Business Catalyst Review
I have a dirty little secret. I hate ecommerce design.
In my history as a designer I’ve always found ecommerce design equivalent to trying to wrestle with a five-hundred-pound greased gorilla. At best it is a big hassle, and at its worst it is blood and carnage flowing down the streets.
My biggest complaint is usually how unwieldy and annoying it is to work with most ecommerce backends. Trying to force your design into some ridged code is often a recipe for disaster. So when I heard that I was going to review Adobe’s Business Catalyst, I braced myself for the worst.
Fortunately, there was very little grease and barely any gorilla required at all.
What is Business Catalyst?
At its core, Business Catalyst is a hosted application for building and managing online businesses. Its claim to fame is that it is more than just a website development tool; it’s an online business building tool. With a touch of marketing mumbo-jumbo it promises to deliver higher profits in less time.
That means that Business Catalyst comes with a whole lot of features built in, and since it’s hosted, you can access it and edit it from any browser anywhere. I don’t know how you feel about ecommerce in the cloud, but I found it pretty convenient for a person who is often on the move.
Features
- Code and style the site the way you want – HTML and CSS thankfully reign supreme in the backend. That means easy edits with a few Business Catalyst tags to plug in here and there.
- Client can make select edits to content without breaking the design– We all know how clients love to ruin a design. You control what text and content edits are allowed within your CSS framework.
- Drag & Drop web form builder – Here’s a nice little feature, a simple drag and drop area for custom building of your own contact forms.
- Automatically created customer information database – That sounds like a mouthful. What it basically boils down to is – when a visitor interacts with your site in any way (sends you an email, subscribes to a newsletter, purchases a product) they are automatically added to a customer database that collects information and helps you individually track and service them.
- Header/Content/Footer template construction using HTML + tags – Straight forward 3 part construction with your header and footer info applied across the entire site. If you are familiar with WordPress you’ll be right at home here.
- Dreamweaver extension allows you to easily work with all your files locally – It seems only logical that Business Catalyst would have a Dreamweaver extension. You don’t have to use it, but for those that do, it makes working with files locally a snap.
- Custom menu building – Ecommerce navigation can get out of control pretty quickly as more and more product lines are added to a site, so it’s nice to see a built in menu and navigation builder.
- Individual modules – Announcements, FAQ, Photo Galleries, Links etc – There are a wide variety of modules that you can add to the site with very little setup.
- Marketing section for sending out email campaigns – Remember that Business Catalyst was keeping all your customer information nicely tucked away for you? When it comes time to send out your first email campaign, simply use the built in campaign area that will draw from your customer database. Campaign performance and all the statistics are tracked for you.
- Customized system messages – You’re website visitor made a boo-boo? Tell them with your own customized system error messages.
- Weekly Email Report – Every week, information about how your site is running will be delivered to your inbox. I don’t know of many business owners who wouldn’t eat that stuff up.
Building Your Site
Whether you’re starting from scratch, using a pre-packaged template, or importing a current site, Business Catalyst has you up and running with a minimal amount of fuss. Since you’re working with a hosted application, you don’t have to worry about the fun of creating databases and setting permissions. All that backend stuff will be handled for you.
Once you have the core of your site running you can chose to edit and maintain the templates through Dreamweaver or any other HTML editing program. Or, should you prefer, you can make edits right from your browser by logging in and using Business Catalyst’s online editing tools.
All the modules and built in features are fairly easy to use. For example, if you want to create a dynamic menu – easy. Just assign your own CSS style names with a click or set your style, hover state, and selected state through the Business Catalyst editor.
Online Store
Here’s where my hair usually starts falling out. Setting up and adding products to an online store can take years off your life. Luckily, adding products in Business Catalyst boils down to adding a name, a small and large image, a description, and then the product catalogue you want it to go into. Creating individual catalogues is just a matter of clicking which products you want included and letting Business Catalyst build it for you.
Prices for different countries, shipping weight, choice of many popular payment gateways, and inventory control are all included as well.
Is Business Catalyst Right for Your Business?
While I don’t know if I’m ready to annul my no-ecommerce policy, Business Catalyst comes pretty close to getting me to reconsider it.
The service packs a lot of punch and there seems to be a minimal amount of gorilla wrestling required to get an online store to play nice within your design. And while a hosted offering may scare away a few clients, I can’t see many business owners having a problem once they see all the features Business Catalyst has built in for running their online business.
The monthly fee to the client can run anywhere from $16 – $39 per month per site. While $16/month gets you a basic starter website, most business will require the $39/month package as it comes with the online store and email campaign features.
What does it cost the designer? Well, to be honest, this was a little confusing at first. The site makes mention of a free plan, a $995 Standard Partnership and a $1995 Premium Partnership, which made me scratch my head for a bit. But the truth is, those partnership plans are for designers who want to put their own brand onto the program or earn a percentage from each client’s website that it hosted with Business Catalyst. Should that not interest you, there is no cost to the designer to use the service. Not a bad deal, really.
Business Catalyst can be tried out for free by signing up for a basic starter account. The training videos are well done, so even if you don’t feel like signing up for an account, watching the videos will give you a good idea of how the service works and it will help you decide if it’s worth looking into further.
Editor’s Note: This is a sponsored review by Travis King.
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Anyone have any experience using BC for an ecommerce site?
Hi?I’m experienced on BC/Goodbarry Development.You can easily redelegate your domain and have a demo site for the testing of the page if it’s not reay to be live.
I agree with helvitica.. business catalyst’s ecommerce is pretty neat
BC Sucks.
