JMortensen

Hey there Amy. I've bought from your business before and I have a somewhat related business, so I figured I'd give you my $.02.

I actually have 2 mail order businesses, one is www.thepetdoorstore.com, which I've been running with MOM and Sitelink since 2003, and the other is www.m2differentials.com which I have been trying to get up and running for about 6 months, and it's still not there yet. The pet door business has probably 500 stock items, although a lot of them have size/color matrices, so the total number of items is I think just over 1000. I set that one up with my own website that I designed with the help of a graphic designer, and I basically just use Sitelink's Basket function. If you go through my pet door site and click on an item you want to order, the next page is the Sitelink basket page with this stock item added. This works reasonably well and if suppliers change prices it doesn't take too terribly long to change the info in MOM to reflect changes, but I do have to change the website as well as changing the info in MOM when updating prices or descriptions. In order to not have to change the website AND MOM, I decided to try to use Sitelink's web templates for the new business. The differential business has 6000 stock items so far and it is proving to be a real bear to manage with Sitelink. I'm currently on the phone with tech support because the Sitelink department files somehow got corrupted. This is probably my 20th call to Dydacomp in the last few months. Basically the issues as I see them with having many stock items and trying to manage it with MOM are as follows:

1. No way to make changes to large numbers of stock files at once. If one of my suppliers calls up and says "We're raising our prices by 5%" I would then have to manually go into each stock item to change the price. Same thing with descriptions, web page titles, etc. Changing information on thousands of items through MOM will take a LONG time. Open a stock item, find the info you want to change, change it, save that stock item. Open the next, etc. You can edit the information directly through dbuwin, but even there you have to go one record at a time, you can't copy prices from an excel spreadsheet and paste them in several hundred or thousand at a time. It's one by one. And in dbuwin you have the added bonus of possibly irreversibly damaging the stock file. Caution (and backups) are paramount when working in dbuwin.

2. Web pages are templated and not very easily customized for best appearance. You can get around this by plugging in your own html code into the text boxes in MOM and in the Sitelink admin screen, and by manipulating the .asp pages in Dreamweaver or similiar. Although that works, I think it's kind of hokey.

3. Departments screen is buggy. Of course I say this as I'm talking to tech support, but I've had several issues with this part of the program already. It may be because I have something like 1800 departments, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to have problems. Departments classify your items, in your case it is analogous to your Shop by Category and Shop by Brand menus. There are no drop down boxes like you have on your site now, although I'm betting Dydacomp would do something like that custom for you at some extra cost.

4. I expect there to be a #4, I just haven't run into it yet... ;-)

The unfortunate thing for me is that I haven't found a better solution, and at this point I've put so much energy into making MOM work that I don't want to look for one. I know that there are larger scale solutions that cost many times what MOM/Sitelink costs, not sure whether they're worth it and not willing to find out.

All that crap aside, I need to call you guys and order up an Accusump and some brake pads.