Crooked Spin

I started using E-Junkie for my shopping cart at the beginning of August when Cyndicate was released. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience. I think my customers get a better buying experience and I get some new nice features for little cost.

Set-up was super easy for me since I was already accepting IPN notifications from PayPal on purchases. E-Junkie send out the sales info in the same format. All that it took was a slight modification to the check for valid transaction method. This also ends up being really convenient if you add other payment processors. They translate the notifications from google checkout or whoever into the same IPN like notifications. So you only have to support one system for use with multiple processors.

Another feature I really like about E-Junkie is that you can use it with PayPal Pro. Turning on the option lets you take credit cards without you’re customers having to see PayPal. Some people still have an aversion to PayPal over their early years and this can help easy their anxiety. When a customer pays with a credit card, they’re taken to a secure page with a form for all of the info. Everything is then taken care of for you. You don’t have to worry about setting up the certificate, the form, or the communication with PayPal. Once the card clears, you’re server is pinged just like any other transaction.

Pros:

• Easy to switch over to.
• Global and per item coupons
• I like the lightbox style cart on my pages. It helps hide that I’m using an external service.
• PayPal Pro option
• Easy integration with other payment processors like Google Checkout.
• User never sees PayPal for credit card transaction, only if they choose to pay with PayPal.
• Can easily do an affiliates program.
• Cheap, only $5/month for less then 10 skus.
• Can handle taxes and VAT collection, you’re responsible for submission

Cons:

• The credit card info entry form is on their site with PayPal Pro. The URL might scare some people.
• The credit card info entry form isn’t customizable. Point one wouldn’t be as bad if you could customize the page to look like your site. They claim that it’s coming, but I haven’t seen anything on it yet.
• Coupon support could be a little more robust. I wanted an option to lock codes to either specific emails (crossgrade offers) or to a domain (offer to people with apple.com email addresses). They say it isn’t possible due to not having the email address until check out and that they can’t ask for it earlier due to Google Checkout’s terms of service.
• They don’t send back some registration info, like the user’s address, in the registration post for downloaded items. They only send them if it’s a good that’s being shipped, even if the user enters the info in the form. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to see where paid users are located for things like localization.
• The sales logs could be a bit more robust. I’m not sure exactly what I want here, but it feels like something is missing. They’re on about the same level as PayPal’s history which I’ve never been a huge fan of either.

Overall, it’s well worth the $5/month that it costs for the service. I might consider going with something like the Potion Store sometime in the future to have more control. But for now, the easy set-up and configuration of E-Junkie wins out.

Update: One more Pro to add. Customer service has been quick to respond and helpful when emailing them. Today was a good example. I ran into an issue that appeared to be a fairly decent bug. I thought there was a loss of sales data when a sku was deleted. The Cyndicate-EagleFiler bundle no longer showed up in my sales logs. I emailed emailed support and heard back from Robin heard back from Robin an hour or two later saying that it was fixed. Fortunately, it appears that it was simply a display error and not a loss of data. The issue was handles right away and all of the bundle sales showed up when I checked the log later in the night.

Full disclosure: The above ejunkie links are affiliates links. If you follow these links and sign up with e-junkie I will get a commission. The commissions aren’t huge, but a few of them would cover my monthly cost. Free e-junkie would be even better then $5/month e-junkie. =)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 3:39 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.