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The Long Tail, the Ah-Ha Factor, and Saying What No One Else Says
A client asked me today, how to get the long tail search engine traffic. Good question, and a good goal. Getting it has always seemed easy for me, but when I actually started to analyze why so many people fail to get it, and why some people just easily do so, I learned a few things.
First, it is important to understand WHY long tail traffic is so important. Think of a very big fish that dies on the beach, and all the seagulls swarm to it, fighting over that one fish. Hundreds of seagulls, and one fish that happens to look bigger than all the rest.
Meanwhile, all around, there are other fish. Smaller ones to be sure, but still enough. Maybe you have to go catch a few, and that takes a bit of work, but it certainly takes no more work than fighting your way to the front of the crowd to get one measly bite of the big fish.
Personally, I choose not to be a squabling gull. Recent research suggests that less than 6% of traffic comes from the top 10 keywords in a given industry. If you increase that to the top 100 keywords, it still accounts for only 20% of the traffic. So everybody and their dog are fighting over that 20% while the other 80% is pretty easy pickings.
There is a trick to it though. Common marketing instructions say to get it by having lots of content. They leave out some important information though. Because content alone is not enough.
- If it is reprinted content, it will lack the power. Good long tail content is ALWAYS unique.
- If it is the same thing everyone else is saying, it won’t work. Good long tail content is interesting… it gives people information they can’t get elsewhere. It has the “ah-ha” factor.
- If it is egotistical it is as much a waste of your time as the content is a waste of the visitor’s time. It has to speak to the needs of the individual who might want what you have, and it has to do so in a way that other marketers are overlooking.
Everyone who tries to go after the long tail tries to take shortcuts. So it doesn’t work. You have to be thoughtful, and you have to know your customers to get it.
Every VA in the world knows that if they write articles, they can market with them. So every VA in the world writes the same articles – “How a VA can save you money”, “Grow your business with a VA”. BORING! There are 200,000 copies of that same article, written by 200,000 different people, and not one of them says anything that a real prospective client wants to read.
If you want to grab the long tail, and profit from content writing, you have to start thinking out of the box. What are the real concerns of your customers? What are they really searching for online that they can’t easily find?
Forget keywords. Seriously. Long tail keywords happen naturally as a result of good writing, you simply do not have to think about them. If you start thinking about them, you destroy your ability to get them, because the power is in the variety – the happenchance that occurs with good writing.
Think about needs.
If I am considering surgery, I want statistics on morbity rates, but I also want personal stories. In fact, with that target market, personal stories may be the most powerful writing.
If I want a website, and I don’t know much about the technology behind it, I want someone to explain things in simple terms.
If I am looking for insurance, I may want to know what effect my health history may have on rates or ability to get insurance. I may want to know whether there is a medical exam, who does it, and who pays for it and how.
Listen to your customers. What are they asking over and over? What are they most concerned with? Answer those questions in ways no one else is doing. And make sure you give some information in there that gives them a key, or a grain of understanding that they can’t get somewhere else – that is the “ah-ha” factor. The meat in the article that makes them think, “Oh, NOW I get it!”.
The combination of those things – original content, stuff that is interesting and informative to your audience, unique writing with the “ah-ha” factor (that tells them something no one else is saying in quite that way), will bring in traffic and people who are already pre-sold. When you give them something they can’t get from just anyone, you’ll be pulling in people who want to work with you, specifically. And you’ll be astonished at how they found you – it will be something you could not predict.
Unpredictability is part of the power of the long tail. It is what makes it easy to just write, without worrying about doing anything other than creating good writing, and it is what brings them in to you rather than to your competitors who are just aiming at the top spots.
It’s been working marvelously for us – and by getting power in the long tail keywords, we eventually start moving up in the top ones. But I’d be happy if we never did that, simply because those long tail keywords are so powerful, we really don’t even NEED the top ones.
Let the other mindless gulls squawk and squabble. I’m content fishing on the fringes.
AWOL, With Good Cause
Ok, so I haven’t been blogging much lately. And I haven’t been doing much on FaceBook. And I haven’t been posting much on Ryze. Our newsletter has been late once, and completely missed once. A few friends with whom I regularly converse even emailed to ask if I was ok!
I’m just BUSY! Too busy to do anything more than just gasp for breath now and again, and to write a little when I need a break.
We have a major project just going live, one that we have to announce sometime in December, one more rolling out before the first of the year, and the project to end all projects that we are building around the other ones. We have decided to franchise.
