Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)

Server Uptime is good

Online Chat is good

Security is good

Technical Service is good

If a customer has a query they don't listen to the customer they just look at ways to hide behind BC company policy. In the UK if a customer changes a subscription plan by law they have a 14 day cooling off period. BC doesn't allow a plan to be changed once it’s been upgraded even if this is within a 24 hour period. I understand that BC having to comply with international law is not going to happen and that's not what a customer would expect. But what I do expect is for their accounts department to actually consider and review a customer’s requests or simple error's made without just quoting company policy.

In my case, I noticed our website was being tagged as NOT SECURE in Google Chrome Browser. I knew BC didn't offer SSL when I tried it a few years back but that I would check to see if they added that service. Sure enough, they added SSL certificates last summer, that’s was great news. So I read that SSL only came with the Platinum Service Plan and upgraded at a cost of $264.13 . Then a few minutes later I noticed that actually, I could have purchased the SSL on my current Web commerce plan (Gold Plan) for just $80. Within 24 hours I requested the upgrade be canceled and to just add SSL to my current plan. After all, we didn’t need a Platinum plan for our needs we only needed the SSL certification. The accounting department said this was not allowed or possible due to their cancellation policy of NO REFUNDS. They even suggested I could change back to GOLD service in the summer and then pay another $80 to add the SSL that would be lost. This is not the service I would expect. In strict comparison and contrast to our domain is hosted with GoDaddy and they will allow customers to change service policy at any time and they always Pro Rata any billing need meaning the customer is never charged for a service they don't want at that time.

When a customer upgrades a service it should be upgraded for 12 months from the upgrade date. The old service remaining credit should be deducted from the new service subscription and BC should clearly display the upgrade price for the next 12 months. The customer should be given the opportunity to review the service cancellation policy before checking a check-box and then processing the order.

BC fail to communicate important service upgrades such as SSL certification added last year. Someone could have called me on that emails get lost these days so what’s wrong with a plan good old fashioned phone call

BC has changed their service plan names, that's not a problem in itself providing its communicated to the customer and that it is 100% adopted across all media platforms, user portal and billing etc. The WebCommerce Plan is also the Gold Plan and I was not aware of that so found it very confusing.

When upgrading a service plan BC should provide pop up windows to highlight the company cancellation policy which is good standard practice

We do'nt have to worry about the website uptime and maintainence which means 100% avalibility to our customer to improvove our ROI

We only want to pay for services that we use and the problem with bundled package services is that you can end up paying for more servicves than you need or use. whats wrong with given customers a service tick box and then providing them a price for what they are going to use rather than lots of unused services that reduce ROI

We could have improved our ROI 7 months ago had we know about BC SSL certification upgrade, which improves SEO to improve our internet search results

Webapps is superb

Liquid Code Access is great

Documentation can be found easily

Phone Support Not Available

Can't add your own SSL Certificate

Blog System is not so good.

As mentioned previously, we use the Content Holder module quite often because of the ability to place any html content that is prone to being frequently edited. It simplifies the process and allows us to simplify our templates.

We also like the ease of the Photo Gallery and how simple it is to either add or remove photos from the gallery once it has been placed.

Media Downloads seems to be a very helpful resource. With its ability to be categorized both by file type and customized categories within the web site and then placed by category also helps us streamline document placement especially when there are large number of those resources to organize.

News is obviously a much needed resource and it is simple to add news items, classify them and place them on template pages where they are fed. It is one of the easiest items to teach new clients how to manage.

Web Apps is our most prized module because of the ease of creating a database, then being able to style the output in any shape form or fashion.

The Web Forms is very helpful and easy to create. Placing the forms is simple especially when inserting as a module. The problem comes after placement. It is time consuming if there are any edits that need to be made to the form. For example, if you are in the U.S., you typically do not want other countries to show up on a dropdown menu. It would be great if BC would allow you to check the countries (or states) that you want to be active. Also, often times within a web form you may want to include to separate address fields. That is not allowed unless you go back and do custom editing for the forms. "Workarounds" are typically possible but for the designer, anything that adds time to the process also cuts down on profitability.

Where we enjoy the ease of creating Photo Galleries, we also don't like the fact that you can style the output like you can within other module templates. For example, many clients would like to offer better descriptions and even style the descriptions. If displaying a photo from a art museum, you may want to give the proper title and that would include italicizing the name of the artwork.

One of our biggest pet peeves is the fact that BC only offers the European date style when displaying that dates in the modules. You should be able to check a box on which date style should be shown.

On Web Apps, almost everything is fantastic EXCEPT for the ability to sort web app items by date. If I wanted to create a calendar of events based on a web app I want to create, I would want to be able to display those items in chronological order.

The Event Module is great except the way it uses a quirky form to process payments and reserve events. It should behave more like an ecommerce solution where the form is easier to fill out, customize, submit and process.

Surprisingly enough and despite having a second, less expensive hosting solution, a majority of our clients prefer to use the Adobe Business Catalyst solution. We are then able to enjoy the commissions that are returned as we sign up new customers for annual contracts.

Being able to store and utilize data that comes from web form submissions has been very helpful in customer retention since we became a partner in 2011. Since that time, we have only lost two clients. That's 3 times better than our other hosting solution.

Our largest negative impact has come from having only one choice in SSLs. For example, we had a great client in a local and growing bank. We spent 2 months getting the web site built to their specifications and we were very clear on the SSL situation. However, once the site went live, problems arose. In the past they had submitted their site to search engines with their secure URL and that was all that was indexed. Then when their customers searched for their site and clicked on the secure URL, it either showed that the site could not be found OR it said that they were entering to a site with an unverified SSL. People would then call the bank and complain. We then had to quickly move their site to another solution costing us days of re-development time and resources.