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Re: Softcart from Mercantec
On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Russ wrote:
> ****** message to minivend-users from "Russ" <russ@khouse.org> ******
>
> Hello List,
>
> Has anyone used a recent version of SoftCart from Mercantec? Experiences?
The previous person to warm the chair I am in now used and deployed it. I
went through a week or so of evaluation and that is why I now use
MiniVend. I needed to do things that just were not going to be possible
with SoftCart.
If you have a store that matches their generic templates, it is probably
much faster to set up a SoftCart store. However, as your store grows and
changes and you add special features, at some point you will have a harder
and harder time with SoftCart. MiniVend starts out somewhat difficult,
but it never prevents you from doing something. At the very worst, you
would have to change some MV code or write the whole page in Perl. There
are lots of precompiled executables in SoftCart. Unless you are a wizard
with a disassembler and feel like patching binaries, there are certain
limits in functionality that you will just not be able to pass.
One of the things that turned into a real annoyance with SoftCart was
the ability to brand the catalog by the reseller that had linked to us.
We do a fair number of things in the background based on that reseller ID.
My predecessor tried for months to get it to work with SoftCart and was
not totally successful. It only took me about two months to learn MV well
enough that I had nearly the whole site working with all the reseller
branding and full SQL database backend etc.
E-Commerce is _not_ easy and anyone that tells you that you can create
catalogs trivially and be online instantly is definitely selling you
something. Any system that is very easy to use to make a demo is probably
limited to just that: making demos.
The beauty and challenge of the web is that how we interact with others is
only limited by our intelligence, skill and most of all, IMAGINATION.
Any system that sets up fixed templates removes some of your freedom.
Maybe SoftCart is right for you, but it certainly wasn't for us. In a
previous life as a professional e-business consultant for a large (very
large) firm, I _never_ used pre-canned systems like this. Of course, we
did often start will large application servers, but those are really just
giant libraries and flexible environments.
Best,
Kyle (KH)
