Proven RMS ECommerce Solution

Mike has good points listed and we also thought about some of those cheap mods, but decided against it. I guess you get what you pay for unless you customize it to your liking, which is why x-cart is a great product. I would also like to inform everyone we were with Nitrosell for a year and our site never got launched. Nitrosell's serviced solution wasn't customizable to our needs and we ran across Kosmos and went with the Kosmos solution. The vast flexibility the Kosmos solution offers seems to be limitless, especially if you want to customize any portion of your website. We needed individual auto parts to be found online for dozens of different models and RMS by design doesn't allow this out of the box. Nitrosell just couldn't figure out how to customize our store to get our site online, but Kosmos did. The hard part to digest as a business owner is the expense that has to go into any customization and our modest budget was enough to get exactly what we needed done by Kosmos and now we’re selling online! Of course we also had the option to have other developers work on our site too, but why trust my site to developers that may crash the online store? I like the idea of owning my shopping cart and have control over my site files, so if I wanted to host it somewhere else in the future I have that option too. Overall the pricing seemed to be the same, Kosmos didn’t have any annual license fees and bandwidth was much more inexpensive as compared to Nitrosell. Nitrosell and Kosmos both have their benefits and limitations. Just do your home work research the shopping carts to see if your needs can be met. I think all and all if you want a solution without much control over modifying the features and can’t break it, then Nitrosell might be a good option. Kosmos with a website maintenance plan has exceptional support and we’re happy how things have come together. I wish I would have known about Kosmos before hand, but at least the word is getting out for both solutions now.

Allan

Also, would like to mention that we do offer a FREE Mercury Gift Card integration and Payment Gateway with X-cart. You'll have one statement and not three and you won't have to pay three different transaction fees.

For more information please call Mercury or see our site here:

I would also like to state, there are a lot of 3rd party mods available and you'll have to understand that they are very inexpensive for less than $100 dollars and we always recommend that our clients review them as much as possible to see if they fit their needs. Just like buying after market auto parts, not all will work as expected or hoped. Your other options would be to customize your own mod and that may cost a few hundred dollars or a few thousand, who knows. Customization is always an option though. Also, X-cart is a stand alone shopping cart that you own and it's not a HOSTED solution like Nitrosell. So if there is a new version of the cart that you'd like it's very easy to update the cart within the admin area if you haven't gone into the code and manipulated the functionality at all. If you have a lot of customization, X-cart's script will flag what files were customized and then all you have to do is go in and manually change the new code out within those files. With a Kosmos Website Maintenance plan we'll do these updates for you or you can have your own development staff update your cart too. We would hope you'll go with Kosmos for all of your development needs but you don't have to. You'll have full access to all of your x-cart code and have the option of using our developers or yours, so there's much more freedom of access.

If you have any type of special customization or feature needs for your site we highly recommend bringing those up ASAP and we can address how that will work with the Web Integrator and X-cart. The new Web Integrator has a few new featurese and is now in Beta for testing with a few clients. The new version would have addressed some of Mikes problems, but not the 3rd party mods which are out of it's realm of control.

Alex

this memorial store looks like a template and doesn't look any thing> like their more professional site > > Jeff hi Jeff,

i do the store site for

and you are right, it is a nitroSell template, but i can go into their back end code and make massive changes with css and if i study the code enough i can remove the 3 column layout, move and make panels and add anything. but i don't have time to do a kick-ass design, i am not strictly the web guy, i make the art for products, shoot and clip the photos of the products, manage the RMS, eMail marketing, SEO guy, in house IT guy, and i have 5 other stores to do all this for. i assume that the other sites you reference are done by people with little to no html experience, which is what nitroSell is excellent for (although it's forced me to learn more about code like SQL and become an expert in css)

as for the look, it's parent site is not

but rather the top bar has all the other affiliates (i added the custom code to nitrosell's template so all affiliates have the same header navigation). the USNM previously ran a yahoo store (horrible) but hired us to manage the physical store and we created the new store website. then the memorial redesigned it's website, but we didn't change ours. i believe the store is meant to stand on it's own; it's more about the lone sailor than the memorial itself. if you want to see better examples of the store looking like the .org site check out some of my other stores and then use the top links to see the parent site: these just used the basic layout with color schemes from parent site: i'm only commenting because i found this link to my site in google webmaster tools and wanted to let you know that i did research, but only bethel woods consulted us about the look of the store site (several meetings and revisions, i had it looking like the .org site with a 2-column format and no special items on the top, but eventually the marketing dept. wanted to keep the original layout from nitroSell because it was NOT confusing but organized and everything is where most users expect common things to be) all the other stores didn't give a lick of input so i used color schemes from the corporate sites and didn't customize anything.

