A Solid Solution for RMS Online Shopping Cart for eCommerce

Holly, You need to do a search of the newsgroup for nitrosell and/or kosmos and you will find a wealth of information about both solutions. There really is no other solid solution available to integrate with RMS, so you basically need to decide between one or the other. For what it's worth, when I do decide to go full bore online sales I will probably go with nitrosell. From everything I've read on this newsgroup(and there is a ton of info on here) nitrosell is a better fit for me. I really want something that is very easy to maintain. Setups not the big issue for me, because once you've done it your good to go. What really concerns me is to have a solution that is simple for me to maintain without needing a degree in computer science, or needing someone to help me all the time. Since nitro basically leases the software to you, they are responsible for keeping you running at full speed with no downtime. Craig

Holly, there are a couple of other companies out there with solutions but I haven't heard any real positive feedback on them, so they will have to make a post and hopefully have some references. As far as

and Nitrosell.com, they both have workingsolid solutions but are quite different and your needs would have tobe addressed towards the solution that best fits them. I'veresearched a lot of the solutions extensively and have not purchasedyet but I'm leaning towards Kosmos at this time. I'll notate thedifferences below and Kosmos or Nitrosell can correct me if I'm wrong. Kosmos Central's RMS shopping cart:

1) Ownership? You own the shopping cart and the solution outright and it's open source so your staff will have full access to all the code for any customization. With Nitrosell they sell it as a SERVICE, so you can't touch the code or modify it at all (thus you can't break it either) and have to use what they created so there's no customization to the feature set at all unless Nitrosell does it for you. They do have a good set of features and so does Kosmos and the cart supports 112 Gateways where is Nitrosell has about a dozen only. With Nitrosell your feature set growth happens when they add features to their code with Kosmos you can customize the features exactly the way you want by having the Kosmos development team do it for you or you can do it yourself if you're a php developer. There are also a lot of 3rd party mods not supported by Kosmos or X-cart which is the shopping cart and usually cost about $100, which are great since they are usually about 90% of what you need and no need to redevelop the wheel. 2) Hosting? The Kosmos solution is Portable so you can host elsewhere with a supported platform, and Kosmos recommends you start with the implementation on their servers so you don't run into any of your own hosting provider’s configuration problems. It's better to have your own dedicated server too if you're going to host by yourself or in house this way you have FULL control over your server configuration. With Nitrosell you have to host with them and can't transfer all of your files to your own servers. What about bandwidth? The Kosmos solution resets monthly and currently starts at 3GB's/month, where is Nitrosell gives you an allotment for the year of 30GB's. The big issue is when you need more or when CHRISTMAS SEASON hits, what are the additional costs? Whose going to charge you the arm and a leg? From my research Nitrosell sells an additional GB for $95 and Kosmos sells 10GB's at $25/month. 3) Custom Design? I've seen a lot of really nice Kosmos designed sites and customers that have designed their own sites using the Nitrosell seems very limited to the templates for designing a site so the flexibility for customization on the design doesn't seem there but from what I hear it's easy too. 4) Licensing? Nitrosell requires you to pay an annual $300 license fee to use their Hosted SERVICE and Kosmos only charges you the $300 when you need the NEW license version for when you upgrade your RMS and that could be 5 years down the line. I'm excited about RMS 3.0 and license fees should be something more to consider. 5) Monthly base Service Fees. My Nitrosell quotes for hosting was $250/month and $100/month for Maintenance. Kosmos doesn't force you to have maintenance at a minimum cost of $150 and the basic hosting package was only $99.95 with SSL etc, so that's a $100 savings monthly and if I need more bandwidth you have to consider those fees too. Kosmos said with their maintenance you can use it for rms ecommerce support, web marketing (Analytices), custom design, custom development, flash work, hosting anything that fits within the allotted hours and pay the difference if you need a large custom project completed. Nitrosell just sells the RMS maintenance (gateway, integration problems, cc processing), Hosting and Analytics so you can't use it to create any customization for your site that's extra.

All in all, I like the idea of owning my cart and knowing it's mine and not leased or a so called SERVICE. With the Kosmos support maintenance, development and design its far more superior. I did talk to half a dozen references and they all gave raving support reviews and I suggest you do the same. I didn't feel the same about Nitrosell and response time seemed lagged since they are primarily in Ireland and not here in the states. Nitrosell would be good for someone who wants a basic store and really doesn't want to customize it very much so when it's setup it's done and that's it. Kosmos has the same support and quality and the monthly costs from what I’ve researched is cheaper.

