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Brett - In March, we changed the price of the annual support and updates plan from $195 to $295 per year if you have a current support and updates plan. If your plan has lapsed, to bring your software back on support and updates is $395 for the first year and $295 for renewals. The reasons for this are two fold. First, the $195 price was no longer sustainable - we are doing more updates and in particular, security and shipping modules are changing very rapidly right now, necessitating more patches and support than ever before. Support and update revenues help us not only support the existing product, but also to move the product forward. As far as the charges to bring a product back on support, we didn't believe that it was fair to the customers who continued to support us year in and year out and who keep their product up to date to pay the same rate as customers who only chose to update when they had to.
While you are correct that previous new versions of ProductCart have always included new features, I can tell you that ProductCart 5 is the single largest update of the software since it was created 12 years ago. It includes more upgrades and new features than any other previous release of ProductCart. In the past year, we have rewritten 40-50% of the code, completely changing and modernizing the way ProductCart works. It now supports fully responsive design - Tableless with HTML 5 and CSS3. The mobile module that was previously an add-on is now included. All design elements are now separate from the logic code - This will make it much easier to create beautiful designs that are easy to upgrade in the future - something that has not always been easy to do in ProductCart. There are a host of other new features as well. If you would like to see a PDF of some of the new features of ProductCart 5, you can find it here: http://www.productcart.com/pdf/ProductCart5-Features.pdf
While it may seem that it would be just as easy to switch as to upgrade, remember that a switch usually involves losing all of your historical data which is a big deal for most store owners. It is usually far more work than most people can imagine. I can also tell you that having worked with several other storefronts, that we never found one that worked as well overall as ProductCart - one of the reasons that I bought the company a year ago.
As far as ASP being an aging technology, while the core has not been changed for some time, it is stable and robust. There is not much that you need to do with a shopping application that you can't do in ASP. In fact, at least one of the major hosted shopping applications is still based on an ASP core (even though they work real hard to hide it) Why? Because it works. We develop in both Classic ASP and ASP.net at NetSource and I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of projects can be done in either environment with very little difference in the outcome.
We expect ProductCart 5 to ship in the the first half of May. We have done extended Beta testing and are now doing final Release Candidate testing on several live stores. I believe the wait will be worth it - this is an extremely exciting time for us as we fully believe that ProductCart will once again move to the top of the heap for ecommerce software. And, we already have a full list of features that didn't make it into 5 that will go into 5.1. We'll start development on that later this summer!
Greg Petry President NetSource Commerce
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