Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

Is there a gallery or listing of actual sites using Store Manager? Before I sign up, I'd like to get an idea how it might compare with other eCommerce solutions.

Also, I assume I can sign up and then cancel before 30 days if I determine that Store Manager is not for me. Can you confirm this?

Thanks!!

Hello William:

Sqwants2bead http://myofficelivecommunity.com/discuss/members/SQwants2bead.aspx runs Store Manager if you want to know about it just ask her.

Gary
New Mountain Tavern		Silver Moon Furniture

Hello William:

If you are brave just read some of SQwants2bead's post concering Store Manager

Gary
New Mountain Tavern		Silver Moon Furniture

Willem:   I just helped someone make a site, including Store Manager & PayPal.  It was a nightmare, though I don't think my experience was quite as bad as what SQwants2bead went through (I just scanned her posts). You can see the results here:  http://lifetimelearningbrenham.org/shop.aspx.

Some things to watch out for if you decide to go ahead with OL's store:  

--The product listing page is not customizable. You can't even include a note to potential buyers on that page.

--It has to appear in the navigation as "Product List." At least, I haven't figured out yet how to change it to something more appropriate to our situation..

--Somehow we ended up with 3 product list pages. OL's support was unable to help . . . said he'd never seen it happen before.  I tried restoring from a backup I'd made earlier, but the store page was still messed up, so I'm wondering now if the backup feature even includes store pages. Ended up delisting products, but I'm still not sure how I got the extra pages to go away, since they aren't deletable in Page Manager and only one of them was listed there anyhow.

--After everything was set up, our test purchases wouldn't work when we got to the payment page. SQwants2bead is right. If you have any trouble integrating PayPal with OL, each of them will tell you the problem lies with the other. A few days later it suddenly worked, so patience may be required.

I think $40/mo is ridiculous for what you get and am going to suggest to the site owner that she start looking for another shopping cart service.

Forgt to say:  At one point when the woman I was working with got discouraged, she wanted to drop the whole project and cancel Store Manager.  OL's support person said she could do that. It was less than a week after she signed up at that point. I can't confirm the 30-day period.

Greetings, cd

you wrote:

--It has to appear in the navigation as "Product List." At least, I haven't figured out yet how to change it to something more appropriate to our situation..

I haven't had problems with ours. I named ours "Our E-Store", you can change the name in page properties.

Peace be with you

Mark S. Sanford

www.sanfordconsulting.net

Willem:   I just helped someone make a site, including Store Manager & PayPal.  It was a nightmare, though I don't think my experience was quite as bad as what SQwants2bead went through (I just scanned her posts). You can see the results here:  http://lifetimelearningbrenham.org/shop.aspx. 

Some things to watch out for if you decide to go ahead with OL's store:  

--The product listing page is not customizable. You can't even include a note to potential buyers on that page.

--It has to appear in the navigation as "Product List." At least, I haven't figured out yet how to change it to something more appropriate to our situation..

--Somehow we ended up with 3 product list pages. OL's support was unable to help . . . said he'd never seen it happen before.  I tried restoring from a backup I'd made earlier, but the store page was still messed up, so I'm wondering now if the backup feature even includes store pages. Ended up delisting products, but I'm still not sure how I got the extra pages to go away, since they aren't deletable in Page Manager and only one of them was listed there anyhow.

--After everything was set up, our test purchases wouldn't work when we got to the payment page. SQwants2bead is right. If you have any trouble integrating PayPal with OL, each of them will tell you the problem lies with the other. A few days later it suddenly worked, so patience may be required.

 I think $40/mo is ridiculous for what you get and am going to suggest to the site owner that she start looking for another shopping cart service.

******************************************

I have been away from the blogs for a bit, working like crazy on my shows that are actually producing revenue (or I'd be living in a van down by the river for sure by now)  Some feedback that I hope is better late than never . . . . .

FYI folks, I have only posted about 1/3 of the issues I have had with SM since I signed up when it was released. Not enough hours in the day. (Posting this at 2:52 a.m. central time)

Yes, you have to have the patience of a saint to deal with this, although Store Manager has come a long way as far as documentation and even a demo site now, since I signed up. But there are still issues and shortcomings and unfortunately MS doesn't always admit to them. As you probably saw in my post about all products not showing up, MS knew about the "bug" but chose not to inform, nothing was put out here until I posted the issue and the response from MS technical (and I use that term loosely) support. I have been researching new eCommerce solutions but haven't had a lot of time to dedicate to that right now, and so feel trapped into keeping SM and dealing with the garbage that goes along with it because I have so much invested into my site, an unbelievable amount of hours. Partially because of my own technical inabilities but almost as much has been because of a substandard product. I believe my frustration is most evident in the string of postings where it was announced that new people would get a promotional price of $14.99 when me and many others have gone through all the pain and agony of being the guinea pigs for this product. I think I have posted a response from MS on an issue or two.

On top of the $40 for SM now they want to charge an additional $10 for the email markeing piece of it.What's next?

If you have any questions on Store Manager I'd be willing to discuss the pro's (and there are a few) and con's of it.

Afterall . . . .SQ just wantz to bead.

