Derek,
Thank you, as always, for the feedback, as brutal and public as it is.
Regarding NitroSell's platform, what we're selling and marketing is not an offering that's customizable in every conceivable way; we're selling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. That means that, at its heart, every store runs on the same database structure and codebase. That brings advantages:
- It's plug and play: a non-technical user can be up-and-running with our software within a matter of hours
- We take care of the hosting, including redundancy at every layer, with automatic load-balancing for your store across multiple web and database servers, as well as best-in-class content delivery via Akamai, with consistent, 99.9% uptime for over 10 years: forum.nitrosell.com/.../830 ; I'd be amazed if any of our competitors can offer that level of redundancy, responsiveness, or availability (and prove it!)
- We are an audited and certified PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider; this is again not something you'll see with our competitors and is not easily achieved on a bespoke, custom-developed solution; while Magento itself is PCI-compliant software, that *does not* mean a custom hosted solution on Magento is compliant. PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance requires annual on-site audits from an accredited PCI-DSS assessor. In our case, we use the industry leader, Trustwave, and we are happy to make our QSA-signed Attestation of Compliance available on request
- Upgrades are included in the service: we are continually adding new features to our platform and these are seamlessly made available to your webstore. With self-hosted solutions, especially where you've stitched in a third-party sync'ing process, upgrades are guaranteed to be headache
- While our competitors often crow that marketplace integrations are not available, that's strictly not true: we offer a comprehensive Amazon integration, which can literally be switched on and, given sufficiently high quality data, can automatically sync your items to Amazon, and have them available for sale within an hour. It works with your existing NitroSell software and is already in use by over 30 of our retailers. We also work with Google Shopping and an eBay integration is under development
We admit that it also brings disadvantages:
- You can't drop third-party code and libraries directly into your hosted environment (good luck with getting that certified PCI compliant !)
- You can't entirely re-write the store's templates -- writing your own database queries from scratch and tweaking every detail in the background isn't available, which helps us to ensure high performance across the store
- You can't host the store on your own servers; again, this is the nature of software-as-a-service
These points are true for any software-as-a-service eCommerce offering, including the main players in non-integrated eCommerce (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.).
It's true that if you want a completely bespoke solution, NitroSell is not a good fit, and we do not market it as such. That we have been in business for 10 years, and are the market leader in integrated eCommerce for the point-of-sales we support (with over 600 customers), speaks to the fact that our platform *does* work for most retailers.
Regards,
Donogh
P.S. Building your own version of NSc Sync isn't as easy as it seems; I've yet to see software from a competitor that works as well or as smoothly.
