A few years ago, September 2004 to be more precise, I (Craig Brass - Managing Director and Chief Software Architect of Craig Brass Systems) began doing some freelance work for a Health and Beauty Company called Its Elixir.

At that time they had an online store setup by a small Company. It was a pre-made solution using the scripting language Adobe (at that time a product from Macromedia) Coldfusion and a Microsoft Access Database but several customisations by the company who built it had been made to suit the needs of Its Elixir.

I was told at the beginning it worked fine. The problems started to arise when more customers started to visit the store after some marketing had been done. It was found that when 5 or so customers were browsing the store at the same time, the database crashed and was inaccessible for up to 15 minutes which was obviously costing the Company money in lost orders as most customers will not wait until it comes back online and go elsewhere. This also caused problems internally as the order management backend was unavailable so staff were sat around waiting for it to come back online. As the problems got worse, the director who commissioned the work tried to contact the company who built the software but they had disappeared and were uncontactable. It was at this point he contacted me to see what I could do to sort the problem.

Although I had worked a few small stores for people in the past, I had never worked with a store this large (over 1,000 products). Quickly I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a good idea to fix the current system as it would require converting it to a MSSQL database which is very expensive to run so we decided to start again from scratch. To add to this, the Company who built the software had fully encoded the software which would stop me even trying to fix it.

We decided to use PHP and MySQL (as the majority of hosts support them and it is much less expensive than the Coldfusion solution they were then running). I set about looking for a good piece of base shopping cart software to work with. I tested just about every one on the market at the time and found one solution (which I won't mention the name of) to be the best of the lot. It wasn't too expensive either priced at $185.00 back then.

After purchasing and installing this software, I quickly began to find that it lacked important features that I would have expected to find in any shopping cart solution (Recently Viewed Product List, Standard Sitemap, XML Sitemap, Newest Products List, Option for Customers to Have the Store Remember Their Login, SEO URLs, etc) and some functionality was only available as addons they sold (the ability to edit orders, returns management, etc). We did however find that most of the functionality we needed was available from 3rd party modification suppliers but this was at a cost. The bad thing about having a lot of 3rd party modifications though is that if you decide to upgrade, you have to reapply your modifications and even if you do this there is no guarantee they will work with the newer version. Below I have created a table showing exactly what we spent to get the store the way we wanted it.

As you can see, the total comes out at $3431.57 and that doesn't even include the hours I was paid for setting it up, implementing the modifications, making other small changes, changing the design, etc. Also remember that some of these prices have now increased so if I was to do this again, it would be even more expensive. I estimate the final bill at over $5,000. This is obviously a LOT more than the initial $185.00 price tag we initially looked at.

I began to realise from looking over their Company Forum that although there were many people requesting features, they were not implementing them. Nearly 3 years have passed since the initial purchase of the software and only one major upgrade to it has been released and the new features in this version did not include many of the features that were actually requested by their current clients showing they are taking it in the direction they want rather than what the clients want. I had also noticed that answers to technical support questions were getting slower and slower over the time that I worked with the software. It started off good as I would get a reply to a support ticket in a couple of hours. By the end of development it was taking more like 2-3 days. Both of these things annoyed me.

After looking around the market to see if there were any better solutions available at this point, I found there wasn't and began making notes on what would be the perfect Shopping Cart / eCommerce solution that you could install and would include all the features I thought should be included. Soon, I turned this into a 50+ page feature specification. By the end of 2006 I had received interest from a few investors to turn this idea into a business and at the start of 2007, we hired a developer to begin coding our solution based on the specification.

Viper Cart includes all of the features listed above for the one off price of $399.95 and an optional small fee for upgrades every 6 or 12 months depending on how you choose to renew. We also have an open feature requests board on our forum that we actively check when planning a new version of our software.

*Prices listed are the prices Its Elixir paid at the time of purchase.