That has been a long time coming. I’ve sort of known it was where I needed to go, but I had no idea how to make it work with our unique business structure, and the broad marketing region that we serve. I’ve finally figured out the details – well… not so much figured them out, as realized that all the other bits and pieces of events in our business over the last six months have sort of solved most of the execution problems for me! Suddenly I looked at it in a new way and KNEW how all of the bits needed to come together into one big comprehensive whole.
Pretty awesome. But a big thing. The great thing is, that in all the other things we are doing, if we just polish them off, we’ll have all but a few of the parts we need for the franchise. It takes the Trade Association, the Training Courses, the Kit Websites, and all of those things and pulls it together. It helps us to solve some of our long term staffing problems while also achieving our goal of spreading our skills to other small webmasters.
It is still daunting. Because the number of things which we have to do hasn’t decreased. There still seems like more than I can ever do. But it is also something that can be rolled out in stages. And so we will.
There’s a lesson in it too. You don’t have to know all the details about how to get somewhere. You do have to know how to get to the next bend in the road, and then you have to be willing to survey the landscape there, choose the next route based on the best opportunities, and let your vision expand as you go.
I’ve had an idea of some large goals to begin with. I didn’t know quite how we’d do them all – I still do not. But every few months, new possibilities unfold, and I go back and measure them up against my dreams. If they fit, we seize them and magnify them. If they don’t, we ignore them and keep going until the right ones do present themselves.
Just because you can’t see it all right now, doesn’t mean you can’t do it!
I’ve Been Learning, Have You?
My primary website is a MESS! It was nice when it started out. But then I had more things. And web standards changed. And I learned some more stuff. What was good then is now an embarrassment. And like the shoeless cobbler’s kids, my websites are the last to get attention. Clients have to come first.
So today, I’m looking at the positive side of it.
People are hiring me anyway – so at least my client work is speaking well of me.
The fact that I see that it is an embarrassment means I’m learning. Learning is good.
The fact that I’ve outgrown it means our business is expanding. Growth is good.
The fact that web standards are changing means (usually) progress on the web.
Of course, the negative side is always there, haunting me. Which means that one of these days I’m going to have to put aside my other pressing projects and put some time into a redesign of the template. Luckily, the site is built so the template can be revised without having to redo the entire site… one of the positive aspects of the progress of the web!
Look around. What have you learned that has made something you did before obsolete? What have you outgrown that needs a change? Are you nagging yourself to get the change done without acknowledging the growth that necessitates the change?
I Don’t Read Your Emails Anymore
Yeah you, FaceBook “Friends”! I don’t read your teleseminar emails, your “join this” emails, or your “special deal” emails. Nope! I trash ’em!
I have some real friends on FaceBook. You know, the kind who actually KNOW me, that have talked to me about something real, who have taken the time to be a real person to me. If they ask me to join something (which they only do if they are reasonably certain I will be interested – see, they KNOW me well enough to know that!), then I read their message, and consider it.
But if all I have ever seen of you is your name in an ad, you haven’t got a chance. If you email me on a regular basis with ads, and have never taken the time to so much as look at my profile (by which you’d know I’m death on internet marketing spam tactics!), then you are going to be trashed without being read. In fact, I won’t even read the TITLE of the email (yours are so long that all I ever see in my email program is your name… you know, the hypy one that is too long…). I never SEE the great thing you are trying to advertise, all I see is your name and BLIP! You’re GONE!
I’m a nice person. At least, most of the people who know me say that (if you ask my teenage daughter who is in a mood, she might not agree, but the prevailing concensus is that I’m not mean). I don’t like getting snotty about this. But sometimes I think that this is all that certain people will HEAR!
I’m also NORMAL! Virtually EVERYBODY, except internet and social networking greenies, react the same way I do. They don’t have time for people like you! Their life is full of meaningful relationships, urgent tasks, and offers from trusted sources. Why in the world would they even bother to read your ad when you haven’t bothered to try to even get to know them?
You may think you are following the rules – you may think that your PM blasts fit some rule of “relationship building”. They don’t. They are ads. In a world saturated with ads. Everybody is screaming, and nobody is listening to anyone who hollers. They are listening to those who quietly talk to them, person to person.
Next week, I’ll be unfriending anyone who sends me regular PM blasts who doesn’t even know my name. I encourage everyone who reads this to do the same. They can all go and holler to themselves. The rest of us have a real life, and a real business, and we’re too busy succeeding to listen to your immature irritations.