The server has been down for days.
BC did not inform me of the coming down time. I have clients ready to boil me in oil.
Suggested to all my clients they GO DADDY !!!!!!.
Business Catalyst has a powerful ecommerce engine built into it that puts business owners in control and enables them to easily sell their products online. What distinguishes this system from the myriad of other ecommerce systems in the marketplace, is its integrated customer database. The customer database automatically captures customer purchases.
Using Business Catalyst for websites, in my experience, has been like juggling fire. Anytime there has been a problem with the website, the only way to communicate with B.C is by e-mail…and the response time is slower than desired in any business situation.
Then, the “representative” which set us up with this ADOBE leviathan quit…and from there, trying to get any assistance was frustrating.
We were referred to GoDaddy or Roark Creative… and were kept running in circles endlessly. It’s as if, once the bill is paid, they really cant be bothered.
After reading this article, I’m struck by the familiar ring of an advertisement, rather than a review.
I’ve been a Premium Partner with BC for 5 months now after extensively researching web platforms for my clients. We were previously using WordPress as our platform of choice but found it wasn’t as flexible as we needed for our clients, and a lot of the modules available were either glitchy or offered little to no support. We needed a platform that gave us total design and freedom and the ability to create our own apps based on the client’s specific, and often complicated needs.
Then we found Business Catalyst.
We loved how BC covered all the bases like the flexibility of a custom-designed website with Content Management, eCommerce, Email Marketing, Customer Database and detailed Analytics, all with user-friendliness.
We’ve built a number of websites in BC and myself (the Designer), my Developer and my clients have all been stoked with the final product. We are currently experimenting and training on custom Web Apps and are just starting to discover the potential in what we can offer to our clients.
The only thing clients have shied-away from is the monthly fee, but if you can correctly explain the benefits they will receive then you will find you can close most sales.
Overall a terrific platform and un-beatable value for money.
Can you contact me or send me a link to your site. I’m looking for a BC developer for our site.
Hire me.:D
helvetica5 – email me at kjjmbp-at-verizon-dot-com if you would accept a small project. I have a home page and interior page “inspiration” sample that I created within BC. Needed by Nov/Dec timeframe.
Your email is invalid.email me khemchay@gmail.com
It’s invalid email .email me khemchay@gmail.com
I’m a free partner in BC and I like it a lot – though at the moment I’m tearing my hair out trying to make one of the catalogues work with my products for a site of my own. Clearly I’ve done something wrong with one of the templates and the way i’ve applied it, but that always happens just when I’ve decided my CSS finally rocks. No, it doesn’t.
But when you compare the cost and functionality of BC to something like Infusionsoft, which claims to automate a client’s entire marketing process in much the same way – only costs thousands of dollars and takes hundreds of human-hours to set up but DOESN’T come with a hosting component – BC starts to seem like a no-brainer at $39/month.
Just remember that no all-in-one system is going to be perfect, and be prepared to write a little html in areas where you don’t think you should have to.
My advice to readers of this is don’t do it. I have been using Business Catalyst for a year and have not added a new client to the system since September due to a very buggy system, and an incredibly arrogant out-of-touch, unresponsive support function.
There is no phone support. An urgent support ticket has a promise of 8-hour turnaround. I have waited a week in some instances. The frustration of partners – those of us who shelled out $2,000 for the privilege – is extreme. We can’t explain to our clients why the email server has failed again, or when it will be fixed – because we can’t get a response from Business Catalyst when this happens. There is no warning from Business Catalyst as to system failures, and very often it is a day or two before they even post any reply to dozens of forum posts begging for an explanation.
We can’t explain to our clients why suddenly the shop isn’t working, or why the system rewrote the code in the template, or why we are getting blank white pages on a system function – because we are blocked from the folders that serve the ecommerce and other functions. I stopped using the Business Catalyst Dreamweaver plugin that they promote because it was rewriting code on upload – actually changing the path to items on publish – such that pages didn’t work. It drove me nuts – until I realised the only way to override was simply not to use Dreamweaver – but to edit the templates online in the BC system. Talk about tedious.
Business Catalyst just offered me a 50% discount on hosting fees to add new clients to the system because they noticed I hadn’t added any in a while. Duh. Why would I? How could I?
I took my branding off the service two months into using it because there were so many problems that I could not resolve. I lost clients specifically because of Business Catalyst.
But worse still, is that if you post any complaint about Business Catalyst on the forum, they quickly block your access. They say the forum post is being held in moderation, and then they simply don’t publish it. They are censoring their users to hide the facts. And we paid for that privilege?
This is the thing that Business Catalyst doesn’t get – we are not paying to use the system. We pay for that with monthly hosting fees. What we pay for as partners is support. It is called a partnership for one reason and one reason only – support.
Business Catalyst has squandered thousands of opportunities to redeem itself. It has failed to do so every single time. Right now I have been waiting 40+ hours for a response to an urgent support ticket. I have posted three requests for help in the forum, with no response from Business Catalyst. I see other forum posts also screaming for help – unanswered for days. My favourite headline: BC suport where are you?
Hi all, great to see some candid discussion about the platform.
@Noosachic, I hear your frustration with us, and I understand. 6 months ago, shortly after our acquisition by Adobe, there were some system issues that we, admittedly didn’t handle very well.
While I don’t doubt that you’ve experienced situations like this with us at some stages, I want to point out a few changes we’ve made internally to try to address the issues you raise.
I’d like to point out that every web host and SaaS provider do have problems from time to time, just as corporations do with internal servers. It does happen, unfortunately.
