Jim Sutton’s Weblog

We have had several years of experience running a store (Baby Mine Store) powered by E-Commerce software from Monster Commerce (now Network Solutions).  Recently, Network Solutions has decided to “upgrade” all of its customers (including ourselves) to a new version of the software (called Network Solutions Pro E-Commerce).

Briefly, it appears that Network Solutions has failed its customers in this “upgrade.”  I worked in software development, development management, and general management of large software projects/products for many years at Hewlett-Packard and other companies large and small, mature and start-up.  During all of those years, we would never have released a new version of an existing software package that functionally was incapable of supporting existing customers and was significantly more difficult (and less productive) to use in many areas.

Yet this is precisely what Network Solutions has done.

For example, our E-Commerce store deals with about 150 manufacturers.  The older package easily dealt with these manufactures, including having an automated method for sending customer orders to the manufacturers with the orders correctly parsed into the products only for that manufacturer and not showing the selling price.  Network Solutions’ Pro E-Commerce software does not allow dealing with manufacturers in the same way at all, forcing us to treat them as warehouses.  Worse, there is a hard limit of 25 warehouses, so we simply cannot use Network Solutions’ Pro E-Commerce package unless we manually process (and split) each order and manually transmit the correct subset to the manufacturers–which would significantly reduce productivity and increase the chance of erroneous orders (most of our products are large items which ship directly from the manufacturer).

As another example, the older package allows easily entering multiple variants (such as size, color, finish) per product. So, for example, one might have a chair which comes in 5 finishes (Cherry, Oak, etc.) with 5 cushion colors (Beige, Blue, etc.). The old software required that we make 10 simple entries—one each for each finish and each cushion color.

The newer Pro E-Commerce software requires us to make 25 much more complex entries, one for each of the 25 possible combinations of finish and color. Further, it forces incorrect assumptions on the store owner—for example, that cushions cannot be interchanged among the chairs.

Without dwelling on the specific issues, which are numerous and serious, I am much more concerned about what this indicates about future product design and support that we would see.

We were never consulted during the design process of Pro E-Commerce.

We were given virtually no information about Pro E-Commerce prior to our forced migration. (Our migration, like many others, was abruptly put on hold until next year some time.)

When we discovered these critical functional and usability defects in Pro E-Commerce and reported them, the response was underwhelming. When we finally pressed for a commitment to correct at least the problem preventing us from supporting our existing manufacturers (which is a total show-stopper), we were told Network Solutions had no intention of fixing that problem.

To quote Network Solutions management:

“This means we offer one software package to meet the business needs of all of our ecommerce customers. This also means that we do not expect our customers to be 100% satisfied with every feature of our shopping cart software, but that they will find enough value in the overall package to be a satisfied customer.

This also means that over time, our turn-key application may no longer meet the needs of individual customers. !”

So, even though our customer needs had not changed at all, Network Solutions sees no problem that their application no longer meets our needs because they reduced the functionality (and usability and productivity) of their application.

The issue, of course, in addition to what this says about Network Solutions’ commitment to its customers, is that the very high expense of moving our store, which has about 4,000 products in a design tightly tied to Network Solutions’ product design and structure, is of no concern at all to Network Solutions.

It would not seem wise to buy into an E-Commerce solution like Network Solutions’ Pro E-Commerce in the face of such convincing evidence that Network Solutions will abandon you in a moment for their own convenience (or, in this case, just because they didn’t want to take the trouble to design a quality product). Further, it is clear that they have no commitment to continuing to support existing features or data structures.

Footnote: I did end up getting a voice mail from a support supervisor who said he wanted to speak with me.  I called back a couple of days ago and got his voice mail.  He’s not called back since.  Past experience suggests that Network Solutions Customer Support simply is not structured to have any power to really facilitate any product change or defect repair to Pro E-Commerce.

I had also contacted Network Solutions Executive Escalation Center a couple of weeks ago.  I was hoping that either their executives would better understand (and change) their decision and the implications for customer loyalty or that they would better support exporting the components of our store so that we could move to a different environment more supportive of our needs.  I’ve just gotten a response that they do not intend on fixing this defect.  They’ve responded that, “I am very sorry, but the new package [Network Solutions Pro-ECommerce]…will not work for you.”

Further footnote: I sent an email essentially reflecting what is in this post back to the Executive Support group; I also copied the CEO of Network Solutions (lucky guess on the email address).  That resulted in a contact from the head of the Executive Support group, a call from Network Solution’s Director of Customer Support, and, finally, a call from the product manager for Network Solutions Pro-ECommerce.

The Director of Customer Support fundamentally confirmed that ECommerce CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) do not have the power to declare a defect a bug; instead, virtually all defects are classed as “enhancement requests.”  So, there is no motivation to repair serious and critical defects–they are all simply enhancements.

I do appreciate all of these responses, although I wish Network Solutions had initiated them at a more appropriate time in the design cycle.  I still have no commitments that any of the issues we have will be addressed, but at least they are being discussed again.  I was informed that we will not be forced off the current version of the software, but Network Solutions will discontinue all support of the current version.  Since the current version of Network Solutions Pro-ECommerce we are on is already at least 2X overpriced, we would then still be paying way too much each month for a totally unsupported package.

I’m not sure what is happening next (if anything).  We still feel compelled to be looking at other ECommerce solutions and the concomitant expense of moving to a different platform unless and until we can get a commitment to add our required features to Pro-ECommerce.

I’ve gotten several interesting comments; you might want to take a minute to browse the comments.