If you need to know how to do it right, I’m always willing to help – and that ISN’T an ad. Countless people will tell you I’ve offered them free resources that were solid, or gave advice without cost that was invaluable. I don’t want to stop anyone from succeeding. I just want to help them get out of their own way, and stop irritating the very people they ought to be befriending!
Why are You Really in Business?
I find that most business owners have not really put a lot of thought into WHY they are in business, beyond “I like doing this.” or “I want to make money.” They haven’t thought about their own driving motivations.
It is really valuable to figure out what your real purpose in business is. Much like the true product in marketing, the real purpose is often abstract, or seemingly unrelated to the day to day tasks.
My purpose is to strengthen families. Most of my clients are parents, many are stay at home moms. Of course, I serve single people too. But underneath all my goals for helping businesses succeed, is the purpose of making life more affordable and manageable for families. By offering success services, I help them afford to care for their families.
So what is your REAL purpose? Beyond making money or creating or selling a product or service, what is the goal that gets you out of bed each morning?
If you identify that, and work toward making that more evident, then your business takes you places in interesting ways. It becomes something unexpected. Our business grant is a result of that. Bad Behavior Stand Alone came from that. We are working on other software tools development to further that purpose. I train webmasters for that reason. I constantly work to produce more, for less, and profit more, because of that. Because my success leads to the success of others, and that helps families survive.
Because this is my goal, it changes HOW I teach, and it changes what I do. It makes ethics paramount. It makes the methods I teach ultra clean, it means I must be able to do things differently because my goal is not just to be another web designer. It is to create something different and better, that makes the world, and families, better.
Take some time to brainstorm, and figure out why you are really in business, and what your long term goal is at a deeply personal level. It may surprise you. And it may be the key to unlocking potentials you never anticipated.
A Tiny Choice, An Immeasurable Result
It didn’t seem like that big of a choice at the time. I mean, it was sort of a scary choice to make, and I knew that it was one of those “letting go of the security blanket” type choices. I thought I knew what it meant at the time. I didn’t. And when I realized what the choice ACTUALLY meant, I was astonished at how it contributed to the defining aspects of our business, and even our identity as business owners and service providers.
This has happened to me over and over. It hasn’t been a single choice, but many, which have shown this pattern. A small choice, which seemed a little against logic, but which we made because in spite of the fear attached, it felt right. And then the impact unfolding into an eye opening concept. I’ll tell about three of those choices:
1. Years ago. I chose to do flat rate pricing instead of hourly rates. Scary… what if I underestimated? But I did it because it felt right. It has been more than a defining aspect of our business. It has been totally empowering. I didn’t have to track hours while balancing children and business. I saved that time I’d have put into tracking hours. I no longer had an earning ceiling. The faster I worked, the more I made. WOW! That has been huge also.
2. Making the choice to train my own competition, without holding back any trade secrets or empowering information. Scary at first. But the impact on our business even in the last two months since making that choice, has been huge. It is like a whole new world of potentials and possibilities have opened, and the things that are coming back to us are just incredible. I never could have predicted how good this one choice would be.
3. Making the choice to drop HTML sites and focus on dynamic sites. Since that choice was made, new opportunities have opened up. Not only that, but we feel more capable of pursuing certain things that we felt inadequate to do before. Our focus on making our dynamic site services better, has sharpened. Our vision of what we need to do next, has become more clear.
Each of those decisions seemed at the time like a small one, even though the philosophy we had to overcome was a major limiting one. How easy it would have been to say, “Nope, I’ll just do it the way everyone else does.”, and dismiss the idea to change. How easy it would have been to be caught in the rut that would have limited our potentials.
Those decisions that we make, which go against conventional wisdom, and which our mind tries to minimize into insignificance when we fear taking the leap, are often the most important ones. The ones that define us as unique, and which give exponential power to our growth potentials.
Where we are today, compared to where we were even two months ago, is astronomically different! Better, bigger, more exciting! And I can see, that if I had failed to make the choice for flat rate pricing 10 years ago, and then reaffirm it each time we grew or offered a new service, we would not have grown this much, and we would not have as much potential to grow further. I can see that the choice to train my competition is a fundamental aspect of where we are going now. I can see that the choice to abandon HTML websites and focus on dynamic sites is opening doors and potentials that I was little aware of at the time.
