Like many OCR communities, we have a need for team gear. You can see our current selection right here – http://www.nesstore.com
In the early days, we would have a spreadsheet, and a paypal account, and lots and lots of headaches as we tried to figure out if everyone on the spreadsheet had paid, and where we were shipping things. That got old quick and we setup an integrated store on our website, which we used for some time before having a few major problems with it, and looking for another option.
Enter Storenvy.
Storenvy was free, with a few monthly paid extra’s that we could use – or not. It was slick. It was FAST! It was standalone, so if there were problems with it, it wouldn’t bring down our main site. We did our due diligence, research and ensured it had the features we needed and our first item – the Family Reach Raffle – sold over $1000 worth of tickets and we added more and more items as we got used to it, before ultimately shutting down our old store.
But, it had things we didn’t like. Only one account could login, so Jess – who handles all the Drill shirt orders and Beth – who does much of the packing and shipping had to use my account to login. Less than ideal, but manageable. More seriously was that when you left us a note during checkout to tell us the nickname for your drill shirt, the ONLY place that was logged or tracked was in the email we got. Not in your order on the website, and most critically, not in the export of that order.
This became the critical point – the order export is a crucial part of how we handle orders. (tech speak ahead) We export them to CSV, then make a pivot table containing the drill shirt, size, full shipping info, nickname … otherwise we have to go into each and every single order – one by one – which can easily be 80 – 100 orders. We found a bigger problem than missing nicknames – the order export didn’t even have your own shipping or billing information. Turns out, Storenvy only log the personal information of the person ordering items on the FIRST item in your order. So, if you placed an order for a raffle ticket, wrist band and a drill shirt – only the raffle ticket would actually track the order information.
Of course – this is a major failing and we raised it with their support team. Who acknowledged that yes, this was a bug. But they were kinda busy, and no one else had reported it, so they weren’t going to fix it.
Within three days we’d migrated everything back to our old system, Woo Commerce. I’m still trying to clean up the mess of orders we had during our time with Storenvy, and suspect I’ll be at it a few more days yet.
So, if you are from another OCR community – or even looking for something robust to manage things like shirt ordering or team gear – I can’t recommend Storenvy. It’s just not ready for anything other than a single person selling crafts (think Etsy competitor) – not a full webstore solution.
