Hi everyone,

I have just signed up (and paid unfortunatly) with PageVille and have struck problems straight off. Here is the email I sent to them:

"***MOST URGENT*** I have just payed to get the PageVille Shipping Cart on my website and have found that your payment gateway site has been down for days, and is still "busy" with so-called heavy traffic - "The shopping cart server is busy due to high volume" it says. No shopping cart payment gateway = no sales.

What is going on here?? As a new customer trying to get a new business up and running, I think I have made a big mistake in signing up with PageVille Shopping Cart.

If this continues one more day I will have no choice other than to cancel my subscription and request my money back in full, as you are in breach of contract and not delivering the service I paid for. Perhaps cheap shopping cart does mean cheap service? I hope not.

Do not ignore this email as you have done in the past. You should know that one unhappy customer can tell thousands in these days of internet forums.

What is going on? All I want is some real customer service and communication from you guys. FIX THE PROBLEM!!

You need to get this sorted fast for us all to be happy again.

Regards, Max. (Spiritland.com.au)"

Has anyone had any dealings with this mob or heard anything about them, good or bad. No gossip or speculation please.

Max.

Hi Max

I'd never heard of PageVille until I read your post, so I did a bit of poking around. I think you will struggle to find other users of this S/W because it's so out of date and the traffic that the PageVille site receives is virtually nil. The last time the S/W or the website (www.pageville.com) were updated was in 2005, though they both look like relics from about 1998. Ecommerce has moved on since then in terms of functionality, presentation and security, this software was out of date before it was even released.

Here's a few other sites that are registered to the same guy.

http://www.chadkister.com/

http://www.dysartwoods.org

http://www.greenfieldhistoricalsociety.org

http://www.myspamgone.com/

On the first site he claims to be an author, a public speaker, a film maker and a web designer (Jack of all trades comes to mind). I can't speak about his other talents, but one thing's for sure, he's no web designer!

I highly recommend getting a refund on this. If he won't reply to your emails and you paid by credit card then I suggest you do a charge back.

If you do choose to use other S/W for your store, I'd recommend ZenCart which is open source and 100% free. The only necessary expense will be hosting, which for low traffic sites the cost is virtually negligible You may also want to purchase a template and possibly pay someone to do the techie bits if you don't feel comfortable doing them yourself. You would end up with a store that is so far more powerful and up to date than your current store that they aren't even on the same scale.

I'm sorry this isn't the sort of reply you were looking for, but I felt it was information you should know.

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Lawrence

Thanks Lawrence for your investigations. I had a response from PageVille in due course and sent them this email:

"G’day Bob,

I had a touch of panic there for bit, as every time I went to the shopping cart, it said it was busy. This went on for a few days and had me trying to verify if PageVille was legit or what. Hence the email to you – I have been working on getting my website and business off the ground for months, and to have this killer problem one week before launch date was just too much for a country boy to handle.

Then I had a thought – perhaps it is because I have not added any inventory items in the cart yet that is causing the problem. So after putting in an item and clicking on the buy button for that item, it went through to the cart, finally. Yes!! After that, I could check the cart and it came up OK, as long as there was an item to purchase in it. I then cleared the cart and clicked to go to the cart without a buy item in it and it always comes up with the “busy due to high volume” message, even now.

So, the only real problem is that it is not coming back with the correct message when you try to go to the checkout/cart when nothing is in there. It should read “YOU HAVE NO ITEMS IN YOUR CART”, not that it is “busy due to high volume”, as customers will not go any further and click a ‘buy’ button, because they have just been told the cart is not working.

I have also realised that you guys are asleep when I’m awake, being on the other side of the planet, so communication is going to be a bit drawn out. I do appreciate that you have gotten back to me on this. I think that the simple stripped-down concept of the PageVille cart is great, and I will send you through my suggestions for a few tweaks at some point, when I’m not so busy."

So things are not as bad as I thought. Will keep you updated.

Cheers, Max.

what has been the outcome of this suituation?

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So why didn’t I go with Zen Cart (or one of the other hundreds of similar shopping carts) for my online shop setup? I spent many a frustrating week researching various combinations of carts and payment gateways, some very expensive, some cheap, and some free (at least to purchase).

My needs: First time to the E-commerce scene; Very small home-based business beginning; Low ticket price on sale items; No cash resources; Absolute zero HTML writing skills; Low computer jargon understanding (what is MYSQL or PHP??); BUT… Good understanding and use of Microsoft FrontPage and Publisher; Familiar with QuickBooks and have run businesses before, including retail; Reasonable skills in design and desktop publishing; Have done several websites in FrontPage for various organisations.

I downloaded several shopping carts and tried getting them sorted (I got further with Zen Cart than the others), but always got stumped through lack of computer language skills and totally resented having to learn another area of the computer world that was simply a means to an end - which explains my love affair with Publisher and FrontPage. So I had no choice but to look to out-sourcing to get Zen Cart (the ’free’ software) up and running to a point that I could handle from there - at least several hundred dollars, if not into the thousands of dollars. Not such a free option after all!!

So then I searched for a cart that I could use WITHIN FrontPage and found PageVille. Cheap - just $129 per year, with zero monthly fees on the base plan. Easy - just an add-on to FrontPage that gives you the means to load up any buy button with the product details, which are automatically sent to your PageVille database when you upload the page through an FTP program. The Admin Page for your site on PageVille is also pretty straight forward (basic), though I have yet to resolve a few minor issues, but at least I am up and running. After some early panic, I have learnt to use PageVille to good effect and very much appreciate its simple approach without all the bells and whistles of the full-blown (bloated) shopping cart that seems to be the norm. I track my stock through QuickBooks, so I don’t need to do it online, same with all financial and delivery tracking.

The other side of an online shop is the order/payment gateway. Again, after weeks of research and deliberation, plus given my small start-up, I was pleased to find that PageVille could take the orders and credit card details without processing them, and that I could then retrieve them through a secure login and then process the payment in-house with my banks merchant facility - very cheap, easy, safe and flexible for refunds or amendments. So I’m very happy at this time and it is looking good at the point.

I hope to start trading on 1st September IF the rest of my stock arrives in time, which is another saga. So I will give an update on it all in a few weeks time. Cheers, Max. www.spiritland.com.au

i would still advise using zen cart as you can customize it very easily and there is a massive user base so lots of addons mods etc.

i would be willing to install zen cart for you just drop me a pm

im sure most others on this site will also advise you to change.

but if your happy then your happy and i wish you the best of luck

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If you couldn't get to grips with zencart and you plan to run an ecommerce business then I think you may be in trouble.
You can NOT go into ecommerce withoout being prepared to learn along the way.
You would have found many helpful people on the here and the zencart forum who would have teaken you step by step through installing zencart.
As for card processing zencart is also capable of processing cards etc.You simply add extra modules.
I wish you good luck, but personaly I wouldn't have chosen to start off with a package that nobody else has even heard of, least of all pay for it

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Party Dresses
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Thanks for the comments and offers of help. I will let this run for a few weeks and see how it works out and will post an update later. Cheers.

whoa that's the worst of the situation so far. i hope that wouldn't happen to me