1ShoppingCart.com is history.
If you’ve purchased anything in the last two or three days you’ll notice that we have a new (and improved) shopping cart. I started with 1ShoppingCart almost 4 years ago when I started my own resporg and changed the focus of my business from a toll free consulting service to a more mainstream Toll Free Search Engine. 30,000 customers later, they allowed us to grow from $2,000 a month in 2004 to a million dollar a year business in 2008, so this isn’t easy to write, but someone has to tell the world about how many problems there is with their system and how they’ve literally attacked their own customers to try and keep people silent.
During the past year or so, they simply had way too many major outages, issues over charging customers and simply lost too many orders to stay with them. But even worse than the technical problems was the way they blamed everyone else, from the customers, to their browsers to us for things that were obviously their fault. They simply didn’t care, unless you wrote something about it, in which case they attack you full force. It’s important to mention that we’re not selling or promoting anything at all. We’re simply sharing our own experience with 1shoppingcart.com with the rest of the web at large. I say that because I’m going to be putting up several posts about our experience in a section specifically for our 1shoppingcart.com story.
There’s a saying that goes: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing‿ and if honest people don’t say something about companies that really mess up, how would anyone ever find a good service or why would companies even care about doing a good job? Not only am I not doing this to sell anything, but I’ll probably have significant negative fall out from just sharing my honest experience. That’s because unfortunately companies that hurt their own customers, are often more than willing to hurt anyone that speaks out.
But they don’t realize that I’ve built my business sharing my honest experience and I’m going to do that no matter how many lawyers they threaten me with or what they do. The world (or at least anyone considering their service) needs to know what they’ve done!
(5 votes, average: 3.20 out of 5)
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Joany says:
January 15, 2009 at 8:21 am
It sounds like you’re the one trying to discredit them. I don’t see them attacking you like you say. How are they trying to hurt you? You don’t have any details at all… it sounds like you are just slandering. Just my thoughts
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
January 16, 2009 at 1:03 pm
They’re not ‘saying’ anything about us. It’s what they DID to us that cost us thousands of dollars. I’ve documented quite thoroughly numerous technical problems where they have simply shut down their whole business for most of a day one time and just shut us down at other times. I think the fact that they shut us down for undisclosed violations of their terms of service with no notice simply because we complained privately to them about their overcharging a customer, also shows their attitude too. If that’s not specific enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
Every time they do ‘maintenance’ something breaks or stops working. There’s to many things to post them all in just comments. But don’t worry. I’ve made a whole section of our site that I’ll use to walk through the specifics. This was just the first one. Oh and I’m also making a list of the benefits of the new service because we didn’t realize what we were missing in a lot of ways.
Saying it’s slander, makes it sound like you’re from the company or have some some ulterior motives (using an anonymous yahoo email address & ip 67.159.54.26). The bottom line is that it has to be false to be slander. They are going to have a hard time disproving anything I write because it’s the god’s honest truth. The truth may be damaging to them but it’s still the truth! I have no axe to grind and I’m legally allowed to express myself if it’s true. I’m not competing with them in any way. I have nothing at all to gain by telling people what happened. I’m sure they’re going to do their best to discredit it but that doesn’t make it wrong.
The web2.0 is all about consumers being able to rate companies and share their experience to educate potential customers. That’s all I’m doing.
aaron (1 comments.) says:
January 19, 2009 at 10:52 pm
For what it is worth. Thank you for this post. Although, it has nothing to do with 1-800 #’s… you have helped me a lot. I have a few website’s that I will be transfering shopping cart service and email follow up systems to, and I was looking at 1shoppingcart.com’s system. It is a large and tedious transition, and you helped me decide to pay a little more and go with infusionsoft.com for my shopping cart, crm, email, and follow up. It’s expensive, but I rather learn a superior new software, then learn an inferior software for a year, then have to change. Thanks for your opinion. I have had website gateways go down and you work hard to bring visitors to your site. So, you should always have a service that is reliable. You DO NOT have the time to monitor a professional service that you pay for to do the job right. And, one thing that is most important to everything else… is that the customer shoud be treated with respect.
Thanks again for your help. Fellow Netepreneur,
Aaron
aaron says:
January 19, 2009 at 10:54 pm
oh yeah…. here is my tip. I have two merchant accounts and two different payment gateways set up for incidents like this. It helps put your business back in control. I hope this helps.
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
January 19, 2009 at 11:06 pm
That’s a great tip about having two separate systems. I would also caution against using an affiliate program and auto responder from the same company you get your shopping cart from. I see that with phone companies, offering TV, Internet and phones and how that makes it hard to change your TV for example, because you don’t want to have to change your email address. And anyone using 1shoppingcart certainly has to have some contingency plan at a minimum.