rather

the top bar has all the other affiliates (i> added the custom code to nitrosell's template so all affiliates have the same> header navigation). the USNM previously ran a yahoo store (horrible) but> hired us to manage the physical store and we created the new store website.> then the memorial redesigned it's website, but we didn't change ours. i> believe the store is meant to stand on it's own; it's more about the lone> sailor than the memorial itself.>

site:

site:

Hi all...yes this is all true - you can do a lot of editing with the CSS...we also have something called NitroScript which is essentially an extension of HTML. By manipulating the CSS and editing the various pages of the templates' layout using NitroScript, you can have completely unique looking desings. Check out the following:

(check out the Java scroll bar on any ofthe department pages - like 'footwear') - they can put a man on the moon but theywon't touch RMS e-Commerce integration!

We're even doing full mutli-language & multi-currency templates now:

RMS database is in all English, butwe've provided a mechanism for presenting that data in French! We'vegot French and Spanish versions done now, and we are working onGerman.

Hope this helps... Todd

I'm going to jump back into this thread. First of all most of these posts don't address the original question of : which solution is bug free. I doubt neither is bug free.

I bought the Kosmos solution almost 3 years ago. At the time I could only find the NWT integrator and Nitrosell. Usually the posts about RMS and E-commerce are in reference to which is the best solution. Most of the comparisons on here are between apples and oranges. The majority of statements on here have been in ref. to web design, SEO and page load speed etc.. If the question was who has the best hosting and the comparison was behind Nitrosell and each individual hosting service for the sample Kosmos sites, this would be a fair question. But it's not fair and that is one of the primary reasons you should give Kosmos consideration.

1. Web design for the Kosmos solution can be handled in numerous ways. If you want a inexpensive site you can use the included skins or spend 0-0 and get an exisiting skin customized. I have been quoted anywhere from 0 to 00 for custom designs. There are lots of designers that specialize in custom skins and development for X- Cart and a lot of them are really good. With Nitrosell you are limited in the design options, it's either use their templates or pay for development.
2. You have more control over SEO with X-Cart, there are modules and services available or you can do it yourself.
3. Speed of page loads and data transfer is only partially based on the solution code. How it is hosted has a large impact on these speeds. If you are on a shared server with 200 other sites you probably are not going to be as fast as if you are on a dedicated server. With the Kosmos solution, if it's not fast enough you can move to a different hosting solution as you own it. With Nitrosell, if it's slow your stuck with it as they sell the service not the product.

1. If you need a custom function/service and Nitrosell doesn't offer it - your stuck. If X-Cart doesn't have it, you can buy modules and modifications from a lot of 3rd pary vendors. You can also have a custom solution developed as it's open source and there are an abundance of X-Cart developers out there.

As for me, I wanted to own the solution and Kosmos was the only option. I run two sites off of one database and will probably expand to as many as 5 sites within the upcoming year. The costs for each additional site are no where's near the price of the original solution purchase. You are not forced to buy all of your software from Kosmos (I'm sure they'd like you to though). I'm not sure how Nitrolsell prices their multi-sites as it was not available when I upgraded my system.

I can't tell you that Kosmos is better than Nitrosell as I haven't used Nitrosell. I would think if you are a store owner with limited computer experience Nitrosell might be closer to a plug and play solution. I can tell you that I'm happy with Kosmos and how it has expanded to meet my needs. I am extremely impressed with the support that Kosmos has given me and my company. then new dispatcher system is pretty powerful.

One other point; one of my sites is for an organization and required that I be able to process their propietary credit cards (not processed by normal merchant service providers) Kosmos was able to develop a custom gateway that processed their credit cards. I also accept Google checkout and do large percentage of sales through it. Google is a key player in the online commerce scene. I use Google adwords to produce traffic/conversions and I don't pay any processing fees for Google transactions,so it's like taking cash (no fee). Google is easily added to X-Cart at no charge.

Bill

But, that is exactly why I chose Kosmos. First you cannot compare page load speed etc. between the two. Why? Because it is only a fixed entity with Nitrosell. and

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