Thread

Just saw this email roll in.  A little bg first, I do quite a bit of ecommerce work, specifically with managing bands online sales.  I’ve also been a CI/Kohana user for about 3 or 4 years and also have contributed to a few other frameworks & projects.  So, with that said, I’m all about business prospering, are you fucking kidding me.  10k - haha.  Good luck with that one shopigniter.  I can setup and online store with any of a multitude of FOSS carts, pay 3 programmers to deck the hell out of it and still have $ left over to grab a 30 pack and spent a few days laying in my hammock.  Even with the ‘boutique’ package I would rather throw a wad of cash into a fire.  So, pricing = what kind-of crack are you smoking.  Now, once I move past that whole part, I’ve gotta do WHAT!  host it on your servers?  HAHA.  Yeah, not going to happen - not to mention your hosted on RS cloud.  A little pre-warning to you -  RS cloud is migrating their cloud over the next few months.  There will be some good things to come out of it like RS fanatical support, but even better, you’re going to get to deal with over-saturated interwebs, downtime and heavy I/O loads as they migrate.  Great Call!  (I love RS’s managed servers btw, the company I primarily work with has about 20k/month in servers there and they’re awesome, just not their cloud, ick..)  Alright, so pricing,hosting = what kind-of crack are you smoking.  Modules, how to fuck am I supposed to build a module if I can’t test ... what if my store needs some feature and that one feature is preventing them from using your system.  Hell, we don’t have any sort of solution in place for that other than a ‘promise’ that we’ll have 3rd party developers lined up.  I’m sure you’ll be charging them to develop on your platform right?  O.k. so you’ve become officially retarded.  Now, I see here you have some benchmarks - 10x faster than magento and 3/5% faster than ‘other’ SaaS solutions.  What solutions, where are the benchmarks and can some 3rd party verify this?  NO!  O.k., no biggie, I’ll take your word.  Now, how do I verify that the store is secure; I mean we’ve all seen apps that work fine on the frontend, but as soon as you open up a file on the backend it’s like a giant WTF.  We all know it’s built on CI, thats great, CI is stable has a great community etc… But we can see the source code… It’s no big surprise that CI is popular because they don’t try to hide everything from you and keep you locked into a solutions fully managed, built and supported by 1 company.  Sorry, fail.

O.k. so I hate bashing on a company that built what(probably) is a good product albeit severely overpriced in a FOSS market, but you guys really pissed yourself on this one.  I heard about shopigniter maybe a year or so ago and was like cool, I would use that; it would great if it was free but I can see how they would charge something like Ellislab does for EE, but holy hot shit god-damn you’ve either been in a severe car accident or smoked yourselves silly.  Best of luck to you!

IMO their prices = lol

Im with mikeyhell on this one.. I too was very interested about shopigniter the day it was mentioned here on the forums the first time. I opted for the demo 3 times and never got any answer. Then I saw the pricing at some point.. Woah! So not for starter businesses.. So I cannot recommend that product to our customers who wants to start ecommerce from the start.

Too bad this project has gone this way.. Good thing about their sloweness is that we have now developed our own ecommerce from ground up and chose CI as framework(which has been a great decicion as CI really was the right choice for ecommerce).

Well, I guess ShopIgniter is not for small sites with very few sales.
Consider the scenario when you sell for $10K every month. It’s not very expensive then.

But I have to agree, I kindof hoped for a inexpensive solution that I could use when building sites for my small clients… 😊

Well, I guess ShopIgniter is not for small sites with very few sales.
Consider the scenario when you sell for $10K every month. It’s not very expensive then.

But I have to agree, I kindof hoped for a inexpensive solution that I could use when building sites for my small clients… 😊

I don’t think even a big shop is going to be interested in this.  Like I mentioned above in my first post, we do a lot of sales for several music groups, not the little coffee shop kind, and as their online sales director & programmer I would never recommend something like this, ever when their are great projects already available - is it CI, no, but who cares as long as it scales, makes money and I can mod it into whatever I want - the fact that the FOSS ones are that is really just a bonus. 

I went back to the thread where I had originally seen info about shop igniter and whoever that was that was posting about it mentioned(seemed to be the lead dev) there would be a community edition.  I really hope they intend on releasing it because I don’t see this going anywhere.  I really hope they are successful but all hands point to no on this one.

These guys just do business in another segment then you guys. It is not only ecommerce. It is also social, design, chat, hosting, seo and probably much more. It is the complete shebang :D I made a lot of e-commerce solutions in CI and what they have done looks sexy. These prices are not outrages just in a different segment.

WE just need to make our own. I started my Community Cart project when I was hoping that ShopIgniter was going to be available, but wasn’t. I just waited too long, and then ShopIgniter just seemed like something I didn’t need. Yes, my e-commerce application sucks compared to theirs, but I can say it’s 99% built by me, and I know how it works, and can modify it easily. To me that is most important, because you never know what kind of customer you are going to have, and most of the time they just want to sell their merchandise, and that’s it.

All it would take is a small number of dedicated CI users to make a cart that was awesome.

Yeh i was very excited also when they first started posting and signed up for the developers program. I think they have a clear business goal and market now. With the new funding as well i wish them the best of the luck. I will keep my eye out for the community edition.

Having built and modified many different carts in my time as a designer / programmer i think i need to create a set of tools that i find easy to modify and understand. Also easy for future clients to use.

I have recently toyed with PyroCMS and will start writing a Cart module for this. Ill post up some links later and if anyone cares to contribute to the project we can get something going on..

People generally underestimate the cost of doing business online. I have been surprised by the amounts quoted for turnover before it’s considered “worth it”. SI is imo only/best suited for an existing store with a proven sales record and hopes to expand. $3000 for your first month and $500 thereafter, cheapest plan, is too much of an overhead unless you are actually making serious money already. And by that I mean more than $10 000 a month in actual gross sales (do some math). Why they throw in specific hosting specs that usually list and sell for $1.99 a month in that plan is a mystery. But all this pales compared to the sifr replacement of Gotham Light that they use for headlines. 😉