That said, we’re in the business of providing a reliable service, so any failure *is* a failure – we get that and I’m not trying to beg odd. But what we did learn is that we weren’t communicating about the issues very effectively – which is something that some other web hosts and system providers do very well, and it helps them mitigate the impact.
What have we done to help with this?
Firstly, we now have a twitter system status account which we use to update with issues in real time. We also have a dedicated staff member to monitor forums and ensure that posts like you mention are answered. We have also begun blogging post-mortems of issues after they occur in an effort to be transparent with our users.
As for our current support queues – this isn’t due to arrogance. Our team loves our customers and wants to help. Unfortunately we’re experiencing a high amount of load on our support team. We’ve updated our support autoresponder to try to express this. And while I realise that it doesn’t really help you get your questions answered, we’re working on it as best we can and we’re looking to hire new support resources to assist us. We’re not arrogant or aloof – we’re just working hard to try to answer all the questions that come in.
When it comes to blocking posts on the forums, we do block some people, but the criteria is quite clear:
- if you’re being offensive
- if you’re spamming
- if you’re starting a new thread when a thread already exists (we’ll ask you to repost on the existing thread)
- if your post relates to wholesale/Partner program concerns. Since clients have access to the forums (as does everybody) there are some discussions about partner programs, pricing markup etc, that don’t belong on the forums.
Apart from that, we don’t block posts, and if you’ve had that happen in the past and you don’t believe that you crossed any of the above guidelines, I will certainly look into it for you. We pride ourselves on our open community… even though there can be some negativity towards us, we feel the conversation is valuable to have in the open.
Feel free to post links to your requests for help and I’ll take a look at them if I can help.
I’m sorry for the bad experience you’ve had, and I know there are a lot of areas we can improve – especially around communication with our Partners. We are improving and we do have plans in place to continue to improve.
That said, I also want to point out that your experience isn’t a universal one. We have many partners who are happily using the system and are building sites for their clients successfully and profitably; unfortunately some partners are effected more than others due to the timing/locality of some of these problems.
It seems you’ve been hit more that your fair share – and for that I apologize and hope you’ll give us another look when you’re ready.
-Brett
I agree with Brett, I’m a Business Catalyst partner since early 2009 and it’s true that they had some issues in the past years, but I think a SaaS is a work in progress and since Adobe bought the company, there is some major improvements that are still to come and many features are added every months. http://businesscatalyst.com/wish-list/list-public
Since january 2010 a lot of issues have been fixed, and I think Business Catalyst will be a new era for web designers that are not back-end developers.
So for web designers that hate coding like me, it’s the perfect solution
In the long run I’m sure it will pay off for both partners and clients.
I was an avid user of InContext Editor, the precursor to Business Catalyst. I was really bummed with Adobe discontinued it and only offered BC. But, it does look pretty robust. My only complaint is that you have to host with BC. That’s a big issue for my clients who don’t want to switch their hosting. And, since it’s such a pain to switch hosting sometimes, it makes me hesitant to even recommend BC. Maybe one day I’ll do it. Thanks for your review…for someone who never does ecomm, it was good to read how easy BC can make it.
I was very excited when I first read this article this morning. I hopped right onto the Business Catalyst site, signed up, created my basic structure and began editing from both the portal and my new Dream Weaver extension. 8 hours later deleted all files and explained my discontent in their exit survey. The program seemed fantastic and flawless in the many, many videos I watched prior to digging, however, I found the exercise and results to be pure torture, much like many other template based, portal driven programs I have tested in the past. I am no expert in html, nor am I a novice. Bummer.
Lauren, this behaviour your describing is a-typical and sounds very strange. Are you saying the system some how deleted your files? I’ve personally never had that happen to me, and I use BC to run our website (businesscatalyst.com)
Were you using the latest version of the extension?
I’d love to help you more and understand what happened so we can improve our documentation and product (and maybe get you started), if you’re willing to get in touch?
My email is bwelch -at- adobe -dot- com
No, Brett, I deleted all files associated with BC on my computer. The marketing, including the video tutorials are a far stretch from what the actual user experience is like. I found it to be as temperamental and unstable as anything I have used before. The 5 in 1 feature seems appealing, but when customer service doesn’t seem to exist, why partner with “5″ companies that do not provide an acceptable level of customer service?
I’m sorry to hear that Lauren. Yours is not a universal experience, but I can understand that you may have experienced some instability, perhaps you were unlucky enough to sign on during some system problems.
As for customer service – this is something we’re working to improve. We do have our forums, which are open to everyone to ask questions and these are monitored by our staff, but I assume these weren’t enough for your needs.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you; your feedback is useful, so thank you
great review of this service! i use VirtueMart for my eCommerce sites and so far have been pretty pleased with how easy it is to setup.
Hey Melissa InContext Editor is back, while I dont’ think it has been around a great deal of time it is back in the menu.
We recently signed up with BC only last month, and while I haven’t pitched it to clients just yet (need to do alot of their training first to feel comfortable) I can see that in certain cases it is an easy sell. Ofcourse I don’t think any product will fit every client you have but this is a good product to have in your arsenal.
If anyone is interested in sign up for a plan you can use this promo code and get 5% off LTPDZF (which is better then a slap in the face:)
I recently tried BC for a project I’m working on but ultimately decided to move it to another platform. There is a lot to like about BC (having ecommerce, content management, email marketing, and CRM all in one place is pretty cool) but there are also some negatives. I kept running in to areas where I couldn’t accomplish what I wanted to because of various limitations. Having it hosted with them was also something I was not crazy about.