Fear will stop us. Dismissing choices and making them insignificant can in fact make US insignificant. Considering those possibilities, and being willing to take the risk, face the fears and go forward in new directions, can explode our potentials and make us a force to be reckoned with!
Which would you rather be?
Green Tomato Relish – Another Garden Metaphor
Yesterday, I enjoyed a nice chicken salad on crackers, made especially tasty by stirring in a healthy amount of green tomato relish. The day before, I savored nachos, topped with zingy green tomato salsa. Tonight, I’ll slice and fry the last green tomato to serve beside dinner.
Sometime about the end of August, our abundant tomato crop was hit with the first freeze. We weren’t sure then whether we’d get any mature tomatoes or not. In the best Frugal Yankee tradition, I began looking for recipes for green tomatoes.
Relish, Salsa, Fried Green Tomatoes, Pickles, Casseroles, etc. Who knew there were so many uses for unripe garden fruits?
Every single one required two things from me:
1. Additional ingredients. Sometimes they were things I did not have on hand – I had to get them specifically if I wanted to utillize the abundant crop of green tomatoes.
2. Effort and specific types of work. What I did with them made all the difference.
You can see where I’m going with this…
We didn’t plant the garden and say, “Oh! I hope we get a LOT of green tomatoes, I’m just so looking forward to having to make-do!” We had big dreams when we planted 40 tomato plants. We wanted sauced, diced, and ketchuped tomatoes!
That first freeze didn’t kill our hopes. In fact, after that first freeze, which only killed the tops of the tomatoes, we gathered a small amount of red tomatoes – enough to make a weeny batch of ketchup. A few more tomatoes ripened indoors after a hard killing frost in September.
But we had more greens than reds, and we had to do something with them. In order to use them, we had to add the right ingredients, and if we didn’t have them, we had to go buy them. One or two were things I’d not need for anything else – I had to get them specifically to make use of those green tomatoes. And I had to do the right things with them, to make them into something good, otherwise they’d just be yucky green tomatoes.
Life, family, and business all do that to us. We plan our plans, and start to carry them out, and along comes a disaster that blights our hopes and kills the plans. What do we do then?
Do we cry that we didn’t get our juicy red tomatoes? Do we look at the distruction of our plants and at all those sad green tomatoes and see nothing but disaster? Or do we go seek out recipes for green tomatoes, and then add the necessary additional elements to turn them into something unexpected, but every bit as tasty and useful as what we had originally planned?
Sure, I still wish I had been able to harvest a bounty of red, ripe tomatoes. But since life handed me green tomatoes, I’m just thankful that there was something good I could do with them to turn it into a blessing of a different kind.
Magento’s Turn
We researched a bunch more carts, and selected PrestaShop and Magento from the heap to learn to use. I’ve muddled my way through literally dozens of cart types and managed to make them work – some well, some not so well. Magento defeated me, and becomes yet another to be added to our “Never Again” list. Understand… I’m not stupid. I am pretty experienced now at templating, setup, and other common aspects of a range of dynamic software. I teach classes on this stuff, through a highly credible institution.
If you’ve wandered around in the cart world, Magento is getting rave reviews. At least, it sounds like it. But most people who choose not to use it just wander off, and never say a thing, because they somehow think maybe they were the cause, perhaps not smart enough.
It fails our tests on three critical points:
Design, Function, and Sustainability.
1. Templating is a nightmare. I kid you not. They not only scattered the template bits through about 200 files, they threw XML into the mix for no other reason than just because someone could, I guess. It feels very much like they happened to have someone who was all happy for XML, who just wanted something to do, so they let him work it into the templates. Unfortunately, for most designers learning how to template a cart, in a hurry, learning to apply yet another coding language, with proprietary usages, is not only inefficient, it vastly complicates things. Think I’m exaggerating? Look around. Algozone, Template Monster, and a number of other sites have Magento template areas with not ONE THING in them. All of the freely available templates for Magento are merely a variation on the default theme – many have just changed a graphic or two, no real significant changes are made. That says loudly that it is so difficult that even template gurus are avoiding it.
2. Bugs. Things just didn’t work. Simple things, like categories. And the fix for one was likely to cause something else to break. Some features didn’t quite work yet, because they are still on the drawing board. Some were supposed to work, and didn’t. Overall, it was surprisingly stable in some functions given the relatively young age, but it lacked stability in some rather basic areas.
