ShopFactory Professional 5.0 Review

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(More customer reviews)I own a e-commerce site created with ShopFactory ver. 5 and would like to express my experience with this tool.
ShopFactory will do if you have a small e-commerce site but when you need to insert a lot of products and images (I have over 1700 products and 4000 images in 4 languages) ShopFactory becomes hell.
What you need to know about ShopFactory and they don't tell:
1)ShopFactory does not create a database driven website. Instead it creates html-files. Not necessary bad, however if you edit one single word (e.g. mistyping) in a department, ShopFactory recreates the whole site in all languages. This means that it will need to upload all files (in my case over 8000) because the new created files have a date stamp which is more recent than the ones on the web, although their content did not changed. The build in file transfer utility can't even do this job because it has not a timeout prevention build in. So I needed to buy a good and fast FTP software that uploads at night. You can imagine that the whole process is time-consuming.
2)If you add pictures, ShopFactory will remember the complete path. You don't tell ShopFactory the path of the folder you put your images in, no, ShopFactory will use the complete path including the driveletter. This means that ShopFactory is not verry suitable to use on a network and does not allow you to move your images to another location (e.g.:if you would like to reorganise your system) unless you agree to relink all your images.(in my case over 4000) Can you imagine how time-consuming this is ?
3)ShopFactory comes loaded with bugs. For example: you are able to change the language file to your own needs. Excellent, but when you do this within ShopFactory your customers won't be able to buy any products anymore because they can't give their addresses. The input form is simply not generated anymore. So you need to edit the language files with notepad or another editor to prevent this from happening. ShopFactory's helpdesk didn't tell me this, another user did.
4)Concerning postal prices to other countries, ShopFactory let you multiply the postal prices with a number given by you. However since this is dependent on the weight which not always follows the same structure as the local post , you are not able to calculate the right shipping prices for export. Now, there's a way to work around this problem, but ShopFacory's helpdesk did not told me, another user did.
5)This brings me to ShopFactory's helpdesk. Either they don't want to help or they don't know how to help, fact is that you can't count on their service. I've reported problems several times where they told me that it was the first time they heard about it and probably the problem would be on my computer, where later I could read in some older forums they have online that the bugs were reported years ago and several times. In the mean time they've released a new version without fixing the bugs.
My advise: If you're happy with a small site, ShopFacory will do. If you want to create a professional site with lots of products and images, don't buy ShopFactory unless you're willing to accept above mentioned disadvantages and bugs. I my case I'm still using ShopFactory until I can find a way to move to another software without the need of reinput all the products and images. (Months of work went into it already.)
I hope I've informed you with this.

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ShopFactory Professional is designed to make shop building as easy as possible. No programming skills are required. Virtually anything can be achieved with point-and-click commands and powerful yet easy-to-use wizards. And shops will run on any server--without any installation requirements.
ShopFactory Professional features 150 predesigned shop themes to help you customize your store to fit your needs and style. ShopFactory quickly allows you to build multi-department stores that make navigation easy for your customers, allowing them to browse through your departments or use the powerful search function to locate a specific product.
Just point and click to add departments, sub-departments, products, and multimedia links, or to customize the look of your shop front. Add other features required for a professional retail outlet, including product weight, unlimited options and choices, and more. Easily adjustable shop templates allow you to select and modify the look of your shop with point-and-click ease.
Easily define unlimited tax and shipping regions, or use the integrated UPS shipping calculator access (U.S. only). Sophisticated discount structures allow just about any discount method you may need. Before publishing your shop, you can preview and test every single function of your shop on your local computer. You can even send and receive test orders with the default payment system. The integrated publishing tool makes it easy to then publish your shop on the Internet.

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