For a much more detailed review of BC in which the Marketing Manager responds to the post, check out:
http://www.freelancereview.net/detailed-review-of-adobes-business-catalyst/
@Noosachic – Thanks for your honest experience. I spent hours and hours looking into BC but ultimately the lack of the support really turned me off. How could Adobe put their name on something so limited and buggy?
If you like to force the BC to push it limit you can use there API’s.
Honestly on my first BC development I found out it’s hard to manipulate but later on I can manage all entire pages and the technique is simple standardize your codes
and you should be good on javascript or jquery/mootools.If you want your PHP code to work on BC you can use there API’s and fetch POST/GET data.
Advantages of BC is no need to install a plugins and you don’t need to upgrade to a new version.
We have been using Goodbarry/Business Catalyst for 2 years now, running multiple websites and spending >$200 a month with them. I would stop tomorrow if we could switch to a different system relatively easily. My frustration grows on a daily basis.
Everything Noosachic said above has been exactly my experience.
I am really sad to say I would NOT recommend BC to anybody in good faith at this point. Sad because I formally raved about the system. There are too many issues that go unaddressed.
For example the reporting function does not work properly and produces garbage e-commerce sales reports. Our main site which turned over 100k or so last year had sales of several million if you believe their reports. Some days we did greater than 100k according to the reports (actually closer to $1000). Other months were zero when in fact it was a few thousand.
In addition they still have cascading deletes in place so that if you delete a “no longer stocked product” it is not archived in sales reports. Hence you go to look at an old customers order and you cannot see what they bought. We made the mistake of downloading all products, making minor changes in the names of 10% of them then uploading to replace all the existing product in order to avoid duplicates. It worked fine, but effectively wiped out all old stock and replaced it with the new. The result: all sales prior to the upload were lost in their system. So, yes, you guessed it, all historical sales data gone.
How can you possibly run a business if that is the result? This is so basic in business. Yet, it has been five months since I brought this issue up, and I have re-asked the question at least 8 times with detailed posts and screenshots and they have failed to respond even once.
The latest issue is emails. This weekend they had some update to their servers. We have not received even one “system email” for sales, and worse not one pdf for offline processing. The finally responded to my pleas after a day rather than 8 hours with some nonsense generic reply which had nothing to do with my question. When I pushed, they blamed me for putting a space between recipient email addresses. The fact is the spaces were there before and everything worked just fine. In addition the system emails work differently and are nothing to do with the pdf recipient email addresses. These transactions are unrecoverable by them or me, so now we have to contact every customer to ask for a good time to phone to get CC details. How maddening is that! And I pay for this headache!
If anybody knows of a similar system please let me know.
If anybody on BC reads this please convince me to stay. I have invested a LOT of development money in this because I believed that Goodbarry/BC has a lot of potential for the small business person like myself.
David
Hi David,
Sorry I missed your post earlier asking for help.
I’d like to understand some of your points here and help you out if I can; drop me a line at bwelch at adobe.
Thanks,
-Brett
I just looked into BC some, but the major flaw I see is SUPPORT, specifically by phone.. That is one thing I have to have, and why would I pay 1-2000 dollars for that when there are big names out there that offer it for free? I will stick with them.
can you please use some examples of those big names you use. I just would like to compare apples to apples. Seems like a good service though I need to test still. No service like this is going to satisfy 100% of everyone’s needs but if there are better or comparable services can you list them?
My big draw to BC is the CRM. Seems really great and something I haven’t seen to many people comment on. Let me know what you think.
Which big names offer this for free?
We’re currently researching BC to make it part of our web design services. Obviously there’s some people who’ve had some unfortunate experiences. On the other side of the coin, what are some of the good experiences people have had with it? If anyone’s reading that knows – care to post?
Many thanks in advance
If you are interested in learning what 10 questions Adobe (Brett Welch in particular) wouldn’t answer regarding Business Catalyst, check out this link:
http://www.freelancereview.net/10-questions-adobe-wont-answer-about-business-catalyst/
In response to the 10 questions Adobe won’t answer, check out BC Gurus: http://www.bcgurus.com
Informative answer from well experienced BC developers.
When I tried to play the “Tour” videos on your site, none of them would start.
So….help me, please!
David Kauffman
Hi David K,
Not sure what could be happening – can you email me so we can troubleshoot a little? bwelch-at-adobe-dot-com.
Hopefully i can help…
-Brett
BC is pretty neat, but there is no real support or help desk to fix small problems quickly that are at their end.
I used to develop websites using whatever CMS and hosting my clients requested. That was never a good margin business, as it takes time to learn new systems and deal with the idiosyncrasies inherent in those systems. Now that I develop exclusively on BC, I can produce really full-featured websites very rapidly with better margins.
Because BC is a hosted solution, it doesn’t suit all clients. But I’ve been willing to turn down significant projects if the client doesn’t want to use BC because it’s just not good business for me.
Reality is, I’ve only had one client that was reluctant to use BC. Their IT staff just didn’t want a hosted solution. The client (and their IT staff) ultimately came around because my pricing was very reasonable and the range of features offered on BC was so compelling. Now they love their new website, and are delighted at all they can manage on BC without calling me. They have become one of my better clients, and I’m developing two more sites for them — plus they have referred me to other clients.
I’ve always had very timely support when needed. I’m a true believer in BC, and after almost 20 years in the business, I’ve hitched my wagon to this rising star. If you haven’t taken a serious look at BC yet, you really should.
Pretty Pollution has been using Business Catalyst for over 5 years. We’re in a good position to comment on BC.
