Dear Nigel,

You've known the Early Impact management team for quite some time and you know that we take customer feedback very seriously. Both positive and negative feedback, that is.

Many times we choose not to reply to a forum posting as we would like other users or resellers to step in, which happens very often. This was the case with Gavin's message.

Back to your posting: I am sorry to hear frustration in your message, but I don't believe you message is fair. We are constantly trying to improve ProductCart based on the real issues that real companies bring to our attention. There are businesses doing millions of dollars a year on the Internet with ProductCart. We are certainly not out of touch with "real world companies and operations" as you seem to suggest. I can assure you that we never stop paying close attention to what they have to say.

And it is certainly not true that we have wasted time on adding fancy interface elements over the past few months, forgetting more important things. We do work on the interface, as it is a key element of any e-commerce store. However, we spend the vast majority of our time on other aspects of the system. For instance, being in the UK you know that we recently spent a substantial amount of time on the following projects:

• Google Checkout UK integration,
• PayPal Pro UK integration
• Rewriting of the way the system handles VAT

These development efforts were based on a substantial number of requests received from UK users of ProductCart. We didn't wake up one day and decided to "go for it". We listened to what our UK customers needed from us.

The integrations with Google Checkout and PayPal in the UK were not trivial projects. Other UK customers will tell you that some of the issues we found were completely outside of our control, and prolongued the integration efforts. In fact, we are still working with the PayPal team to iron out a few remaining issues in the PayPal Express UK integration.

These and many other projects have indeed delayed other activities, such as updating our User Guides. We are not happy about that at all, and we are working on that "as we speak". Believe me, no one is taking any vacation time these days at Early Impact :-)

And we are adding resources to our staff to try to do more, and better.

With regards to order management, there is no doubt that new features could be added. However, you have to consider the following:

• Feature Requests
  Literally every day we receive messages containing sensible, smart suggestions and feature requests. I'm not making this up. This happens every day. This is great on one side - as we continue learning what customers need - but on the other side makes us realize that we will never be able to tackle them all. I often tell the rest of the team that if we had another 10 developers starting tomorrow, we would have projects for all of them, from day one.
• Counting on our Partners...
  Based on the above, our strategy has always been to count on other companies to step in. Unlike many of our competitors, at Early Impact we chose to license, not host our e-commerce application. This allows third parties to "step in". We also chose not to provide any services that would compete with our partners. One of the reasons for doing so is that we wanted to promote an environment where companies that have proficient developers on staff could create and market "add-on's" for ProductCart. Some have done so: small features all the way to complex integrations with Point of Sale systems. We hope to see more in this area in the future.
• ... to arrive where we can't go
  Order management, for instance, is an area where additional development could be done by a third party. Early Impact will never be able to create a bridge between ProductCart and all of the numerous accounting, POS, CRM, etc. systems that exist out there. Other companies will see the opportunity and step in.

We continue to work hard to make ProductCart a better product. In the next update you won't see many new features at all. None of the "bells and pointless whistles" that you seemed to indicate we spend time on. We have spent a lot of time strictly on "performance", for example. We have been working with some of the busiests ProductCart stores to improve the performance of key areas of the storefront. 

You can rest assured that we will continue listening to your feedback as well as that of other customers, and that most of our development efforts will be driven by it.

Best Regards,

Massimo Arrigoni
CEO
Early Impact

A tighter, two-way integration with QuickBooks using the latest SDK is indeed something that we are planning to work on shortly. Integration with SAGE is currently not on our internal development schedule and would be a great project for a knowledgeable third party.

Cheers,

massimo
Early Impact