Elastic Path get away with murder *again*

by Jack Hughes on January 18, 2008

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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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{ 16 comments }

Robert Aronsson January 18, 2008 at 9:46 PM

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 ?

Jack Hughes January 18, 2008 at 11:30 PM

@Robert – I guess new customers won’t come across the problem until they have already handed over their money.

ses5909 January 22, 2008 at 7:37 PM

I’m surprised to hear about this. It is definitely bad practice not to provide something like that.

Jack January 23, 2008 at 5:29 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?

Andrew January 29, 2008 at 4:40 PM

I 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.

Jack Hughes January 29, 2008 at 4:58 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.

es April 18, 2008 at 10:16 PM

I 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.

Jack April 20, 2008 at 7:13 PM

@es – I wouldn’t count on it…we “upgraded” to EP6 and had to regress back to 5.1.

Carrie June 6, 2008 at 8:05 PM

I 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)

Jack Hughes June 6, 2008 at 10:59 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

Farzad June 29, 2008 at 11:42 AM

we 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.

Less Mitch November 18, 2008 at 11:57 PM

We’ve been using EP’s software since… well… MerchantSpace. ^.^ (there’s a name you don’t hear too often!)

Migration has always been an issue, however considering the hugely progressive leaps made in the data structure for products & variations while keeping the elasticity of attributes – I don’t mind doing manual imports – and we have a relatively robust sku count of around 72k (and growing).

I’ve really gotten pretty good at manually mapping the data now. Granted, for non-savvy users this would be a pain and then some data does need to be manually entered or updated to coincide with our internal systems, but ours is a custom job anyway.

We are in the process of migrating from 4.1 to 6.0.3 right now.

EP6.1 has just been released, but we are going to wait a little bit for anything further.

Jack Hughes November 19, 2008 at 4:18 PM

@Carrie – we are currently doing Google Checkout integration. We’ve just finished PayPal integration.

Abz November 24, 2008 at 10:01 PM

Interesting stuff about migrations, however I am currently looking to buy EP6.1 for my company. Overall do you feel this is a good product. Our proof of concept exercise worked well, the only misgiving we have is what the product is like under real life load and the general operational reliability.
Any insight much appreciated.

Jack Hughes November 25, 2008 at 10:11 AM

@Abz – I’ve no experience with EP6.1. We deployed EP6.0 but then ended up rolling back to our previous EP5.1 installation due to reliability problems. I don’t think I could comment on how reliable EP6.1 is because we’ve not had any contact with it.

Roberta July 2, 2009 at 11:02 AM

We use EP6 on our website and I have to say, its a complete disaster area. So anyone thinking about using it, wait until the new versions come out! Our site is riddled with bugs and while it may be partly to do with our web developers, the software needs way too much manipulation.
So I agree with Jack, reliability problems are massive with EP6.

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