Proven RMS ECommerce Solution

Hi Tif, good work on doing your research. Here are a couple of ideas I would suggest when choosing your RMS eCommerce solution.

3) Also how long has that company been selling and integrating RMS with a shopping cart? Kosmos Central has been successfully integrating an RMS eCommerce integration for almost three years of our seven years in business. We've been adding new RMS eCommerce clients on a weekly to monthly basis ever since. Also, make sure you can talk to at least half a dozen existing clients that are using their solution and if they only have a couple happy customer that are willing to talk to you then there's probably something more going on there.

Sounds like you know more about our product than probably I do, so feel free to take the next step and schedule a demo soon.

Take care and hope you had a Happy Easter too!

Alex

I have used Kosmos/NWT solution for a few years now. I had/have some issues with it, now mostly mapping issues (some fields that I believe should be mapped to X-Cart are not) and I use a third party MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) module that gets screwed up if I put items on sale and then upload them to X-Cart (another mapping issue I believe). But, if you want to upload some or all of your items to a website the Kosmos solution is quite good. I may switch to another platform as I have a new requirement that requires me to mirror my site behind a customers firewall on their servers and give their customers special discounts (if I can resolve this with Kosmoscart, I'll keep it) I have done several sites with Frontpage since about 96/97 and got quite use to it. X-Cart requires PHP, HTML knowledge or an outside developer to really customize it. There are a lot of modules available for it, but obviously you have to be aware that they might not work with Integragtor correctly. Walter at Kosmos has actually answered my emails at night which was impressive (They're PST - I'm Central time).

One issue I have right now with the NWT integrator is sometimes you get an order that is fraudulent, but once you download it to RMS it seems that there is no way to delete it. You have to add it to your customer accounts and process it to remove it. Otherwise every time you go to process your orders these bad ones will be sitting there waiting to be processed. I may be doing something wrong, but the documentation is sparse.

I'm not trying to put you off - contact several users as Alex recommended and make sure it will do what you want it to do. It does work and Kosmos is very responsive to trouble calls.

Bill Hobby Central

"Tif" wrote:

Bill,

Hi Bill, it's Walter ...

I would like to know more about the limitations in mappings you experience. If there is some data not coming from RMS to to your website, this may have been added in recent releases or something that can be configured. Please give me a call or email about this.

I am also not clear on your new requirements, but we have a version available that allows for multiple price levels to map to membership levels on your website. This can be used for dealer or wholesale pricing. It work like this: you set the price of an item in RMS for retail, then set additional price levels in RMS, typically PriceA, PriceB, and PriceC fields. Each of these fields are then mapped to your website membership levels. If a DealerA logs in, he will see PriceA field for his price, and respectively for the other price levels. Not sure if this is what you are after, but it is a great new feature we now offer. Kosmos is continually looking to improve functionality and add features, client requests are the number one way we prioritize future updates.

There is not a built-in RMS function to delete pending orders, however you can run a sql script that will clear the pending orders, but it will also clear any other pending internet orders. I suggest, rather than allowing orders to reach RMS that may be fraudulent, even if you do fraud prevention at the RMS level, to process payments online or at least have a payment processor perform address verification and cc validation. This will eliminate a majority of this type of situation. Kosmos recommends very competitive rate payment gateways that you may want to consider, let us know if you are interested.

Haven't heard from you in a while, let us know if we can help, thanks!

Walter

Thanks for the info everybody! I'm leaning towards Kosmos since there's really not much out there that I can trust.

Tif

Tif and everyone out there. Even though Kosmos lets you own and touch your code you can still DESTROY your whole environment if you dabble in the code where you shouldn't be in.

As a former developer, I have broken a lot of sites learning about code and how it functions! I'd be very careful what you ask for and make sure you don't dip into the code if you're not a master carpenter!

I've also worked with about all of the solutions out there dabbling with RMS and eCommerce and there's only two that I would even consider for a high end client. Kosmos and Nitrosell so do your leg work, figure out your needs and make your choice from there. If you want to save a buck and become another developers guinea pig for their so called RMS shopping cart solution and lose customers at the same time because of all the bugs you have to report, that's your decision.

Good luck Tif

Luke

Hi Tif, et al, NitroSell is headquartered in Cork, Ireland that's true but we have several office in the US and we have our main office in San Diego. Indeed 70% of our business is in the United States.

