Elastic Path get away with murder *again*
Elastic Path are enterprise e-commerce software developers. We use Elastic Path software as the e-commerce platform on this website. For the second release in a row they haven’t provided a mechanism to import an existing product database into their new release.
I have never come across another software company who hasn’t provided at least some form of upgrade assistance with their new software release.
We first started using Elastic Path software version 4.1. We then upgraded to version 5.1, a big improvement. Unfortunately, no mechanism existed in version 5.1 to move our existing product catalogue over to the new version. Nothing. We had to re-enter the information all over again. No small task even for our relatively small product catalogue.
I did let Elastic Path know how annoyed I was at the time. I thought they understood how important an upgrade mechanism is to their customers.
Elastic Path have just released version 6 of their e-commerce software and lo and behold, they have not provided a catalogue upgrade mechanism again. Nothing, not even the basics like category, product and SKU.
The really odd thing is that producing a basic catalogue import mechanism would, compared to the job of developing the rest of Elastic Path 6, be trivial by comparison. We don’t know any where near as much about the Elastic Path code base but I doubt it will take us more than a week or two to implement the necessary code. Why risk alienating your existing customers for a week or two of development time?
As a software developer myself, I’d have a hard time thinking of an industry in which companies get away with such shoddy treatment of their customers.
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We would be history if we did this to our customers, and rightly so might I add.
How are they able to sell new versions ?
Quote | Posted January 18, 2008, 9:46 pm@Robert - I guess new customers won’t come across the problem until they have already handed over their money.
Quote | Posted January 18, 2008, 11:30 pmI’m surprised to hear about this. It is definitely bad practice not to provide something like that.
Quote | Posted January 22, 2008, 7:37 pm@Sara - Not only is it bad practice, I’d say it is pretty much unheard of given that a large amount of a software company’s revenue comes from upgrades. What incentive do you have to keep upgrading if you know that every time you do you won’t be able to bring your data with you?
Quote | Posted January 23, 2008, 5:29 pmI am a manager at Elastic Path and spoke to Jack in response to his support call. While we acknowledge and apologize for the lack of adequate migration tools, I would like to explain how this situation came about and stress that we are working to fix it.
A migration tool was included in the EP6 plan. However, as we built the new features and carried out performance and scale testing, a number of database changes were required and we were unable to complete a reliable migration tool on schedule. Furthermore, we recognized the opportunity for more flexible import/export capabilities that enable intermediate processing.
Consequently, we are now working on a stand-alone import/export/migration tool that will be more reliable and flexible. We chose to release EP6 without this tool because postponing the entire product merely delays those who do not need the tool without helping those who do.
Quote | Posted January 29, 2008, 4:40 pm@Andrew - Thanks for dropping by. To compound the problem the import feature doesn’t work correctly when you choose the “Insert and replace” feature and one of the products is already in the database which I believe is the whole point of the “insert and replace” feature.
Quote | Posted January 29, 2008, 4:58 pmI was burned by the lack inability to migrate data from ep4 to ep5. My complaints fell on deaf ears and I spent about two weeks re-entering data. Hopefully when the time comes to move to ep6 I won’t get burned again.
Quote | Posted April 18, 2008, 10:16 pm@es - I wouldn’t count on it…we “upgraded” to EP6 and had to regress back to 5.1.
Quote | Posted April 20, 2008, 7:13 pmI was wondering if anyone who had/has EP 5 has integrated google checkout?
Also, totaly agree with the import/export abilities being completely rediculous. We have a lot of merchandise and it took us over 3 months to get all the product data correctly input, we aren’t switching over to EP 6 until there is a mygration tool. (Hopefully there will be one in the near future)
Quote | Posted June 6, 2008, 8:05 pm@Carrie - we wrote our own migration tool though I understand that EP now has one too. Kind of academic for us because we’ve gone back to EP 5.1
Quote | Posted June 6, 2008, 10:59 pmwe have successfully imported catalogue data from an EP4 installation into EP6. You need to customize EP4 export tool in order to funnel data into EP6 data model.
As any shop or installation has its own configurations and attributes,thus a customizable export mechanism is needed to export the data selectively in order to match the target application’s data model.
Quote | Posted June 29, 2008, 11:42 am