We’ve seen the platform grow and become more and more powerful. Not only has the CMS become more feature packed, the support is much better (not all vendors offer live chat), and the system is faster and more reliable and stable than I’ve ever seen it before.
Let me make a very important point:
Last week I was approached about design and dev of a new website. The request was for lots of advanced featres: shopping cart, blog, secure members area that takes direct payment to the clients bank, email marketing setup etc
Pretty Pollution submitted our quote (around the $20K figure). The client was getting three quotes and was so shocked by the other quotes that he sent them to me to see why ours was so much cheaper (the others were between $50k – $70k). My response was that the quotes submitted by the other suppliers were reasonable considering the functionality. However Pretty Pollution was able to leverage from the suite of Business Catalyst tools to supply a superior website at a much reduced cost. We got the job. And the end result will be exceptional.
There’s some talk in this forum about lack of support, problems with the CMS, stability etc. I’ve been using Business Catalyst (as well as many other CMS) for many years. Business Catalyst is excellent, we have very little complaints, we love it and our clients love it. From our experience we continually move our clients from Other CMS systems into Business Catalyst, and our clients genuinely love it. I do note a few technical issues, there was an outage one day and some of our sites went down. There were some email marketing issues at one stage. But in the 5+ years that we’ve been developing BC websites, no complaints with us. We’ll continue to use it and can’t wait to see what new features are coming.
My Advice:
-Be patient and learn the CMS. It’s not hard.
-Partner with a Senior Parnter. There are a few of us out there that don’t mind helping new partners, and businesses get up to speed. Find a partner that has a lot of experience and is willing to share their knowledge with you. (I do note here that there are a lot of flakey partners around), so be selective on who you choose. Do you’re research.
-Don’t offshore your work to Asia (from my experience the language barrier and experience equals a “nightmare”.
-Use the Business Catalyst forum and support page
If anyone has any particular issues they wish to address offline, feel free brett@prettypollution.com.au
Brett Stockley
http://www.prettypollution.com.au
Premium Business Catalyst Partner
We continue to use the Business Catalyst system for our e-comm and content management clients, however, I must chime in that support and email issues continue to be problematic for us.
I’ve had a client fail multiple PCI compliance tests with her website. We submitted a support ticket, were told it was escalated and they’d be in touch in 1-2 business days. A week and a half later, I logged in and the case was closed. My issue, which was big enough that it was escalated, appeared to be completely forgotten. When asked further, I was told they were still digging. And I’ve emailed every day since with no word.
Recent email upgrades in the system have many partners completely puzzled with excessive bounces from Yahoo accounts (and some others I’ve seen on the forums). No response or resolution has been given by support, only acknowledgment of a problem and days of silence….
I agree with the partners who chimed in above… we’ve PAID to be partners in this system. PAID to have support. We aren’t just making money on resells here… A lot of times, I feel like I’m DEFINITELY not getting my moneys worth at all from this PARTNERSHIP. Love the system, love the features. But I want them to be stable (IE PCI complaince is pretty important) and reliable (email deliverability is a KEY component to email marketing). I understand there will be problems, but waiting days / weeks for responses is a ridiculous “support” system.
Gotta love the transparency of the web for this reason. No company can hide behind any word play or slight of speech.
We recently have been looking into BC coming from building WP sites for years. The folder will stay open until we hear of more improvement.
^^^
Christopher – we build basic sites on WordPress – we did look at business catalyst some time ago and like you, thought it might be best to wait for a while. Just interested to know: why were you looking at moving away from WordPress to BC?
Hey Mark,
I would probably say I was more intrigued with having one location to manage an online business than anything else. I find our own company using many different applications to do various jobs (data retrieval, client db, ecomm, website, stats, blog, etc ) and find myself wishing for 1 admin login with a succinct way of navigating it all without the loss of sleep or hair…. So naturally BC seemed pretty promising. I love WP and would probably use it for about 75% of business needing something simple and easy to use. However when you start getting into functionality and stuff that is a little more in depth we usually split the load onto different apps. I have tried plug ins for WP for Ecom and hacking up custom plugs to make stuff happen, but its well, hacked up. Something that would have a simplified backbone for all of the needs of an online business while staying lean and clean would be awesome. WP once you get into plugs and functions sometimes isn’t the most “ergonomic” and can be tangled at times.
The other thing is to me, while BC can do a mail campaign it is never in my opinion going to top something like Mailchimp and that is where our deciding factor comes in, while having one login and admin location works great, its not a deal breaker for us if the separate parts give you more mileage and use than all in one solution. Some people it may work great for I don’t know if its good for us just yet. Maybe future iterations surely.
Hi Chris – yes I hear you
wouldn’t it be nice to have a complete online business system, with as you said, one login, that doesn’t just sound good in the sales and marketing literature, but actually works at the technical level and is reliable and stable!! We were quite excited when we first heard about BC because of how easy it is to sell – but not worth selling something is the solution is going to create problems for both parties involved.
I don’t think these systems are quite there yet, but we wait in hope
thanks for your in-depth answer about WP – e-commerce is definitely still a problem with this otherwise very good system – anyway off topic
Once again thanks – the comments from some obviously very experienced developers on the matter of BC, have made us feel good about our decision to wait for improvements and review it again later.
Mark, if you’re waiting for a unanimous thumbs-up opinion on any platform that does as much as BC (not that one exists), then you’re going to have to move to another planet. Fact is, this stuff is complicated. BC makes it as easy as it could possibly be, but it’s still complex stuff. You still have to wear your thinking cap. Don’t be put off by folks who just want to push a magic button. Give BC a try. Build a few sites. You’ll start to see how powerful it really is, and you’ll find yourself ready to handle projects you never dreamed of.
