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.

1) Ask for a live online demo and most companies should be able to show you the whole checkout process. We use Gotomeeting so you will be able to see how it all works. From editing your items in RMS and marketing for the web, to uploading to the web and then purchasing items and downloading that order into RMS store operations for processing. This should be a smooth process without any pop up RMS warnings or Matrix items not showing up on the CART properly etc. Feel free to setup a DEMO with for a timeconvenient for you and any members of your organization. 2) Another thing you should look for is whether the company doing the RMS eCommerce integration is also competent in custom web design, custom web development and successfully web marketing their clients too. Pay Per clicks and Google Analytics are a good start for new sites, but good SEO or Search Engine Optimization consulting should always be in mind. Having one out of three competencies just doesn't cut it, so I would look into that companies overall qualifications very closely.

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.

1) If you go with Kosmos make sure your developer isn't pulling your leg and is feeding you a story that he's a great PHP developer. How do you know if they actually know what they're doing? Do your research and maybe ask Kosmos to find out if they are competent. 2) Or just let Kosmos handle all of your customization and you stay out of the kitchen. Are you going to remodel your kitchen and build your cabinets, mud your walls and tile everything yourself? I'm sure you may do a good job, but do you want a showcase kitchen from your contractor or a kitchen that's only nice enough for a renter? 3) Nitrosell doesn't allow you to touch the code and they lock it down so you so called developer wanta b's can't break their solution at all. It's on lock down for a reason.

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

think you'll find that in general our customers are very happy withtheir webstores. We are committed to our customers online success andour 98% retention rate demonstrates that quite effectively. If you would like more information please feel free to call our office at 619-446-6718 or submit an inquiry at Al the best, Todd Jensen NitroSell

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.

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:

and if you look at their NitrosellStore, which is only one of the gift shopsand this one is the Johnson Space Center Gift Shop. What about Calgary Flames? I wouldassume they would like to have a more professional look too. What about a billion dollar entity like the US Navy memorial store looks like a template and doesn't look any thinglike their more professional site I'm assuming these companies didn't do their research when deciding to go online with their RMS. Nitrosell has been around for quite some time. Maybe the gift stores had a limited budget and didn't have the funds for a custom design that emulated their own corporate sites. When I viewed these stores for the first time I became confused and wondered if they were even affiliated with the corporate site at all. These online stores do not bring any WOW factors like the corporate sites or build any consumer confidence to make a purchase. Don't get me wrong, Nitrosell is a good solution, you can't break anything and they hold your hand the whole way. But your limitations or in customization to your source code and that's where Kosmos excels leaps and bounds past the competition. Just do your research and figure out your needs and go from there.

Jeff

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

Also I don't understand your use of:

to compare the speed of Nitrosell sites with your Kosmos sites.

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

37.86 KB 0.43 sec

0.01 sec Kosmos 12.38 KB 0.42 sec 0.03 sec Nitrosell 23.21 KB 0.34 sec 0.01 sec Kosmos 31.81 KB 0.34 sec 0.03 sec Nitrosell 41.88 KB 0.38 sec 0.01 sec Kosmos 8.41 KB 0.28 sec 0.03 sec Nitrosell 13.92 KB 0.31 sec 0.02 sec Kosmos 6.82 KB 0.17 sec 0.03 sec Nitrosell 61.55 KB 0.4 sec 0.01 sec Kosmos 13.46 KB 0.38 sec 0.03 sec

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

1 26.35 KB 0.32 sec 0.01 sec 2 11.85 KB 0.2 sec 0.02 sec

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

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

1-408-649-5371

"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.

1) What generic highly competitive keywords/phrases are your clients ranking very high in? I don't want to see results for a domain name like DomainWineName for DomainWineName.com because that's already the domain and it should have high rankings already. Everyone please show me how your sites are ranking on the first GOOGLE search results page for a keyphrase that even the competition across the nation are paying high dollar for Google paper clicks and would love to have natural organic search rankings for. Obviously for DomainWINEName.com, maybe being found for 'Red Wines' or 'Merlot' on the first page would be KILLER! Being found for red wines in a local like Florida, doesn't cut it. Whose going to search for wines in florida?

JK

Hi JK, here are some solid key phrases.

Client:

Top Ten in Google for Parts like: HyperPro Damper Yamaha R6, DJ HUB 2 Map Switch & Harness, MPS Dry Nitrous Kit 1 lb,....

Client

Ten Google Examples: Black BT BARREL, Airsoft Guns 249P, DYEHEADWRAP 06 OLV CAMO, etc.... Client Bonnevilleresort.com Top Ten in Google for: hot springs resort, hot springs spa, day spa resort, and of course geography listings too.

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