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Ashop Commerce

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Ashop Commerce Review

    Liz Hull

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Advertiser Disclosure: Our unbiased reviews and content are supported in part by affiliate partnerships, and we adhere to strict guidelines to preserve editorial integrity.
Date Established
2001
Location
Australia
Liz Hull

Liz Hull

Contributor
Liz Hull is a writer for Merchant Maverick. In her three years with Merchant Maverick, she has tested and reviewed over 40 eCommerce platforms and published two ebooks on the topic of online selling. Liz has also been published in Startup Nation and Home Business Magazine Online. Liz has a BA in English and Spanish from George Fox University.


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8 Comments

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    Gregory March 7, 2016 at 9:40 am

    I did the trial for 2 days… the easiest, user friendly and fast. I have a small store and had it up and running over the weekend. Great price for anyone with less than 500 products.Email was a concern, I don’t want to point my domain to their servers for that reason, so I just did domain forwarding.

    5

      This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

      Kylie Warren June 18, 2014 at 12:57 am

      I signed up with Ashop earlier this year and have found it pretty easy to use and the functionality good so I was a bit surprised to read the comments. It looks like something happened to customers last year but whatever the update was it has since been fixed. I have had good experience with their tech support who were friendly and helpful.

      4

        This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

        Atlas November 22, 2013 at 4:19 pm

        I have been using Ashop for at least 5 years and recently I have been very disappointed with their Technical support. They had changed their software about 6 or 7 months ago. We have not had our Facbook page since the upgrade.
        I am very close to closing my stores on Ashop and opening up new stores at other shopping cart software.

          This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

          Timmi August 8, 2013 at 10:09 am

          First of all, I’d like to thank you for all the great info you’ve provided on this site. I’ve been searching for some honest reviews for Shopping Carts for a long time.

          Second, I’d just like to point out that I just visited Ashop’s page as it seems to have everything I was looking for, including a wholesale option, but sadly the price points have changed and now the only options are $69 & $149/month. It’s a little out of my price range right now for a start up. But hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade to them once my shop gets rolling.

          Keep up the great work!

            This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

            Amad E. August 8, 2013 at 3:11 pm

            Thank you for the heads up Timmi. We’ll have the pricing changed this evening.

              This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

              linbo July 22, 2013 at 11:59 am

              After exhaustive testing and major dissappointments with shopify, bigcommerce, and pinnacle, I’ve decided on Ashop.

              Ashop provides several notable out-of-the-box features that are missing on other ecommerce platforms:

              >>Inventory in fractional amounts. It always seemed to me that this would be a no brainer for most carts but alas, no. Ashop allows fractional inventory and sales–useful for products that are sold and priced by the yard like fabric or rope or trim. No one wants their customers trying to figure out partial yardage and possibly making a mistake. So I can sell .5, 1.0, 1.5 yards and have inventory debit correctly. If you need this type of feature and you’re evaluating other cart systems, make sure to ask if inventory is debited correctly.
              >>Multiple images for product variations. An example would be that you sell tshirts. Red tshirts and green tshirts are variations. Then you want three views of the red tee and 3 of the green. Most carts restrict you to a single photo for each variant.
              >>Full information and image upload/download. Many carts rely on a .csv file but one cannot include all the data for products and must find another way to create/update categories, associate an image or images with a product, create/update product variations.
              Truly Ashop seems the most robust–you can upload a full Microsoft Excel file or even Microsoft Access. I found no other carts that did this.
              >Weight increments in ounces, grams, pounds, and kilos. All the other carts I looked at only use pounds or kilos. Ridiculous when you sell lightweight products.

              There is more but these are the basics. Decent, knowledgable support. Probably the only failing so far is lack of evening and Sunday support. Although many of the other cart systems were the same.

              I’ll post updates as I create my shop.

                This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

                linbo August 15, 2013 at 8:40 pm

                I thought I’d give an update on my review of Ashop. After much struggling I wound up cancelling my account with them. I invested about a month of my time trying to set up my shop.The first, and most serious problem is that their support staff is generally clueless when it comes to anything but the most basic of features. The serious part of this statement is that they make things up to fit what you want so you think they are knowledgable. When implementing the promised features I found them to be completely mis-represented or missing. Details follow at the bottom for anyone interested.*The second big issue is their support outages. I got used to being able to contact a support person through live chat or email. Without warning on three occasions they disappeared for several days. Meaning, no phone, no chat, no email. Gone. And, things were broken.Apparently they were installing a global update. I found out by searching the community forum and found posts like, “Oh no, they’re doing it again!” No email, no big notice when I logged in. They did post after the update was in progress a note on Twitter but that seemed a little late to me.The third and perhaps for some a deal breaker was the broken shop installation after said update. Missing front page, products and description photos mixed with other products. Inventory counts out of whack. My store had not gone live yet but what if it had? Yikes. And my shop was broken was at the same time as the support outage.The back-end user interface completely changed and they removed many features that I was using often. Finally, when I asked for my mere $69 back for the first month I was told “We don’t do refunds.” I asked several times and even bumped it up to whatever passes for management. A big fat “No.”Although I was initially excited about Ashop and it’s features, after a month’s time of rigorous investigation I have to give them two thumbs down.*Here is what they promised and could not deliver:1) Inventory count in fractional amounts, i.e. I have products sold by length of one yard and wanted to offer partial lengths in half yards but keep the pricing of one yard. They cannot do this. They can make it look like it works but the inventory will never be correct.2) Individual products can have variations (yes), then those variations can have multiple photos, no. They promised the ability to have multiple photos for each variation and can only do one. Also the storefront “look” is a little off.3) There are many ways to keep track of inventory. One way is to keep track manually. The more common way is to let your store keep track. What I mean by this is if you have ten doodads and sell three your inventory reads seven. Makes sense? The default in Ashop is to *not* keep track. Let’s say you have 800 products. This means that for each and every product you need to click on a tiny button, click on an item in the pull-down, hit save. EACH PRODUCT. There is no other way to do this. The promise? A new column in the spread sheet to automate this.My conclusion is that Ashop will be good if you have a small business with not a lot of products. You should probably use one of their out-of-the-box templates and not tweek it too much (in case those tweeks disappear during an update). On the other hand if this works for you you should probably stick with a different cart solution anyway. Basic is basic and available with most of these ecommerce solutions.Oh, and I forgot. They were willing to custom code me solutions to the above three features for a price with an indefinite delivery date.

                1

                  This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

                  Dennis June 25, 2013 at 4:46 pm

                  I just talked with support at Ashop, and they said it comes with 5 email accounts. Unfortunately there is no ftp access, for those who want to have additional pages not in the cart system. Otherwise it sounded pretty good.

                    This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.

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