Lastly, I’ve never waited longer than a weekend to get helpful and courteous support that satisfied my support requests.
Seriously, give it a try.
Fair point Joe – and food for thought.
Spose one never knows until one knocks a few gigs out in it
Mark, I’ve been a partner of BC’s for nearly two years. I’ve never hated a company more.
The BC system – when it works – is great. But it doesn’t work as often as it should, the email is constantly down, the problems with the data centres earlier this year were unforgivable, that there were no mirrors or redundant backups is unacceptable, the system is not secure and does not perform as promised.
I could live with all of that if I could get immediate notification of a problem, and immediate support to fix a problem. But one does not get this with BC.
It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles a product has – if it is unstable, if you cannot do anything to fix it yourself, if you can’t tell your own customers what is going on and how long until it is fixed when there are problems – and there are constantly problems – then it is not a system worth having.
What these guys cannot get into their heads is that we are not paying thousands of dollars to use the system. Use of the system costs $47 a month per client and is an ongoing charge.
What we pay for as partners is support and service. But there isn’t any. If you are lucky enough to get a response it is hours or days in coming, it is usually insulting, and very often does not resolve the problem until there has been a string of support tickets back and forth.
“Don’t be put off by folks who just want to push a magic button”? Who would those folks be Joe?
The ‘folks’ who are telling it as it is on this forum rather than reading from a marketing brochure are developers and designers of websites, none of whom I would insult with that comment.
We have given it more than a go; we’ve given it thousands of dollars for the privilege of being a PARTNER.
That contract suggests a partnership, a team working together, on the same page, for the same cause. But that is NOT what you get with BC.
I have waited over a week for a response to urgent requests for help on system faults that I could not resolve. I’ve never been notified proactively that there is a problem with email, or ecommerce or of the data centre being down. Not once.
I paid $2,000 for the privilege of having a company that is supposed to support me, destroy my business. I have lost three key retainer customers directly because of BC. As a web designer who earns a living from building and maintaining websites for clients, BC is a poison pill. I removed my branding from it within three months and haven’t added anyone to it in over a year.
I won’t until BC puts a bulldozer through its arrogant ‘support’ team and does an intensive course on customer service.
I can tell you now that is a fake post and some of the things said here are far from accurate.
Which one is the fake post??
Can anybody explain why i am having difficulty signing up as a partner. On the free signup page it asks to input a validation code, which when done, tells me it is incorrect.
Has anybody else had this problem. I have e-mailed tech support and received an automated response telling me somebody will be in touch shortly, but as of yet (5 days later) i am still waiting.
I am not one for shying away because of other peoples bad experiences but prefer to make my own judgement…… things are not looking good…
Hi Dave,
Are you trying to input the word verifcation or the referral code? If you are entering the verification, perhaps clear your cache and try a different browser. The BC word verification used to have problems, from my knowledge its all fixed, but could be something with an old browser.
As far as the referral code goes – you need to have a partner refer you in on their side in order for the referral code to take for your discount. If you just simply use a published code that you found on the internet, it will not work – referrals have to be two ways.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to shoot me an email directly.
-Brent Weaver
BC Gurus
brent@bcgurus.com
Wow, quite the thread, linking to deleted posts, etc, along with a catfight over at bcgurus…. never a great idea to say to a potential or current customer “what the hell is your problem”? You work at Adobe, Brett?
Here I am, having come here just looking for some honest opinions on BC, and found this. I think I’ll avoid this product for now, it has a ton of promise but wow–too many bad customer service issues which aren’t helped by all the deleted threads and name calling.
For now I’ll just continue to evaluate which commerce platform to help my clients develop on.
PS: FWIW, I can’t tell if this post is 2010 or 2006… would really be nice if a year was posted on the threads and original “paid” review.
I’m trying to build a portfolio website in BC. There is no documentation on how to create portfolio page with web apps.
Does anyone know or can show me how to create a page that will show small some recent work of websites.
I thought it would be easy to do in BC, but so far I cant figure it out.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
You can checkout our portfolio at:
http://hotpressweb.com/portfolio
I would be more than happy to talk with you in more detail about how we built that, shoot me an email.
-Brent Weaver
BC Gurus
brent@bcgurus.com
But BC is not good when building complicated websites. It’s very limited. It sucks. It can only do simple things. As a developer, I would surely recommend Joomla/Drupal because you can extend them with no limits.
I’m wondering if there’s been any further developments in shoring up the reliability of BC’s e-mail services, and the uptime they were reported in the comments above.
Daniel for updates to their system (outages etc) follow their twitter @bc_obnw
Noosachic you hit the nail on the head! So with BC you get to give Adobe all your web hosting business and then go away, is this correct? Adobe wants you to have to pay a price for something you used to make 100% of the profit hosting your clients web site, now earn a small percentage by becoming a partner.
So here is your new work flow, pound the pavement and attract new customers on your own expense, make graphics for their website “unless the customer is able to find a template that works with BC – which you will get paid to install it, maybe 1 hour”, setup your customers website on BC, Go Away BC now hosts your customers website and there is no need for you to get in the way anymore.
And hey as an added BC bonus, developers can earn less a 70,000 job can now be done for 20,000 then your competition can bid it for 15 then 10 and all the way down because anyone can use BC no HTML programming required.
