Happened to check my helpdesk area…
Support is now for sale…
[url]Support -
yup, I noticed that too over the weekend. I’m down to 19 support days, so not a lot of time left between the release of 1.3.3 and my support expiring… yikes! :eek: still no official announcement from the CS-Cart team.
- What types of questions will be answered after support has ended?
- Do we receive additional support time for mods that are purchased?
- If we are a reseller, can we have 1 support account for all of our accounts (licenses)?
If you ask alot of questions will they get answered?
I thought I made a post here, am I going crazy or did it get deleted by chance? I know I wrote it all up but I thought I submited it as well…
I’ll probably will be getting ready to buy some support but it would be nice to know exactly what kind of support they will cover, ie will CS be supporting us in helping get our custom mods working, will they help with coding? ect…?
I think it is very important to receive clarification of what is deemed “support” from CS-Cart. I see three potential support situations based on the current support structure and would like to know what level of support once can receive under each situation. The 3 situations I see are as follows:
- Receiving 30 days of support included with initial license purchase.
- Purchasing additional support in 30, 90, 180, and 365 day increments.
- Not purchasing additional support after the initial 30 days expires.
It appears that all questions have been regularly addressed for individuals while under the initial 30 day support period through the helpdesk system. The only thing I am aware of that has not been covered is specialized coding requests. In those cases, a quote for coding services has been given. I would assume that the additionally purchased support periods would work similarly, but it would be nice to know specifically what is included, especially since 3 months of support costs more than the initial license does.
I have personally submitted two helpdesk requests in the first 2 weeks in which I have had a license for CS-Cart, as follows:
1.) The first request was to ask whether any changes were being made to the Authorize.net payment module in the next version, because I wanted to add some enhancements to the code, but did not want to duplicate code that had already been completed. In response, I received a code snippet of the only change that had been made to the Authorize.net code.
2.) The second request was in regard to bugs and suggested usability issues in the FedEx and USPS shipping modules. As a result of this request, I received download links for files with bug fixes for those modules.
My question is whether informational requests like #1 and bug issues like #2 will be covered after the inital 30 days of support expires. Will these questions be answered or will I be required to purchase additional support to receive assistance with such issues. If they are covered, then what am I getting for the additional support purchase? This is why I think that clarification of exactly what support is being offered in all cases is important.
On another note, I think that an improved system needs to be established in regards to notifying store owners about known bugs and their fixes. In regards to the FedEx and USPS modules previously mentioned, I spent several hours changing settings, and testing the setup because of bugs. All the while, these bugs where known and had fixes. There was no way for me to know this, however, without submitting a helpdesk request. Unfortunately, since the time difference between myself and support is about 8 hours, anytime I have an issue during my workday, I must submit a helpdesk request after support has closed. This means that I must automatically wait until the next business day before I will receive a reply, assuming I receive one the next day. I do not understand why support has setup the system so that they must repeatedly receive the same requests for fixed bugs instead of posting a listing of bug fixes in the helpdesk area or on the forums. The current system wastes both support’s time and the store owner’s time. If bug fix releases are not going to be made between feature releases, the least that could be done is to make the bug fixes known in an easy to access fashion.
In regards to new features, I also think that it would be very beneficial to have a decisive and complete listing of new features implemented into the next release. As a programmer, I do not want to spend alot of time working on mods that are going to be in the next release. This is a very simple matter of good communication.
I hope this has not hijacked the announcement purpose of this thread, but these issues all relate to how support functions within CS-Cart and my initial impressions after 2 weeks of using the software. If necessary, I can repost my comments in another thread.
Not cool at all…
- Ok first off was this support stuff in place when customers ordered? If not changing your policy on support after we pay is not cool…
- Its really not cool when you submit a ticket with in your 30 days and you get told:
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We have received your messages, thank you.
Unfortunately your free techsupport time is expired on May 2, 2006 so now we cannot render you the assistance for free. If you want to continue using our support service you need order “Technical support subscription renewal”:
1 month - USD 45.00
3 months - USD 120.00
6 months - USD 220.00
1 year - USD 405.00
You can buy the technical support subscription on “Services” page in this Help Desk.
Thank you for your attention.
—
Sincerely yours,
Alex Vinokurov
https://www.cs-cart.com
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But the ticket was submited with in the 30days you just took to long to answer it “Posted: 05/02/2006, 21:18, ID: #100003703”
- If we are paying for support is it going to be faster? Will you post your holidays like 5/1/06 was a holiday but we had no idea.
Changing a poloicy after someone has paid you and not up holding your first deal is not cool. I have only been using cs-cart 30 days yesterday, I just hope I made the right pick…
Vortech,
Thank you for posting your issue. I am curious what kind of support you were requesting that was automatically denied an answer just because 30 days had passed by the time CS-Cart responded to your request.
This is the reason I started my last post with “I think it is very important to receive clarification of what is deemed “support” from CS-Cart.” No clarification has been given as of yet. I am hoping that CS-Cart will make this information public soon. I have 10 days left before my 30 day period expires. I will have to make a decision whether I am going to stick with CS-Cart before then. The answers I get regarding this issue will be very decisive in that decision.
I expect that all bug issues and usability issues will still be covered after the 30 days without additional charge, but I have not seen any statement that this is the case. This is very critical considering that a new version is soon expected to be released. I have put my development on hold, awaiting that time, and have therefore lost much of my initial 30 day support time. I will not be willing to pay for additional support for bux fixes or questions not covered in the documentation when the next version is released.
CS-Cart? Any clarification?
It’s more of a bug than an issue with something I don’t know. The HTML catalog does not work really well for anything over 5000 products.
- It can mess up and make all pages the index.html page and not the page it really should be.
- It’s slow. It took over 12 hours for ours to run with 64,000 products.
- If you use a 301 redirect some of your pages will no longer work within the CMS because it does not make those pages, like the ones under Site info will no longer work. At least it did not before when we had the 301 on there because those are not made in to real pages with real links.
There is a lot of issues in the cart but it can be made very good. But if they cut off everyone from support they will also be limiting them self for bugs. I work with a lot of software companies and not one would have told me what I was told by cs-cart and I had submited with in my 30 days they did not even look at the time stamp.