SQ, in regards to the issue with not being able to page through all products in the list... to be fair we were not aware of this issue until one of our customers alerted us to the issue via the forums/support team (we were not keeping it a secret :-)). It was a bug that was introduced in one of our more recent upgrades. Once I was made aware of it I posted a workaround to the forums. 

That said, I realize you have been waiting for a fix. Although it hasn't been soon enough... we will be releasing a fix for this shortly. I totally understand your concern and I appologize for the delay.

Sincerely,

- Mike

Mike,

 Would you also have a fix for the problem of not being able to give customers options to our products in Store Manager?  When I called for support at I was informed there was nothing they could do.  Seems to me it would be easy enough for one of your programmers to add a feature for each of our products to have options for our customers to choose like sizes or colors and so on.  As it stands, if I was selling a sweater available in a thousand colors I would now have to list a thousand products in my product list.  That's quite confusing for customers and a turnoff.  Like others who wrote previously, I also put in a lot of time and trust in your company only to come up flat.  I would like to work through it and continue but if I can't present something reasonable to my customers, then I really have to look elsewhere.

 Would anyone have a company to suggest that has worked better for them?  I truly appreciate all of your help and advice.

 Theresa JB

Hi Theresa,

Although I'm not able to give you an exact date, in the very near future we will be releasing a new feature that will enable you to specify variations (size, color, ... whatever) for each product.

I will post a message to the forum once it is available. I know that there are several users out there patiently (some not so not so patiently :-)) for this functionality to be available.

- Mike

Thanks Mike,

I appreciate your effort to resolve this issue; however, timing is everything.  Can you please tell me exactly where in the forum you will post this message so I can look out for it?  How much time are we looking at--a week, month or longer?  Thank you.

Theresa

Would it be possible to add another ecommerce functionality to my Office Live website like ZenCart?  I've been hearing a lot of good things about them but would hate to undo everything I've been working on.

 Theresa

I am thinking I was the customer that brought this to your attention: from my post 6/5, and if you knew about this issue before I posted it here, why wasn't I informed? I AM a paying customer, I deserve to know if something I am paying for isn't working properly. Also, your work around still does not guarantee that my customers will see all my products. If they do not choose to shop via category, which as was pointed out here in the forums, most people browse all products, then they will not see everything I have for sale. If there was able to eliminate the choice to view all products then that may be a temporary solution. Is there?

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Posted 6/4 or 6/5

I'd like to share an email I got from Microsoft customer service today, I have had Store Manager since it was introduced, I believe I was one of the first to sign up for it. So I am paying $29.99 now, soon to be $39.99. This is where it really gets to be baloney.

I discovered a couple weeks ago that all my products weren't visible, with previous experience with MS customer service I thought I'd just do what I could do to fix the problem myself, changed some settings, still  could not get all my products to be visable. On my "shop" page you can view the first 100 items but when you click on the arrow to turn to the next page to view 101-118,  the next page will not come up, it will only show 100 items. Below is my email to MS and their answer to me, have I said that this is CRAP? No? Well this is CRAP.

This on top of how they try to promote their Contact Manager, use email, promotions, blah blah blah, but then do not offer a way for you to do promotions, no where to insert a promotion code at checkout or anything. Sure I can send out an email to my very short mailing list and offer them free shipping for a purchase over a certain amount, but how do I know if a sale results from that email campaign or if I just plain got lucky and someone found my site and bought something? There is no way to know.

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--- Original Message ---
From : susie@beaded-inspirations-by-sq.com
Sent : Monday, June 02, 2008 7:38:45 PM UTC
To : OFFLV.0000.00.00.EN.MSF.SEA.UA.T01.RTG.00.EM
Subject : Microsoft Office Live Free:Help with the service

Service:  Microsoft Office Live Free

When you view the products section of my website, you may only view the first 100 items, when you click on the next page icon the first page comes up again. According to the page there are 118 products, but you are unable to view 101-118 because of this.

What domain (URL) are you contacting us about?
   www.beadedinspirationsbysq.com

The e-mail address for us to send a response:
   susie@beaded-inspirations-by-sq.com

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From: Microsoft Customer Support
Sent:Wed 6/04/08 11:47 PM
To: (susie@beaded-inspirations-by-sq.com)

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Office Live support regarding your store manager. My name is Brandon and I will be creating SR 1068983591 to track this issue.

I regret to inform you that this issue at hand is a known issue that we are trying to get resolved.  There is not a time frame on when this issue will be resolved.  I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

For your convenience, our support staff is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please call us at 1-866-591-5483 for immediate support. If you choose to reply via email, please do not change the subject line so that we can directly reference your case.

Regards,

Matt

Microsoft Office Live Customer Support

Toll Free US: (866) 591 5483

Toll Free UK: 0800 028 3834

Mike,

 I'd also like some comments that address the loading speed of my products? I have asked folks in a different string to test it and let me know what kind of results they get and they have not been good. Any fix for that? Still lots of traffic and not one single sale online. You also mentioned the "options" function was in the works, any update on the promo code ability?

Theresa,

I will create a new post announcing the availability of the new product variations feature to the Sell Products and Services Online forum. I will also send you a direct note via the forum's private messages feature. You should receive an email when you receive a private message. Although schedules can change, and it's not always prudent to publicize a release date, we are aiming to make it available within the next couple of weeks.

- Mike