Shopping Cart Review: eCongo Free Commerce

Overall

At first glance, the eCongo Free Commerce shopping cart system might seem ideal for many small businesses as it allows a store to be built with unlimited items at everyone’s favorite price: free. And this initial impression is further enhanced by the store building process, which is very straightforward.

However, the system does have some weaknesses and merchants need to consider these carefully before building a store with eCongo. These deficiencies are in the areas of real-time credit card authorization, specification of shipping costs and the store reporting system.

Set Up

Creating an eCongo store is a simple, three step process. The first step is to select a URL for the store in the format of “mystore.eCongo”. The next step is to specify some basic data for the store: its name and description, what categories of products are to be sold in it and which payment and shipping methods are to be used. The third and final step is to enter the storeowner’s contact information.

These three simple steps are enough to create a simple, albeit empty, Web store. However, once the basic store has been created, the look and content of the store can be further refined. For example, the overall appearance of the store can be modified by choosing from six pre-defined “looks” or templates or by uploading custom images.

As well as a product catalog, each eCongo store has four information pages automatically added in to it: a contacts page, a FAQ, a help section and a returns policy page. The merchant can specify the content of each of these four sections by completing a simple form. A surprising omission is that there is no section created for the merchant’s privacy policy.

The eCongo catalog has a fairly complex structure as it allows departments, categories and items. For example, a home entertainment Web store could create a “video” department and categories for “action” movies, “comedy” etc. This can all get a bit confusing, especially as items for sale can be added to both categories and departments.

That said, defining categories and departments is a simple process. Merchants enter the name of the department/category and then choose from one of six display styles – a good feature of the eCongo system is that categories, departments, items and the overall store can have different styles specified for them. Each department and category can also have an image uploaded for display in it.

Once departments/categories have been specified, items can be added. This is done by filling in a form for each item — there is no ability to upload item data from an existing database. As well as a SKU and manufacturers part number information, each item can have a short and long description defined. The long description can be up to 16,000 characters long which will prove useful for many businesses. And like all description fields in eCongo, a limited number of HTML tags can be added.

The display style for each item can also be specified, and up to three images — a thumbnail and two more detailed ones — can be uploaded. Attributes (for example Small, Medium and Large in a T-shirt store) can be defined for any item, but these must all share the same SKU and price. There is no limit to the number of items (or indeed departments and categories) that can be added to a store.

When building a store online, it is comforting to be able to frequently preview the impact of the changes you are making. eCongo has a rather unusual approach to this as it is not possible to view changes or additions in real-time. Instead a Manager/Publisher function has to be selected and used to request a preview update. It can then take up to 10 minutes for the new preview store to be generated, a delay that might become frustrating if you have a lot of changes to make.

When the store is complete the Manager/Publisher function is used again, this time to make the store available to the public. Once this is done, it is time to begin promoting the store and eCongo provides a couple of tools to help. Web stores can be automatically submitted to five search engines with the option to define both the store description and keywords. And an advertising generator is also provided that is used to produce text adverts, which can then be exchanged with other eCongo storeowners.

Each store also comes with seven predefined e-mail addresses, and it is possible to specify a different e-mail forwarding address for each of these.

The support provided is it generally good: a brief tutorial is backed up with a detailed store tour and context sensitive help is available on all forms. The eCongo Web site also contains merchant FAQs and further support is available through e-mail, by telephone and even by online chat with eCongo’s support team.

One of the most attractive features of the eCongo solution is, of course, its price with the basic service being provided totally free of charge. However, to compensate for this, eCongo reserve the right to use up to 10% of the space in every Web store page for it’s own advertising. Storeowners have no control over which ads appear, and thus a merchant could find that their store is carrying adverts for their competitors.

eCongo offers credit card processing as a premium service. There is no set up or application fee but there is a monthly cost of $39.95 in addition to a discount rate of 2.59% plus $0.30 per transaction. These costs include the provision of a merchant account and real-time transaction fees.

Order Processing

Each eCongo store comes complete with a secure, Java based shopping cart that has some nice features, for example the ability for customers to save items on a “hot list” for possible later purchase. However, the order processing system has a couple of serious deficiencies.

First off, the only way to accept credit cards online is by applying for a CardService International merchant account via eCongo. Storeowners who already have a merchant account (from a provider other than CardService International) can only use it offline i.e. by taking a credit number over the ‘phone and either “swiping” it through a terminal or manually authorizing it. This is clearly unattractive for merchants who already have a credit card merchant account. And it is equally unattractive for those without merchant accounts as they are denied the opportunity to shop around for a service that suits them best.

The eCongo system also has a very rudimentary method of specifying shipping costs. Although merchants can choose to offer up to six predefined shipping methods, they can only set the cost for one method which then becomes the default ship cost for all items. Customers are able to select other ship methods during the checkout process, but there is no way of automatically calculating and displaying the cost of these alternatives. Instead, merchants need to contact customers after they have placed their order and advise them of the applicable shipping cost. The only other alternative is for merchants to define the shipping cost on an item-by-item basis, but this is also unsatisfactory as there is no way of automatically varying this cost to reflect the shipping method or distance to be shipped.

On a brighter note, the eCongo system automatically generates e-mails to customers when an order is received and shipped. However, the content of these messages is not customizable. This is unfortunate as the standard message has a glaring omission: although eCongo does provide a system that enables customers to track their orders online, this information is not included in the order acknowledgment!

The merchant also receives a copy of the customer’s order acknowledgment, which alerts them that an order has been received. The merchant can then log on the to the eCongo system and process the order, either choosing to ship it, decline it or put it on backorder. eCongo does not support partial shipments so a whole order needs to be placed on backorder even if the merchant is only short of one item.

Administration

Store administration is straightforward, using the same forms that were used to set up the store. All information about an item can be quickly altered, by changing the appropriate field and re-saving the form.

There are some good features in the eCongo system for the creation of price promotions. Items can be specified either as a “store special”, a “departmental special” or a “category special”. Items specified as being on promotion are then highlighted in the appropriate section — for example “store specials” are highlighted on the home page.

A major drawback of the eCongo system is that the reports provided are fairly rudimentary and cover basic order history only — there are, for example, no reports available on customer activity within a store. As I have said many times before, statistics are the eyes and ears of the online merchant. And without access to detailed statistics such as where visitors came from, what path they took through the store and what they purchased, a merchant is basically operating blind.

By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
January 19th, 2000

[Review criteria]

eCongo Free Commerce

http://www.econgo.com

Shopping Cart Review: eCongo Free Commerce

Overall

Set Up

Order Processing

Administration

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