JShop Server SoftwareJShop Server (JShop) is a shopping cart e-commerce system written in PHP and using MySQL databases. Its features include: stock control customer accounts gift certificates advanced pricing options in-built logs and reporting search engine detection and search engine safe links full tax and shipping in-built order management system
The Website tells us JShop is configured, managed and maintained through a Web-based interface that behaves “like an application” as opposed to a Web system… whatever that means. For an aggravating Website, JShop is best in class. Sitting on a shaded blue background is textual content of gray (I think). On the other hand, aside from one simple editing error, the composition of text is clean, informative, and compact. The site reads among the most polished cart shopping Websites in the business. Which makes the gray on blue even more aggravating. Functionality and Features The demonstration store for JShop uses standard templates provided with the product, and you simply click on the demo link on the Examples page to have your pretend-money way with it. A JShop Server single-site license runs £200 (about $319 on September 25, 2009). Support plans are available for reasonable ducats, but it wasn’t obvious that JShop has a professional services team available to work out any extra functionality a client may need. All software is delivered electronically through a registered-users area, which provides constant access to installation files. Base Functionality From the literature on the Website—very little impartial, objective information on the product seems to exist in cyberspace—JShop seems to be focused on the introductory and small-scale customer. Then like the family home, it aims to grow with the client as their businesses mature. So is JShop a sophisticated shopping cart for cottage industries? General Observations JShop has laid out its Website to show multiple categories of features. And expanding these shows that the creators and developers of JShop intended from the start to throw every imaginable item from every imaginable wish list into the pot. The question here is how well have the features been implemented. Is it better to be feature poor and do everything perfectly or be feature rich and do everything unevenly? I will say the description of features is impressive… and artistic (except for that darned ubiquitous dark-blue background with gray text). Unless one has young eyes, one will not have much in the way of hang time on this (superficially) well-written site. Limitations Here it gets tricky, because out on the Web nobody seems to say anything bad—or good—about JShop. Even Volusion and Nexternal lack the Google ads claiming their products are superior. Perhaps JShop is a relatively small player in the game. Personally, I can’t see how “no news is good news” for JShop customers. Lacking criticism of any kind, even any substantial body of third-party accolades, suggests to me JShop is an fluffy, showy solution for the wine and cheese crowd. Plus, it’s UK-centric. Support and Documentation All support is handled via. email because, as JShop claims, “this leads to much quicker resolutions to problems.” So much for the immediacy of chewing somebody out on the telephone… or even chat. But you have three tiers of paid email support, and access to the forum. Documentation is somewhere on the site, I just know it. A pretty good piece of upgrade description came up on a Google search, and it had the JShop icon on the browser tab. So there’s probably quite a bit of help in that area once you get to know the principals. Conclusions= JShop could be good. It has a decent demo as a starting point. Rating 2 stars (out of 5) A 5-star e-commerce solution is available with Premium Web Cart, which is full-featured and usable across the widest range of business size. It is also built on the latest Web technologies and comes to you in an affordable suite of options designed to aggressively grow your core business. Best Wishes, 
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(2 customer reviews)
