Ekm Systems Ltd ekmPowershop Review

Overall Rating

No software to install or configure
It is always being updated
Good customer support

All changes are live, this is either a good point or a bad point depending upon your opinion. For me it has caused problems when changing the design of my store, as if i change something and I get it wrong, my live site looks nasty until I can fix it. However I have emailed my concerns to ekmpowershop and they did advise they were going to update this, but nothing has changed as yet.

Setting up a shop with multi-language requires you to setup multiple shops, one for each language you wish to use, so it can work out expensive if you wish to have alot of different languages.

The EKM Powershop system is web based and so is all accessed via your web browser which means you can work on your site (designing, maintaining and dealing with customers orders) via any computer with a internet connection. I took advantage of this on a recent holiday to Greece where I was able to check our orders.

To create a really nice looking website it does require some skill, and the example sites used on the ekmpowershop "our customers" section do mainly use custom HTML. If you know how to design a site you can use any HTML editor such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc and create a really nice looking site. Alternativly most web designers can develop for ekmpowershop and ekmpowershop themselves have their own design team, although I have no experience in dealing with this side of the company.

However there are some nice looking templates which are easily customised and you can easily get a nice looking site up and running. Recently they seem to have been adding more templates including one which looks a bit like Amazon and another which is a osCommerce style look.

I have found working with the system very easy and to be honest quite good fun. I initally started selling on eBay and I have found that my ekm shop compliments my ebay business very well.

The system offers many advanced features such as discounts, customer reviews, multi-currencies, custom designs, mini carts. On their website there is a full feature list.

The support from the company is quick and helpful both via email and telephone.I did find myself contacting them quite a bit in the inital days of setting up my store as I attempted to design my store myself and so found their tag system confusing, although in retrospect it is relativly simple (a kind of mail-merge but for design).

Overall a very good system and they have been a really nice company to deal with.