Tom

Holly with the Kosmos RMS Shopping cart we have dozens of clients that don't even know how to crop a picture and thus barely know how to use RMS. That's why they pay for support and maintenance. Kosmos FULLY supports every aspect of this integration for any customization or website needs for clients that pay for maintenance. You can choose to use part of your maintenance for web marketing and part for basic website support or custom design work etc. Our clients can sit with staff on the phone for an hour if they'd like and discuss website needs and any customization they'd like. The solution works for everyone right out of the box 95% of the time with no need for customization and only a custom design is needed, and those clients are VERY HAPPY with their product. The system is very easy to maintain and all you have to know is how to add pictures to your RMS and the software does the rest. You don't even have to touch the back end admin area of the cart, unless you want to or would like to review past order history etc. There is absolutely no down time, because our servers are located at The Planet Data Center in Dallas Texas ranked second in the world to only to privately held IBM's data center with over 30,000 servers per location. With our high end clients we don't want any of them to experience a minute of down time and we have emergency support if a client needs it. The solutions are different as far as license ownership and portability, and we also have a FULL SERVICE option when you choose to pay for maintenance. We don't force our clients to have to buy maintenance, but we HIGHLY suggest it and thus the solution is FULL SERVICE solution with all kinds of flexibility. What I would do is contact a few clients that have a basic maintenance plan and ask about the support and customization they've done along with how the solution has worked for them. Give me a buzz and we can discuss your needs and go from there.

Alex

503.977.0171

Hi Holly,

just a quick answer. I've been searching the market for RMS integrated e-commerce solution and it's true that the only two solutions that You can get feedback about, and they are Cosmos and NitroSell. I know a little bit about Kosmos, mainly from what I have found on the net, but I must say that my experiance with NitroSell have been more then good. The support we are getting from them is just great. Really, it is a pity I can't have more time for NitroSell Commerce (leading other projects, etc...).

The software is very solid, have not found bugs or problems, easy to use and very user friendly. They have local support, just as my company does for our final clients, so don't worry about that. It's true that there is a part of the code that is "not available for editing", but You can always talk to NitroSell, they are doing Customizations also. But on the other side, I have found many ways You can edit or customize the web (html, script, css, the standard options, etc, etc...). Also, the way the system works, it's imposible to be attacked by hackers, it's integrated with all google/froogle/constant contacts, your RMS SO database is safe since what the the final customer is seeing is only a "view" of the data you want to show, etc, etc...

Feel free to contact me if You need more info. Hope I'm helping...

Regards, A.

Also check out storefront at storefront.net. I've been successully using them for 4 years now ... their synchronization tool is a little quirky, but it does the job.

In-store inventory is sychronized every 2 minutes (you chose frequency) with our web site (woolandcompany.com), and the on hand on the web is as accurate as RMS is in the store ;). Internet orders our fed through to RMS where they are finalized ... including CC authorization - no re-keying of sales info (customer name address, items purchased, cc info).

I have full source code access to storefront, I believe Nitrosell is a hosted-by-them-only solution, which I found to be somewhat limiting when I did an evaluation 4 years ago. I'm sure things have moved on. I know nothing about KOSMOS.

Four years > Hi can anyone let me know what you think are the most SOLID and PROVEN

Just researching KOSMOS and realize that they use an integration tool from the same company as storefront - NewWest. As I have a fairly early version, I would hope that NewWest have since eliminated some of the quirkiness that I mentioned above.

BTW, storefront is a .net based web application.

storefront at storefront.net. I've been successully

You might want to consider that you'll never get the quality support you're looking for from Storefront. Just search this forum for StoreFront and RMS etc., most of the posts as of late are not very positive. Your post was the very first one so I'm assuming like you stated you just didn't know there are better options out there.

"I dont have a really comment on the ecommerce solution but stay away from LaGarde StoreFront. The company was horrible to deal with, plus their storefront product was overly complicated and a pain to work with. "

"StoreFront.net is pure crap. Horrible support, overly complicated software, etc. Way too expensive. We implemented their store a couple years ago and it was the worst development experience of my life. I was so glad when we got rid of it. It was better for us to get rid of the software than to keep using it."

I've had a terrible experience with storefront in the past too and will not go back ever again.

Jeff

 Your post was the very first one so I'm assuming like you

Like I said, I have had 4 very good years with storefront ... so I won't knock them. Someone tell me where there is a PERFECT solution and I'll jump on it. I'd be much happier hearing about the positive experiences people have had with different solutions.

I originally chose storefront over Nitrosell (previously NitroASL) 4 years ago, because SF gave me the source code control I needed at that time. I am hosted by LaGarde, and in 4 years I can count 2 short outages that I noticed - both of which were resolved very quickly.

I really haven't needed their support.