3. Updates. Ok, so we NEED updates. And we expect them. In fact, one of the criteria for “good” Open Source software is that it have an active developer community. Magento feels a little more like being thrashed by Hammy. I downloaded and installed version 1.1.3, and tested it – the next morning there was a notice that 1.1.4 was available. I then downloaded and installed version 1.1.4 just a few days later. Within a week, there was a notice that version 1.1.5 was released, with a critical security update. Ok, I can see that. But then a week and a half later, version 1.1.6 was announced. Each update required a tedious install procedure (more tedious than the simple ones, but even simple ones would have been annoying every week!). Considering that each update had the risk and very real possibility of breaking something, it was simply too fatiguing to contemplate actually trying to manage a site in this for a client. How the heck could I afford to maintain it at my usual rates? And how in the world could the client afford to pay more just to keep up with an ill-planned update schedule? Many can barely afford even a small fee each month.
Given the complexity of templating, the lack of existing templates that would be easy to change, I’d have to charge considerably more to my clients for setting up the site. Given the bugs, they’d pay more, and get less than they expected. Given the update schedule, they’d be squeezed for even more to keep the thing running without unacceptable risk, and their site would be down once a week for updates and troubleshooting after doing the update.
I think that Magento has potential. But I think that it is immature, and that the templating is overly complicated without a benefit that even begins to justify the complexity. And the update schedule is simply insane.
This is one reason I have waffled back to the position of giving CRE one last chance. Because I keep getting told by other developers that there are plenty of other options. But there really aren’t. There are a LOT of potentials. Plenty of possibilities for tomorrow.
But today, we have only the choice between solutions such as PrestaShop (promising, functional, but lacking in at least one critical feature set), Magento (nuff said), Zen (clunky setup, awkward templating), CubeCart (I REFUSE to hand edit code just to get basic features, and then have to hand edit it again every time the cart needs a patch installed!), VirtueMart (functional, usable, but lacks key functions), Agora (PULLEEEZE… it has ONE shipping option… Anything else you have to custom code!), or any number of other almost but not quite usable cart systems out there that people use only because they don’t know that they shouldn’t have to spend all those extra hours setting up or maintaining a cart.
I’m not just complaining and trashing systems left and right. We are involved at a more practical level – reviewing and publishing reviews is necessary, I think. But actually working on the projects that can meet the need is also important. And we’ll keep doing that too. Sharing our knowledge of how to do things in CRE and Joomla, sharing our custom modifications for VirtueMart, making our auto-install systems available for others to use.
The need is there. And as long as our clients need it, we’ll fight to get it, and help create solutions.
There’s Always a Next Level
I’m not sure whether I find it exhilarating, or indescribably wearying. Sometimes a little of both, I guess. We are in the process of taking our business to “the next level”. I find that every time I do, there is another level waiting. I’m not even so sure it is like stairs or rungs of a ladder. Maybe more like a mountainside. Sometimes rocky outcroppings, sometimes smooth slopes, sometimes gravely slides, but always small pebbles, streams, hummocks and plants to navigate around and over.
I’m also constantly seeing differences between people who succeed in business, and those who don’t, and I think that the constant growth and change and upward climb is one of those things. Failure to grow when opportunity presents, and resistence to needed change stifles a business.
Growth isn’t something that just happens. Not sustainable growth, anyway. You can’t just get more customers and grow a business. Each time you get more customers, you have to adjust to the increased workload. If you don’t, you sink. So growth means planning, adjusting, and more work. It means changing the way you work long term. If you don’t, growth becomes an unpleasant experience.
Statistically, a significant number of businesses scale back after explosive growth, choosing to never grow that large again. They maintain a sort of equilibrium, by turning away business, or by neglecting to accommodate additional customers in a satisfactory manner – so they go elsewhere. They may choose to stop marketing, or decide that extra service is no longer possible. They reach “critical mass” and choose not to change how they do things to raise the limits so further growth is possible.
I think that there are two points that are missed by small business owners where growth is concerned:
1. Not understanding themselves well enough to know what it is they love about the business, and how to keep it in the business as growth occurs. Often, they think about what they want, but not what that actually means. Everyone wants to be famous, but do they want reporters waiting to ambush them when they leave their house? Everyone wants to be rich, but do they want to pay the taxes, make the choices, and deal with the responsibilities that come with it? Business is like that – rapid and large growth has two sides, and it is wise to understand what you really love about your business, so you can preserve it and minimize the negative impacts of growth. This should be considered early on. What is it that defines the business, and makes you love doing it? When growth occurs, those are the things to hang onto, and to develop new strategies to preserve.
