Netfirm's Commerce Pro
By Sean Michael Kerner One of the biggest
draws that any Web host has is the price of domain registrations. Once only the
purview of Network Solutions at $70 plus per domain that price has in recent
years dropped to previously unimaginable levels. Both Yahoo and GoDaddy are
offering annual domain registration for under $4.
Among the lowest consistently offered domain registration prices is Netfirms, currently offering dot com domains for
$4.95. Perhaps even more startling is that Netfirms has a $9.95 a month, hosted
e-commerce offering that combines two free domains names with a generous amount
of hosting space, and, oh yeah - one of the most popular and extensible shopping
carts on the planet.
What It Is
Netfirms currently offers two different core hosting
packages for e-commerce hosting: the "Advantage" package at $9.95 a month and
the "Business" package at $14.95 a month. The difference between the two is
essentially space and size. Advantage offers 20 GB of storage and 750 GB of
transfer while Business offers 40 GB and 1500 GB of transfer. Both include email
accounts (Advantage - 100; Business -200) and MySQL 4.1 databases (Advantage -
30; Business - 60). From an e-commerce point of view, both have the same
shopping cart.
Setup
Getting a Netfirms Commerce Pro shopping cart setup is at
least a two-step process. The first part of the process is a simple one click
from the Netfirms Control Panel to actually add the cart to your site.
Somewhat to our surprise, after the Commerce Pro shopping cart was added to
our test site, a familiar looking screen greeted us. Netfirms Commerce Pro is
actually an OScommerce shopping cart. We suppose if we had first looked closely
at the FAQ page and noticed item number ten then we would have known that before
we first attempted to install the cart. It's certainly not clearly mentioned on
the About, Features, Store Demo or Admin Demo pages. More often than not, Netfirms
refers to Commerce Pro as, "an Amazon-style shopping cart."
As an aside, the Admin Demo is hardly a demo. Rather it's just a simple page
with some screenshots and text, there is no actual "demo" that you can play with
to be found there.
Netfirm's implementation of OScommerce starts with the same fundamental
"flaw" that all OScommerce users experience when, upon installation, there is no
step-by-step wizard to guide you through a proper shopping cart setup.
Certainly, Netfirms does provide some decent documentation to help users, but we
find it significantly easier when initial setup and configuration is a guided,
as opposed to an exploratory, effort.
Features
Netfirm's Commerce Pro implementation of
OScommerce appears to be a relatively default installation of the standard
OScommerce milestone 2 release. Since it is a hosted application in this case,
though, Netfirms has saved potential OScommerce users the trouble of actually
loading and configuring a Web server to actually host the application. Netfirms
also provides SSL secured access to the cart's administration.
Among the default features are a variety of payment gateway options
(including, Authorize.Net, PayPal, iPayment, 2CheckOut, PSiGate, SECPay and
TrusTCommerce) as well as automated shipping calculator inclusion from UPS and
the US Postal Service.
The greatest power of OScommerce is its extensibility. Thanks to its open
source nature, there is a vibrant and robust community of users and developers
that have added many new modules that can be added to an OScommerce
installation. Unfortunately, Netfirms does not provide easy access for its users
to take full advantage of those modules. One would assume in this day and age,
for example, that FedEx would be a nice addition to have as a shipping option.
There is at least one such module that is
freely available on OScommerce.com that Netfirms could have included with its
Netfirms Ecommerce Pro.
Netfirms Commerce Pro also does not, by default, include a module to easily
allow users to populate their catalogs. Though the support Web site does include
an explanation of how a user
could attempt to configure that functionality themselves.
Do It Yourself
For many, we'd suspect that the great price on
domains and hosting offered by Netfirms would be very attractive. On the hosting
side, most users will find great value for the price paid. As a pure hosted
e-commerce play, though, at least for novice users, the Netfirms Commerce Pro is
not necessarily an ideal solution if you're looking for everything but the
kitchen sink pre-packed and ready to go.
Netfirms Commerce Pro does save potential users of OScommerce the trouble of
trying to set up the database connections and associated permission themselves,
which can be troublesome in some cases.
The fact that Netfirms Commerce Pro doesn't add on a whole lot to a stock
OScommerce download, though, is easily overcome in a variety of ways.
If you're willing to explore a bit there are plenty of modules on the main
OScommerce Web site that aren't too difficult to install and get running.
Then again there are at least two open source pre-packaged OScommerce based
solutions available that you could just download and the host with Netfirms if
you really wanted to. One of those options, CREloaded has upgraded its offering
since we reviewed it a year ago and now it boasts no less than 50 built in
add-on modules that significantly expand a stock OScommerce installation.
Considering that Netfirms e-commerce pricing including hosting starts at only
$10 per month (which includes 2 free domain names), we suspect that a lot of
users won't mind too much investing some additional time to fully customize and
realize the potential of their storefronts.
About the Author
Sean Michael Kerner is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. |