We have an enterprise class web solution that enables small to medium sized retailers compete and win against big box retailers. We deliver a very deep integration to RMS itself, but we also are very engaged in actively marketing our customers web stores. We package a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features that drive business not only to your web store, but also to your bricks and mortar store. Indeed consumers are using the internet, today's Yellow Pages, to find the products they are interested in buying. They may not always buy online but they will use Search to find a local merchant that see what's in stock. We do an excellent job of that and you can see that by doing some basic searches like "affliction Scottsdale" as if I was interested in Affliction Jeans, and I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona - if you try that search you'll see Scottsdale Jean company comes up top. That's of course just one example, but if you go to our website, and look at our portfolio page, you can grab any product name of any site, place that product name into a search and see where the site comes back. Most of the time, the webstore that you are grabbing the name from will come up in the top 5 results. If it doesn't it may be a relatively new item and it might not have been indexed yet, but most of the time you will see excellent results.

We have a number of large customers that include the US Navy (4 museum stores), NASA, Stone Brewery, Calgary Flames, Leeds Rugby and others but of course our bread and butter is smaller boutique shops like Venissimo cheese, Amazing Grapes, Adel's Wines,etc. We are very customer service oriented and if you contact any of the customers on our Portfolio (via their 'contact us page') at

strictly on RMS......it is worth taking a look at.

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.

Thanks,

--Mike

"Kosmos" wrote:

Just an FYI here...NitroSell has its own interface; for handling web orders which does allow you to get rid of any pending order on an individual basis.

I’d like to reiterate that the power of the Kosmos Central RMS eCommerce solution is VERY flexible.

Feel free to call us with any questions.

Alex

Well if I owned a multi million or billion dollar corporation I would definitely want a very professional look to my site. Nasa has a very nice site:

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Excellent post! We have a client who needs a great looking website so I did some digging.

Here is what I found:

NitroSell has about 60 showcase eCommerce sites which they claim are “just sample of hundreds of existing RMS-integrated online stores” at:

Because I’m right now focused on the design aspects I went down through the Kosmos showcase stores first. Here is what I found:

All of the Kosmos stores have a completely different look and feel, so each one must have been a custom job. The design quality varies tremendously from very good to the very poor. Some did not appear to have any shopping carts at all and one was even an ebay store! This makes me ask how many clients running RMS does Kosmos really have?

The very first Kosmos store I clicked on - a shoe store:

NitroSell is also a mixed bag of good and poor design. Some of the better NitroSell ones I found where:

Overall from browsing through the two portfolios, I found the NitroSell stores where way faster and more response than the Kosmos ones, and that is absolutely critical, as is Search Engine Optimization. I did some tests (copy and past some product data into Google and see if the sites come up) on this and again NitroSell SEO came out on top on this very important aspect. What good is a great design is nobody can find your site?

One outstanding Kosmos site is this one:

and in fact is very close to what my client needs. How much would Kosmos charge to do the design aspects of a site like this? If the price is right and they can give me the responsiveness I need ,plus SEO as good as NitroSells’s then I might go with them.

Mark

Mark SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has 100's of factors to be aware of and speed loading is just one of them. We’ve been involved in SEO before working for Kosmos Central and have written and published many SEO articles. Example:

Nitrosell Sites:

Kosmos Central RMS eCommerce Sites:

The results will vary each time you run the test based on the time of day for traffic. Our servers are top of the line Dual Conroe Xeon's and located at The Planet Data Center, which is the second largest Data Center in the world next to IBM's publicly held data center. We don't have our servers located at our office and don't wish to. The Planet Data Center has a small army of network administrative specialists that have one primary focus and that's to make sure the SERVERS and the NETWORKS that are supporting over 30,000 servers are always up. Having the slightest amount of down time could cost our clients thousands of dollars and this is why we are paying a premium for support and chose to host our clients websites there.

Also, the designs are not all custom in our portfolio and some clients have chosen to use a 3rd party skins and there are 100's out there for less than $100 dollars. Some also have decided to go with the FREE templates that comes with X-cart software too. Our solution is very flexible and if the client doesn't have the budget for a full blown customized RMS solution, they can go with a FREE skin and do the RMS integration six to twelve months later. So, feel free to give me a call if you'd like and we can go from there.

Alex

Alex this comment makes no sense - SEO and speed are two different things!

