I wanted to take the time out to post a review for friends over at EZ Merchant Solutions.
We've been doing business with them for several years now ... from all the way back when we started deploying clients on CSCart 2.2.x.
Tony over at EZMS has been a pleasure to deal with. His company produces high-quality addons for CSCart that are not only written with great care programatically, but also very user-friendly and feature packed. Add to that, they are a bargain for what you get. Having purchased CSCart addons from various vendors over the years, I can say that EZMS produces some of the highest quality addons we've worked with. Most importantly, EZMS offers the quickest and most skilled support of any vendor we've dealt with. There's no back and forth once a day for 10 days when dealing with their support like with some other vendors.
If you're looking for CS-Cart Addons that work and are backed by a competent support team that stands behind their product ... check out EZ Merchant Solutions (ez-ms.com).
I agree 100%. We have been working with Tony over at EZ Merchant Solutions for over 5 years. We started way back on version 2 when we only had 1 website. We now have 5+ sites on cs cart. We have purchased many of his addons, but he is our go-to guy whenever it comes to any cs-cart custom modification or question.
We've tried other "overseas" developers and details get lost in translation and you have to wait 24 hours for a response. Tony is US based and in the same Pacific Time zone as us, so he is always responsive. I emailed him yesterday morning to develop an api for a third party addon(Yotpo) and by the afternoon he had already completed it. He stands behind his code and wouldn't hesitate to recommend his services in a heartbeat.
I have been using CS-Cart since 2007 and I have also tried some of the other developers over the years.
A few months ago, when I started my upgrade of my heavily customized cart from 2.2 to the latest version I had a decision to make.
Suffer through the issues mentioned in some of the above posts or find a better way.
I came across Tony of EZ-Merchant on this forum because of all of the extremely helpful posts he has made throughout the years.
I hired him for some serious customizing and he is doing great work, very quick and at reasonable costs.
He really surprised me because I asked him for something and instead of just doing it, he asked me why I wanted to do it that way and we then explored other ways of creating a smoother interface for the customer. He really cared about the whole picture.
About a month ago, we bought the simple, yet effective summary checkout add-on.
There are a few pre-filled in fields, like 'ship by' or 'use gift wrap' but we don't use it for that purpoose.
Instead it replaces freebie items that apparently confused the heck out of many customers, some of whom even called to enquire what it was all about as they didn't want anything.. never mind if it said 'nothing' , it would still remain 1 items.
The biggest PITA was that the automatic recalculation function which works just fine for paid products, did not work on freebies.
Fine if it is a gift, but not so fine if you ask whether they want a free newsletter (the automatic built-in subscription only attracts trolls, so I was removing 99 troll subscriptions for every real subscriber, whom I might erroneously remove as well!)
If the default was "subscribe me" they'd get subscribed even when they didn't want to.. so you end up getting into trouble.. and if your default was "not interested" you'd never get new subscribers, unless they were smart enough (1 out of 10 was/is) to click 'recalculate".
So.. Tony's Summary checkout is a true blessing as you are now sure the choice your customer made is actually what they chose (or they leave it at the default which is fine too).
Just 2 caveats, make sure that after each change you go to the language administration as the field name will be reset to the English value so you have to rename it every time you change something.
We use it in combianation with the other highly recommended add-on one-step-checkout by Louis so you need to contact him to make it work.
the other caveat is that the remarks disappear when you edit an order and are not visible on a packing slip..
We are now printing the invoice again and if we do edit, copy the checkout remarks to the client comment section before making changes.
Not 100% sure yet but we are rather convinced it helps with conversion.
Instead it replaces freebie items that apparently confused the heck out of many customers, some of whom even called to enquire what it was all about as they didn't want anything.. never mind if it said 'nothing' , it would still remain 1 items.
Just 2 caveats, make sure that after each change you go to the language administration as the field name will be reset to the English value so you have to rename it every time you change something.
We use it in combianation with the other highly recommended add-on one-step-checkout by Louis so you need to contact him to make it work.
the other caveat is that the remarks disappear when you edit an order and are not visible on a packing slip..
We are now printing the invoice again and if we do edit, copy the checkout remarks to the client comment section before making changes.
Will look into the two issues you note. Neither should be happening.
