url coupons and accounting integration.

-- HikaShop version -- : current

I like you guys. I have tried all the other joomla carts. Hikashop has the best support by far.
But there are a couple things that continue to nag me about the product and unless I want to bear the burden of financing development of some products instead of sharing that burden across multiple users, those fixes probably won't happen. For example url coupons so that the user can click a link and have the item and a coupon added to the cart automatically, also xero or quickbooks integration, etc. I saw that you guys made some integration for some accounting saas in the UK, that doesn't help us in the US.

From a user experience standpoint, Woocommerce blows away any product available for joomla. It also has the features I have mentioned and a ton of other features that I have been wishing for. It's so much better that I am considering migrating to wordpress from joomla just for the cart.

I really wish you guys would take a good look at woocommerce as a case study on how to do this right from a business perspective and how to enhance the user experience. Woocommerce makes tons of money by charging for every addon instead of doing a tiered system like Hikashop does. In addition to most likely making more money, this also would give you better insight into what plugins offer a business case for you to spend resources on for upgrades etc. Seriously, WC has a boatload of addons and they are doing very well these days. I wish Hikashop could be the WC of Joomla.

I did see that quickbooks online integrator, ITS $400 ! With woocommerce it's free, possibly the development may be subsidized by quickbooks since it's a saas app which they make money from by having the plugin available.
Getting this from a third party also adds another layer of support issues and it is not made specifically for Hikashop and there is no demo to see how well it would work.

When I say user experience, I'm mainly talking about the shopper experience. The back end in Hikashop is cumbersome, but once you get used to it does the job and that is not really important since it doesn't affect sales.

Woocommerce is not the only cart for wordpress, there are dozens of them. Jigoshop, cart66, on and on.
But it's probably the best one and they have a system which is very profitable and this allows them to hire more people etc.

Your model of a 3 tiered system can only allow for so much growth. What you end up with is a system where you have a growing number of plugins bundled together. This does not show you which ones

What you have with the tiered model is a core product that gets bigger and bigger with more and more plugins that need to be supported as part of the core. If you sold the plugins separately, you could 1. run exact tests and take preorders to make a business case for the development of each plugin. and 2. know your ROI for each plugin. and 3. allow the customers to choose which plugins they want to pay for and which ones they don't.

Let's take an example. I was trying to set up a subscription box site. Hikashop can't do this right now. I need a recurring subscription payment plugin, I need that to tie in to shipstation or some other shipping label plugin, and I need to take stripe payments. Here are 3 basic plugins with a price for each one. With Hikashop now, stripe is included, but the other two aren't available. I purchased these plugins from woo and the cost of the plugins was over $300 even though the core is free.

I'm just trying to say that I think you guys aren't maximizing your profit potential with this model. Not that I want to spend more money, but I am willing to in order to get a better overall product.