Very angry about new features for money.

[hanzoswords]

And I don't appreciate you locking someones thread when they bring it up. Does not sit well with me as a long time customer (2004) whos had as many as 4 carts going at one time. It's painfully obvious you are gouging customers for a new revenue stream. An app for advanced search? Really?..... Wow.

I am looking at alternatives right now.

[cashmore]

Yes, I am looking at alternative as well. A good company tries to grow too fast and becomes driven by marketing.

[DaveW]

I am not completely decided on this yet, but am going to keep an open mind for now. I have been with a bad company and bad cart (Monster/NetSol) and this ain't it. Locking the other thread was not good, IMO

For example, I would pay a lot of money for an app that inegrated the back end of more than one cart, but it would not be fair for everyone on 3d to have to pay more for this feature that only effects a few of us.

The advanced search is less clear cut for me. I would love it on one of my carts, and not so much on the other, so I am not sure if I would like paying for it when I won't use it.

If 3d stays with this approach, I suspect that market forces will dictate what is a paid add on and what is not. If comparable carts all have advanced serach in thier basic setups, it will get added. If not, those who need it will have to pay.

DaveW

[GonzaloGil]

If you looked for advanced search in the past, you probably run into

http://www.sli-systems.com/ (Over 10k/year) + pay per search/page view
http://www.nextopia.com (About 1k/year)
http://www.google.com/commercesearch (25k/year)

The Advanced search plugin is not a simple add-on, its comparable to those solutions, but at $60.00/month. 3DCart is not a search company and we are not going to create something like SLI, Nextopia or Google, instead we'll partner with companies that have the technology ready and provide it to you at a much lower price.

Obviously this functionality is not important to you, and that's ok, but the reason the plugin was developed is because we had a large # of clients going out and spending thousands of dollars to add these advanced search technologies and we thought we should help them out and provide a more economical solution that had the same results.

[DaveW]

I should amend my post, I was refering to the Advanced Category Filters not Search.

DaveW

[elightbox]

I started the post that was closed by the moderator, and even though I think closing it was not a good move, I was mostly satisfied with Jimmy’s answer.
The advanced search as explained would command the high cost and is justifiable. Others developed by 3dcart I think are overpriced at least in my opinion.
I can see on UserVoice that there are tens if not hundreds of requested features, and 3dcart can not be expected to develop and include all for free. Offering a smorgasbord of reasonably priced add-ons ($10 - $99 depending on complexity) for web site owners to choose from would be fair and cost effective, while at the same time profitable for 3dcart to develop.

With some carts there is a cadre of developers creating enhancements for the cart and selling them to users, this would be similar. Opening it to 3rd party developers would be even better, but I can see a benefit for keeping the code and database off limits.

Then 3dcart can concentrate on functionality issues and major enhancements for the software.

[jhb]

We have used the filtering system on 3dcart and it is not worth the money. It is limited to 4 filters at a time and has disappeared from our site multiple times.

[widgets]

We have used the filtering system on 3dcart and it is not worth the money. It is limited to 4 filters at a time and has disappeared from our site multiple times.

Can you explain what you meant by 'disappeared'?

[jhb]

Can you explain what you meant by 'disappeared'?

One day it would be visible on the site, and a few days later it would not. This happened multiple times do to incompatibilities with some of the templates and once due to an error I made in my template code. It usually took a few days for the error to be corrected and the filter to be reinstantiated. However, the limit of four filters is the real downer for us.

As far advanced search, is there any discussion of integrating something like Solr or RDF based systems which are open source, easy to implement and add a lot of value? These have both been successfully implemented in Content Management Systems like Drupal.

[GonzaloGil]

As far advanced search, is there any discussion of integrating something like Solr or RDF based systems which are open source, easy to implement and add a lot of value? These have both been successfully implemented in Content Management Systems like Drupal.

We looked at Solr, and were going to use that to build our own "advanced search" however, what we found is that the setup and maintenance of the catalog was not very easy. Sure if you had 1 store to manage and wanted to tweak it, its awesome, but didn't work for us on a massive scale for every store.
The third party that handles the search has a very advanced system, similar to Solr, with a few additional things specially for SEO.

I continue to tinker with Solr there's a .net client here http://code.google.com/p/solrnet/ but I don't think we'll be integrating it anytime soon.

[cashmore]

I just wanted to clarify my previous comment in this thread about looking for an alternative to 3dcart. Actually, I'm good with 3dcart for the time being. It is a good cart and a good company, but I'm going to be watching things carefully to see how the company changes over the next year or so.

I'm actually more concerned about all the downtime we had this month. So, yes, I am looking at alternatives. I'm doing research and I want to have an alternative cart in mind in case the downtime issue continues or escalates.

Happy New Year, everyone!

[rburton34]

Please dont mention downtime. The cart I am leaving is down constantly. :confused:

[wcsjohn]

The downtime this month certainly was frustrating, especially for the time of the year, but for the past year 3dcart uptime has been fantastic. Better than ANY host we've been with over the past 5 years.

[piaf]

I also think that downtime might have been server specific, because we haven't experienced a single minute of downtime since we went live in mid-November.

[rburton34]

I also think that downtime might have been server specific, because we haven't experienced a single minute of downtime since we went live in mid-November.

Best news I have heard all day. My current platform - who I hope to be gone from by Feb. - has had several days of downtime so far this year (and its only the 7th day of the year) and STILL hasnt got the USPS live rates figured out yet after 6 days.

You made the right move Piaf.