There are many Open Source packages available for business and web site owners. At first glance they seem like a great deal: no costs for the app and quite a few features. This may not be as good for most people as it seems at first. Let me talk about a couple apps we have used with some clients and how our SAM system does things differently. Let me state though, that these may have a plug in that changes some of the following functionality.
The first package we’ve used is OS Commerce. This is a free e-commerce package. It is quite robust and does everything you could want. Here are the annoyances we have with it:
1 - Listing of items - in the public area the items list in 1 way and only 20 to a page. This can be limiting for some. Since SAM is customizable, we make the listing fit the website and company that needs it. This can fit different types of products including making some customized options available for products.
2 - Specials - This really drives me crazy. If you want an item to be listed as a special you have to go to a completely separate section to edit this. Then you are given a huge long list of all items in alphabetical order. Not divided by category and no way to filter or sort. Ugh. When you have 2000 products and many with similar names but different categories, this becomes very unwieldy. SAM, on the other hand, saves time and makes it easy as we can allow a special price to be put in right on the edit screen. The system then is smart enough to know which price to use and can be set to use the special for a certain length of time. We can also put a button on the listing screen to easily allow specials to be turned on and off with just a click.
3 - Editing products - speaking of clicks, this also is cumbersome. When looking at a list of items, if you want to edit it you have to find the item in the list and click it. Then click the edit button that appears. SAM has an edit button next to each item so you can easily click it once to edit the product.
4 - Options - some of the options, like sorting and whether something is to be shown or not, aren’t intuitive. They use a number to set options. This can be confusing. SAM makes this easier by ensuring that all checkbox, radio, and drop down lists have easy to read choices that make sense.
5 - Product Attributes - This is the worst. You can set different optional attributes to go with a product. But to associate any attribute you have to go to a separate section and do each one. It is extremely confusing, time consuming and gets very difficult to figure out how to match things up. SAM, again, makes this easier by having the attributes able to be set on the edit screen for each product. BUT, we can also set up a separate section for adding attributes to a single product or even a group of products at once. Very flexible and user friendly.
These are just a few examples of how OS Commerce may not be the best for everyone. Keep these in mind. If using OS Commerce causes your company to spend 30 extra minutes a week updating their website, that is about 25 extra hours per year. We strive to shorten that time so that you make the most of the time running your business and not updating your website. Those extra hours can add up to a lot over time.
The other package we have used is Joomla. Many businesses are using Joomla to control their websites. The problem is that this can be confusing for many people as Joomla has many more features than most people use and it gets confusing and difficult to use. If there are features you don’t need too bad they are still there. Need another feature added and you need to hope there is a plugin or you can try to find someone that can add it. Then you need to hope that they can add it without breaking things and that it works. With our SAM, we have designed it so that we can easily customize it to accomodate each comapnies unique needs. One of the confusing areas is that of the levels of admin access. It can be hard to figure out how to assign different people to different levels so that it is effective. With SAM, we have an easy to use and unique system that allows you to assign each section to a person. This makes it easier to understand the security and who can do what. It is also easily enhanced so that we can customize for unique features like ability to read but not edit a certain section. We also lay out areas of editing so they can be found quickly with minimum time spent working to edit that information.
At Mind Architecture we are constantly working to improve our systems for you. We try to design our functionality so that web designers can design their site any way that is needed and they know that we can get our system to integrate with it.