2. Not being able to change in constructive ways. They tend to just get bogged down when growth happens, and they hate that, so they feel like growth isn’t what they wanted after all. Tied closely to the first point, the ability to actually initiate change in a business, in a way that keeps it fun, is one of the keys to growing beyond your current capacity. Sometimes it means systems for the routine or boring parts. Sometimes it means automation to streamline the processes so they are more efficient, and so you have more time for the fun parts. Sometimes it means outsourcing the parts you are not as good at, or dislike doing. Sometimes it means hiring someone and defining duties for them that take the less enjoyable tasks off your shoulders. But it always means lightening the load of the things that you do not enjoy as much, first, and never automating anything that is a critical element in defining your niche if it would lose quality to do so.
The onward and upward path is much smoother if we are thinking about where the time holes are in our business, and always thinking about how to make things operate more efficiently. Plug the holes, and life gets more fun, and less harried.
There is never a stage in business where efforts cannot be made to keep it enjoyable, and to keep it growing, if that is your goal. There’s always a change that can be made to make things better.
And Again with CRELoaded – B2B Released
Well, I’m not happy with the pricing on B2B. It is the subscription model revisited. Some very discouraging elements to the new pricing on it.
First, they raised the price – a LOT. I can guarantee they will lose business because of it. Many people who need it, and who would buy it if priced lower, won’t. It does include some tech support, but many of those who need to just get in the door with it don’t really care about that.
The entire package is now $595. An upgrade from 6.2 is $250. They are giving a short term concession to recent purchasers of 6.2, to reduce it to $200. If you just paid $350 for a piece of software, would you be happy about being stung for another $200 when you discover two weeks after you bought it, that an upgrade is impending? They are offering a free upgrade for people who bought it recently – but only to the people who KNEW 6.3 was coming. NOT to the people who didn’t know that – those who bought 6.2 B2B just a week or so before 6.3 standard was released. Those are the people who were caught totally off guard, and had no idea that it was coming.
The nasty part to it is that the price includes only three months worth of updates and patches. That includes bugfixes and security patches! They want another $195 for 12 months of the privilege of downloading fixes! This is not standard for the software industry. The standard is that patches and bug fixes are free, whereas there may be another charge for major feature update versions. This is just a variation on the subscription theme.
I think they should have kept the price lower. I will say this until I’m blue. $300 is one of those mental price breakpoints for many small businesses who need to get in the door with a wholesale-capable cart option. If they needed to cut something, they should logically cut support. Not everyone needs it, or wants it. And business-wise, that would actually increase their profits. Here is why:
If you offer software at a price of $300, with no support, the bulk of what you make is gravy. You maintain the website, the documentation, and the forums. All relatively low costs. Lowering the price increases sales on the items with the highest profit margin. Hmmm…. that’s a good thing!
If you bump the price to $600, you not only slashed your sales by MORE than 50%, you also MORE than doubled the amount of overhead if you justify that increase by bundling it with support. Personal support is expensive to provide. The profit margin on it is very low. You have to hire people to put in hours, to provide that support. You just slashed your sales, and you just slashed your profit margin, both at the same time!
On the other hand, if you charge SEPARATELY for the software, and the support, you come out ahead. At the lower price, sales go up on the things that have the lowest overhead and the highest profit margin. That’s smart! And there is no built in support cost for people who do not need it (many people are perfectly happy using the forums) – support becomes a separate thing which has to then be self-sustaining, as it should be. It becomes the LESSER part of the business, where software sales becomes the greater part. Again, as it should be.
Higher sales, higher profits, with each business owner paying only for what they really need. Everybody wins.
That said, it is also relevant to mention that I’ve been asked to review both the Pro package, and the B2B package. I’m currently selecting suitable projects to use them with, so that they will be truly tested under actual business need conditions. The reviews will happen in two stages – short term first impressions, and long term performance. I’ll be posting links to the reviews here when they are completed.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
Take Heart CRE Users… X-Cart is Infinitely Worse
Gosh, I feel like a snippy critic for this one. I’d worry about it except that everything I’m going to say is absolutely true, and something that people investigating cart options oughta know.
A client contacted me to do some work on X-Cart. She paid for the software – no Open Source freebies here. We had trouble accessing the support forums in the first place, due to ownership issues. Once we did, I have become increasingly frustrated with this cart. I’ll outline a few of the reasons why I hope to never have to work on it again – in fact, any other new clients who have it will be turned down flat.
