david constable,
Thank you for the feedback.
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I have been with ecwid from the start - and have various accounts here for my customers (I have always recommended Ecwid - even though for SEO it's very bad) the ease of use and integration was the main selling point , and the 100 products or 17dollars option was very fair.
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However - 10 products / free option - no one will go for this obviously - other than kids who are playing with their own sites.
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Our main goal of plans changing is very simple: charge fair and adequate price for the amount of service Ecwid offers. We believe that it is necessary for success of any business and Ecwid particularly. And if Ecwid is successful, our users will benefit a lot: they will get more new exciting features faster.
And we believe our new plans are fairly priced. Moreover they're still pretty cheap, if you compare them to other hosted (SaaS) shopping carts.
As for "kids who are playing with their sites" - well, Ecwid is so easy to use, that we really have some kids who set up their stores. It is something we are proud of.
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Faced with having to pay 180 dollars a year I would recommend any future customers of mine to go with a free cart - and host the database themselves (they can backup themselves) or go with a 'paid' cart if they want extra functionality.
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It is always important to compare the "cost of ownership" of products, but not the "cost of install" only.
Free self-hosted shopping carts are free to install, however what are the real costs?
- First you need to invest your time to install a self-hosted cart on your server, set up databases and other things.
- You need to purchase an SSL certificate.
- All cart maintaince is also on you: you need to upgrade it manually to get new features. You need to make sure it is secure. You need to apply patches manually to fix bugs. You need to make sure it works fast and tune it to get good perfomance. You need to buy more expensive hosting if you get more visitors. And so on.
Merchants are required to invest their time to cope with all these things and mess with a code (days or even weeks) or hire somebody to do this for them.
Does it cost more or less that $180 per year? $15/month? 3 cups of coffee for month of work of team of 25 professionals who are working day and night to make sure your store works good?
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You have been very clever when saying there will always be a 'free' version of Ecwid, you are correct in that saying - but you never said you would reduce the functionality of the free version - did you - maybe I am wrong - but I have never read you mention reduced functionality / products etc. - Please answer - as I think I can no longer trust ecwid not to change the conditions again in a years time
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Trust of our users is very important for us. We promised that Ecwid's free version would be always available and it will be.
Moreover there will be no reducing of functionality for existing users. If you're registered before the new plans were released, you will get the same level of service including all features you can use now, product limits, etc. The new plans are applied for the new users only.
I think it is more than fair.
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I think this means the end for me and ecwid for any future clients - I have 5 eCommerce projects coming up. As usual I offer them a few solutions , ecwid - and 2 others - one free , one paid. I am 100% certain they will not choose ecwid now.
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I'm upset reading this. However I still think that Ecwid is much better than other carts and if a client sees what Ecwid is offering, what problems it solves and how it works, s/he will choose it.
10-16-2012, 04:16 PM
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