CommerceV3 is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that will both build and host store platforms.
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Turbify
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Turbify, formerly Yahoo Small Business, and now an Infinite Computer Solutions brand, is a website hosting solution for small businesses and retailers, supporting business email, basic or managed web hosting, a well as Wordpress and "Business Maker" web services.
I believe CommerceV3 (CV3) is best suited for small to mid-level catalog companies. You would want to make sure to integrate CV3 with your back end system or you'll be doing a lot of manual entries or manipulating data for table uploads. You can easily manage the templates in CV3 with a basic knowledge of HTML and work up from there
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.
CV3 provides us a plethora of marketing tools to customize offers and campaigns to our customers. I've used BigCommerce and Shopify and neither comes close to the capability of fine tuning sales, offers, and discounts by product, category, customer and more.
The purpose of partnering with any e-commerce platform is to provide a secure site and stable checkout process for our customers. CV3 has been amazing at keeping our site up and running through peak traffic and attempted hacks. The checkout process has been rock solid and also integrates seamlessly with PayPal. I've used Amazon Payments in the past without incident, but decided to end that option due to Amazon's policies.
CV3's architecture on the back-end is designed to be plain and simple which provides an easy-to-use interface to streamline our work. The template driven structure to manage the front-end will become a favorite for most programmers in no time at all. In fact, I'm not a programmer, but do customization and design changes almost on a daily basis with ease. Any changes made to a template may be viewed on a staging server before pushing live. Templates, as well as other data may be downloaded any time for backups. Exports and imports of product data is simple and powerful allowing me to change massive amounts of data easily.
Customer support is always a contentious issue with most providers, however, CV3 has by far been the best I've encountered in over 30+ years of experience with software vendors. They are very responsive and escalate the issue to the proper person without having the redundancy you experience with so many other companies. They understand the issue the first time, and tell you the truth.
Any e-commerce business is about shipping. CV3 has the most powerful tools to control shipping. It will challenge the most creative minds on how to best merchandise products based on weight, dollar amount, global geographical location, dimensions, category, exception rules, by carrier, all the way down to the sku level which can have it's own set of rules. It gets complicated, but it works great and ties in with the promotional features as well.
An area I'd like to see enhanced is the sku level pricing calendar. You can set specials prices to start and stop at certain dates and times, but it's fixed to certain years. You can't have your chosen items go to seasonal pricing every year at the same time, you have to change the years each year.
There are multiple product setups: basic, parent with children, and sub-products. Each type exports on the same datasheet all intermingled and this can be tedious isolating the different types for editing and re-import.
Vendor and Brand are data points on each item, but they are not controlled by a table. We end up with the same vendor or brand misspelled multiple times.
There is no FTP capability (PCI issue?) and no blog site with the parent domain. These have to be handled using a separate sub-domain.
The shipping calculator for customers should be available anywhere there is a shipping option presented during checkout.
Faster live times. Currently, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to see template/product changes pushed to the live cdn.
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.
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.
In my view, CV3 meets our needs better by allowing us a much easier way to manage the front end the way the templates are structured. BigCommerce recommended using an FTP tool to download, modify, then upload. Shopify has some very sophisticated templates, which, in my mind, required a senior level programmer or lots of outsourcing for even minor changes. Neither of the other systems come close to CV3's marketing capabilities through their promotional tool without any add-ons. Shopify, for example, is stripped down and if you want a certain feature you have to find one of their approved partners, sign-up, integrate the feature and hope it works. To purchase all the features we're currently using in CV3 you'd have quite a list (and expense) of partners. Examples would be enhanced shipping capabilities or the ability to customize a product purchase. CV3 has features specifically geared for a catalog company, like request forms and capturing key codes. Plus, built-in rewards program, wishlist, gift certificates, bulk email, and data feeds for Google Shopper, Channel Advisor and SingleFeed.
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.
One positive impact has been the use of product reviews. This feature has helped us weed out bad products and promote good ones while allowing customers to share their experience.
It's a fixed fee user agreement which favors increasing sales.
The stability of the checkout process has helped conversions and lowered support.
Having integrated inventory with our back end has helped meet customer expectations.
The promotional capabilities of CV3 has allowed us to provide new and different offers keeping customers engaged.
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.
