helpdesk is built so it looks like "in order to get any ping reply you need to pay us". As far as I understand unless it is custom modification or in order to help technician need to get in to your site all support should be free. I also noticed that staff mostly replies in forum only to new cs-cart members.

[clips]

Darius, on 20 April 2012 - 06:43 AM, said:

Helpdesk is built so it looks like "in order to get any ping reply you need to pay us". As far as I understand unless it is custom modification or in order to help technician need to get in to your site all support should be free.

I agree that the helpdesk makes it appear that any help given should be paid for and they sometimes take credits when they should not, but I think you are dreaming if you think they are going to or even can answer every question for "free". Oh my, their cart is competitively priced and you think they should do all support for free? First of all they would go crazy answering so many questions because many people are too lazy to research it. Second, I like the lower price up front because I "usually" do not need quite as much help. So if someone needs more help they can pay more and get the support. Again, lower up front is better.

Darius, on 20 April 2012 - 06:43 AM, said:

I also noticed that staff mostly replies in forum only to new cs-cart members.

This is a good point. It would be interesting to see why the CS staff does not reply to many questions from the regulars, yet they seem to troll the forum for the newbies or those who have not yet started.

[BaDTaG]

I don't understand all the fuss.

i always get an reply wen i contact them and i must say it is among the best support i have seen among the different shopping systems out there.

and i still got all my credits from wen i bought the software.

[pbannette]

When I have problems that I feel are software related/bugs and report the problem, I typically hear back from support in one business day. Support does put in effort to fix the problem. We can go back and forth for several consecutive days to fix a problem. I don't have anything negative to say about support in general.
I do distinguish what I think is a software bug from me playing around and breaking something or asking for support for what really is development problems/questions. I hire a developer for this rather than try to make it a support, software bug issue. I think a line has to be drawn between what is support and what is starting to be debugging user created customization problems/third party mod problems, etc. I think the line is fuzzy.
I do have an issue with software problems that have been identified and confirmed in recent versions of CS-Cart and the fix is "fixed in the next version". I feel that the fixes should be made available for the current version. This can be with a sql file to fix the database, posting of the code fix, or a replacement file. . This is especially true for version 2.2.4 issues. The next version is 3.0 and I don't plan on upgrading to 3.0 just to fix some issues with 2.2.4.
Bob

[zazaqaz]

I have been really disapointed with CS cart. I had 1.3.5 SP3 and it was rock solid and worked perfecly. I liked it so much that I decided to upgrade last august to the 2.0 version, and had problems out of the box. Errors, etc... One of which is that CS Cart only allowed upgrades on my purchase for 4 months after my payment and will not honor my allowed 1 year updates until this coming August. I have opened ticket after ticket only to be told that I am beyond my one year of updates. HOW??? I purchased a full new licanse in August 2011. Maybe the Russian calander is different. I do beleive that there is a communication problem with the company, and if the company does not honor a simple contract, how do I trust them further?

[orangegirl]

Hello, Zazaqaz.

It is a bit strange to here this from you. As far as I can see in your Help Desk account, your license date was changed by our license manager in order to allow you to upgrade to the earlier versions. And she asked you (on January 20, 2012) to contact us when this upgrade is completed so that we can change the license date back. But we have not received the reply from you yet. Please contact us in your Help Desk account.

[El Nucli]

I am completely satisfied with the CS-Cart team, and mostly agree with Flow's opinions.

The time-zone effect is not an issue for me (I'm in Europe), and most of our tickets get an answer within few hours, and usually they come with a solution in a day or two.

When I'm in need of support, I can manage 90% of my doubts through their documentation, knowledge base, and the impressive value of the forums. I am used to search through forums and, in my humble opinion, must say that the community of Cs-Cart users is supportive, fast, and collaborative.

When I've needed support from CS-Cart, I've always found the amount of credit points required fair; today I still have most of the points earned through the buying of licenses.

Once I needed a customization and the process of quotation, buying, development and delivery of it was absolutely correct, exceeding my expectations for delivery date and in all stages communication was easy and fast.

Marc