Plight with New Web Site

Before we examine the next series of Lemax Christmas and Halloween villages, I thought I’d whine a little more about our new e-commerce site. I discovered, quite by accident, that ProStores doesn’t do two things related to international shipping costs. First, internationally, they only support “automated” shipping costs for Canada. Second, they require a separate merchant-defined shipping table for each international country that you wish to ship to.

First things first, let’s address Canada. If ProStores dynamically links to the USPS site to obtain shipping information about Canada, then it doesn’t make sense to me that they can’t obtain shipping rates for any and all other countries that the USPS ships to. Unless there’s something wacky going on behind the scenes at the USPS (and that’s always a possibility), then ProStores and the USPS should be able to pass between themselves the shipping rates for any countries. (This comes from ten years as a programmer and 31 years in information technology overall.) The more we sellers sell, the more commission ProStores will rake in, so it makes good business sense to facilitate the shipping process.

Next, apparently the ProStores idea of a work-around for this is to permit merchants to define their own shipping tables for specific countries and to use a default shipping table for all other countries.

ProStores permits us to import and export information in our hosted databases. Products, customers, orders, and a variety of other information can easily go to and fro. Why not allow the shipping tables to be imported? That way, we sellers could create a spreadsheet that we could manipulate and change around easily.

Instead, we must sign into the ProStore and change the 1-pound rate, the 2-pound rate, the 3-pound rate, . . . the 44-pound, etc. for each country – 45 entries in all per country. Most European countries share the same shipping charges for packages weighing up to and including 44 pounds. I cranked in 20 different tables for 20 different European countries. Then, I added a table for Australia and another for “everywhere else.” If you live “anywhere else,” the rate probably isn’t accurate. (But all the others are up-to-the-minute!)

Guess what happens when there’s a rate change? Yes, every one of those tables needs to be updated! What a nightmare! If they’d just link to the USPS published rates available on USPS.com, then all this could be avoided. I wouldn’t have to close down my site for hours while making these changes. And you would be spared the inconvenience of another web site under construction right when you want to place an order!

Ah, if I ruled the world!

I don’t want anyone to think that Im negative about ProStores. I really think it’s a good e-commerce solution. They have most bells and whistles any retailer needs, and the features are easy to tap into. Everything’s customizable. If you know a little HTML, you can make your ProStore dance. But, straight from the box, it’s a very usable service for most retailers. As I learn more, I’ll share it.

Next time, we’ll delve into Caddington Village, the Victorian Christmas village from Lemax.

Check out what’s happening at www.lemaxvillages.com.