I just wanted to give my 2 cents on what I think CS-Cart needs to do going forward.
CS-Cart needs to focus on creating stable bug free software geared to enterprise customers. Historically, CS-CART has had a low price point to attract the “mom & pop” beginner ecommerce ventures however the problem is that us enterprise customers who run real businesses with massive competition have much greater needs then the people who are starting out.
So what should CS-Cart do?
Do what Magneto did…
Offer your software for free with no support
Have a yearly support fee and offer Enterprise grade software and Enterprise grade support.
Most importantly… increase your support fee's to hire the BEST programming and QA team you can as well as the BEST support team you can.
I would trade an increase in supports fee for the lost hours of my time and lost sales due to buggy software and/or lack of finished features.
I agree 100%. We are an ´enterprise´ customer and we are amazed at the low price points of such good software and the various 3rd party add-ons.
What we miss most, however, is 2 things which CS-Cart would really need to improve if they ever want to have a chance to capture enterprise customers:
data connectivity: the current functionalities fall far short of exchanging all CS-Cart data with other enterprise systems (ERP, PIM, etc…)
response time: both Cs-Cart but also the 2 third-party developers we tried are too slow in responding. Sometimes we need to have a response in a few hours, but often in max 24 hours. Not waiting 2-4 days!
I fully realize that response time = cost. But we would be more than willing to pay (much) more for priority support.
And that's the comical part about CS-Cart. We essentially begging to pay for better support and they ignore us… lol this is a license to TAKE our money!
Were also begging for scalable, reliable, secure and feature rich software to take us all to the next level… again this is a license to TAKE our money!
CS-Cart is at a cross roads… stay small and cater to the mom and pop shops or starting acting like a TRUE cart provider and support us customer who are NOT playing around here and run serious businesses.
Honestly Cs Cart has so much potential and they expect their customers to do all the work while they just release 1-2 small updates once in a while…
Bigcommerce is almost identical to Cs Cart and they went huge, how did they do that? they improved and worked on their product to continue to improve and offer better ecommerce platform while Cs Cart's theory is to just sell some licence and release a few small minor updates which other ecommerce platforms has had for years…
I wish someone buys CS CART of these current owners and pay them off which i'm sure is what they are looking for and have some new owners who actually care to work hard and go big.