The language should track the language you are set to in the admin panel. I.e. if you change a value from "yes" to "si" and you are in the 'es' language, then it should remain 'yes' in 'en' and 'si' in 'es'.
For the second I'm assuming you mean the info that is optionally displayed in the 'user notes' area that describes what was selected. They should be visible when editing an order and subsequently saved.
If you want to have Lewis contact me with portable changes that need to be made to work in his 1step checkout, I'd be happy to add then at the same time.
I found and fixed the issue with the language update.
However, in using 4.8.1 I can't reproduce the issue with not retaining the notes.
Can you contact me via email at support at ez-ms.com so I can duplicate the issue?
If the addon has the 'add to notes field' setting checked, then the info related to the summary fields should show on the packing slip within the notes field.
Sorry for a late answer, I don't habitually look at the forum (I = Anthony's partner)
Freebies are simple free items, some are physical gifts (a small or larger sample up to a real gift), there's also the question if people want a printed package insert (instructions how to use) as well as a question whether they want to subscribe to our newsletter.
The free items were and are confusing to customers who see their cart being filled all of a sudden with extra items and unfortunately we can only conclude it led to lower conversion rather than better conversion .
We decided enough was enough when one such suspicious person called us angrily and then exclaimed that he couldn't get rid of them even when he had clicked on 'nothing' .. not understanding that while NOTHING (0 zip zilch) still is 1 item.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was and is that auto-recalculate does NOT work on free items. So if someone says : yes great, I'll subscribe to the newsletter and it is NO by default, that YES won't register if they do NOT actively click on 'recalculate'.
Vice versa, when we have a YES by default (we had this until the new privacy law was enforced at the end of May) they will be mad as hell if they said NO and then.. the no didn't register.
Will look into the two issues you note. Neither should be happening.
The language should track the language you are set to in the admin panel. I.e. if you change a value from "yes" to "si" and you are in the 'es' language, then it should remain 'yes' in 'en' and 'si' in 'es'.
For the second I'm assuming you mean the info that is optionally displayed in the 'user notes' area that describes what was selected. They should be visible when editing an order and subsequently saved.
If you want to have Lewis contact me with portable changes that need to be made to work in his 1step checkout, I'd be happy to add then at the same time.
I found and fixed the issue with the language update.
However, in using 4.8.1 I can't reproduce the issue with not retaining the notes.
Can you contact me via email at support at ez-ms.com so I can duplicate the issue?
If the addon has the 'add to notes field' setting checked, then the info related to the summary fields should show on the packing slip within the notes field.
Glad you found the error, I did however just add a little something to the field where I offer a free sample (adding a third choice) and still had to change the word sample into proefmonster .. or do I need to go to both sides?
Mind you, I chose to use 2 languages for the content of the fields, it is only the field name that I wanted to change on the Dutch side, that is the Dutch word for sample, newsletter and package insert!
As for your last remark, I will look into that as I don't exactly remember where I can check or uncheck that box.
Glad you found the error, I did however just add a little something to the field where I offer a free sample (adding a third choice) and still had to change the word sample into proefmonster .. or do I need to go to both sides?
Mind you, I chose to use 2 languages for the content of the fields, it is only the field name that I wanted to change on the Dutch side, that is the Dutch word for sample, newsletter and package insert!
As for your last remark, I will look into that as I don't exactly remember where I can check or uncheck that box.
I have not released th fix yet. Am waiting on clarification of your other issue so I can make one release with needed changes.
I've used several of Tony's addons and have been very happy with them. Most recently we hired him to develop a custom addon for a financing service. Tony was very patient during the process despite the merchant being horrible to work with. Ultimately he was able to create the addon that worked exactly as we needed it.
Tony has been great to work with. I recently contacted him with a problem I was having with one of his plugins and he immediately got to work on a fix. I appreciated that he took the time to set up error logging on my site so that he quickly and accurately identified the problem - rather than just throwing out a fix he thought might work.
I've used several of Tony's addons and have been very happy with them. Most recently we hired him to develop a custom addon for a financing service. Tony was very patient during the process despite the merchant being horrible to work with. Ultimately he was able to create the addon that worked exactly as we needed it.
Hi! I would love to look into getting this custom addon for the financing service. I tried to call at the phone number on the website to no avail. Would you mind helping me in order to make this happen. The only finance agent showing approved is not accepting new clients at this moment. I appreciate you help in advance.