Bill
aaron (3 comments.) says:
January 20, 2009 at 12:42 am
Bill,
That is exactly what I have been thinking lately about an all in one service like the one I am currently a few days from purchasing; http://www.infusionsoft.com . I’m affraid to put all my eggs in one basket…. but, at the same time my business is getting more busy and since I love building new businesses so much, I want to have one tool that will do most of my follow up with my customers and also be available for tracking their buying and response to my follow up. Do you know of any better systems I should consider before diving into this costly software and spending the next year learning all of it’s functions?
Thanks for being so responsive.
Cheers,
Aaron
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
January 20, 2009 at 11:36 am
Their auto responders do do a good job of following up and I got compliments from that and with an autoresponder asking for testimonials got quite a few as you can see too. The down side is that when you’re using that too, it makes it that much worse when things fall apart. We got used to the new order notices coming late or not at all at times.
Bill
aaron (3 comments.) says:
January 20, 2009 at 11:40 am
So, are you saying that is what software you are using right now?
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
January 20, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I was using 1shoppingcart.con until they just shut us down at 5pm on Friday 1/9 in the middle of our month with no notice or justification whatsoever, because I complained about them charging a customer four times and not showing it at all in the cart.
Bill
aaron (3 comments.) says:
January 20, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Yes. I can feel the pain. What software combo are you using for crm, shopping cart, and client follow up?
Thanks for any suggestions that will make my next software integration easier.
busywriter (1 comments.) says:
January 26, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Hi Bill,
Sorry to hear you’ve been having problems w 1shoppingcart. Have heard rumblings and murmurings of discontent with them before.
That must be how my orders with tollfreenumbers got lost last summer. Hmmm.
I have found solutions for my clients – maybe these will be of benefit to some readers of this site.
Follow up autoresponder:
I stuck with purchasing and installing a software autoresponder on my web site. Very happy having control over it. The learning curve is a problem, although much less burdensome than learning (and avoiding mistakes!) in the infusionsoft platform. That system is autoresponseplus. I’m not a reseller, look them up if you wish.
CRM:
Infusionsoft is an option. Perhaps not the best. Try Entellium.com. Smaller. I’m not a reseller. Look them up.
CRM Report:
This may be useful – 15 Companies compared.
http://www.customerthink.com/report/hosted_crm_buyers_comparison_guide
Shopping Cart:
Don’t know what direction to go in. Have been using combined PayPal and Clickbank. Still have to be creative to capture client physical address. Good product offers help.
Maybe that helps Aaron out with a few resources.
Glad to help Bill, you have ensured a easy toll-free purchase for my clients for a few years, with never a complaint.
Best regards Bill,
BUSYWRITER,
David Morrison.
Nathaniel says:
January 30, 2009 at 2:43 pm
How disappointing to hear about your experience with 1shoppingcart, Bill. I work in the merchant account business, and people frequently ask us about shopping carts. Typically, however, unless it’s a small mom-and-pop who can use one of our free carts, I don’t have much feedback for them because we typically let their web developers choose their shopping cart. I eagerly look forward to hearing how it works out with your new cart over the coming months! Good luck!
Rob says:
May 8, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Hi Bill, I would suggest to anyone looking for a shoppingcart to consider Magento. They are at magentocommerce.com and are a free open source software. For CRM, you are better off sticking with Quickbooks and their CRM manager. There are also addon CRM’s you can use which integrate nicely! For affiliate management look at idevaffiliate at idevdirect.com Hope this helps!
Gerson says:
June 1, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Hi
I have heard of similar stories from various providers and invariably it turned out to be that financial fraud rules demand suspension of service for investigation. If you have a complaint of such nature it is the duty of the provider to suspend the service and thus any business should have a plan B. While of course it would be better if one is told about why things happen, there could also be cases where it could disrupt the so called investigation and they would not tell you why.
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
June 1, 2009 at 5:23 pm
There was NEVER any suggestion of financial fraud on our part. The problems started when 1shoppingcart charged someone repeatedly without showing the information in the cart. This upset me and I tried to get an answer. When I couldn’t get any answer I wrote about the problem and that really pissed them off. They shut me down with NO NOTICE WHATSOEVER for abosolutely no reason other than, I was complaining about them.
It was a pain, that I probably wouldn’t have gone through if I had a choice, but I have to say that the end of the story was happy. I haven’t gone back to write about that much yet. We went with a better, more expensive shopping cart and not only do we really love it, but it has really helped our business.
You don’t realize what you’re missing when you don’t know any better. 1SC tries to be everything to everyone and it’s passable most of the time. But as I told them, a shopping cart that works most of the time, really isn’t working. And it took some time to get used to something else, but in the end it was MUCH better. I haven’t talked about it much yet, but we use GoEcart now and it’s better in almost every way except the auto responders.
Bill
Alan (1 comments.) says:
July 14, 2010 at 5:12 pm
I’ve been with 1SC for years and have never noticed a sustained outage until right now. I’m wondering how often this happens when I don’t know about it. Super frustrating.