So with regards to shopping carts on own webserver, my favourites areMagento vs. Interspire? Mark, would love to hear your thoughts comparing these products subjectively and in regards to the below:

Magento is free… but themes are $299?
(i aint got the skills or spare dosh to whip up something to match my branding) Also there’s mention it’s still in beta & is slow?

Interspire is $299… with a heap of built in store designs (that people would actually want to use) and noob design friendly with its drag & drop. It’s also local (I too am in Sydney), has a v.funtional cms and integrates with decent emarketing package…

Ya but how can i come to know that i am paying the right amount.

Amrendra, I think that this shopping cart is really worth it. It has most excellent features I did not find in any other eCommerce solution.

I’d also like to see a comparison between Magento and Interspire Store. Both look like awesome products, but I haven’t had time for a full review or comparison of either.

I’m concerned about reports about the really slow speed of Magento (and possibly high loads it puts on the server?). At this stage I assume Interspire is a better product when you look under the hood, since the company has several other excellent web based apps and a lot of experience and users.

Our designs are very “out of the box” so to speak. We are having a hard time finding a cart that will let us customize and not force us into a template approach. Our designs are unique and sometimes different from page to page within the same site. Is this cart good for that?

Overall, the Interspire shopping cart is a good product, but they are still working out the kinks. There most recent release did fix a number of issues. The worse part about Interspire is the support. It sucks. There isn’t even a manual, just old articles kind of compiled in an area. Documentation is non-existant. They take anywhere from 24-72 hours to return emails depending on the day of the week. The positives are their themes are good, the stores offer more cool functionality than most other e-commerce packages, and overall I am happy enough with my store. But for my next e-commerce store, I will probably go with somebody else.

Can you use these carts as a download site selling downloadable products

I stumbled upon this page somehow, but thought I would share since I have used both Magento and Interspire.

Magento looks the part, but for an average user that cannot code efficiently or deal with the skin themes in Magento, this product should not be considered for a custom site. You can download Magento or get hosting that provides free 1 click installation and then use the one free template or find some others. You will be fine if you can settle for not having a custom site. Also, Magento is only slow if you have a host that is slow. Get hosting from simple helix and you will be more than fast.

Interspire is a few hundred american dollars plus an extra hundred american dollars for free upgrades and support for 2 years. Many free templates come with it, or just replace the header and footer file with the header and footer related to your site and you will have a custom site just like that.

The both basically do the same thing except for a couple features here and there. The checkout is exactly the same. Which is probably the best part of Magento.

So anyways, Magento is free, but support is hundreds of dollars and requires subscription of at least 1 year. Interspire is a few hundred dollars and comes with support and is much more stable than Magento.

Sorry for the disconnected review, but basically, Interspire is better right now. Magento may be better in 2010 with some large improvements. They came out with an update just within the last month and then came out with 2 more updates to that update to fix bugs… So, it has issues….

Anyways… Interspire definitely.

If anybody out there is using Inspire please let me know! It looks great and we need to get away from our Prostores.com hosting in the immediate future!

Thomas

I’ve just written up a review and linked it as my “Website” so you should be able to read it if you click through.

Bottom line, as things stand I would wait at least 6 months before you jump to Interspire and make sure you request access to view the customer forums and the comments on there before you ever make a purchase.

Right now, communication with this company is beyond poor… Overpriced, overhyped and too darned full of themselves at present.

Interspire sucks, cart looks good on paper but many advertised features do not work like telephone order facility, SEO friendly URL’s, Flexible coupon codes but worst of all is the pricing and confusing update, upgrade and support plans.

You might buy a cart now for $US 1800 and also payed for a year support and updates but if a after 3 month a new version which Interspire deems .5 is releases you will have to pay another US$900 to upgrade even though you just paid around US$2200 3 month ago.

An be aware Interspire is churning out releases quicker then you can think from beta to version 5 in a bit over a year and unfortunately releases are not very well tested so frequent bug fixes of bug fixes are common which is a pain if you have a modified cart as updates are so time intensive.

Also support is slow and often ineffective.

I recently spend 5 hours reviewing all of the features and demo for interspire shopping cart including the videos and demo store/admin. I must say this is a pretty polished system. As with any shopping cart there could always be improvements however i’m pretty impressed expecially with the ease of integration with 3 party software. We are currently using OS commerce which has been a nightmare for programming / custom coding. (of course you get for what you pay for and its free). I’m also going to look at aspdotnetstorefront. Hope this helps.

Does anyone know if interspire has a simple table mode option to present a plane list of (downloadable) products?
I was playing with their demo and saw all the templates and it seems they do not have such an option.

Interspire started out below $300. However, the shopping cart is limited to 50 products (if I am not mistaken).

You need to pay for the professional version which is just under $1000. Still product creation is limited by a fixed quota.

This quota limit is really not a great thing to impose on the buyer.

The comments from Eric are missleading as Interspire has a very shifty support and update/upgrade policy.

You pay for 6,12 or 24 month of updates and support but this does not include upgrades!!! So it could well be that you purchase ISC and 4 month later Interspire decides it’s time for a new upgrade and you would have to pay again 50% of the purchase prices to receive the upgrade even though you still have many month left on your support and update plan.

You practically have a support and update plan for a version not longer supported.

Interspire went from Beta to version 5 in less then two years so upgrades are chrurned out quickly.

Interspire is a a cart with a good UI, reasonable templates but also with bugs and shortcomings, updates are often poorly tested and break many things (so always good to wait some weeks) some advertised features do not work at all or are poorly implemented. Support can often be frustrating slow.

