MonsterCommerce www.monstercommerce.com Review

Overall Rating

MonsterCommerce back office is surprisingly easy to use. It's not bad for a company that is just getting into e-commerce, either not yet selling, or selling very little, but users should expect issues. Customization is good, if a little buggy. Perfectionist coders will spend hours trying to get things right.

I don't really even know where to start here. MonsterCommerce seemed to run relatively smoothly until they were acquired by Network Solutions. This may be a coincidence. Either way, about two years into using MC, we saw our shopping cart abandonment rates skyrocket. Then we started getting phone calls from customers telling us they simply could not add items to their cart.

Once we got about a dozen phone calls, we decided that this was probably not a case of inexperienced web customers. Once we got the cart to malfunction for us, we got MC Tech Support on the phone. After several phone calls moving up the ladder of tech guys, we were left with the same response we had gotten from the beginning: "We can't get it to malfunction, so we can't fix it." It was that day that we began shopping around for a new e-commerce package.

Since then, we have experienced a number of problems, including but not limited to, the site going down for entire days at a time with no solution or explanation, continued unresolved cart issues, numerous Froogle and Google Base feed issues, and an alarmingly increasing rate of shopping cart abandonment.

Most problems with MC result in Tech Support replying with something along the lines of "We can't get it to malfunction, so we can't fix it," or simply alerting us that our issues are "known issues" with MC's development team. These known issues have no ETAs for fixes, and there is very clearly a gaping disconnect between MC development and MC support.

I know what I said in the "Good Points" section, but as I type all our issues out, I realize I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. If NS wants MC to continue, they're going to have to give it a ground-up overhaul.