EKMPowershop

[adbart]

Just thought I'd alert others of you looking for a simple online shopping cart solution to this site.

EKMpowershop (www.ekmpowershop.com) looks great on paper - its very simple for first time users (say, if you are building a website for a novice who needs to constantly update it), but it is severely limited.

One of the things that struck me the most was there is no facility whatsoever to update products via database migration methods - everything has to be done over the web interface, i.e. you have to add/remove/edit every single product manually.

On top of that, the design set is very limited.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's comments on this service.

[ADAM Web Design]

That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Many of my clients would have no clue how to work with any database software, yet would still like to be able to add/delete/modify products themselves. The web-based interface, if done properly, would allow them to do this themselves. Sure, it's one at a time, but it works and works well for them. So I can see an argument for a web-based interface only, as it would attract the non-tech-savvy client.

It's also a hosted solution, from what I'm reading. You can only go so far with those anyway.

Now I've never used it, but from the sounds of it, you've picked out something that would work well in an entry-level scenario, but not much more than that.

[adbart]

Definitely, I agree.

I'm doing a migration from EKMp to a self-hosted SQL solution for a client over the summer.

Not particularly looking forward to the ins and outs of it, as it means employing someone to re-enter hundreds of products manually unless I can come up with an effective PHP script that will pull the info from the EKMp pages.

Oh well. :(

[ADAM Web Design]

If you're familiar with ASP, there's a wonderful component called ASPTear that will help extract the contents of web pages. The price is right too...free (unless you want some of the advanced features, which in this case you really don't need.)

Just a thought.

[adbart]

That looks interesting, I'll have a closer look.

Cheers for the tip.

[johnbradbury]

We have an account with ekmPowershop and you can gain access to the raw data within the database, just email their support team, they are a nice bunch of guys and are really helpful.

[adbart]

Ooh I'll look into that then, cheers. I guess I just assumed that they didn't do that....

Welcome to WPW by the way :-)