Likelihood to Recommend The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
I would tell a colleague to stay clear of Yahoo Web Hosting/Yahoo Small Business. Our business has been with Yahoo due to the fact that there was nothing else around at the time of our signing up with them. Since then there are much better alternatives as the fact that Yahoo has virtually no third party support really hurts it, and the fact that it is so barebones and hard to customize and work in the back end makes it so that you have to find one of the few expensive developers that specialize in Yahoo. This is another huge hurdle if you plan to build a good website.
Read full review Pros Probably one of the easiest e-commerce platforms to work in, it does take setup, but compared to a lot of other e-commerce solutions, this is probably the best one that I have seen that can be designed and implemented custom. Their template system works very well and allows you to create and re-use templates across Adobe Business Catalyst. Their pre-built modules are great, giving people a great way to use common web elements without having to use a plug-in or find some solution, it is simply built in and generally works exactly as you would expect. Adobe Business Catalyst is more of an all-around solution, providing elements that most smaller companies would have a hard time figuring out, since it includes the ability to build websites, send and track e-mails, analytics. It really is a powerful tool that would typically require a fair amount of coding knowledge and expertise but with the system already built, it can be easily modified and edited by those with limited or no coding knowledge at all. Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Yahoo Web Hosting/Small Business is above else, cheap in pricing at the very least in terms of monthly costs. The backend of Yahoo Web Hosting/ Small Business is customizable, assuming you can find one of the few developers that can code for it. We were given a dedicated account manager though I believe it was because of how long we were with yahoo and how many complaints we had. Read full review Cons Multi Client Management: The dashboard for managing multiple clients as a reseller is a little difficult to get to. There is also no very easy way for me to manage multiple clients at once. I have to log into and out of individual client accounts to do billing or management. Lack of Server support: There are certain server protocols and languages that are not supported using BC. For example I cannot build a custom php database and upload to BC. I am required to use their tools. Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Extremely old and outdated back end. Yahoo Web Hosting is at the very least customizable but everything beyond just running a simple store requires custom work that you will have to pay an expensive developer to fix for you. Yahoo Web Hosting is a complete mess in terms of branding and policies. In the span of our last year with them, they went from Yahoo to Yahoo small business to Aabaco and then back to Yahoo and each time were assigned a different account manager. Abysmal customer service, every time we had to open a ticket we had a customer service agent in India that could not fix our issue and we were eventually assigned an account manager after numerous complaints. Barely any apps or app eco system on Yahoo. Frequent down times caused by Yahoo Web Hosting cost our business lots of lost revenue. So antiquated and backwards, they were one of the last companies that I know of to switch over to https, we reached out to them several times to switch our website to https and it took an agonizing amount of time for Yahoo to implement it for all their customers. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Usability Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Reliability and Availability very few issues with availability
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Performance Very few issues
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Support Rating The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
The customer support for Yahoo Web hosting is a complete disaster. Every call is transferred to a technical support department that is in India which usually isn't an issue as that is the norm for a lot of businesses, however, this technical support team in Yahoo does not know how to diagnose issues or offer support. Every issue we had some, some critical like why is our website down were met with clueless customer support agents that would get back to us in 48 hours minimum. Eventually, we were given an account manager that actually did his best and was able to get to the right people at times for critical issues but it still was a complete hassle and waste of time every time we had any issue with Yahoo Web hosting.
Read full review Online Training bcgurus.com kiyuco
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Implementation Rating Pretty easy to do
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Alternatives Considered As far as the CMS for BC goes, there is none out there that compares. In the past we have utilized Joomla, Wordpress, Mambo, Drupal, Concrete 5 and others. None of them were as easy to use and train on that Adobe's Business Catalyst. Our alternative to BC is WordPress when our clients want a less expensive solution. For the most part that works OK but we have had issues with plugin incompatibility among other issues. We lost at least two clients because of similar issues. The other great part about BC's solution is that we can still work with our favorite site creation tool - Dreamweaver. The whole process continues to be more and more simplified with added features to the system. No other solution (that we've found) offers such an easy way to create custom web sites that are easily editable by our clients.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
After we departed Yahoo Web hosting we found out that there are numerous much better web hosting platforms, the main we focused on were
Shopify ,
GoDaddy ,
BigCommerce , and
WordPress . Between either is a much better alternative than Yahoo Web hosting as they all have much better third party support, more familiarity in the platforms which means more developers that are familiar with the platforms. Above all else, all three of these companies have stood the test of time and haven't rebranded themselves into different company names like Yahoo did with Aabaco and back and are much better for any small business.
Read full review Scalability It's easy to build small sites or large sites and there is lots of templating.
Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Return on Investment As someone who uses it on behalf of other clients, our ROI with BC is definitely positive. We needed a mid-range CMS without huge licensing costs to satisfy mid-range clients who have some dynamic needs but doesn't need the expense or liability of enterprise level products. Without it we would have lost possible customers or taken bigger hits on projects because of the costs involved with satisfying their mid-level needs Our clients are all usually very positive about the BC platform and are able to use it themselves which lessens our Support time/cost. To use the Web App element,. which we do on almost every site, you need to pay for the highest plan. This brings along with it many features most of our clients would never use. A more basic plan with that Web App capability would be a big improvement on our costs. Read full review Infinite Computer Solutions, Inc
Yahoo Web Hosting impacted our business in a very negative way with all the time we wasted and revenue we lost. Our biggest loss of revenue was deciding to stay longer than we had to with Yahoo Web Hosting as the cost of moving to another platform was high but we had no choice. Yahoo Web Hosting constantly interfered with our workflow with its lack of third party support and poor customer service and constant downtimes. For instance when we wanted to find an inventory system for our business virtually NO ONE supported Yahoo. Read full review ScreenShots