Hope that helps

The interspire cart is pretty decent, but they have the absolute worst support ever. Our cart “broke” on a Friday night so we tried to contact them to get it fixed. They were closed until Monday. Contacted them on Monday and they never got around to answering our trouble ticket. (they don’t do phone support whatsoever).

So, we lost all sales from Friday through Tuesday before we finally got our own programmer to fix the bug in their software. Probably cost us about $4,000 in lost sales.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t use Interspire shopping cart for the simple reason that support is horrible.

Let me give you some advice. Do a search for Interspire+review+problems. You will find that the products they make may look good, but their life cycle is very short and NO SUPPORT IS AVAILABLE FOR OLDER PRODUCTS, and by older I mean just 18 months. Interspire just offers the costly upgrade route. So, if you go with Interspire be prepaired to rebuy the product often as they even remove all the old support files off their web site.

I had a query. I am looking for ecommerce s/w that has multi site facility. With this i mean ability to cater multiple store fronts using just one backend. So that multiple stores home page etc can be updated from one place and change applies to all store fronts in one go. I am sure magento has this facility. Does any one know about Interspire in these requirements?

Hi everyone else,

After really listening to your feedback and talking to hundreds of customers, we’ve now officially changed our upgrades and maintenance policy.

Here’s an overview:

- All new purchases include 12 months of maintenance free
- All upgrades are provided to customers free instead of being paid
- If your maintenance period expires, you can optionally renew it, however it’s completely optional
- All customers have been given an extra 9 months of maintenance free, giving them more technical support and the latest release of the Interspire Shopping Cart free

The new upgrade and maintenance policies have been really well received by customers and we really do thank everyone for your feedback, both good and bad.

You can have your say and learn about our new policy (which was implemented last Monday) here:

(dead URL removed)

Cheers,
Mitchell Harper
Interspire Co-Founder
mitch [AT] interspire [DOT] com

Gaurav,

In regards to your question about a cart handling multiple sites, there may be other options but the one we’ve used is 1automationwiz.com which is a 1shoppingcart derivative. This system is separate from your site, and provides links or buy buttons which take a customer into the actual cart.

We do our own page/web design with html and use this cart for handling orders. I think it’s reasonable to use if you don’t have a ton of products. Overall it does have some limitations but it will allow you to use it on a variety of sites.

All the best,
Mark

customer service is rubbish and they have become money grabbers. Going by past experience I made a purchase and it’s like I am dealing with a different company. I waited 3 days for a response to service request, when I gave up through frustration and requested a refund, was told no, refer to terms, no matter what I said, the wall was there and that was the terms that I was meant to have read thoroughly.
It was suggested I should have taken a trial, however when you access bigcommerce via interspire you don’t get this option. I have spent a week trying to explain my case, all to no avail, this company is now officially rubbish.
I won’t be dealing with them again, or recommending their products to any of my clients, buyer beware!

In Fact just discovered they billed me twice for the same thing, I cant believe how much time I am spending trying to rectify my decision to go with them,,, never ever again.,… This company does not know how to be decent.

Hey guys

interspire is really good software, but their service really really sucks.

i bought their products then a month later new updates came out. by this time i had already modified parts so didnt wat to upgrade….. but interspire refuse to help me even though i have a maintenance contract unless i upgrade.

they dont understand that i spent lots of money modifying and cant upgrade without haveing to redo all the modification……but they refuse to even look at it unless i upgrade. (despite haveing a maintenance contract)

the point is, the part im complaining about never worked in the 1st place, they sold me faulty software. but againr efuse to help.

also if you ever want to get a hold of them…there is no helpline to call. you have to email them and wait 24 hours for a response in which they just ask you another question…..which leads to another 24 hour response and so on…… it takes days to get anything done.

I admit their software is fantastic…..but the service is really not worth it. i wish i had used a different program now.

i wouldnt reccomend based on their attitude to their customers…… they have no interest in protecting the longevity of their customers unless they upgrade to the latest version.

again i make my point i am under warranty and maintenance, but they still refuse to help unless i upgrade. but i cant do without spending lots of money remodifying.

I would advise strongly against going with Interspire. Like others have said, the software is great, but the support is extremely bad. In other words, if anything breaks, you’re screwed.

We upgraded from the Shopping Cart Starter Edition to the Professional Edition ($995) just over a month ago. Because this would also involve a software update, we paid Interspire to do to do the upgrading ($199). This seemed a “safe bet”.

Since then there have been a bunch of PHP errors preventing the system from functioning properly: certain values are not being passed into the MySQL database. This means that order information doesn’t show up and customers don’t receive download-links. Essentially all orders have to be handled manually.

For some reason I cannot get Interspire to resolve the errors they themselves created. What I can get is an extremely slow “tech support” who never really answer your questions and mostly manifests itself as mindless drones.

This has been going on for a month now. I’d estimate about $10,000 in lost sales. Obviously I’m looking for alternatives, but I’m stunned that Interspire seems to have no qualms about this.

Interspire (Big Commerce) are a joke. They have a number of things on the front page of their website that are advertised that don’t work! PayPal payments cannot be taken without using the Paypal website itself and support don’t care!!!!!!!!!!!!

Interspire sucks big time, you ask why?

1. Non existing support
2. half of the features don’t work since version1 like coupons codes in conjunction with variations
3. Variations are a mess
4. It’s not coded on a modular base so all changes require you to change the core of the cart (nightmare for updates)
5. Company is frequently changing it’s policies.
6. Despite what they saying the absolutely do NOT listen to their customers

Used to have two Interspire carts but now us CS Cart no more Interspire for me after being their customer for 3 yars

How is Interspire vs. X-Cart?