Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)

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

Phone Support Not Available

Can't add your own SSL Certificate

Blog System is not so good.

There is a lot of documentation out there, but much of it is out of date or lacking in detail or specificity.

The biggest weakness of BC is its support. While the chat feature is good, it has long hold times and staff that is not knowledgeable about the product. I doubt anyone in support has ever even built a site with Business Catalyst before. They need US support centers with actual designers or developers who would be able actually help. It seems like 50% of our support questions should be easy but end up being escalated as a "not for the development team" or never answered.

The Admin UI could be more intuitive and the In-Content Editing is very difficult to actually use in practice with a novice client.

They do not have the ability to create and build custom plug-ins for use on websites.

They do not support every payment gateway, they support the major ones, and most others, but if you have some very unusual payment gateway, it might not be supported.

The custom web apps were absolutely one of my favorite parts of this system, and it is really a shame that they do not allow them to be used on all tiers of the website, you have to get the web commerce tier to edit and use them.

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.