Interspire
August 4, 2009 by: admin
Interspire Shopping Cart touts itself as being the most feature-packed easy-to-use shopping cart around. Formerly known as Interspire StoreSuite, the software package includes everything you’ll need to create, run, market and profit from your online ecommerce venture. Interspire is well known for development of products such as Email Marketer, Knowledge Manager and WebEdit, but the new version of their shopping cart promises to be a complete ecommerce solution right out of the box. Here’s a breakdown of the features included in Interspire Shopping Cart:
Store Design Templates
Drag and Drop Design Mode
Simple Shipping and Payment Gateway Integration
Multiple built-in inventory tracking options
The ability to sell physical or digital products
Fast page loads due to extensive AJAX programming
Variations of products each with unique pricing, stock, images, etc.
Integration of SendStudio and Knowledge Manager for email marketing and FAQs
Price:
Starter Edition $295
Professional Edition $995
Ultimate Edition $1795
Refund Policy: 60 day, no-questions-asked refund guarantee
Latest Version: Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0
Contact Interspire:
Interspire Inc
9606 N. Mopac, Suite 960
Austin, TX 78759
United States
sales@interspire.com
1800-939-5570
Inspire Website: Click here to visit website
For non-techies, the new InterSpire Shopping Cart, previously known as StoreSuite appears very flexible and feature packed, with drag/drop design mode, single page checkout, auto-generated static SEO urls (though would be great if it’s more customizable) with full meta control and massive reporting features.
While not the cheapest in the market, but probably 1 of the easiest to use for non-techie business owners allowing them to focus on the business operations and strategies. In addition, it seamlessly integrates into another InterSpire powerful email marketing / autoresponder product, with split testing (!)
I have been an Interspire customer since 2004 and have always received great support, even when I haven’t updated to the latest release. They still provide free updates and patches if I prefer not to upgrade.
We run about 15 stores for clients on Interspire’s cart and use their email software as well. We’ve spent about $25,000 with them so I think that speaks words about their excellent products and support.
Anyone serious about ecommerce/email marketing uses Interspire, and that speaks volumes about them as a company – they have the BEST products you’ll find with the support you need.
This is coming from someone who has tested every single one of their competitors both free and paid.
I just spent an hour or two having a play with version 3.5 of Interspire Shopping Cart. I have to say, this is the single most polished product I’ve ever used. All products have their pros and cons, but for sheer polish, from the AJAX powered search box, to the amazing design mode (click through for short video demo), this product oozes style.
Lots of nice touches like a built in logo creator (ok, not great for us all, but useful for some), very easy to use site designer, extremely easy to integrate third party products such as Google Analytics, Live Person chat, and a third party affiliates program. The CMS, while not a full blown CMS, is better than than 90+% of the shopping carts out there. Their support for product variations, and inventory tracking for product variations, is probably the best I’ve seen.
I have to admit this one has flown under my radar a bit (despite being a local company – I’m also in Sydney. Sorry Interspire!), but they are a sleeping giant. Definitely makes my short list of products to consider.
I think that this shopping cart is really worth it. It has most excellent features I did not find in any other eCommerce solution.
Interspire is $299… with a heap of built in store designs that people would actually want to use, and noob design friendly with its drag & drop. It’s also local (I too am in Sydney), has a very funtional cms and integrates with decent emarketing package…
I recently spend 5 hours reviewing all of the features and demo for interspire shopping cart including the videos and demo store/admin. I must say this is a pretty polished system. As with any shopping cart there could always be improvements however i’m pretty impressed expecially with the ease of integration with 3 party software. We are currently using OS commerce which has been a nightmare for programming / custom coding. (of course you get for what you pay for and its free). I’m also going to look at aspdotnetstorefront. Hope this helps.
The interspire cart is pretty decent, but they have the absolute worst support ever. Our cart “broke” on a Friday night so we tried to contact them to get it fixed. They were closed until Monday. Contacted them on Monday and they never got around to answering our trouble ticket. (they don’t do phone support whatsoever).
So, we lost all sales from Friday through Tuesday before we finally got our own programmer to fix the bug in their software. Probably cost us about $4,000 in lost sales.
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t use Interspire shopping cart for the simple reason that support is horrible.
Interspire sucks, cart looks good on paper but many advertised features do not work like telephone order facility, SEO friendly URL’s, Flexible coupon codes but worst of all is the pricing and confusing update, upgrade and support plans.
You might buy a cart now for $US 1800 and also payed for a year support and updates but if a after 3 month a new version which Interspire deems .5 is releases you will have to pay another US$900 to upgrade even though you just paid around US$2200 3 month ago.
An be aware Interspire is churning out releases quicker then you can think from beta to version 5 in a bit over a year and unfortunately releases are not very well tested so frequent bug fixes of bug fixes are common which is a pain if you have a modified cart as updates are so time intensive.
Also support is slow and often ineffective.
Magento looks the part, but for an average user that cannot code efficiently or deal with the skin themes in Magento, this product should not be considered for a custom site. You can download Magento or get hosting that provides free 1 click installation and then use the one free template or find some others. You will be fine if you can settle for not having a custom site. Also, Magento is only slow if you have a host that is slow. Get hosting from simple helix and you will be more than fast.
Interspire is a few hundred american dollars plus an extra hundred american dollars for free upgrades and support for 2 years. Many free templates come with it, or just replace the header and footer file with the header and footer related to your site and you will have a custom site just like that.
The both basically do the same thing except for a couple features here and there. The checkout is exactly the same. Which is probably the best part of Magento.
So anyways, Magento is free, but support is hundreds of dollars and requires subscription of at least 1 year. Interspire is a few hundred dollars and comes with support and is much more stable than Magento.
Sorry for the disconnected review, but basically, Interspire is better right now. Magento may be better in 2010 with some large improvements. They came out with an update just within the last month and then came out with 2 more updates to that update to fix bugs… So, it has issues….
Anyways… Interspire definitely.
Overall, the Interspire shopping cart is a good product, but they are still working out the kinks. There most recent release did fix a number of issues. The worse part about Interspire is the support. It sucks. There isn’t even a manual, just old articles kind of compiled in an area. Documentation is non-existant. They take anywhere from 24-72 hours to return emails depending on the day of the week. The positives are their themes are good, the stores offer more cool functionality than most other e-commerce packages, and overall I am happy enough with my store. But for my next e-commerce store, I will probably go with somebody else.