caution - WORDS...... lots and lots of words

OK, so I have a family member who is in a tough spot. He lost his job after 22 years at the same company, 10 of those years as an executive, because the parent company shut them down. He hasn't been able to find a new job yet in the small town they live in.

Somehow he stumbled upon a seminar given by http://storesonline.com/, which appears to be, duh, and online store service, that provides you with a complete backend and CMS for setting up a website with nice page templates and decent layout customization, with a full shopping cart, inventory management, customer management, some basic search engine optimization, traffic stats, all that. And I think when you sign up with storesonline.com you get access to a directory of drop-shippers. That is, you can sign up without actually having anything to sell, but you look through the directory of manufacturers, find something you'd be interested in selling, then set up your online storefront for that manufacturer.

So - personally, i think the whole thing is a horrible idea. It takes one quick Google search to find out that there are a LOT of dissatisfied customers of storesonline who say their store fronts don't get shit for business, storesonline has horrible customer services, they can't get refunds, etc. Also, since you're basically looking through the same directory of manufacturers as all the other storesonline.com customers, I don't see how you can possibly build a competitive advantage over anyone else, especially since you have no real relationship with the manufacturer or the actual product you're selling. Furthermore, this family member is an intermediate computer user at best, but has absolutely zero web experience with CMS, web design, ecommerce, SEO, anything like that.

But he seems to have been pulled in by the sales pitch, and he went to a seminar with another out-of-work friend, which sounds like it was a typical high-pressure "SIGN NOW" deal and so-called success stories, kind of like selling timeshares or something.

And.... they bought into the "deal" storesonline.com gave them during the seminar..... between the two of them, they put down $5600 (!!!) up-front (would have been $6000 if they didn't sign-up on the day of the seminar), and have something like $60/site/month fees. They have 3 days to evaluate the system to get a full refund, otherwise, they're on the hook with these guys. That's where I come in. As the family "computer guy", I've been tasked with taking a look at what storesonline.com, seeing if what they offer is worth $5600 + the monthly fee.

Off the bat, I can say "no", since they have a store, but they have nothing to sell.

Ignoring that caveat for now and focusing purely on the service itself, one of the main sales pitches was "how easy" salesonline.com makes it to create and fully manage a store, all in one place. This may be so, and the CMS does look pretty good, but I am interested in other systems that may do something similar, but don't require such a large up front fee. I have done my fair share of webdesign and webpages, but have never fully ventured into creating or managing an actual ecommerce site or a real online storefront. So I'd like some input into some alternative services or products that can do the same thing storesonline.com claims to provide.
For example:
- the CMS and page management portion -> Joomla, Drupal, etc have great templating engines. I imagine they have pretty sufficient plugins for shopping carts, payment management, etc?
- Yahoo Store does stuff like this, right?
- customer and sales management - salesforce.com?
- site/traffic analysis -> google analytics
- inventory management -> ? salesforce? yahoo stores?


I don't really need any commentary on how smart of a business decision this would be, unless anyone has ever had any success with something like this (and yes, I am aware of the NCSU kid who was making something like $200k selling beanbag chairs through a drop-shipper). I still maintain that it is a poor business decision, again, if he has no real knowledge or connection to the products he would be selling. I'm mostly interested in, if he actually did have something worth selling, would a nearly $6k upfront investment in a service like storesonline.com would be worthwhile or if the same goals could be accomplished through other services.

10/30/2008 11:44:43 PM

People actually fall for this shit?

10/30/2008 11:59:51 PM

If he had a product to sell, I could get him set up with our e-commerce engine for 1/30th the price.

I guess I'm not charging enough.

10/31/2008 12:09:20 AM

for curiosity, do you have an actual, proprietary (or home-grown) ecommerce engine, or do you install/manage one from someone else?

10/31/2008 12:34:26 AM

home-grown.

running on a couple sites, most notably http://www.ncstatealumnicollection.com

[Edited on October 31, 2008 at 12:48 AM. Reason : aww its officially been a year for alumni collection.]

10/31/2008 12:43:04 AM

This is plain and simply a scam. Nothing more.

And forget CMS systems. There are a half dozen free open source, and VERY inexpensive ecommerce packages that you can set him up on in 30 minutes. Get him an account on 1and1.com, and he can go to his bank of choice to get a merchant account setup, which will, in total run him 50-75 bucks a month for everything.

There are also TONS of free drop-shipping services on the web. Hell, 30 minutes on Alibaba.com will find you plenty alone, and it's not even a site dedicated to that.

He needs to get his money back ASAP.

OScommerce, CubeCart are the two i've used with great success (and pretty damn easy to retemplate and integrate with payment gateways too)

[Edited on October 31, 2008 at 2:49 AM. Reason : .]

10/31/2008 2:48:51 AM

well I got to him in time with my argument and they closed the account today and got a full refund. Now if I could only get his wife to give us the scrapbooking business/pyramid scheme..... but that's another fight for another day, i suppose.

i quoted you Noen as a "software expert who works at Microsoft." And uhh..... i said you were a "good friend". I guess a little white lie never hurt anyone, especially if it saves them $6000!

10/31/2008 8:58:01 PM

this thread was relevant to my interests, thanks for the info guys.

I will move in another direction.

10/31/2008 9:27:08 PM

yeah there's no reason to spend $6000 on an e-commerce venture unless you're using it to buy inventory.

11/2/2008 2:13:38 PM