Coffee Cup Shopping Cart Creator and Designer review

*Somewhere between Thankful Thursday and the Thursday rant......it's a shopping cart software review.*

If you've been following my blog over the last couple of weeks, you will remember that I've talked about upgrading my shopping cart system.  After doing some research and talking to friends, I decided to give the Coffee Cup software system a try.

Full disclosure:  I am NOT a paid spokesperson or am an affiliate for sales.  This is just my experience on using their product.

First, I should probably say why I wanted to design this shopping cart myself.  I talked to a web guy about doing it and well, let's just say it didn't work out.  Multiple reasons why it didn't, and I don't want to discredit what he does, but I was disappointed with how long it was taking to get some of the features I wanted and I was going to have to give up more "control" of my website than I was used to.  (The control was most important to me for tweeking SEO and such.)  So I've been using the Coffee Cart Shopping Cart Creator and Designer (both Pro versions) for about 10 days now.  Here's what I can tell you:

Good things about Coffee Cup:

1.  You can download a trial of their software.  This was a big deal to me.  It would have been a lot less likely that I would have bought it if I didn't get to use that trial first.
2.  Pretty affordable.  Buy what you want (like an a la carte menu) and use it.
3.  Their email support is very attentive.  When I called their customer support line and they said I would have to pay for an appointment, otherwise I could email for free, I was skeptical.  I was pleasantly surprised that I would usually have a response within a few minutes to a couple of hours.  Even on the weekend.  Pretty cool.
4.  I can use the shopping cart system with Paypal Websites Standard (the free version).  This one was a huge advantage.  Most shopping cart systems charge you $30 a month and up, PLUS you have to pay for a merchant account monthly at $10 per month (or more).
5.  You just pay for their software once and get free upgrades.  (At least that's what they advertise at the present.)  No additional monthly fees.
6.  Really useful user forums.  The staff and regular users of the product are pretty good at posting useful information in the topics forum.

Bad things about Coffee Cup:

1.  I had to call my web hosting provider (Go Daddy) 6 times in a period of 24 hours to get several issues fixed.  The issue was in the specifics of the servers my website was running on and the Coffee Cup software not liking those servers.  Probably an over simplification of the problem, but basically, it was stuff out of my control and stuff that I had no idea was going to be a problem.  Kind of annoying, especially since the last problem was an issue with the Coffee Cup software that Coffee Cup says was not their problem.  (Many thanks to Go Daddy for writing me the patch and emailing me the file to upload to the server to get my site up and running without a bunch of errors.)
2.  Everything is a la carte.  You buy only what you think need, only to find out when you want to do something else, you have to buy the upgrade or a whole new program together.  All of a sudden, what looks to be less than a $100 investment can turn into $300 to $400 pretty quickly.  (Now of course as I write this, I see they are running a special on a bundle of the best selling Coffee Cup software programs.  Isn't that always the case???  Buy something before it goes on sale.)
3.  It's kind of a weird system.  If you've never done web designing before, I would be concerned that it's over your head (even though it is the WYSIWYG system), but for someone like me who has used HTML editors, Frontpage and Dreamweaver to create websites, it was a bit annoying not being able to adjust everything like I had been used to.

So the bottom line, would I recommend it?

Well, I already started making sales with the new shopping cart, so something must be better from a customer angle or else it's pure dumb luck.  (Either way, I'll take it.)

If you're thinking about purchasing it, DEFINITELY download the the trial versions first.  I think if you have no experience with web designs, there might be easier systems out there (but maybe they cost more?)