How does Soholaunch compare with Yahoo stores?

[patrickb_313]

My current store (www.simplyperfectgiftbaskets.com) is hosted by Yahoo Stores. Because of the monthly fees, I'm looking for an alternative to Yahoo. I can upload multiple products, including descriptions, prices, and multiple shipping rates, in one .CSV file and my pages are built automatically. Also, if I name my product images the same as the product page, I can upload all my images in one zip file and they are automagically added to the product page.

Can Soholaunch do this or anything similar? Batch uploading is a huge time saver for me, especially when I have to swap out products for the various holidays or change shipping information for the summer months.

Also, I have a merchant account. How do I hook the shopping cart and the merchant account together?

One more thing, is there a sandbox where I can check out the various features?

Thanks.

[jcnelson]

Hi Patrick,

It sounds like you have a good handle on the yahoo store. Soho can work very well, depending on the features needed to run your store. It is however very limited compared with the features of yahoo.

We are have one customer that we moved from yahoo to soho and has been running for five months. They did about $16,000 in sales during December so it has actually worked very well for them.

There are some major differences in the two programs. Feel free to email me and I will give you a link to our demo that has all the features enabled.

We have done several changeovers from yahoo to different programs depending on the customers needs. If you don't find soho to be all that you need, I would be happy to give you some recommendations that would match your requirements.

jc @ oregonhosting.com (remove the spaces)

[Jim Buckler]

Hi Patrickb_313,
Thank you for your interest in Soholaunch.

With the Soholaunch cart you can download the data table, CART_PRODUCTS, from the Site Data Tables option on our Main Menu. This table includes all the data for your shopping cart items. It's easiest to see the file structure if you have already entered a few items in the cart through our regular interface with product categories, descriptions, and prices assigned. Once you have done this you can easily download the data table from Site Data Tables and them import it into Excel as a semi-colon delimited file. You would then have the ability to maintain your entire cart offline, save as a csv to your local computer, upload to Soholaunch via Site Files and then choose that file to import back into CART_PRODUCTS via Site Data Tables. You may want to maintain separate csv files for your various holiday selections.

Product images should be uploaded via File Upload (or FTP to the correct folder, if you wish), but you can then call that image by inserting its correct file name in your uploaded csv file (full image as well as a thumbnail image).

In response to your question about your merchant account . . . If you are using one of the Payment Gateways built-in to Soholaunch you simply choose that gateway and enter your individual account ID info in our Payment Options section of the Shopping Cart module.

You are welcome to use our online demo at http://ispcon.soholaunch.com (Username=admin, Password=admin). Use Demo1 or Demo2. These both have the shopping cart module enabled. These sites automatically reset after you logout. You may also want to look over the online manual at http://promanual.soholaunch.com. Some of the material may be a little dated, but should be helpful. Flash tutorials (basic) can be seen at http://info.soholaunch.com/index.php?pr=Flash_Tutorials. Let me know if you have some other questions.

Thanks again for considering Soholaunch.