1. Documentation is weak. For a paid cart, that isn’t acceptable. It covers only the most basic stuff, and does not outline many necessary bits of info.
2. You are required to put the version number in the signature line of your forum posts to get help. The version number is hard to find – their instructions do not pertain to new versions. Once you find it, you have to go back and edit your forum profile just to put that sig line in. I don’t like being hassled to get help.
3. You have to edit a LANGUAGE FILE just to change the home page contents! Please be shocked here! This is inconvenient, awkward, and completely unacceptable for cart functions within the last five years! There are hundreds of language files, and you can’t even find the right one without explicit instructions.
4. The template is a NIGHTMARE. In excess of 100 files each one containing one little bit of the page, one snippet of the boxes, etc. The only templating I’ve seen that is worse, is Magento. I don’t mind a header, footer, and main template file. But when every single cell is chopped up on the page, and when the contents of those cells are all in different files from the cell code, it becomes an impossible task to try to edit any part of the design without a reference guide to do it. This level of complexity is not only unnecessary, it is the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to get light.
5. Nothing is simple or logical. It is all convoluted and cumbersome. Backend functions take more steps than necessary, and there are no intuitive tasks. Forget trying to learn this one without both reading the manual, and spending a lot of time on the forums looking up stuff that should be intuitive, but is not.
6. Updating is also inconvenient. This makes site sustainability more costly.
7. Support is paid only. That wouldn’t be a problem, except they have two classes of tickets – HotRush, and Normal. If you have a problem that is urgent, like your site being down, the only way you can get timely help is with a HotRush ticket. They cost twice as much! Currently their support turnaround time on normal tickets is TWO DAYS! This isn’t just unacceptable, it is grossly irresponsible.
8. It has no outstanding features, no advantage that would make any of this justifiable. It doesn’t do anything that other carts don’t do, it doesn’t have ONE THING that is more convenient to do, or more functional. It isn’t a matter of the disadvantages outweighing the advantages – there simply ARE no advantages that would make this cart even a consideration for anyone who needs a functional cart.
I’d expect better than this from Open Source. In a commercial product, it is completely ridiculous. I cannot for the life of me figure out why someone would PAY MONEY for lousy software accompanied by bad support. That is available free, anywhere. Good software with decent forum support is available all over the place.
This doesn’t just go onto my “I don’t like it” list, it goes onto my “Never again” list. Sad, because at one time they had some potential. They obviously have not kept up with the rest of the industry.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
Don’cha Wish I’d Shut Up About CRELoaded?
Some things have gone on behind the scenes. One small improvement has occurred, along with some other troubling things. We take heart from the improvement, worry at the indicators that things are still very much up in the air where the future of this much needed software is concerned.
Some shakeups in leadership. Unknown what the effects will be.
Some forum members reinstated. This is a good thing, and they’ve come back in and are posting without recriminations. A hearty cheer for greatpcs (Jason over at Hoosier Web Design), and discounttools (Jody – sorry don’t know your major business name). I’m sure some others I do not know well enough to know about.
So, it is with great trepidation that I release a report, of sorts, which is a listing of recommendations. I’m releasing this publicly for two reasons:
1. I don’t have the ear of anyone at CRE anymore. This is a way to put this out there so it can be received in whatever spirit they choose to receive it in, or they can reject it outright.
2. I think there are great lessons to be learned about the Open Source world, and about treating your customers well, developing a project, targeting a market, support and service, and cost containment. In presenting my conclusions about what should be done, publicly, I am not just complaining and listing problems. I am giving the other half of the lesson – not just what should NOT be done, but how it might be done better, to overcome both the long term problems of the company, and the newer ones precipitated by a misguided attempt to overcome the earlier ones!
I don’t know all the inside scoop at CRE. But I know what is happening on the outside, and what those things mean must be happening on the inside. All recommendations are based on the problems I see. I’d assume there are other problems under the surface which I cannot address.
You may download the CRELoaded Recommendations PDF HERE.
I don’t expect them to like it. I don’t expect everyone in the CRE user base to applaud what I have to say either. But experience tells me my recommendations are sound, sustainable, and completely achievable, and that implementing them will turn the project around in the way it needs to be in order to not just survive, but to thrive.
I hereby throw it to the wolves.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post and in the attached report are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
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