Hold on a second...
I have the Interspire shopping cart through a long standing colleague and there's a few things you need to keep in mind with Interspires recent changes to customer relations and their pricing/policies.
The one thing I would request is access to their customer forums here:
http://www.interspire.com/forum/
The level of dissatisfaction with their approach has been voiced with ever increasing frustration and frankly speaking Interspire could give a flying flip about any of it. It seems they are concentrating on bringing in new customers and not on those who have been using and recommending the products for quite some time.
That aside here's a few survival tips you need to take into account to be able to use the shopping cart successfully.
1. Ensure you budget for the price of the cart version you need, the full years maintenance and keep a further 50% available in upgrade fees in case they release version 6 in the next year.
2. Bear in mind that maintenance needs to be kept current in order to get security, feature or ANY updates. It also affects your ability to get support (more on that later). If your maintenance contract lapses and a new major version of the cart is released you will be expected to pay FULL price to get the upgrade.
3. Support is currently Australian office hours only. There is a UK office with naff all in the way of competent support. It seems to be almost exclusively for sales at the moment. Most issues are replied to with a stock template response after 24 hours (or later) and often promises to return calls are not followed up. Interspire say they're working on this by hiring new staff but so far there's little change observed.
4. Documentation for the newest version of the cart is not available despite the cart being released for nearly a month. There are also various bugs still pending in the system despite a beta testing system.
5. The Royal Mail module is out of date (still has 2008-09 pricing) and isn't comprehensive although a 3rd party update is available for a charge.
6. A number of the promised features from previous versions still haven't materialised and often they get added to the development model for the NEXT major release so you can (as happened with version 4) end up with a version that was promised a feature but which you can only get by upgrading to the next version at considerable cost.
7. You'd be advised to install the cart and then check that all the necessary functionality is available within the 60 day money back period. There are some glaring omissions in functionality that seem blindingly obvious compared to standard cart practices. Things like invoices showing discount codes and amounts.. Incorrect or missing tax information (legal requirements not followed, etc..)... and more besides. Much of this becomes more obvious when you get into detailed examination so don't just be taken in by the neat interface.
I could go on but basically the problems in most of the system is the insane customer relations policies that have been adopted. Mitchell, one of the key players in the company has become so focused on the level of "big name" new customers that he's lost all focus on managing expectations and more importantly on customer retention.
Granted the company is in a position of being able to ignore most of the detractors as the competing products aren't overly great
(unless you are a PHP coding expert) but if/when a decent alternative arrives I suspect it may be almost too late. The level of arrogance is awe inspiringly bad to be honest.
It's frustrating but that's the state of play... If you can accept a poor support solution and budget for that level of cost I've recommended then it's a good system, but the potential for the whole thing to go completely base over apex is rather alarming.