Just wondering does BC put a generator tag in your website, something to the effect “Adobe Business Catalyst” so potential clients can find out how to built their own website?
Thanks.
NO BACKUPS.
Business Catalyst is a great platform–very powerful and easy to learn. However, they do not offer backups of any kind! Who doesn’t backup theses days???
I have been trying to get support for email that has not been working for 5 days. I DO NOT like paying a company monthly, but not having access to a phone number in case I have an emergency.
Business Catalyst is an ADOBE system, and their address is the same address as ADOBE in San Jose, CA…but the fine folks at ADOBE (in the same building) cant seem to come up woth a phone number for a live person at “Business Catalyst” with whom I can discuss my issue and my frustration.
Dont go for this program if you heavily rely on you website/email. Apparently, the keys to the magic kingdom of Business Catalyst are heavily guarded.
Hi Brett:
We are a partner with BC under WSI, our client who recently could not access their email on a website made on BC was quite furious to know what went wrong, and the troubleshooting guide on the website tell them to contact the partner, but we being a partner are also not communicated any details regarding outages. If there is a formal system for that please do let me know.
Hi Soliddiesel,
Brett’s currently out of office, so I thought I’d get back to you on this.
We’ve recently experienced some issues with hosted email and our legacy Australian datacenter, but are actively working to ensure this does not happen again. Following the email issues you mention, we migrated all email users to the new and improved OpenSRS mail solution and have since seen solid, stable mail performance.
For issues, we recommend that WSI ICs contact their Production Center for technical support, who can then liase directly with the BC Support team if necessary.
Other ways you can keep up to date are via:
* The BC Blog (regularly updated): http://businesscatalyst.com/_blog/bc_blog
* Our Twitter Status account: http://twitter.com/bc_obnw
If you have a pressing issue, feel free to grab a member of the Support team on our live chat service: http://businesscatalyst.com/support/home
Alternatively, you can also seek help from the community on our active forums: http://businesscatalyst.com/support/forums
I hope this helps, and we appreciate your on-going Support!
- Jackson.
It appears that many of my comments and those of others–notably BC’s chaiman, admitting that they failed–have been sanitized from this list. I ask that they all be restored.
Has Freelance Switch been paid off to be biased? Why was the highly partial review posted in the first place?
I was using the latest version of the WP E-commerce plugin recently and am experiencing a few hassles (and limited support from a them that I purchased) and I too have many reservations about diving into e-commerce. I was hoping BC would be the answer but it seems like the general consensus is that this still has some way to go..
We have built almost a hundred sites on BC and have been a part of larger projects that individually launched hundreds of sites on BC. E-commerce works well, is supported, and PCI compliant.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly at brent@bcgurus.com
The word is rigid, not ridged. Just thought I’d let you know. Nice review though. Thanks
Wow, this is a great review of the system, I have been looking to join Business Catalyst as a Partner for years, I was reluctant because like many people I thought it was better to do it with “free” systems or “other” alternatives, but in the end I have had many headaches and lost clients because of the time it takes to learn all other systems and integrate them together.
I am happy to say that within the next weeks I will be partnering up and I already have 1 client that is willing to sing up.
Thank you for this review.
Hi Juan,
I would love to do a quick phone interview with you about your experience with open source and why you were losing clients with it. Email me: brent@bcgurus.com.
So, is the jury still out? There seem to be very mixed reports above with a few very unhappy customers and others sining BC’s praises.
The last post seems to have been from 8 months ago – any updates on service and the state of the application?
Well, we finally made the switch to OScommerce last February and have not looked back.
What a relief not be dealing with all the restrictions, hassles , bugs and slow customer service, not to mention no back ups, bugged reporting (see post above), posts re bugs being ignored and so on. Truly I feel a big weight has been lifted off our shoulders and we can now get on with the business of selling rather than constantly having to struggle with work-arounds.
Our stock control is more accurate: BC has some silly thing where it takes product out of inventory BEFORE it is bought and leaves it in the client’s cart unavailable to anybody else for 24 hours. This caused us so many problems, upset customers, sales not made that could have been and so on.
I have no regrets leaving BC.
Maybe it works better for a service type scenario, or where you need a powerful customer/sales tracking platform.
David
If I weren’t already using BC and I was investigating it as a possible solution for my freelance business, I would find the following observation useful:
There are lots of really good solutions out there that focus on specific needs, such as CMS, or email marketing, or registrations/bookings, or customer database, or blogs, or forums, or custom-built apps, or ecommerce, etc., and many of those have a deeper, more robust feature set than BC. If all you need to do is one of those things, then there are better solutions than BC.
But that never happens — at least not to me. Invariably, I have clients who have a range of needs. As a matter of fact, I’ve never had a client come to me and say, “I only need ecommerce. Period. Let’s use the very best product for ecommerce and nothing else.” That just doesn’t happen.
Before I found BC, I would use one solution for CMS, and another for ecommerce, and another for email marketing and so on, but this was really, really complicated for my clients and me. It’s no small thing managing different tools, different logins, different support issues, etc. Plus, it was difficult trying to make these systems work together, especially capturing and tracking customer usage among all these different apps, which was a nightmare and often downright impossible.
That’s why I love BC. It has a great set of bundled features under the same hood. I can offer my clients a wide range of services, which they can manage with one solution. This is more efficient for me and for my clients, who are often amazed when they don’t have to pay extra for individual feature sets. Another advantage is I am able to remain very competitive with pricing because of the efficiencies in using a bundled solution.