Also I don't understand your use of:

I just ran this test. It gives back three parameters: "Size"; "Load Time"; and "Average Speed per KB".

In testing how fast a hosting solution is, the key parameter is "Average Speed per KB", not "Load time", because different sites have different sized home pages for example. Yet in the report you posted you edited out everything but but Load Time - very strange!

Here are the unedited results of a fair test - the first five sites from both Nitrosell's and Kosmos (page 2 RMS sites) showcases:

# Domain name Size Load Time Ave.Speed/KB Nitrosell

This clearly shows NitroSell's hosting is three times faster than Kosmos.

An even more interesting use of this test is to see how each companies websites performs:

Domain name Size Load Time Average Speed per KB

Again Nitrosell is the clear winner.

What this tool shows is that if I put the same design on Nitrosell and Kosmos, the Nitrosell site would load two to three times faster than the Kosmos one.

However Alex, let me make the point - what I want to focus on is good design, and to choose the company that gives me the best tools to initially create, maintain and continually improve a great site, design wise.

The best design I have seen to date (in terms of being closest to what my client needs) is the Kosmos site:

The more feedback you can give me here on this the better.

Mark

Hi Mark, feel free to contact us and provide your design specs to our design team and we can come up with a cost estimate for you. Coming to an understanding about a client’s vision for their unique custom design and focusing that on their target market is a process we take seriously and are very proud of the work we’ve performed her at Kosmos.

Alex

Hello Mark,

I’m delighted you took the time to test how effective our SEO is. Each and every NitroSell WebStore benefits from top placing in the Search Engines ensuring that our retailer’s products are found first every time.

SEO is an all important facet of the marketing services we provide – we give it intense focus and nobody has a more thorough, up-to-date understanding of how the search engine algorithms and robots operate. Our tools and tactics are reviewed and evolved on a weekly basis and we apply our knowledge to each and every NitroSell WebStore in a systematic, protocol driven manner . Our clients don’t have to read SEO articles on the open internet or take coaching from us. We take care of it for them – it is a standard part of our service ; no extra marketing or consulting fees are charged by us. Our retailers can focus on retailing and processing web orders, while we take care of SEO – and nobody out there does it as well as we do – as you have found in your testing.

For those NitroSell powered retailers who want to understand SEO or apply it their other web sites, we give them access to our continuously updated SEO Knowledge Base (KB) articles. They access these from our secure Customer Portal – safe from the prying eyes of their competitors.

I’m glad you also tested the speed of some of the NitroSell showcase sites. In fact, just like SEO, each and every NitroSell WebStore benefits from our best-in-class, geo-redundant eCommerce clusters that deliver outstanding performance that no competitor comes near. And all that speed comes at no extra charge – it’s a standard part of our offering!

Speed is a critical factor in delivering a great Web experience for the online customer. NitroSell best-in-class SEO means the highest level of visitors and NitroSell best-in-class speed helps ensure the highest level of conversions o f visitors to purchasing customers.

Feel free to call any one our US or European offices to learn more. NitroSell operates offices in five time zones – there is always someone here to answer a sales query or take a support call. My number here in San Diego is 619-446-6718

Regards Todd.

RMScart is the most powerful web store solution for RMS. It is developed by LAN Services with a california based development company. RMScart gives the ability to quickly create and manage an online store in combination with a brick and mortar retail operation running RMS. RMScart helps you upload inventory and download orders in few clicks.

You may contact the undersigned for details.

Regards,

Paras Project Manager LAN Services LLC snipped-for-privacy@lanservices.com

"unknown" wrote:

You guys are FUNNY. I love how Nitrosell is dwelling on speed as the big part of SEO. What are your concrete keyphrase and word examples? Show me some proof! I don't want junk searches, I would like to see industry competitive keyphrases. I don't care if my site is 1/100th of a second faster than my competition if I'm not found on that first page for our industry keywords.

JK

Hi JK, here are some solid key phrases.

Client:

Client

Client Actionironworksinc.com Top Ten in Google for: Custom iron railing, custom railing, custom iron work, etc....

Client Xincom.com Top Ten in Google for: Dual Wan Routers, Dual Wan, Load Balancing Routers...

Please give us a call and we can go over in more detail how Kosmos can help with your web marketing efforts. Whether you're a complete novice or pro we can still assist in just about every realm.

Alex