Questions
I haven't been as diligent as I should have this week. We had company...painting the house... blah blah blah... same old story and I didn't do much footwork. My last two brain cells, however, have been discussing the issue amongst themselves and have a few questions.
Am I the only brick and mortar store using Quickbooks POS that would also like an ecommerce site? There doesn't seem to be a lot of options out there for this or maybe I'm so preoccupied that I haven't noticed??? They all seem to be going on the assumption that the ecommerce thing is all you have going. PDGsoft tells me they are working on it and ASPDotNetStorefront indicates in their forum that they have a way. They just haven't disclosed it. As far as I can see, it's a secret. I'll look again. It would be a very useful feature. Please let me know if you know of something. I may be all washed up on this...??
If I can't get a software to integrate for inventory and sales purposes, how do I handle the inventory with regard to my offerings on the web site? I can manually enter web orders into my POS when they come in and remove items physically from the shelf. But, if Sally Sue walks in and falls in love with a certain yarn and Mary Lou clicks to buy that yarn at the same time, it could get ugly. If you've seen these women, you know why I'm scared.
As you can tell, my brain is kind of hung up on this subject for now. I did a little homework and took another look at PDGsoft. I emailed their sales folks a question yesterday and haven't heard back yet... the clock is ticking. We'll see.
I looked at ClickCartPro and first glance doesn't look too bad. It has a little more user friendliness than PDG but I do not believe they integrate at all with Quickbooks. Again, let me know if I have the facts wrong here.
ASPDotNetStorefront is not looking too bad. I took another look at the features and I think I was getting carried away when I said I needed the ML version. I think we would be fine with the features Pro offers. That brings the price down a little which is a bonus. I have received their free 15 day trial download but haven't actually performed the download to date. I want to be sure I have the time to devote to it. I was pretty sure my in-laws wouldn't appreciate seeing the back of my head against the glow of the computer screen during their visit. Or maybe they would..:-) Just kidding... I have great in-laws.
So, who is leaving the island this week? I believe it will be Cart Genie. Sorry folks but I need something more intuitive at this point in my webmaster career.
I'm sure you are wondering if I'm going to drag this out for another four weeks. I hope not. I'm about as tired of searching as you are of reading about it. As soon as I feel confident and get some of these questions answered in my own mind, I'll make a move. Right now I'm too gun-shy to take a leap on the info I have.
I will be taking a week long vacation to visit my mother so you probably won't hear from me the first week of Sept. That is, unless a computer falls from the sky at the fiber festival we will be attending, in which case I will take it as a sign that I need to blog.
Till next time, Sandy
This post is filed under By Merchants, For Merchants and has the following keyword tags: accounting software, order management software, shopping carts.
