iSpring Market (discontinued) vs. Shift4Shop

iSpring Market is suited for small organizations with limited staff and limited IT resources. Allowing users to self-register is a huge time-saver for small organizations. SEO, Google Tag Manager and SSO are included and easy to set up. For the most part, the documentation is good and the help desk provides timely customer service. iSpring Market is not the best tool for larger and more sophisticated organization. It's extremely difficult to get global reporting data, it doesn't import data from other systems, and it only exports a limited amount of data for use in other applications such as business intelligence software.

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

• It is easy to use.
• It works with Stripe.
• The UI is clean and intuitive for customers.

• In my opinion, charge you too much for what it is worth
• In my opinion, tech support is always blaming client and end up fixing it own issues
• In my experience, make you believe client is important

• There are few global reporting features. I can get specific information on a user or a course, but there is no easy way to find users who made an account and didn't enroll in a course. You have to look at every user, or download spreadsheets and search.
• There are very few hooks available to Zapier to transfer data to other services.
• You can't transfer data into the iSpring Market using Zapier, so we can't use our member management system to populate courses.

• Page structure is all over the place. It can be difficult to find where to go to make page edits.
• Base platform isn't very robust and requires multiple add-ons in order to add CRM, Taxes, and other capabilities
• Reporting isn't very strong, necessitating outside analytics
• File system is also pretty wonky and feels very primitive
• Customer service and technical help leaves MUCH to be desired.
• Not as many supported add-ons/plug-ins as other platforms, and many of them cost additional fees. Many of them also don't seamlessly integrate, meaning you'll need to dev the integration yourself.
• In general, what you see in the WYSIWYG is not what you get.
• Order System is not very intuitive for the modern era

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Not applicable - as a franchisee, the franchiser took over the web site and shopping cart capabilities, so I no longer need the tool. But I would recommend it.

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

regular updates braking our site

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

We picked iSpring Market because of cost, maintenance, and easy of use.

We used them for 2 years and had minor problems up until the end. For the last 2 months, customers were unable to checkout, or connect to our payment processor. We put in like 3 to 5 hot tickets to get fixed and day after day nothing was fixed and support got ruder and ruder with us! We lost thousands of dollars online with this company and now they are chasing us for a renewal payment! Simply put, this is bad software with a poor customer care staff!

• We have saved thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees compared with other products we used.
• We have eliminated the need for contractors, to build content for iSpring Market, saving tens of thousands of dollars, because we can publish directly into the system using iSpring Suite.
• We get 80% fewer help desk requests for enrollment and payment compared to the last two products we used.

• We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info