Pageville shopping cart

Has anyone tried this cart ? good bad ? thanx in advance

What are you looking to do? A custom cart is much better than a canned cart.

Hi, It seems that there is very little discussion on the web concerning PageVille, good or bad, so how about we get it going again.

I chose to try PageVille Shopping Cart because I could do my own site through FrontPage and retrieve the sales details to put through manually to my bank - no ‘real time’ payments with all their hassles and cost. Plus PageVille Cart itself was cheap at US$129. But it seems that maybe it was all too good to be true - stay tuned for updates. I have just sent them an email:

“***MOST URGENT*** I have just payed to get the PageVille Shipping Cart on my website and have found that your payment gateway site has been down for days, and is still "busy" with so-called heavy traffic - "The shopping cart server is busy due to high volume" it says. No shopping cart payment gateway = no sales.

What is going on here?? As a new customer trying to get a new business up and running, I think I have made a big mistake in signing up with PageVille Shopping Cart. If this continues one more day I will have no choice other than to cancel my subscription and request my money back in full, as you are in breach of contract and not delivering the service I paid for. Perhaps cheap shopping cart does mean cheap service? I hope not. Do not ignore this email as you have done in the past. You should know that one unhappy customer can tell thousands in these days of internet forums.

What is going on? All I want is some real customer service and communication from you guys. FIX THE PROBLEM!! You need to get this sorted fast for us all to be happy again. Regards, Max. (Spiritland.com.au)”

I hope that this will get resolved in the next day or two, otherwise I will have to dump them and try another shopping cart.

Look forward to more postings from others on this subject.

Cheers, Max.

I had a response from PageVille in due course and sent them this email:

"G’day Bob,

I had a touch of panic there for bit, as every time I went to the shopping cart, it said it was busy. This went on for a few days and had me trying to verify if PageVille was legit or what. Hence the email to you – I have been working on getting my website and business off the ground for months, and to have this killer problem one week before launch date was just too much for a country boy to handle.

Then I had a thought – perhaps it is because I have not added any inventory items in the cart yet that is causing the problem. So after putting in an item and clicking on the buy button for that item, it went through to the cart, finally. Yes!! After that, I could check the cart and it came up OK, as long as there was an item to purchase in it. I then cleared the cart and clicked to go to the cart without a buy item in it and it always comes up with the “busy due to high volume” message, even now.

So, the only real problem is that it is not coming back with the correct message when you try to go to the checkout/cart when nothing is in there. It should read “YOU HAVE NO ITEMS IN YOUR CART”, not that it is “busy due to high volume”, as customers will not go any further and click a ‘buy’ button, because they have just been told the cart is not working.

I have also realised that you guys are asleep when I’m awake, being on the other side of the planet, so communication is going to be a bit drawn out. I do appreciate that you have gotten back to me on this. I think that the simple stripped-down concept of the PageVille cart is great, and I will send you through my suggestions for a few tweaks at some point, when I’m not so busy."

So things are not as bad as I thought. Will keep you updated.

Cheers, Max.

So why didn’t I go with Zen Cart (or one of the other hundreds of similar shopping carts) for my online shop setup? I spent many a frustrating week researching various combinations of carts and payment gateways, some very expensive, some cheap, and some free (at least to purchase).

My needs: First time to the E-commerce scene; Very small home-based business beginning; Low ticket price on sale items; No cash resources; Absolute zero HTML writing skills; Low computer jargon understanding (what is MYSQL or PHP??); BUT… Good understanding and use of Microsoft FrontPage and Publisher; Familiar with QuickBooks and have run businesses before, including retail; Reasonable skills in design and desktop publishing; Have done several websites in FrontPage for various organisations.

I downloaded several shopping carts and tried getting them sorted (I got further with Zen Cart than the others), but always got stumped through lack of computer language skills and totally resented having to learn another area of the computer world that was simply a means to an end - which explains my love affair with Publisher and FrontPage. So I had no choice but to look to out-sourcing to get Zen Cart (the ’free’ software) up and running to a point that I could handle from there - at least several hundred dollars, if not into the thousands of dollars. Not such a free option after all!!

So then I searched for a cart that I could use WITHIN FrontPage and found PageVille. Cheap - just $129 per year, with zero monthly fees on the base plan. Easy - just an add-on to FrontPage that gives you the means to load up any buy button with the product details, which are automatically sent to your PageVille database when you upload the page through an FTP program. The Admin Page for your site on PageVille is also pretty straight forward (basic), though I have yet to resolve a few minor issues, but at least I am up and running. After some early panic, I have learnt to use PageVille to good effect and very much appreciate its simple approach without all the bells and whistles of the full-blown (bloated) shopping cart that seems to be the norm. I track my stock through QuickBooks, so I don’t need to do it online, same with all financial and delivery tracking.

The other side of an online shop is the order/payment gateway. Again, after weeks of research and deliberation, plus given my small start-up, I was pleased to find that PageVille could take the orders and credit card details without processing them, and that I could then retrieve them through a secure login and then process the payment in-house with my banks merchant facility - very cheap, easy, safe and flexible for refunds or amendments. So I’m very happy at this time and is looking good at the point.

I hope to start trading on 1st September IF the rest of my stock arrives in time, which is another saga. So I will give an update on it all in a few weeks time. Cheers, Max.