Are there limitations and frustrations? Sure, but there’s no such thing as a perfect solution. We all have to find what works for us. All in all, BC meets a very large majority of needs for my clients, and I now develop exclusively on this platform. It has made a huge positive impact on my business.
Looking for feedback on running a large membership site with BC, and how it compares with Infusionsoft as a CMS.
I have been a developer for many years now and in my experience every BC website I have worked on is an absolute mess. I’ve found support difficult to obtain and the CMS is annoying.
Not to mention it’s not open source so you and all your clients are at the mercy of Adobe.
Hi there, and sorry to hear you’ve had an off-putting experience with the Business Catalyst platform.
We’ve been making considerable improvements to the system which aim to address the issues our key Partners have outlined to us. You can track our progress over at the BC Blog: http://businesscatalyst.com/_blog/bc_blog
In regards to your issues with Support, have you tried out new Live Chat Support? You can access it by clicking the blue box in the bottom-right corner of: http://businesscatalyst.com/support/home
Hope this helps,
Jackson.
I build small websites based mostly on WordPress, but have been asked to expand into some eCommerce, so the flexibility of BC sounds great, but I’m a bit leery. Getting the most out of WordPress as a CMS and eCommerce seems difficult at best.
What about Shopify? It’s back end seems a bit mystifying, but promising….
This is a very well great review for business catalyst. Hoping to find more related post like. very helpful!
With BC, you can send newsletters and other campaigns to targeted lists of customers that you’ve saved in the built-in customer database.
Once you’ve sent out an email campaign the system is able to track what happens to each of the emails (provided they were sent in HTML format). Find out how many email addresses it reached, how many it bounced from, how many people have opened the email and so forth.
Its awsome feature you can easily followup with interested customers.
Most of our clients get really good benefit using this feature.
dynamicdreamz.com have a passionate team 25+ professionals consisting of business catalyst programmers, web designers, SEO executives and marketers.
Hello,
With BC, you can send newsletters and other campaigns to targeted lists of customers that you’ve saved in the built-in customer database.
Once you’ve sent out an email campaign the system is able to track what happens to each of the emails (provided they were sent in HTML format). Find out how many email addresses it reached, how many it bounced from, how many people have opened the email and so forth.
so you can easily followup with interested viewers and convert into your customers.
Most of our client gain good business using this facility.
I heard about Muse last week and have been playing with the program ever since. I’m not a pro designer but I want to be able to put together about 5 sites for projects I’m involved in, and perhaps eventually do a little web design for very modest enterprises like freelance writers or other sole practitioners – no big businesses involving inventory and catalogs or anything.. I have taken several html/CSS classes and have 1 site up and running, hosted at BlueHost. I’ve tried dozens (it seems like, anyway) of low-end web design products and also Dreamweaver. Muse is a dream come true from my end, as I’m very interested in design and content and not at all interested in code.
I’m very disappointed that Adobe requires hosting through BC if the problems described so many times in comments here are true. That is probably a deal-breaker for me. I might be willing to pay $50/month if it included ISP as well as web hosting, and if it were dependable and easy to use. It seems like a bad business model to put up so many barriers without offering a useable package.
VJane —
Actually, Muse does not require you host your Muse-created web site on Business Catalyst. You also have the option to export the full website to a folder, and from there FTP that content to the hosting provider of your choice. For more specifics please see the Muse public website here: http://muse.adobe.com/faq.html#hosting
Our company signed up as partners about 1.5 years ago. Mixed success, but with recent launches have had big problems. Support virtually nonexistent (though at least no responses aren’t rude or arrogant). We believe there are fundamental problems with the BC offerings; and feel these won’t be addressed in the short to medium term. We have opted to commence developing in MODX, which so far is providing the tools and flexibilities we’d have liked to see with BC. Suggest BC should have a shake-up of their development and support team – or risk the product be consigned to becoming yet another historical footnote. As we’ve paid for Partnership, we’ll keep peeking in from time to time (as we otherwise migrate out) – and hope that the BC world can change it’s team and culture for the better. Good luck!
Hi Jon,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such a bad experience with us. I’d like the chance to better understand your problems with email marketing so we can improve or perhaps point you in the right direction to help you get things working.
In regards to your other points, SimpleFlame is usually a highly regarded partner of ours, so I’m sorry to hear you didn’t have a great experience with them. I’m happy to provide you with another referral.
In addition, our support team openly advertises their response time as being within 8 business hours. This is, however, just for support tickets; we also have a Live Chat option which is available to you via our website if you have any urgent queries.
In addition, if you let me know what your requirements are I’m happy to suggest some other systems that may meet your needs. Of course, they all have their pros and cons (just like BC) but may end up suiting you better.
Feel free to reach out to me at bwelch at adobe dot com.
-Brett
Hi Jon,
I have indeed looked up your name in our system and found some cases in there. Of all the ones I read, our staff replied courteously and without arrogance.
Unfortunately, as many who work in tech support are aware, one or two sentence support requests often require more information to be submitted. This is because there are often several factors which may influence our response, and we need to support many thousands of customers. So providing us with additional context can be very useful.
It’s also possible that I’m looking at the wrong customer record however – and it’s for this reason that I wanted to chat via email – so that I could get the full story.
Here is a URL for our live chat, which is found under the support section of our website. http://businesscatalyst.com/support/home
Hope this helps, and again, feel free to reach out to me for further assistance.
-Brett
Jon,
I’ve reviewed your cases and spoken to the team. It seems you’re a well known customer around here; I just came late to the party
I notice you’ve sent me an email so I will continue this discussion there.
-Brett
I am curious about the “other systems” you mentioned. How can I get that information?